The Road Away from God

How Love Finds Us Even as We Walk Away

Jonathan Martin

• Publisher: Baker Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781540902160
• eBook ISBN: 9781493437559
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

It's no easy journey disentangling the good news of the gospel from the toxic theologies that have rendered Jesus unrecognizable. It's no wonder the church has sent many walking. 

In The Road Away from God, Jonathan Martin reimagines Luke's story of two disillusioned disciples walking the Emmaus road away from the holy city where they had watched their hope die a gruesome death right before their eyes.

For anyone who is feeling their faith unravel, reckoning with religious trauma, or walking the long road of deconstruction, Martin speaks compassionate hope into the journey of today's disillusioned disciples, revealing that the resurrected Christ is profoundly present with them--even on what seems to be the road away from God.

With "a pastor's heart and poet's touch," as Rachel Held Evans once wrote of Martin, this is a book to help you feel seen in your spiritual journey and all its complexities, and to find resurrection even where you least expect it.

1
The Road Called Godforsaken

THERE IS A ROAD called Godforsaken, leading from the place you came from and stretching to the place you are now. It’s the long road from idealism to hard reality, from innocence to knowing. There was a time when you knew a sacred space, but that sacred space became unsafe long ago. It might have been a building with a steeple, a sanctuary or a temple, or a place that wasn’t religious at all but felt sacred to you—a house, a room, a secret hideaway. It could have been any place, anywhere, but it was a place that felt like home, a place where you first came to feel joy, delight, wonder.

But then something happened in that sacred space that broke your trust, and the place that once felt like a dream turned into a crime scene. Maybe it was the ugliness of evangelical politics, the hidden then not-so-hidden hypocrisy of a leader being revealed, or the dissonance between someone worshiping God on Sunday and then posting dehumanizing slogans on Facebook on Monday. The place where you once found faith became the very place where you lost it. You may never feel like you know exactly how to grieve the death of a person or a relationship, but where do you even begin to learn how to mourn the loss of belief? Somewhere along the way you became disillusioned with an institution, with an authority figure, or with yourself (at least the self everyone expected you to be), and so you took off walking—not knowing where you were going, only knowing there was no going back to where you came from.

This is more than a metaphor. The road is terribly real, as you know from the hard miles it puts on your mind and body. But at the same time, it doesn’t exist on a map. The shape of it, the contours of it, bend in the shape of your heartbreak. The most common, universal experience of the road is that it is long and lonely. And while it clearly seems to lead away from one place, it doesn’t seem to lead you any place in particular. In fact, you wonder if it is leading anywhere at all.

If you haven’t yet physically left the building, don’t let that fool you into thinking you aren’t already on the road. If the time has already come when the house is too small for you, when the system and structure no longer work for you, and the beliefs that kept your life purring aren’t holding you up anymore, then your soul knows this: you are already out walking.

I have written about shipwreck, but this is not that book again. This is not about failure and loss in general but about the very particular unraveling of belief, the undoing of hope. This is for those disillusioned disciples I talk to every day for whom faith feels less like an anchor for the soul and more like a piece of shrapnel they can’t remove. This is for the pastors and church leaders I know who are already bloodied from these deepest questions of the soul, but fear they’d be utterly torn to shreds if they were honest about what they really thought.

Sometimes, as you try to drive far enough into the horizon to forget yourself, the road feels bleak, a long, desolate, forgotten route through the heartland with occasional stops at a no-name motel. Sometimes the road is full of novelty, like an old seaside carnival, with a Ferris wheel, funnel cakes, and mermaids. But even when the road goes from desert into Las Vegas, populated by people and spectacle, the loneliness of feeling exiled from your people never really goes away.

There is a voice in your head that tells you on repeat, “You’re on the wrong path,” and if you were so brave or so foolish as to ask, there would be more than enough people in your old life to confirm that this road is surely the wrong road. This road is surely the wrong road because it has been so difficult. This road is surely the wrong road because it has felt so lonely. This road is surely the wrong road because you don’t know where you’re going, and leaving on a trip without a destination surely means you are headed nowhere. This road is surely the wrong road because it’s cost you nearly everything you have, and all you have is way too much to pay for a road to nowhere.

Whatever the reason you left, whatever made you do it, whatever got you started, whatever you are walking away from, or whoever you are running away from, this is where you are now. If the reason involved the death of a dream or hope turning to heartbreak or sacred space becoming an unsafe space, I have good news for you: where you are is precisely where you are supposed to be. Perhaps that sounds unreasonable to you, seeing as how you may not know how you feel about matters of God and destiny. You did, after all, pick up a book titled The Road Away from God. I don’t know all the particulars or complexities of your story. But here’s what I do know: contrary to what anybody might be telling you or you might be telling yourself, this is not a detour. You are walking the main artery. Even if you feel like you missed an opportunity somewhere along the way—to take the job, mend the relationship, make the different choice that you think would have made life so much better—that doesn’t mean you missed your turn.

