Tugging at Edges

I have always been a tugger at edges. Not a destroyer. Not someone who believes in burning things down. Just someone who finds the loose thread and can’t leave it alone. I was fifteen the first time I felt it. A question that wouldn’t sit still inside the theology I’d been handed. Not a crisis exactly. More like noticing a place where the fabric didn’t quite lie flat. I pressed it down. The community made the cost of pressing too hard very clear. So I went back at twenty and tried to embrace it fully. Married at twenty one.

Built the life the story required. But the 15 year old and her questions didn’t disappear. They waited. At 35 my husband went to theology college to build the structure higher.

I went to the library.

I found a book that told me evangelicalism held the bible too tightly and something in me exhaled. Then I found a professor online who read the bible as literature and I knew literature and hwo it worked. Stories made sense to me.

One brick at a time, for a year, I asked really good questions and watched the wall come down. I didn’t want to blow it up. I wanted to find a way to live inside it honestly. Symbol rather than fact — though symbol is not less than fact.

A way of seeing rather than a rulebook. But the church I belonged to couldn’t hold that. The middle ground kept being made uninhabitable. So I ended up on a shore I hadn’t meant to land on. What I found on that shore surprised me. Not emptiness. Not the bleak atheism I thought I’d signed up for. Something quieter and stranger and more honest than either the faith I’d left or its opposite.

I think the world is made of stories. Not metaphorically — actually. We are born into narratives we didn’t choose, huge ones, already running before we arrive. Family stories. Cultural stories. Religious stories. Gender stories. They shape what seems possible, what seems true, what seems like just the way things are. Most people never notice the edges. They live inside the inherited story as if it were reality itself. But reality and story are not the same thing. And once you know that you can’t unknow it.

What I believe now — if belief is even the right word for something held this lightly — is something like this.

The world is symbol and meaning and we construct that meaning through experience rather than receiving it from above.

Consciousness is probably the ground of everything.

The life of the interior matters enormously.

And we co-create our existence — not alone, not at the mercy of destiny or divine plan, but in relationship with experience and with each other, shaping and being shaped.

I don’t believe in destiny. I don’t believe in the new age version of this which is just magical thinking with better branding.

I believe in uncertainty.

Not as a problem to be solved but as the actual condition of being alive and conscious in a world that is genuinely mysterious.

Here is what I have learned about uncertainty.

It leaves room for stories.

The church offered certainty as the antidote to not knowing. A complete map. No blank spaces. And the price was you had to stop looking at the places where the map didn’t match the territory. The 16 year old in me spotted those places and couldn’t stop looking. That’s what got her into trouble. But certainty was always borrowed. Always one good question away from unravelling.

Whereas uncertainty doesn’t unravel. It can’t. It just says — we don’t fully know, and that is not a problem to be solved. That is the actual texture of being alive. And in the space that uncertainty opens, stories breathe. Your story. Mine. The ones we were handed and the ones we are making. There may even be a meta story, one above and beneath all the particular stories, some pattern or consciousness or meaning that holds everything. I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. And I have stopped needing to. What I do instead is tug at edges. Find the loose thread. Follow it patiently and see what’s holding and what’s ready to unravel. Not to destroy. Not to be left with nothing. But to find the stitching. To see what was load bearing and what was put there to keep me small. To honour the attempt at meaning without being owned by someone else’s conclusions. You are allowed to tug. You are allowed to find the loose thread and follow it even when you don’t know where it leads. The not knowing is not the problem. The not knowing is where the story starts.