The Value of Deconstruction
Whenever I raise my eyebrows these days, I get a sharp pain on my scalp. The wound isn’t bleeding and oozing anymore, so things are looking up, and I’d like to share this story with you to help you avoid future pain. The situation all started with an enormous and ancient piano that had continued to function much longer than it was designed to. It was an old beast of a thing that came to us for free, and I frequently tweaked and tuned it for our children to begin learning the basics of the musical world. When its strings started breaking and its wood began separating, and another free, old piano became available, I decided that the easiest way to move the old one out of the house was in pieces.
Let me tell you, there are a lot of pieces in a piano. The kids loved all the odd gadgets, springs, and knobs that popped out of it and proceeded to distribute them all over the living room. As I reached the point where power tools became necessary and sawdust was flying and the kids were constructing multiple indoor forts, my wife noted that the room had been really clean earlier in the morning. I was in the process of straining to pry a section of laminated beam loose when another beam snapped and caught me right in the head. I always find it slightly humorous and extra irritating when I wound myself with my own strength. As with most head wounds, it sprung a pretty good leak. If I forget where I put the car keys later this week, I’ll have a good excuse. The metal soundboard went to the scrap yard, some boards were kept for other craft and building projects, and the rest went in the pile for heating the house. It turns out that wooden piano keys are dandy for starting fires in the stove each morning.
It was a project that needed to be done, but there was a degree of lament to it as well. I always feel a little pang of guilt deconstructing another craftsman’s work. A piano feels even worse when you think about the music it generated, all the fingers that danced across its keys, all the songs sung, the joy, the worship, and perhaps the sorrow that it helped express in ages past.
Much has been made recently of the idea of “deconstructing one’s faith.” I won’t digress here into the finer nuances of what I think is going on there. There are several rather pessimistic analogies that could be drawn between the deconstruction of a piano and the deconstruction of faith; our inquisitive minds can really make a mess of things, or we often wound ourselves when we try to deconstruct the structural features of things that generate beauty. However, with a more balanced perspective there is a more positive thought here. And, no, it isn’t that if you deconstruct your faith you’ll have the parts to make some neat forts.
When we moved the new old piano in it had some problems too and it needed a few parts. But guess what? I had an entire pile of piano parts and I had just received an education in how they all fit together. And so, with a little prying, popping, and part-pirating, I repaired and brought life into something using the skills I learned through deconstruction.
This morning I was pondering Jesus’s questioning of the Pharisees about whose son the Christ is. By the time he was done, no one knew how to answer him. It seems like Jesus stripped down false cultural assumptions, backed the screws out of unnecessary traditions, and popped the laminated beams out of false and hollow religiosity. And yet, as he deconstructed, he did it with a purpose. He took things down to the size of their essential pieces, showed us how they fit together, and in doing so gave us a glimpse into what God was really up to in the world.
Perhaps you’re in the deconstructing phase of your faith, or walking with someone who is on that journey. But let’s look at it with a broader view. Let’s remember that deconstruction is a phase. It is a journey, but not an ultimate destination, and that the lessons we learn in the midst of it may come in handy in the very near future in some surprising ways. A common hymn hints that this tension is always there for us all, “Prone to wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love,” but it also reminds us that the sturdiest things in life are not those that we fabricate, but those which God glues together: “Take my heart Lord, take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.”