It’s a weekend morning in late November and I’m sitting in a cozy living room with other graduate students, sipping away at my hazelnut coffee and picking at a cold cinnamon bun. All of us are furiously typing on our computers, trying to get a little more work done before we scatter for Thanksgiving break.

I feel very typical, at least for a graduate student. Or as the type of person who chose to continue theological education into her mid-twenties (which in wider society might seem either pointless, odd, or financially irresponsible).

I’m also typical in other ways, or so the statistics tell me. Young adults in my generation are leaving – or have already left – protestant Christian churches in hordes. It seems that the effects of all the youth group pizza parties and amusement park trips wore off by the time we had been in college or held jobs for a few years. In my case, I wandered in and out of various denominations – or “nondenominations” or “interdenominations” – in college before leaving church altogether in the year between college and graduate school.

I don’t know whether I left the church or the church left me, but regardless, as I bridged the gap between youth and young adulthood I found myself searching for a spiritual community that welcomed questions and left space for identity formation that would be creative, not just apophatic.

Apophatic. One of those esoteric theological terms. It basically means defining something by what it is not, asserting something positive through negation. Saying that an apple is an apple because it’s not an orange. Most of the time apophatic theology is applied to God: God is good because God is not evil. Things like that.

By my late-teens/early twenties, I was tired of a certain type of spiritual and psychological gymnastics. I had been raised in fundamentalist Baptist churches and schools, so my spiritual formation had been characterized by degrees of negation: I was woman because I wasn’t a man, Christian because I wasn’t “secular”, and straight because I wasn’t gay.

Forming my spiritual identity through negation became a problem since I liked to ask questions about the disparities between the “positive” and the “negative.” Why, for instance, did the secular and the sacred have to be mutually exclusive? Why was it essential to a “proper” spirituality that I be heterosexual? Why did “woman” in those churches mean that I wasn’t biologically fit to preach or exercise any sort of spiritual leadership over men? Added to these questions was the way I lived, moved, and breathed in the world. I was a girl who didn’t fit neatly into predisposed gender categories. I can’t count the number of times I was told that I would become spiritually troubled since I was a girl who would rather read a philosophy book than a fashion magazine or would rather play basketball than go shopping.

Eventually I had to choose between the static Christian identity that was expected of me, and an identity that could be formed by the people I would meet and the questions that I needed to ask. I chose the latter.

The Divine Comedy tells a story in which Dante, a forlorn poet, finds himself in a “dark wood” when the “straight path” had been lost.  Another poet – Virgil – appears and informs him that the finding the path again involves a journey first through hell, then through purgatory and paradise. Without applying the label of “hell” or a “dark wood” to fundamentalist Christianity, my own divine comedy has involved leaving the forms of Christianity with which I was familiar and embarking on a journey of faith. Somehow I had developed the notion that whoever God was could not fully be encompassed by the hazard of my early church experiences. Metaphorically speaking, wandering through my own dark wood and into hell was a way of choosing God, of making an absurd leap of faith.

It’s been said that life happens between the trapeze bars. One tension that was difficult for me to balance was how to let go of one bar without knowing when or if another bar would appear. Did I have to depart completely from my inherited religious tradition in order to be honest about who I was at the moment or who I was in the process of becoming? It is a precarious position and somewhat incommunicable to those who have never occupied it: how do you hold onto faith in God when the God you were taught to worship does not exist anymore? Must you leave your faith behind to construct new paradigms? Or is there some way to hold it all together? And what can you do in that space between the trapeze bars, when your former paradigms have collapsed and there is not another bar to grasp?

When I realized that my paradigms were shifting significantly, I told my close friends in college that I was a “theological mess.”  Thankfully, some of them were as well and we helped hold each other together. A few of us even founded a Women’s Roundtable for our School of Religion so that together we could negotiate the spiritual terrain that had been both oppressive and liberating. Participating in this group is part of the reason why I’m at Yale pursuing a masters of divinity. Faith, for better or worse, has been a way of living into my belief that there is something bigger that connects us as human beings. And it was my connection with the women of the Roundtable that helped me believe that there could being supportive communities of faith that invited questions, risk, and creativity on my spiritual journey.

So back to my musing about why my generation is leaving church. I wonder if other young adults can relate to my struggle to find a spiritual community that is both welcoming and relevant. Tired of the search, they leave Christianity altogether. And that’s perfectly fine if that’s where their journey of formation has led them. But in this particular moment, I’m back to pondering whether I’m typical… if anyone else left church not because they didn’t find spirituality (or even Christianity) compelling, but because the churches and theologies that grounded their early formation left little space for creatively processing the “contradictions” that inevitably surface through life.

Of course, this is all speculation. I can only speak for myself… where I am and where I have been, and – God-willing – the journey of formation that I will continue. But I continue this journey with the hope that my generation will somehow find ways to support one another wherever the questions lead us.