I remember that moment still so clearly when I sat across my confessor and spiritual director and said, "I feel like the container of Roman Catholicism as I have known it can no longer hold my experience of who God is." Having journeyed with me for eight years at the time, this priest was not at all taken aback by what I said.
He asked me how I felt called to respond to this realisation. I said, "I feel that in order to be faithful to Christ and to keep following where He is leading me, I need to leave this container I know and step into the Unknown without knowing whether or not this will lead me ultimately out of Catholicism or return to it in a new way." I continued, "Father, the mere thought of this scares the heck out of me, but I know in the deepest part of me that this is what I need to do to in order to continue growing in love for and trust in Christ."
That particular conversation took place more than three years ago now. Among the things for which I am grateful are the individuals God has placed in my life to accompany me in the spiritual life, including this spiritual director. He was someone who knew me first through my public persona in the local Catholic world I inhabited because he had heard me speak at an event and had also invited me to speak at his parish. But he eventually became privy to the vulnerability, doubts, questions and struggles that lay beneath my public persona.
Thankfully, he was someone I felt safe enough to trust when I entered spiritual midlife and began to ask questions and have doubts that I never had before. He was also encouraging about my revelation that I had started therapy and showed interest in learning more about trauma which I deeply appreciated. I believe that he also noticed how the interior work of trauma recovery showed up as spiritual fruit in my spiritual life.
When I told him about needing to step out of the "Catholic container" I had known all my life, neither he nor I actually knew what I fully meant. I could tell he was a little concerned about where it may lead, but he had faith in God and he had faith in my love for God. I will always be so grateful that he "let me go" where I felt called - it was an experience for me of God's chaste, non-possessive love. And because of that, I continued to feel safe in my season of deeper deconstruction to share with him what I experienced, unlearned, and learned.
In the years since that conversation, I have indeed "left the container" of the Catholicism I have known. In my heart I always thought that the container I had experienced may not have been the entirety of Catholicism. But until I left it and walked where I had never tread, I would never have known if Catholicism was possibly "bigger" than what I had known it to be.
Now, more than three years after I gave myself permission to step out of that container, I have begun to have a more stable sense of where I stand. I have concluded that there are indeed more diverse ways of "being Catholic" than I used to realise. There used to be a part of me that thought there was some kind of universal standard for being Catholic, and that we were all "more or less Catholic, or not Catholic enough" according to that standard. After my deconstruction, I do not think that way anymore.
I don't think I will ever be done with 'deconstructing' if deconstruction is about critically examining and interrogating my old beliefs about Catholicism in light of an ever deepening and enlarging experience of God. One of the earliest definitions of theology I learned as a teenager was that theology was "faith seeking understanding". If faith is more than propositional belief or following the laws and teachings of the (historically conditioned and still evolving) Catholic Church but the lived encounter and relationship with God, then I expect that as my faith grows, I will continue to outgrow and question theological containers that once helped me make sense of my faith.
Telling the story of the Catholic I used to be and how I journeyed into the person I currently am who is rediscovering Catholicism from a more integrated, securely loved personhood is going to take a lot of words! I would like to try and share some snippets and insights from this long journey in this new series on my newsletter. I invite you to follow along if this is something that interests you!
Personal Update
I have not been posting new content on my Becoming Me podcast or here on the newsletter since Easter. If you'd like to know the reason why, you can check out this short episode: An Unexpected Break: Podcast and Personal Update.
If you have followed me for a length of time, you may already know that one of the principles I follow in posting content is to share when I actually have something I truly feel called to share, and to remain silent when I do not feel prompted to speak or write. This is a way for me - an excitable extrovert with an incredibly busy mind and expansive desire to share what I learn - to be a contemplative in the world and be true to my vocation.
This is part of my spiritual discipline because it seems to be the path Christ has been leading me on. It is not easy to practice in a world where consistency, productivity and high cadence seem so highly valued even when one is providing free content. But perhaps because it so targets one of my key insecurities of being "less than / not enough", it has been an incredibly powerful integrated spiritual formation path for me.
My personal vocation has been confirmed over the years to be about making and sharing on the interior integration journey. There is a great deal of learning (and suffering) through personal experience, deep reflection and integration, refining my praxis, learning new theories across multiple disciplines and fields, and digesting all of these and articulating them across my podcast, writing, social media shares and in-person conversations. Periodic periods of silence from creative output is not a luxury for me but a non-negotiable essential for being true to myself and my vocation.
If you are new to me and my content, here are the places you can find my sharing:
- Becoming Me Podcast / Ann Chats on YouTube (long form conversational sharing)
- Begin Again Newsletter (long form writing)
- Instagram (posts but especially stories and highlights where I share from other resources and lots of personal reflections on current things I am reading)
There is already a great deal of content for you to explore, and I do hope you will explore my content with a spirit of adventure, curiosity and freedom. Come, listen / watch and read what feeds you... stay as long as you need, ignore or skip what does not help you, and leave as freely as you came.
Journeying with you,
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