Dante, The War on Drugs, and Deconstruction

Losing my way and finding it again

Dante writes in the very opening of his Divine Comedy, “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way / I found myself within a shadowed forest / for I had lost the path that does not stray.” 

Hundreds of years later, another poet, Adam Granduciel from The War on Drugs, expresses a similar sentiment in the opening of the band’s song “I Don’t Live Here Anymore”: “I was lying in my bed/A creature void of form/Been so afraid of everything/I need a chance to be reborn” 

When I first read Dante as a teenager I admired those lines because I thought I understood them. When I first heard Granduciel’s lyrics as a man who has almost reached half my life’s way (40), they resonated with my own soul’s experience of the past few years, for I too have experienced losing my spiritual way, and no longer recognizing the places I once called home. 

As a homeschooled, American evangelical child of the 80s, I grew up in an odd mix of optimistic, religious culture-war rhetoric, and anxiety about everything from witchcraft to rock music to godless liberals to Hollywood. That doesn’t even include the rotating list of fears of potentially burning in hell forever or getting persecuted for my faith by the Anti-Christ/previously mentioned liberals or Jesus suddenly showing up for the Rapture at an inconvenient time. 

During these years of growing up I was the good kid, a poster child for my religious community. The doubts and questions that started to come later were just pushed down and ignored, until sometime in 2017 they couldn’t be ignored anymore. A nervous breakdown led to six months of deep depression, anxiety, and spiritual crisis. I felt like Dante’s lost wanderer in the woods, like Granduciel’s “creature void of form”, walking through the darkness alone. 

Thankfully, with time and help I found my way through that immediate crisis, but that time initiated a new phase of my spiritual journey, one that might be described with the popular phrasing of deconstruction/reconstruction. 

Whatever your own thoughts about the concept of or even the phrase “deconstruction”, for me in those early days it made sense to think of it like my faith being a house. I was reassessing all the pieces, seeing what parts might need replacement or repair or just complete demolition. 

In that metaphor, it’s easy to think of deconstruction as simply a mental process of assessing your intellectual beliefs about God, Jesus, the Bible, etc. And that’s part of it. 

But a house is never just walls and floors and appliances. It’s also emotions and memories. And that’s where “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” hit me in the gut when I first heard it, and gave me a new perspective on my own spiritual journey. Because honestly, a lot of my journey of pondering where I’ve been and where I’m going feels like the lines of verses two and three:

When I think about the old days, babe
You're always on my mind
I know it ain't like I remember
I guess my memories run wild
Time surrounds me like an ocean
My memories like waves
Is life just dying in slow motion,
Or getting stronger every day?

For me the journey of faith the past few years hasn’t been a neat, intellectual, linear “deconstruct x,y,z beliefs, now reconstruct”. It’s been like dying in slow motion and being reborn, or as Catholic writer Richard Rohr puts it, “order, disorder, reorder”. It’s actually been less like reworking my specific house around me and more like moving down the road toward a new, sometimes hard to define place, because when I look back on my childhood faith, I realize “I don’t live here anymore”. 

Now, that might sound terrifying, and at times it has been and continues to be. But one thing I’ve found in the past few years is that, even as I’ve become less certain about specific beliefs or where “home” is, I’ve found myself more than ever surrounded by Love, the “love that moves the sun and other stars” as Dante puts it at the end of his poem. And that, ultimately, gives me the confidence to sing, along with Granduciel:

Beating like a heart
I’m gonna walk through every doorway, I can’t stop
I need some time, I need control, I need your love
I wanna find out everything I need to know
I’m gonna say everything that there is to say
Although you’ve taken everything I need away
I’m gonna make it to the place I need to go