I am not lost in the wilderness, I am found
Rather than a constructed-world belief in or about God, I go again and again into the sanctuary of the forest and beleef God.
I grew up believing that whether or not I would spend an eternity of torture in a lake of fire hinged on what I thought about God. Believing (or not believing) in God was everything in my home language. I was surrounded by people who could and would constantly talk about their belief in God, specifically Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior, and was taught that good people believed in God and talked about that belief to anyone and everyone every day.
Unquestioning belief is often synonymous with Christian faith, especially the flavor served at my mother’s table. What I believed about the bible, church, prayer, sin and salvation were the teetering Jenga blocks of my eternal home on a golden mainstream in heaven. As I removed block after block of cognitively dissonant ideas I had been taught about God, the whole system came clattering down.
But I never lost a sense of, a personal experience of, a divine presence in my life even through leaving the church, a brief dabbling with psychedelics, an academic study of world religions, constant, vitriolic haranguing by my mother, coming out as a lesbian and moving across the world to live in The Netherlands with my wife.
Seven years on and The Dutch language still confounds and astonishes my wee American brain. The Dutch are exceptionally nimble as wordsmiths, creating a single word out of many to convey a concept.
According to I Am Expat (a word I dislike for many reasons)
“Back in 2007, the popular Dutch TV show Lingo held a competition where viewers could submit their entries for the longest word in the Dutch language. The winner of said competition was (brace yourself) kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedencomitéleden at a whopping 60 letters!
Breaking it down, kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedencomitéleden directly translates to “children’s carnival parade preparation work committee members.”
Officially, according to the number one dictionary in the Netherlands, Van Dale - which is also responsible for selecting the country’s word of the year every December - the longest Dutch word is meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornis (35 letters) which, when plural, becomes even longer: meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornissen (38 letters).
But even simple words and sounds in my not-native-tongue are frustrating for my clumsy mouth. Huis means house and thuis means home. The ui is a sound like ow as in wow, but not sort of. And no matter how I pronounce it, my neighbors will gently correct me with what sounds exactly like what I just said. Eh he.
While walking, cycling or driving in The Netherlands I would see signs such as eet beleef, or beleef de nachtwatcht and beleef het wonder van gouda! Assuming that beleef translated as belief, so I thought, dang, there’s a lot of talk about faith in a country that’s supposed to be pretty dang secular.
But, beleef does not mean belief. It means experience. And when I finally bothered to Google Translate the word, it bloomed in my heart like a Rembrant tulip. Tumbling back through the language of my youth, I began digging up the word belief and planting the word experience in my questioning mind.
As one who has at my core a sense of there a divine being of love and light, not an old white bearded man who is the manipulative, angry, punishing god of my childhood, the question that lingers is not, do I believe in God, or even what do I believe about God, nee, the question at the core of my long and winding journey is and has always been how and where do I experienceGod?
Some people call the journey of reorienting faith “deconstruction” or even being lost in the wilderness. I am not lost in the wilderness. I am found in the wilderness. If I want to talk about beliefs pertaining to God, I go into church, a bar, or a post-evangelical Facebook group.
If I want to experience God, I go outside.
When I am sauntering through a cool forest, or listening to the high, shrill call of coots on the willow-lined Rhine, or leaning into the rough bark of an ancient oak, I am experiencing the divine in and through all beings. When sipping the cool air above a mountain stream, I am exactly who I want to be. I am not looking for a way through the wilderness into another tamed, constructed version of spirituality.
In the wilderness, I’ve learned to trust my senses. I feel free, whole, and fully integrated into life in a forest, especially when alone on a deeply shaded path, breathing in the life and decay all around me.
In his essay "The Oversoul," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the human capacity to experience God directly, without the need for intermediaries or religious institutions. For Emerson, the experience of God was deeply personal, something that could be accessed through intuition and introspection rather than dogmatic belief.
Emerson believed the human soul was connected to a divine force that he called the Oversoul, which was present in all things and the source of all life and wisdom. He suggested that by tapping into this divine power, humans could gain insight into the nature of the universe and their place in it.
In "Nature," Emerson wrote about the spiritual experience of being in nature and how it can help us connect with the divine. He saw nature as a manifestation of God, and by observing and contemplating it, we could gain a deeper understanding of the divine nature of the world around us.
To Emerson, experiencing God could not be attained through external institutions or authorities but rather through the power of the human mind and soul. It was a deeply personal and individual experience that required introspection and a willingness to embrace the mysteries of the universe.
As I walked away from the constructed world of institutional religion (and the pressure to conform to societal norms), I was drawn back into the natural world and the wisdom of earth-honoring paradigms.
Since choosing this verdant path, I’ve experienced a wild, unbidden faith when I spotted my very first bright red mushroom all dotted with wee white spots, and when I was astonished to hear a real live Cuckoo calling across a lonely Dutch polder, or that morning I felt my heart crack wide open with grief at the sound of logging deep in a Portuguese forest, or the day I shared a memorial prayer beside a tiny creek in the Black Forest, and that afternoon I pretty much ugly cried for joy the first time I stood on a mountaintop in the Austrian Alps, and earlier this month as I accompanied a fiercely tender gathering of queer folx on a three-day nature retreat, and just last Sunday when I leaned into hug an big old tree in a Leiden city park.
This voyage into the verdant world has welcomed me to an embodied way of connecting with the divine that the domesticated world of doctrines and dogma never came close to manifesting.
Rewilding my faith has been about trusting my heart to experience God directly through the created world and it is a celebration of my ability to, nee, our constant and unbreakable connection with the divine.
Beleef, not belief.
I hope you will join me for a beleef someday.