Letters From Leavers

I was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic schools through grade 12. My mother was Catholic, my father was Lutheran, and to get the priest to marry them Dad had to agree that I would be raised Catholic. He wasn’t particularly religious, so that wasn’t a problem. In the ’60s and ’70s, the Catholic schools where I lived were progressive, teaching a liberal, nonliteralist, love-thy-neighbor-most-important version of the faith. The Bible, and its inconsistencies with itself and with science, was mostly ignored. In fact, I got a damn good science education.

But, starting in the early grades and dogging me into adulthood was a pervasive sense of self-doubt. I knew I was ugly, because I was fat, and I knew I was stupid, even though I inexplicably got very good grades. It was just a matter of time before the rest of the world discovered what scum I was.

In college I met my future husband, who’d been raised in an evangelical tradition. Neither of us was particularly religious; he seldom went to church while we were in college, and I attended sporadically. We married soon after graduation in the student Catholic center, not a parish church. Within a year I started feeling a strong desire to reconnect with God. I had a new job, and the self-doubt was reaching anxiety levels. God wasn’t answering my prayers, so maybe I wasn’t close enough to him. Husband had attended one Catholic service with me, and was apalled at what he called “ritual”, so we started attending a local nondenominational Christian church.

Wow! This was an evangelical church, and the sermons spoke to my heart. I WAS scum! I only existed because of the intense grace of God. (That everybody else was imperfect, too, and needed the grace of God, was a message I only heard distantly.) Often I would cry during the sermon, feeling like such a failure. Everyone else in my church-world was accomplished, admitted (infrequent) failures easily, accepted the grace of God, and reveled in the blessing of Jesus. All I felt was wave upon wave of despair. I was worthless. I was complete scum. How did these Jesus-centered people not see it? I must not be capable of accepting the grace of God, because I sure wasn’t feeling it.

Eventually my husband refused to go to church any more, saying he couldn’t stand to see me cry every Sunday and it wasn’t worth his time. I stopped going too. But of course, the self-doubt and despair intensified. I was suffering from depression, and had been for years. But untreated depression gets worse as one gets older.

Finally, circumstances I couldn’t ignore got me into treatment for my depression. After it was stabilized by medication, and I’d had several therapy sessions to teach me how to bypass my automatic mental self-flagellation, I began to think about religion, my belief system, and various other belief systems carefully. I realized that my many years of despair had nothing to do with my proximity to God, but I also had no ability to find joy in religion.

Finally I asked myself, why am I looking to find joy in religion? I decided that Husband was right, and much of Catholic practice WAS silly ritual. The doctrine of the evangelical church was downright poisonous. My mother was a devout Catholic, but her praying was mostly an attempt to manage her anxiety about various aspects of her life. My father, and indeed all his Lutheran relatives, regarded church as a place to congregate with friends and have potlucks.

In fact, when I started thinking about the evidence for any God, I kept coming up short. I could find nothing but anecdote, and my depression had taught me that personal anecdotes are worthless; personal sense of spiritual matters is subjective and subject to the whims of brain chemistry. My conclusion was that there was no good evidence for God, and that religion had injected pain into my life. At that point, I abandoned the former as non-existent, and the latter as a dangerous practice.

So, what gives me joy? The universe itself! I am awed by the great beauty of the cosmos, and of life, and the processes that sustain it. The awe I feel when I think about how the mountains around me were formed, or the fantastic forms of life that have occurred over hundreds of millions of years, just fills me so I think I’m about to burst. That I’m a part, evan a microscopically tiny part, of all of this is inspiring.

And what gives me my rules to live by? The love-thy-neighbor teachings of my Catholic school. Not because it’s ingrained, but because, as a now-psychologically-robust human, respecting others is just part of my evolutionary makeup. We humans are social creatures. We are empathic, capable of appreciating others’ pain, and so desire to relieve it. We also understand that our actions affect our group, and that actions against members of the group are often actions against the group itself. Attempting to love ALL my neighbors on this big planet is impossible, but I like challenges and It’s worth a try.