Because you’ve been walking for a long time, and because you’ve had so many voices in your ear saying that you should have gone this way or that way, please lay down that bag of stones on your back, take a breath, and let this wash over you for a minute. As you will see, self-help clichés and denial are not what I do, so this is not coddling. Dare to believe this might actually be the ground beneath you for a minute, dare to believe this is what’s really real:

You did not make a wrong turn.

You did not miss your turn.

Whatever heartbreak got you here, whatever caused you to question if you screwed up the master plan, know this: you are precisely where you need to be.

If you had only gone this way and not that—well, then you wouldn’t be where you are now, with the sweet, throbbing, tender grace of this moment. If you had only known better—well, it’s impossible to time travel back to your former self and tag out your former self like a professional wrestler and do it differently. You know what you know now. Or hey, better yet . . . you don’t know what you don’t know now, which means the world is open to you in this moment and there is now possibility.

No, you are not too old to find yourself in a new narrative. No, it’s not too late to find a place or a people where your soul can finally feel at home.

I really don’t know how you are going to feel about this, especially if your particular disillusionment with faith or with a faith system has caused you to question the existence of God altogether—which is not only a normal but also often a necessary part of walking this road. But imagine for a moment walking all these miles of dusty, barren road until the vast emptiness fully matches the vast emptiness of your soul. You are fully adjusted to the reality that, at least in a cosmic existential way, you are out here all by yourself. It was your decision to leave on the road called Godforsaken; you have walked all this way on your own, and wherever you decide to stop and settle and build something new, you will do that on your own too.

Then in the distance, you see something that looks like a street sign. This is a road without markers, a road you have walked by instinct and intuition, with no maps and no GPS. Wiping the salty sting of your sweat out of your eyes, you wonder if it is a mirage, an illusion, an invention of your imagination. But the closer you get to the dust-covered sign, the more you know you didn’t dream this up. The road you’ve been traveling all this way, the road you called Godforsaken, has a name. You take another step in, peering for a closer look. The sign doesn’t read Godforsaken. It reads Godsent. You blink and look again, and it reads Godinhabited. You wipe your sweat, blink, look again, and see these words:

Godishere.

Godishere.

Godishere.

If you did in fact miss the exit back somewhere, then God missed the exit too. God, as it turns out, is where you are. And if where you are is where God is, then where you are is right where you’re supposed to be.

Leaving the Sacred City

Before anything went sideways—before there was a story about a religion to tell, before there were any stories about priests and preachers, about church councils and doctrines and traveling evangelists—there was a simple human story about two men grieving the excruciating loss of a friend. They weren’t trying to start a new religion; they were devout Jews who saw themselves as part of a reform movement within their tradition. They had become students of the Rabbi Jesus, who they believed to be the Messiah, the anointed One, the One who would restore their people to their former glory and help engineer the overthrow of an oppressive Roman imperial regime. Their little homegrown movement was far from the face of an empire. They were under the boot of it—they were brown-skinned, persecuted people.

Jerusalem for them was the holy city, the sacred city, the center of the universe as they knew it—the city that shaped their language and their dreams. But hours before, the sacred city had been the very place where they saw Jesus of Nazareth tortured and killed, mangled and disfigured in front of them. The sacred space was not a safe space for them anymore. The city of dreams had become ground zero for all their nightmares. So they did what a lot of people do when the worst thing happens (well, except of course for the women, as the Gospels draw for us in stark relief): they fled the scene. They got away as quickly as they could from the place that now held nothing for them but trauma.

To walk from Jerusalem toward Emmaus is not just to walk away from the city. It is to walk away from the temple and the God they met in it. It is to walk away from the faith that nurtured them and told them they were part of some larger story that might change the world. To walk away from Jerusalem is to walk away from God—or at least from the God they knew then. Luke 24 is unclear as to the exact reason for their journey. Perhaps they are walking home for the night or for a meal. Whatever logical reason they would have given for their journey, the theological reason is not unclear at all: their hope is dead. They are leaving hope behind and abandoning whatever had ahold of them before. They are walking away.

They are walking on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus, from certainty into the unknown, from the sacred into a disillusionment that feels profane. Where they are going is less clear than what they are leaving behind. They are walking away from the holy city, away from the temple, away from the God they worshiped in it. They are walking away from the people and the places that had made them. They are walking away from the place where they learned to pray as children, walking away from the One whom Moses met in the center of the flame—walking away with no return address.

The ground that was hallowed to them before is haunted now. The temple at the center of all their hoping and dreaming and worshiping has been desecrated. The holy city itself has been desecrated because it is now known as the place where they watched God die. They saw hope strung up like an animal, bleeding out onto the ground.

It wasn’t just their friend who died—Love itself died. Their own life’s meaning and their dreams for the future are now swaddled with the limp body of God inside a rented tomb. Their dreams are locked inside death’s cellar, the entrance sealed with a rock heavy as grief.

