Encountering God anew is at the heart of Tiffany Yecke Brooks’s approach to faith formation after deconstruction. She teaches readers how to enliven their religious vocabulary, cultivate fresh spiritual practices, recognize holiness in unexpected places, find new faith communities, and more. For readers yearning for creative approaches to faith reconstruction, To Rebehold the Stars points the way toward new and deeply meaningful encounters with God.
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Author Guest Post
Tiffany Yecke Brooks
The writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is “a time to break down and a time to build up.” For many believers who are emerging from a dark night of the soul or period of spiritual wandering in the wilderness, now is the time to rebuild.
But what does that process look like for those who may be (understandably) reluctant to reengage with the system that harmed them in the first place? How is the church going to meet seekers who want a faith community but don’t want to fall back into the same patterns of legalism, dogmatism, nationalism, and harmful theology that elevates judgment and condemnation under the guise of love?
“To rebehold the stars” are the closing words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1867 translation of Dante’s Inferno. Dante and Virgil have traversed all nine circles of Hell and emerged on the other side of the world in the pre-dawn hours of Easter morning. It is in this moment—when he is fresh from his ordeal—that Dante looks up and marvels that he can once more see the heavens. In this act of “rebeholding,” he looks at the world with new eyes and a new appreciation for creation. There is still a mountain ahead to climb, but this moment in between is about sacred wonder.
This is the moment in which many spiritual seekers currently find themselves. After navigating the confusing, painful, and often disturbing process of a deep faith-audit, there comes a moment when the soul feels ready to rebuild, carrying those hard-earned lessons forward into a new chapter of faith, hope, and love—a chapter of wonder, discovery, spiritual self-respect, theological humility, and a God who is so much bigger than we may have ever been allowed to consider.
What does reconstruction look like? What will fill in where the old bricks were pulled out and discarded? Nature abhors a vacuum; something is inevitably going to wedge itself into the gaps. It’s easy to allow outdated scripts and familiar dogmas we’ve spent years (maybe decades) freeing ourselves from to slip back in unnoticed and recolonize the new shape of our faith. To Rebehold the Stars encourages readers to make deliberate, thoughtful decisions about the rebuilding process rather than leaving it to chance. This isn’t about having a “gotcha” answer to every religious question that might arise. This is about approaching faith with intentionality, holding each belief up first to the heart of God—before tradition, before comfort, before convenience—to decide what place it will have in our second-time–around spirituality.
To Rebehold the Stars guides readers through the process of building a new spiritual lexicon for themselves—a language of faith that encompasses not just new words but also new images, metaphors, impressions, emotions, and awareness.
This process is not about creating God in our own image but about recognizing how each person is uniquely created to engage with the divine. Rather than forcing ourselves to conform to manmade dogmas and rigid traditions—essentially, light pollution that can flood our vision and block out the stars—the book encourages readers to carefully and methodically examine what resonates with their souls as they grow individually as well as in a community.
The book explores how to remystify faith so that we can come at it with a sense of wonder as we reencounter God. Readers learn how past experiences can influence our responses, how to approach Scripture with fresh eyes, and how to adapt and adopt spiritual practices that reflect our deepest beliefs and the responsibilities to which our faith calls us in loving God and loving neighbor.
That is the beauty of the moment when we rebehold the stars, the moment between the struggle of deconstruction and the promise of the climb that lies ahead: We get to build a faith we choose rather than one we have merely inherited.
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