Author: John Lucas Kovasckitz, with Emily Dobberstein
Over the years, Emily Dobberstein has become family to my wife and I. We all lived together for awhile, worked the same job as cottage parents, and if I’m counting correctly we’ve been to 7 countries together. The three of us lived in a very small van (our beloved Beep Boop) for most of our two months in New Zealand, and we’ve shared experiences in Iceland, Nepalese hospitals, and this past year I strummed a guitar as she walked her front yard to marry Peter - a man who, thank God, is worthy of our Em.
For the great majority of the time I’ve known Em, she’s been slowly and lovingly writing a book. I’ve looked forward to its completion for quite awhile, as she has become one of the most trusted voices in my life. It’s finally here, and I’m so deeply proud of my friend Emily. The Courage to Go - A Memoir of the Seven Thousand Miles that Healed Me is raw and it’s honest, and above all it’s a companion and gift for those that might feel alone - especially those healing from abusive relationships, and those finding that the religion they were handed doesn’t bring life anymore.
In Emily’s words, The Courage to Go is:
For those who need help living into the hope
that healing is possible,
For those that are questioning
the “one right way” they were handed
and feel isolated and alone,
For those who wish to feel seen
in the midst of their grief,
For those who have lost or needed to leave
something that once defined them,
For those that have been hurt
by the worldview they were handed,
And for those who don’t understand
how their worldview could ever hurt people.
[…] This book is about seeking mystery, not debating theology.
This book is about making peace with ambiguity, not resisting it.
This book is about the questions, not the answers.
I invite you to read the life-giving interview with Emily below, and to connect with her via her website (emilydobberstein.com, where you can order her book, or via Amazon), and Instagram.
Without further ado, here’s my friend Emily Dobberstein.
JL: What was the greatest fear that you had to overcome while in the writing process, and then subsequently what fears were brought to the surface in preparation for releasing the finished book?
Em: During my writing process, the fear I faced most consistently was that I wasn’t a good writer, or further, that I wasn’t a writer at all. I feared attempting to write a book and failing to complete it or to do it well would prove that. Before writing The Courage to Go, I’d written poems, blogs, and short essays, but a book? Especially a book like The Courage to Go? No way. Important people write books. People with big platforms write books. A random nobody in North Carolina does not write books. At least that’s what the negative voice in my head liked to tell me whenever I reached a hurdle in the writing process (and there were many).
Publishing The Courage to Go felt like releasing the depths of my soul from an extremely vulnerable season for the public to rip apart at its leisure. What the fear leading up to publication came down to was the fear of rejection or losing love for being myself and telling the truth—something I believe is so very human. I feared my relationships with family and friends who still identified with or practiced evangelical Christianity would be negatively impacted or that I would lose those relationships all together.
The unfortunate thing about evangelical Christianity is that some sects of it teach people, consciously or subconsciously, to merge their beliefs with their identity. Therefore, when someone critiques the belief system within evangelical Christianity, like I do many times in The Courage to Go, some Christians can feel like their entire personhood is being threatened and attacked and have the potential to lash out in hateful, judgmental, and often scary ways. I feared letting myself be vulnerable in front of an institution which has a hard time admitting the discrepancies between its fundamental teachings and its very real history of violence and harm, much of which is rooted in white supremacy and colonialism. When white power wrapped up in religion is threatened, it can turn ugly quickly, which we have seen plenty of in the current political climate in America. I worried The Courage to Go would put me face-to-face with that ugliness, but at the same time, calling out and facing the ugliness was Work I was committed to, so leading up to publication I spent a lot of time meditating and preparing myself for the potential of negative pushback.
JL: "The Courage to Go" is profoundly vulnerable, and I think the true gift within the book is companionship to those walking through a similar journey of spiritual deconstruction. What do you feel is the power of knowing that you're not alone, specifically within something that (I know from personal experience) can feel so isolating?
Em: There are many things I believe we are not meant to do alone in this life, and healing is one of them. In my deconstruction experience, moving forward and pursuing healing and reconciliation seemed impossible before I knew that there were other people navigating similar experiences. Something about knowing that I was not alone after months of feeling isolated and lonely gave me the glimmer of hope I needed to dig deep and do the hard work of healing from my trauma. I can imagine this would be the case in processing any adverse reality in the human experience. That is where the power of solidarity and the phrase, “me too,” shines through. Whether it be individual internal healing amidst a journey of spiritual deconstruction, or collective societal healing amidst a journey of reconciling a country’s history, faults, and systems of oppression, healing can not be accomplished in isolation and separation.
We need each other. We need each other. We need each other.
JL: I deeply resonated with your attempts to pray amidst your spiritual deconstruction. What does prayer look like for you now, and what spiritual practices have you found lifegiving lately?
Em: Prayer is still a complicated practice in my life. Even five years after deconstructing my Christian faith, I have not fully recovered prayer in any verbal sense. I constantly have to accept and embrace the possibility that clear, systematic language may never be a part of my spirituality again. Prayer (or contemplation, which is a less triggering or distracting word for me) in my life now is more of a state of being, a way of life, an orientation toward something somehow both greater than myself and inside of myself at the same time. It is a practice of drawing energy from a place of eternal stillness, unity, and love here and now opposed to asking a God with personhood to do or not do something for me in the future on Earth.
In the Christian Bible, God explains God’s self as “I am.” That phrase is probably the most Christian concept that informs my contemplative life today. God is I am—here and now, in this moment, and this moment is all we have. I find that spending too much time contemplating the past or praying for any specific future to be unfulfilling. Prayer is a way for me to return to the present moment, to turn inward so that I may walk an outward life that brings love, peace, and justice—the Way of Christ, I believe.