When the hurt is great enough, you don’t have to have a particular destination; you just know intuitively you can’t go back there. And intuition is about all you have when you don’t have your teacher or your lover or your home or your old-time religion. You walk, only because it hurts too much to stand still.

And so they walk . . . deeper into disillusionment and despair. They are walking right off the edge of the map of the known world. They wonder if they can walk far enough or long enough to escape the taunting demon of false hope in the rearview mirror.

An Accidental Church

So these two men are out walking down their own lonely road, looking like no one in particular. If you had passed them as the day turned to dusk, you might not have noticed the haunting. From a distance, it’s hard to tell the difference between the gait of a person walking to somewhere and the gait of a person walking away from something. These are weathered, working-class men, used to burying any unwanted emotions well behind their eyes. You would have had to walk closer to feel the death that hung heavy in the air between them.

Heartbreak hung between them too, like the man stretched out between two thieves. They are grieving the loss of every dream they ever had—the loss of religion, of tradition, of promise, of yearning. It is as if all their desires bled out with him, so that now all they have is the road ahead of them, all they have is the walking.

To stand still would be to let the horror catch up with them, and that is not an option. When the leather of their shoes starts to rub their feet raw, the sores are a welcome distraction from the harsh rub of reality against their open wounds.

They walk in silence those first few miles because what is there to say, really, while walking away from the city where they watched Love die?

The day grows as heavy as their hearts, the dam breaks, and they finally begin to speak of the unspeakable—they begin to speak of what happened. Tears finally pour forth from these weathered sailors. Torrents of grief upon grief upon grief. The men have lost their appetite for holy things, so there are no pretensions of piety or God-talk. And yet in the simple act of sharing their deepest pain, their sacred grief, something undeniably holy happens between them.

But they are not building altars to any gods here, only to their own grief, only commemorating the holiness of their own pain. They are not talking about the power of God but the spectacle of watching God die. Their ancestor Jacob gathered stones to commemorate his wonder of the Almighty. Why not gather some for their sorrow now, when sorrow is all they have left?

Most who walk the road called Godforsaken walk it alone, at least for a little while. But in that moment, the men feel something powerful binding them together, like a hymn binds people together, like stories passed down bind father to son. But this is not heritage or hope holding them close; this is the shared sensation of primal grief. The things they saw and felt, they saw and felt together, the hope and faith they lost, they lost together—as a kind of shared sacrament.

They have no hope for resurrection, only memories in which the dead seem as likely to haunt you as help you. They have no hope at all, only the shared sensation of their hearts having been ripped out. The only thing redemptive about their pain is that it is not solitary; it is shared. It is not the sometimes performative grief of funerals but the savage, unpolished agony only those who have had someone they loved more than life ripped from them can truly know.

There is a kind of grief so bottomless that it, like love and wonder, is transcendent, big enough to get lost in. It’s the kind of space that’s left when a true believer believes no more. As with making love and speaking in tongues, there are no words for it. There are no prayers to pray and no hymns to sing, only two humans abandoning manners, going all the way into a pain too deep for words, letting themselves get carried away in the cadence of mourning. . . . Do you remember when this happened? . . . Do you remember how it felt when that happened? . . .

There is no other word for what was happening between them but . . . holy, holy, holy.

So as these two companions walk away from home, they do the only brave and noble thing for no brave or noble reason: out of sheer desperation, they name their searing pain. They do not contain their heartbreak, their rage, or their questions. Faithfulness and fidelity won’t sustain them now; honesty is the only remaining virtue. Sorrow gushes from their open mouths like the blood, water, and gore that poured out from Christ’s wounded side. They speak the unspeakable to each other on the long, hard road away from God.

This is where the story gets strange, because the story they are telling themselves and each other is not the story God is telling of their lives. More often than not, perhaps, our lives tell a different story than the one we think they tell. As they are walking away from the holy city, away from God, away from God’s people, away from their community, as they risk vulnerability and partake of the sour sacrament of shared pain, these two disillusioned disciples are becoming a community. In walking away from the temple, they are becoming a temple—a place in which the Holy of Holies dwells. It takes only two people to make a community possible. You don’t have to share piety to have one—in fact, piety is often the biggest obstacle to community. Nobody really bonds over shared piety anyway, but over shared pain.

In a story soon to brim with aching human hilarity, they set out on the road away from God, but their shared brokenness is an invocation to the God they left behind. Vulnerability and shared pain draw the presence of Love, even when they are trying to walk away from it. In the very act of naming their sorrow to each other, in the ve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. The Road Called Godforsaken
• 2. God on the Road Away from God
• 3. When the Story Gets Too Small
• 4. Your Pain Is Real
• 5. It’s Good to Be a Fan
• 6. The Moment of Recognition
• 7. People of the Burning Heart
• 8. The Way Home
• 9. What Had Happened on the Road
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Back Ads
• Back Cover