Have you been following along with the UU Lent word/photo of the day calendar? I find it to be a deeply meaningful spiritual practice as it offers me the opportunity to take some quiet time each day to reflect upon what the word means to me. Then, I practice paying attention to the things that word calls me to, things I may not usually notice. I share my #UULent posts in our UUCL Facebook group. I strive to post everyday, but honestly, I do end up missing a couple days here and there. I would love it if you would all share when you can, too! It’s one way for us to live into and discover the expansiveness of our “many windows, one light” analogy.

The UU Lent word for today (Monday the 10th of March) is “deconstruction.”

Professor of Religious Studies Melissa M. Wilcox explains one technique for deconstruction in her book Queer Religiosities: “Asking questions about who produced a story, who gets to define the “true” version of it, and who benefits (and who loses) from the way the story is told is part of an analytical technique called a hermeneutic of suspicion. A hermeneutic is an interpretive strategy or technique, a way of interpreting a narrative. A hermeneutic of suspicion is one that refuses to accept the narrative at face value and instead asks “suspicious” questions about how the narrative came to be and why it’s influential. … [S]acred stories—stories with truth-claims, credibility, and ultimate authority—can make, unmake, and remake the world.” (P61)

I heard in our worship service today that some of you deconstructed your Christian faith because you asked questions about the stories you were being told. You were suspicious about what you were told you were supposed to believe. Asking questions led you down a different path towards truth, and you then began to recreate a new “window,” with new stories that supported your view through this window.

What other stories need to be deconstructed using a hermeneutic of suspicion? What stories are harmful and how can we “unmake” them and remake them into stories centered in love?

Here are my photos, which are not illustrations of sacred stories, but only images of old walls that someone else put up, the deconstruction of those walls (during which we examined closely how it was built and tossed out parts that were not needed), and the reconstruction of those walls in a way that I wanted to remake them, and with new hardware. (This is my booth at the Lakeland Antique Mall, and it is still very much still a story in progress!)