Holy Audacity and Sacred Arrogance
Is it too late to set 2025 intentions? (P.S. It's my birthday)
I recently embraced the practice of choosing a word for the year. But this year’s word felt less like a choice and more like a force. It simply wouldn’t leave me alone.
I saw the word “disrupt” everywhere. I ignored it, hoping for something softer and nicer-sounding. Imagine my pleasure when my new church small group announced their tradition of choosing star words during the Epiphany season of the church calendar. Both concepts (star words and following the church calendar) were new for me, but I was pleased to pull “clarity,” oblivious to how relevant both this word and “disrupt” would be in the coming months.
I didn’t understand how “disrupt” fit into my life or how to apply it until I came across it—once again—in Black Liturgies, one of the books that would help shape my faith this year:
Whatever audacity my grandma's artistry possessed, I hope someday it is found in me. In you. That you and I would allow the artist in us to come awake; that she would not have to tiptoe nightly through our disbelief. The creative dwells in you; I only hope it is given enough voice to cause disruption. This sacred arrogance is a revolution in its own right.
I finally had the context I needed but avoided, and it highlighted what I’d been working up to for years—a spiritual awakening that’s bold enough to say, “Yes, I’ve changed my mind,” and “What you suspect is true, and I don’t have to explain myself to you,” and “I’m leaving.”
I’d been developing a “sacred arrogance” for a very long time, and it grew to its current size while I wasn’t looking. While I was in therapy, trying to figure out how to control the narrative around how other people respond to the changes I’ve experienced, something snapped.
I can hear a past version of myself, who turned 24 years old ten years ago today, asking, “How could arrogance ever be sacred?”
I’d never be able to explain it to her, with her hardened, hand-me-down theology and made-up mind. It’s something she’d have to grow into. She could only bear witness to an idea like this after her faith had taken on a few different identities and been in a few fights.
This is a type of “arrogance” that hears my therapist say, “There are few things in life that are more personal than faith,” and starts to recognize that, while learning from others can be good at times and even wise, I don’t have to listen to anyone who tries to force my beliefs into the exact shape of their own.
The old me might’ve argued that this is a sinful type of pride or contempt for others, but the new me sees it as bravery that disrupts the status quo for good reason.
It’s a God-given boldness that breaks me out of a prison of fake rules for living and believing. I constructed part of this prison myself, making up rules and requirements. Some of it I inherited from others. It takes a certain level of audacity to poke at, prod, and question any of it.
It’s what I needed to reject those who are convinced that they and their particular tribe have definitively defined what it means to follow Jesus, and everyone else’s journey is the wrong path. (Now that’s what I call true arrogance.)
It’s the type of audacity that Sarah Bessey wrote about in Field Notes for the Wilderness, another book that has helped me feel less alone (and less like I’m going insane) as my faith has evolved over the years:
It takes such holy audacity to choose a new path when the old ways turn into dead ends for you. It takes guts to realize that God is bigger than a church, a tradition, an interpretation, and then to live accordingly.
I’ve had the will, the nerve to change. I’m even quoting authors here that I likely would’ve called heretics 10 years ago. I would’ve been someone’s heretic 10 years ago, and I’m definitely someone else’s heretic today. We all are. This realization—among many others—has been freeing.
There’s a freedom in not caring who calls you what.
There’s freedom in believing that God calls me friend and beloved, and letting that be enough.
There’s freedom in saying, “I don’t know” and settling into not ever having all the answers.
I can’t blame my past self for wanting to plant herself among people who seemed so solid and sure. Saying “I don’t know” felt like betraying God and everything I thought I knew with such certainty, and what an odd thing to start disagreeing with yourself.
To admit: I don’t know if I believe that about God anymore. I don’t know if I believe that about women anymore. I don’t know if I believe that about gay people anymore. I don’t know if I believe that about my body anymore.
That 24-year-old version of me would’ve had to know everything or would’ve faked it until she made it.
But now, I’d say she’s made it. She turns 34 years old today, and she has embraced a life and a faith that isn’t afraid of a few shifts.
There are people I’ll have to disappoint on the journey, including my old self, but as my top song of 2024 so fittingly described, “You'll lose your faith a bit and question if she's you / For a while, you might not like her, but I do.”
My word for 2025 is firmly “disrupt,” and now I know why. In January, I didn’t realize how applicable it would be and just how many disruptions would occur.
And now, in May, after everyone set their intentions for the year four months ago, mine have finally clicked.
My intentions for 2025 (or for my 34th year, or just my entire life) are:
To write from the scar and not the open wound
To embrace the ways I’ve changed, forsaking others’ expectations and desires for my conformity (no understanding required)
To embrace life’s disruptions and even allow myself to overspiritualize them sometimes
To say “I don’t know” openly and often—even if I’m secretly reading five books on the topic
To free myself from the opinions of those who speak prescriptively about what I (and everyone else) should be doing, believing, and saying
To create a life that feels good and is fun and interesting to me
To read with absolute abandon, but also start consuming other forms of media besides books
To return to a simple faith that is more relationship than research project
I have a lot of grace for the old me, and I’m proud of how far she has come. And on my 34th birthday, I’m proud of the thinking, evolving, still-here-doing-this-Jesus-following-thing-against-all-odds version of me, too.
I honor how many prayers I had to whisper in the dark to get here. How many churches I had to leave. How many books I had to pore over. How many times I had to read the Bible cover to cover. How many statements of faith I had to refuse to sign. How many crying fits I had to have. How many voices I had to ignore.
As the late Rachel Held Evans once said, “An evolving faith is simply faith that has adapted in order to survive.” I saw my doubts and questions, concerns and contradictions, what wasn’t adding up for me, and, finally, I didn’t try to slap on a canned, easy answer from some overconfident pastor or get up and walk the other way. I scooted over and made room.