The most consistent, life-giving spiritual practice in my life happens shortly after I wake up (or in these winter days of seasonal affective disorder, whenever I can drag myself out of bed and stumble to the kitchen to boil water for tea). I sleepily fill up the kettle, and while it is boiling, I unload the dishes. I never believed that unloading the dishes could be a spiritual practice until I attended a seven-day Buddhist vipassana meditation retreat on the island of Koh Samui in Thailand, which you and Danielle attended with me on our 2018 trip around the world. Each participant at the Dipabhavan Meditation Center was given a daily task to contribute to the communal work of keeping the retreat running. My task was washing, drying, and putting away dishes after our first meal. I learned there that simply by being mindful during my task, the most mundane moments of life can be sacred and holy if I took the time to notice. So, doing dishes in America? Not necessarily praised as a sacred and holy act. But something about putting away my dishes mindfully, first thing in the morning, immediately grounds me in the holiness of the mundane parts of reality. It provides me with an opportunity to start each day with a small act of rebellion—enjoying doing the dishes, and sometimes, finding God there.
Once the dishes are put away, I walk my cup of Earl Grey tea to a small room in our house, whose walls are lined with bookshelves and maps from all of my adventures around the world. I roll out my yoga mat, light a candle, sit down, and meditate for twenty minutes. Most days my “monkey mind” is active the whole time and I feel not one bit of transcendence. Some days, though, I break through the fog and can see clearly—whether what I see is the Christ, or the Tao, or oneness, or God I do not know for sure—but it is those moments of clarity that keep me grounded and inspired to continue the hard work of becoming love in a world that often seems dark and meaningless.
JL: In a world that craves certainty and clear boundaries (particularly within religion), I have known you to gracefully hold tensions of seeming opposition and to embrace mystery...in a (compound) word: non-duality. If this resonates with you, speak to what it means to feel at home within this space.
Em: This question reminds me of a moment in Chapter 19 of The Courage to Go, and I believe this excerpt is still my best answer to what it means for me to feel at home within a non-dual space today:
In this moment, standing there at the edge of Tioga Lake, looking out at the mountains reflected upside down on the lake’s surface, I tried to hold both sides of myself in loving tension. I held the contrast in my open hands and was somehow still separate from it, looking at it from a place I cannot quite describe, but a place that somehow seemed like a deeper self—one that witnessed my beliefs, emotions, and doubts.
For the first time I felt like I could take a step back and exist comfortably in the gray space in-between the black and white. The gray space was a place institutions and dualistic systems swore was dangerous and should be feared. For most of my life I had feared it, but I wasn’t scared standing there in the gray. I didn’t feel like I had to judge myself for the contradiction, and for the first time, I didn’t feel like I had to choose between skeptic or mystic. I was somehow both and neither. Something about it brought peace. Something about it pointed to the possibility that ambiguity might not be as scary as I thought, and it might actually be the very place the wisdom, truth, and life I sought would be found.
Maybe that is where our true selves lie, in that gray in-between place where we can hold the entirety of ourselves tenderly with love and without judgment. Maybe, it is in that place where the truest light of life shines its face on us, and we are made new.
Choosing to reside in non-dual frames of thinking, feeling, and living instead of resisting them has been one of the most freeing aspects of leaving institutional Christianity. Before I deconstructed my faith, gray, in-between spaces that held ambiguity, paradox, opposition, and mystery all at once were terrifying and anxiety-provoking to me. Now, I try to welcome those spaces and seek them out, for I believe that if that Divine light of life is to be found, it is somewhere in that in-between.
JL: Any post-Covid trips you've been scheming? What has kept the spark of adventure alive during this season?
Em: Well, I got married in June 2020, and after moving in with my partner, Peter, during a year that held more stress, anxiety, and existential dread than any year I’ve ever experienced, I didn’t have to travel much to find adventure (if learning how to live in a shared space with your partner while you both are constantly experiencing stress and are often not your best selves can be called adventure, ha!). As someone who lived an extremely transient life from 2013-2019—never living in the same house for more than a year, never working the same job for more than a year, seeming to be constantly moving, traveling, and living out of a bag—this new reality of being rooted to a place with no clear end date and committed to a long-term marriage relationship was totally new territory to me. Though both of these realities were terrifying to me a couple years ago, they have become the adventure that I need in order to grow during this season of my life. Peter and I live in Canton, North Carolina just outside of Asheville, which has turned out to be one of the greatest access points to spectacular wilderness I’ve experienced in the Southeast. Peter and I both are avid hikers, so in the midst of a pandemic where traveling has not been as much of an option, it has been a gift to spend every weekend hiking, camping, or foraging for edible mushrooms (a more recent hobby we are learning together) in the Pisgah National Forest near our home.
Regarding post-Covid trips: Though our non-traditional honeymoon, a five-day 45-mile backpacking trip on the Art Loeb Trail with average daily ascent totals of 3,000 feet (for you non-backpackers, think of walking up a stair stepper for six hours a day) was lovely, we hope to have a second honeymoon and travel to Ecuador for a few weeks when it is safe to do so again. Peter was a sustainable agriculture volunteer for the Peace Corps in Ecuador. He lived and farmed there for two years and hasn’t been back since. We hope to travel there together so that we can hike a few mountains, eat a lot of fresh ceviche, and tidy up our conversational Spanish, as well as so Peter can show me all of his favorite local spots in a country that was home to him for a while. In the U.S., pending the state of the pandemic, we have a canoe backpacking trip in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota planned in May, and then beyond that, our next trip in the States will either be backpacking in the Pacific Northwest or road tripping through the Northeast, wherever the Covid-19-free wind blows us.
