I used to think that no matter what scandal rocked the Catholic Church, that I would never leave it. Since my teenage years I have been disillusioned and disappointed by fellow Catholics, Church leaders, and what I had learned about the Church in European history and still I had never wavered.
Going into full-time ecclesial ministry is one of the sure ways of seeing even more clearly how un-Christlike the Church can be and I thought my faith in the Church had survived even that. And it used to be that I could never imagine leaving the Catholic Church because of the Eurcharist. So what led me to deconstruct my faith to the point where I was seriously asking if I could remain Catholic? And why did I decide, having reached that point, that I could?
The following entries of this series will attempt to unpack this story arc in my interior journey. I will begin by painting you a picture of how I became so convicted about the Catholic faith that I had been so certain I would never doubt or leave it.
I was baptised when I was six years old together with my parents and younger brother. There is a miraculous backstory to what ultimately led my parents to the Roman Catholic faith - we had an "origin story", a family legend that human logic could not explain.
The legend was that my maternal grandfather who had immigrated from China as a young teenager to build a new life in Indonesia had only revealed his own Catholic faith after his sudden death while abroad on a businnes trip. He had done so by requesting a Catholic funeral instead of the traditional Chinese one that had been planned for him in a supernatural encounter with family members who had flown in to claim his body. According to this family legend, my grandfather also expressed deep regret that he had not been able to share his faith in Christ with his wife and children during his life.
Through a series of unexplainable events, my grandfather's revelation that came beyond the grave was confirmed and he received the Catholic burial he had requested. Over the next few years, the whole family on my mother's side was baptised into the Catholic faith. I have heard this story since I was a little girl and even as a child, found the legend extraordinary.
My grandfather had died before I was born but all throughout my childhood I had heard stories about what an exemplary life he had led even though - for reasons none of the family knew - he had stopped practicing his faith before he married my grandmother and had never told anyone about it. Many years later, after the family reconnected with my grandfather's home village in China, I heard that they found out from relatives and parish records that my grandfather had not only been Catholic, but had been particularly devout and had served as an altar boy too.
This origin story of how my extended family came into the Catholic faith had always framed our faith as "God's will" and proof that the Catholic faith must be true. However, I also now believe that my maternal family's decision to become Roman Catholic was in large part motivated by their grief over my grandfather's untimely death and a desire to be connected with him through faith and be reunited with him after death.
My mother was separated from her family in Indonesia because she lived in Singapore with my Singaporean father and her new Catholic faith became the emotional anchor she lost when her beloved father died. It was her deep devotion to reading the bible, prayer and constant talking about God that first evangelised me in my childhood because I was very close to her.
As new Catholics, my parents - especially my mother - were diligent in forming themselves in faith, getting involved in ministry, instilling family rosary prayer time and making sure my brother and I never missed catechism class or youth group events. My parents also invested heavily in children's books about the saints and bible stories. I was an avid reader and I read every single one of them such that I was the strange kid in catechism class who knew more about characters in the Old Testament and the saints than even the catechist. (That did not make me popular!)
Although I felt a growing connection to my faith through reading, I had never felt a sense of communal belonging in the parish or in the Catholic convent school I attended for 10 years. I was hungry to learn more about God, to draw closer to Christ, but I did not find the nourishment I sought in the activities, camps and classes that were provided for children and youth. There were cliques all around me - both among the parish youths and in school - and being Catholic seemed more like a kind of membership with privileges than anything else. I was active in parish activities but always felt alone.
The one thing I loved - which none of my other young friends enjoyed - was silent adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. I loved Adoration much more than the praise and worship sessions that were de rigueur of youth activities and conversion style retreats. But they came as a package, which I accepted. Yet I always longed for more even though I could not name that longing.
When I was fifteen years old my family joined a parish pilgrimage to Europe. That pilgrimage was a turning point in my story. Among the places we visited were Assisi, Lourdes, and Ars. The stories of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Bernadette Soubirous and St. John Vianney the Curé of Ars came alive for me. I visited and saw the incorrupt bodies of St. Bernadette and St. John Vianney. On that same pilgrimage we celebrated mass in the catacombs in Rome and I will never forget the thrill and transcendent awe I felt knowing that we were celebrating the Eucharist in a space that once held the remains of some of the earliest Christian martrys. I believed.
