The Barge and Rapid Deconstruction

A Guest Post by my wife Ashley

This is a guest post by Ashley. Ash is a seminarian, an associate pastor, a music teacher, and the absolute Love of My life. In this piece she takes a contemporary local tragedy and reflects on how it resonates with the current widely shared experience of faith deconstruction and (in some cases) reconstruction. I hope you enjoy it!

Last week while on vacation, I had to get up for my normal 8:30am class at 5am because we were on west coast time. I crept out to the kitchen and made myself the essential cup of coffee when I saw I had a strange text from a friend in Minnesota. It read, “are you ok? I’m worried.” This text was followed by an article from my mom about the Key Bridge collapse with a short sentence, “I thought you would want to know”.

My stomach knotted up. The bridge collapsed? When? Now at rush hour? I scrolled my Facebook feed. As bad as the horrifying video of its fall and the tragic loss of six workers were, things could have been a lot worse. The tragedy occurred at 1:30am when not as many folks were out and traffic had been stopped on the bridge.

We finished our vacation. I read many news updates. It will take years to rebuild the bridge. Opening the Port of Baltimore again is the first priority as so much of the country relies on shipments into our harbor. Cruises even leave from our port. Economically things are a mess and the weather is impeding efforts to find the bodies of the missing men and clear the harbor.

My two youngest kids attend a school near the bridge and today I finally went out to the end of Fort McHenry to see it for myself.

The remains oft he Key bridge

Even though I’ve seen countless pictures and videos online, seeing the wreckage in person was unsettling. Our skyline is forever changed.

I walked back to the car deep in thought. It’s so crazy to me that something so large and impressive can be shattered in a moment.

In previous conversations I’ve compared loss of faith to a house of cards crashing down. You pull one belief out and everything else falls. However, for many deconstruction is more like the bridge collapse. Our faith was strong and beautiful, protected even; but then the unthinkable happens, a giant barge slams into just the right spot and everything falls.

I’ve heard about these barges (and I’ve experienced some my own) the loss of a child, a relative who is terminally ill, a marriage that dissolves, a realization that you’re queer, an adoption that doesn’t go through, wars, gang violence, financial devastation, chronic illness, political polarization, death of a parent, physical and verbal abuse; the list goes on.

This deconstruction wasn’t meant to happen, but here we are and it will take years to rebuild. There’s no easy fix. The steel will need to be salvaged and the pieces sifted through, the harbor will need to be cleared. New designs and reinforcements will be selected. And finally the actual labor of construction will begin and the bridge will be put together piece by piece.

Sometimes the building or bridge never gets reconstructed. There is no one there to help and it’s too hard or expensive to do our own.

The Key Bridge has federal funding and resources that have been promised to make all this happen. For those of us that have lost our faith, we need a community that can come around and help us sort through the wreckage and support us when we’re ready to rebuild.

I write this to say, my beloved, there’s nothing you did wrong. The barge did the unthinkable, give yourself time and reach out to those who care.