Losing Your Faith, Finding Your Soul: The Passage to New Life When Old Beliefs Die

Q&A with David Robert Anderson

Q. When you turned 40 you experienced a series of events that shook your faith and forced you to find a new beginning in your spiritual life. Can you tell us about your experience?

A. I had a health scare that was my first brush with mortality. I thought I was a “successful” pastor until an arsonist burned down our church. People close to me started dying—then my mother died suddenly. My marriage couldn’t stand the stress. It wasn’t one thing, it was one thing after another. Life wasn’t turning out the way it was supposed to, and I was bitter, angry. I wanted my vision of the good life to be redeemed, saved. I didn’t realize it then, of course, but the collapse of my tightly controlled life was actually a prelude to a much more spacious and gracious way of living.

Q. You write that, “Only people who have faltered, lost a step, suffered and died a little, are ready for the divine life that cannot be earned but can only be received as a gift.” What is the gift that comes with coming to the end of traditional beliefs and looking for a new way forward?

A. Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son is all about grace, and yet the only person who qualifies for that grace is the one character in the story none of us wants to be! We spend the first phase of life trying to prove to ourselves, to Mom and Dad, to the world that we’re good enough—we sure don’t need anybody’s grace. Then life has a way of wearing us down or breaking us down; now we can either surrender to this greater power, or we can fight it and try to reassert our control over that old, busted life. People in twelve-step programs know this best. You have to hit bottom, they say. That’s what has to happen spiritually. You have to say Uncle. You have to be done with all the goodness you’ve earned, so that you can open your humble, empty hands and receive the gift of divine life.

Q. You take readers through the six passages that everyone must make on the way to a mature, adult soul. Can you briefly describe these passages?

A. There are six passages but only one movement, really. When we leave conventional faith—Sunday school religion, in other words—everything moves from what I call out there to in here. It begins by recognizing that from childhood, other people have told you what to believe and how to live—and you’ve complied. The System laid out the path to the good life, and you got on it. So the first passage to an adult soul is simply acknowledging that the old life has failed and you must abandon it (The Good-Bye Gate). This is where authority starts to shift from parents and pastors and teachers and mentors—to you. You don’t depend on other people to tell you what’s good or right, you Stand Apart and begin to trust yourself. Once you’ve separated yourself from everything out there, you’re able to drop down in here—into your own soul where God is waiting. I call this the Deep Dive. Now a funny thing happens, even time moves from out there to in here (Arrival Time: Now). Now all that matters is—are you alive today, right now? Are you awake in this present moment? The ultimate passage follows, and that is Unconditional Surrender. In order to live in this spacious, present moment with God, you have to give up your own control. It’s where we learn forgiveness, and trust our lives to Someone greater. The final passage, Habits of the Heart, helps you to develop the daily, habitual practices that keep you spiritually in shape and alive for the rest of your life.

Q. Is the progression through these six passages linear? How can readers make the most of each transition?

A. Each passage builds on the knowledge and experience of the previous passage, but it’s hardly a linear progression. It’s more like a looping spiral, where we keep circling back over old territory—learning and re-learning, sometimes the hard way. But when we look back after days and years, we see that, gradually, the spiral journey has in fact moved us slowly into a new place. The keys, then, are two: awareness and patience. Pay attention to where you are, and trust that God—not you!—is the one who is leading you in this movement, and it is God who longs to bring you home.

Q. The key to moving from an old, dying faith into something alive is knowing what keeps us trapped in the old faith. Why is it important for readers to know what they’re up against?

A. Anyone who sets out on a spiritual journey must be aware that the conventional life that is presented to us as the unchangeable status quo—the only game in town—is in fact a destructive way of living. You have to know that and desire something better. In Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian’s home town is Destruction. In other words, every person ends up living in a place where the very life is being sucked out of you. I love that scene in the book when Christian flees the city of Destruction, crying, “Life! Life!” It’s quite possible to be lulled into complacent compliance, and never realize where you’re living. If you seek the ultimate life for which human beings were created, you have to know what you’re up against. Wake up. You have to realize that your old way of living and believing has broken down, and also recognize it as a huge opportunity that can catapult you out of the old and into the new.

Q. How do you direct readers to walk through the second passage, Stand Apart? How do they find their true self?

A. Most of us realize, after thirty or forty years, that we’ve been living someone else’s life. Our ideas, beliefs, convictions are all inherited from the group—family, ethnic heritage, church, neighborhood, school. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact in the early stages of life it’s a gift. But eventually it becomes groupthink, and the “ties that bind” must be loosened—sometimes broken. In order to find our true self, we have to step away from all the groups that have defined us since birth. Murray Bowen called this “self-differentiation.” I devote a whole chapter (Leaving Home) to the important work of separating from our family of origin, which turns out not to be a rejection of home but the healthiest way to be an adult child. Further, I help the reader to separate from conventional notions of “being good” and from the whole construct of Heaven & Hell, which in its popular form keeps us trapped in the reward-and-punishment system of early-stage religion.