My immersive experience of being where the saints and martyrs had lived and died nourished my imagination, my mind, my heart and my soul. Now on hindsight I can recognise that it was also an embodied experience which was what made it so powerful. What struck me more than anything was the relationship that the saints had with Christ. It seemed to me that this relationship they had with Christ was the key to how they could embrace everything - even persecution, misunderstanding, sickness and death - with supernatural joy. I admired them, and I wanted what they had. Because the truth was that my own life was falling apart.
Just a few months before this pilgrimage, I had turned fifteen. Things had been falling apart at home for a few years by then, and I had also experienced painful student politics and betrayal in school. When I was on my way home after being with my friends that birthday, I had a sudden thought: What if I stepped in front of a car and died that day? Would anyone miss me when I am gone? Would anyone even notice? (My adult trauma-informed self now understand that I bore all the signs of trauma back then, and I was all alone.)
What I had experienced on that pilgrimage gave me hope. I felt that faith must be the answer to life's suffering. A relationship with God like the one the saints had must be the way into being able to bear suffering without being broken.
I especially related to the saints because their stories always emphasised that they bore their suffering in silence, and I was in a position where there was no safe adult in my life I could speak to without feeling like I was betraying my family. We lived a double-life - one for the public and one in private. It tore me apart and faith in Christ became my only anchor because there was nobody else who could actually be there for me even though I was known by so many in my parish community.
I don't want to minimise the spiritual power of the conversion experience I had in that pilgrimage when I was fifteen. But on hindsight I now realise that it was also that conversion experience that led me to adopt spiritualisation and spiritual-bypassing as my go-to survival response for the next two decades of my life.
Believing that every pain and suffering in our earthly life is temporary can be an extremely powerful and attractive way of dissociating from a life where suffering cannot be escaped. This was what I - as a fifteen year old - picked up from the witness of the saints, through the ways their stories were presented to me. Keep my eyes fixed heavenwards, and ultimately all will be well. Suffer well and silently with Christ, and I will become holy.
While spiritualising and spiritual bypassing could temporarily numb my pain and even make me feel like my suffering was bringing me closer to God, this experience of deepening faith did not provide me with any support on how to live my life here on earth in the midst of my suffering. I just assumed that if I kept praying and growing closer to God, that I would be able to miraculously rise above all my emotions and keep forgiving and loving those who wounded me.
So I tried as hard as I could to build a prayer life and to rise above my emotions so that I could forgive and love others. And when I struggled to do so, when the hurts were too much to bear, I could only assume that it was because I was not yet holy enough. Noone ever told me differently. The stories I read and preachings I heard only ever affirmed that this was how faith is supposed to be.
This pilgrimage to Europe marked the first deep, maturing conversion of my relationship with Christ into the intimate friendship I so desperately needed in my life. But I had not yet begun to "hear" God respond to me in prayer. That would take place the following year, and it is the story I will start with in the next installment of Being Catholic After Deconstruction.
A Note
If you are also healing from trauma in your life, you may be able to recognise the gravity of harm in what I have described above even though I have not spelled it out. I am purposely choosing to keep this series' emphasis on story-telling rather than analysis and explanation because what I hope above all to share is the human-ness of the interior integration journey and to illustrate the long, slow and winding path that God brings interior pilgrims on.
I am only able to share all this now because I have already grieved and raged at how the distorted images handed on to me about God, the saints, and what it means to be faithful and holy had harmed me and kept me separate from myself and unable to trust God. I am now at the point in my journey where I can re-integrate my past with genuine gratitude without minimising the harm, where I can view my younger self and the people in my life with compassion while fully acknowledging how broken and dysfunctional things were (and still are).
Part of the mystery of the interior journey is how God does not despise what is broken and distorted and how authentic spiritual growth can still take place even while being mis-shapened by trauma. In fact, authentic spiritual and integrated human growth often does begin with grave distortions because the interior journey is itself the process of restoration, mending and integration. This is the process of THEOSIS, of divinisation. And it is what I have come to hold as the core of being Christ's disciple.
Journeying with you,
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