I have a complicated relationship with religion.
How my concept of God and faith and spirituality has evolved over time
This is the fifth and final essay. Though there is more for me to write, I’m still unraveling the layers of core beliefs originating from my childhood, and as I do, I’m deciding what good aspects to keep and what to discard. This is shaping who I am, and my opinion is that every human who is open to personal growth never stops becoming.
If you missed the last essay a few weeks ago, here it is:
For decades, I surrounded myself with reminders of my particular version of religion, because it felt safe somehow—like a cocoon that sheltered me from the onslaught of negativity and violence and conflict in “the real world.” This is how I was raised: within the containers of conservative Catholicism that defined who I was and who I would become.
“Someday when you get married and have a family…” my mom would often say to me as a child, and I accepted this as fact, internalized it as my destiny. Marriage, motherhood, and domesticity were the gilded trophies sitting somewhere on an imagined mantel in my future, and I never questioned any of it. It all made sense.
When I met my husband Ben, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. There was no question or doubt, only certainty that cemented this intense, pulsating drive to conjoin my life’s trajectory with his. Eighteen years later, I can tell you that I do not regret this decision to marry Ben, because he is a good man with a good heart.
I wanted motherhood to be my defining characteristic of womanhood. Shortly after I lost my first job as a high school counselor in 2009, I awoke to an empty two-story house and no solid plans. My friends were all pregnant with their first child, and I felt a sense of urgency to meet my biological clock’s demands for producing progeny. As I neared thirty, I believed becoming a mother would fill the chasm of emptiness in my heart.
When our first daughter Felicity was born in 2010, I poured myself into caring for her. I did then as I do with all things: invest every ounce of my heart into what I have committed to and what, or who, I have chosen to love. My religious beliefs were the backbone that supported the spine of the life I had chosen to follow, a life I accepted as the true path—maybe the only path—to holiness.
I can’t give you one defining moment where my religious worldview began to crumble, because it happened in increments over the course of about ten years. And I want to be clear that when I say it crumbled, I do not mean that I have walked away from my faith, only that I have allowed it to take different forms and to expand outside the dogmatic boxes that often restrain a person when one lives within the confines of rigid religiosity.
Religion provided me with answers, solutions, comfort, and meaning. When the shape of motherhood stretched beyond my expectations, my response was to force them back into those containers labeled Breastfeeding Pro, Co-sleeping Queen, Multitasking Mom, Domestic Diva, Faithful Follower. My reality was that Felicity wouldn’t latch properly for breastfeeding and I felt suffocated by being tethered to her every two hours nonstop; I couldn’t sleep with Felicity in the room with me, because every little squeak and movement from her would rattle me awake; I was weepy and overwhelmed on a daily basis; and I resorted to processed meals for dinner.
The portrait of Natural Motherhood circulated within the communities I had connected with. Breastfeeding issues meant I needed to see a La Leche League expert or consult with a lactation nurse. Bottle feeding with formula was frowned upon and indicated a subpar quality of bonding and nutrition. Allowing my daughter to sleep in a separate bedroom with a crib might disrupt our burgeoning mother-daughter connection, or it could cause Felicity to develop an insecure attachment with her primary caregivers, mainly me.
On and on, the narratives flooded every phone call and house visit and postnatal checkup. I couldn’t escape the message that I had failed somehow at motherhood, that the shining glory of my womanly essence was shattered by the choices I had to make for my personal survival and sanity. These were elevated within my religious community, along with the tropes repeated to me about the honor and privilege of pregnancy and childbirth.
I could tell you more, especially about how Sarah’s birth annihilated most of the lingering tapes running through my mind, in which I parroted that my primary vocation was to be a wife and a mother, that I was to welcome as many children as God gave me without question and with total acceptance and happiness, that I would be fulfilled if I chose to open my heart and my body to a throng of tiny humans and that this would be doubly pleasing to God when I acquiesced my career goals in pursuit of making our house a home.
Living under this umbrella during my stint as a branded Catholic author temporarily assuaged the underlying guilt and shame that coated my emotions and informed the way I showed up for my family every day. I thought I had stumbled upon some magical secret about how to make career and family life work within the parameters of the version of Catholicism that defined me at the time.
When I say my relationship with religion is complicated now, I’m not saying I believe organized religion is, in and of itself, harmful. Instead, it seems to me that the way organized religion is presented to a person can be either harmful or healthy, and that’s what I’m still trying to unravel as I make my way forward within the Catholic Church but feeling very much on its fringes.
Is there a place for me?
I’ve asked this of my spiritual director, Mary Sharon Moore, for about five years. Originally, it surfaced from a primal pain, and I voiced a question that surprised me: “Why does it seem like the church I love doesn’t love me? I feel like I’m losing my faith.”
And I’ve never forgotten what Mary Sharon told me in my spiritual crisis. She said, “Good. It’s good you feel like you’re losing your faith, because that means you are outgrowing the old containers that restricted your faith from becoming something beyond definition. When your faith stretches outside these boxes, it feels like a type of death, because it is. Let yourself shed the old skin and grow into the new.”
What I’m telling you in this essay is that I believe in a benevolent God. I believe that every time I love, I experience God. And every time I enter the sanctuary of the natural world, I encounter the divine. I believe in goodness and mercy and healing. Theology provides dense and cerebral answers when answers don’t suffice. And maybe it’s true that nobody really understands God—not fully, at least—because the deeper we go inside ourselves, the more mysterious is the divine.
Maybe God is Mystery, and I can lean into living the questions, as Rilke once wrote, because the seeds of promise sprout from what I can’t explain or fathom. And when I acknowledge my littleness in this vast, vast expanse of infinite universes, that is when I fall to my knees with reverence and awe in a moment of true surrender to every beautiful gift offered to me in this moment.
I was introduced to
and her beautiful, sensitive, and tender writing about five years ago when a close friend of mine, Katie, dropped off one of Rachel’s books—Only Love Today—as part of a care package shortly after I gave birth to Auggie. Since that time, I have come to know Rachel on a personal level, and her testimonial for upgrading her subscription is something I cherish, as I cherish each and every one of you.
Have you ever wondered, “Is there a place for me?” Sometimes the containers into which we were born or placed or told we fit into become suffocating and stifling. If you want more stories about the complexities and nuances of our shared human experiences, consider upgrading your subscription or leaving a tip today.
I relate hard to this as a lapsed Catholic. You've given me pause to consider how spirituality can shift and change over time and doesn't need to be a hard rejection. Thanks, as always, for your wisdom, Jeannie.
I'm glad you were able to find someone that helped you grow your faith in a way that made more sense to you.
My dad was that person for me. Although we, my siblings and I were raised in a Methodist church--which was my mother's religion--my dad was raised as a Quaker.
We were taught, by him to question every aspect of the faith lessons we were learning in Sunday school and to question what fit for us right now and what didn't.
All throughout the rest of his life, his message remind the same spirituality is meant to grow with us, to stretch us as human beings to be better people.
There is more to spiritual growth than our religious beliefs and values.