There was a story I once read about a man who was so competitive that he would drink everyone under the table and be the last to fall unconscious in the tavern. One day that man gave his life to Christ and eventually he joined a religious order and he searched for the most austere and strictest observance there was. He ended up becoming a Trappist monk.
He was determined to be the best Trappist monk there was and he made sure to fast more and do more penance than any of his other brother monks until his Abbot ordered him to eat and give up his penances because he was becoming ill. The writer who narrated this story closed it by observing that while this man had left the tavern, the tavern had not left the man. The same compulsive patterns that enslaved this man continued to enslave him in the Trappist monastery.
I lived this same story. When I was thirty, I made a life-changing pivot in life-direction. I took leave from my PhD studies in Philosophy of Education to enter full-time pastoral ministry in a parish - first as a volunteer and later as a member of staff. In my youth and young adulthood I had been highly successful and awarded as a student in both leadership and academics. In my youthful idealism, I had thought that now I would be using all the gifts God had given me for his Church instead of climbing the ladder of success "out in the world" of academia.
When I look back at this season of my life now, I realise that those five and a half years I spent in full-time parish ministry were the critical years that led me to begin my interior integration journey in earnest. Externally, those years were my absolute peak in terms of engagement with the Catholic Church and in my personal spiritual growth. I was thinking about God and how to evangelise and disciple his people 24/7. I was at work from 730am in the morning often till 10pm or even later.
During those years I began to have regular monthly spiritual direction and go on annual silent personal retreats. I completed the full Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in the 19th annotation. I was zealous and passionate and well-meaning and so very prayerful (ask anyone who knew me in those years in the parish and they will tell you what I was like). In many ways I was a fireball (someone's description of me) and a powerhouse of productivity for the parish. I gave my all and perhaps because I did, the cracks and fragmentation within me did not take long to surface.
I was still the same person from before I went into full-time pastoral ministry. The same unhealed wounds. The same distorted image of God, the same triumphalist view of my Catholic faith, the same distorted ideal that sancity was to be grasped by sheer effort, discipline and unquestioning obedience to God's will. I had the same lack of compassion and patience for weakness in myself and others (even though I tried to be patient with others because I believed that to be virtuous), and the same compulsive drive to excel at everything because that was what I believed would bring God glory.
In those days I came to a realisation - being in full time ecclesial ministry was like being in a pressure cooker. Whatever unhealed wounds in a person will in due time be forced out into the open. In my case, I not only burned out physically and mentally, I was brought to my knees spiritually and emotionally. I came face to face with my limitations and realised that whatever gifts I thought I had to offer God were useless unless I had a more integrated and resilient core self.
One of the things I began to notice in those years was how many people seemed to respect and like me, but they could not be at full ease around me in the same way they could with some of my other colleagues. Back then a part of me believed it was because I held them to a "higher standard" and so they were uncomfortable. The truth was that I was never truly at ease with myself either because I was constantly trying to be worthy of God's love and trying to help others become "worthier disciples" too. How hard it was for my heart and soul, much less my body, to rest in God's love!
I suffered many "battle wounds" during my time in full-time ecclesial ministry and I inflicted wounds against my intentions too. I was so scrupulous that I was constantly examining my motivations, and because of that, I knew that my motives were pure and my intentions were always good. And it was precisely because I knew my motives were pure that realising I was still inflicting harm on those I cared for eventually broke me.
How can it be that pure intent and striving to be loving, responsible and virtuous as Christ's disciple could backfire so badly? Why was I still so insecure about myself? Why did it hurt me so much when my work did not get praise? Why was being misunderstood so emotionally incapacitating for me? And why was I so poorly equipped to handle toxicity and dysfunction even though I was an adult?
There were many things I saw and experienced about the Church in those years that could have disillusioned me, but interestingly, I wasn't disillusioned. I was disappointed in specific individuals whom I thought acted very poorly, but my mentality was "nobody is perfect" and that I should strive to still be loving and understanding. In reality, the me of those years did not allow myself to feel "inappropriate feelings". And that included anger.
During a medical check-up in that season, my doctor told me that I had heightened androgen levels and asked if I felt aggressive often or felt like beating people up. My honest answer was that I did not. I did feel frustration often but I stuffed my feelings down or spiritually bypassed them so that I could "be more loving and patient" and continue to do my work.
My body paid the price. I developed chronic acid reflux and IBS such that I could not lie down flat at night to sleep. I began falling sick with increasing frequency and took longer and longer to recover. My endometriosis and PMOS worsened because my body was so constantly flushed with cortisol due to chronic stress. I felt ashamed at how weak my body was and tried to tough it out until I could not. It was, in the end, what I experienced as defeat due to my body's limitations that forced me to admit my limitations.
Even after I had burned out twice, I still continued to pray for the grace to remain where I was if it was what God called me to do. And I stayed because I did not discern that God was calling me to leave that job yet. If you ask me now if I could have made a mistake in discernment at the time, I would say it was highly probable because back then, I did not take data from my body into discernment. My faith was still disembodied. I believed "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" and interpreted it in such a way that I should not make allowance for my body's needs. The mission of Christ always trumped my body, after all wasn't that the examples of the saints we were always called to emulate?
And yet, this was also an example of how "in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose" (Rom 8:28). If I had not stayed on and kept pushing out of fear of not being good enough as a disciple, if I had not been so insecure about showing vulnerability, I would not have been forced by pain and illness to admit that I had limits. That admission of limitation shattered my ability to preserve my survival persona of being that person who could handle whatever was given to me and excel in it.
I prayed for more strength and greater ability, but instead of granting those prayers, what I consistently heard God respond was, "Ann, all I am asking is for you to be yourself." When I insisted that being myself was not good enough for me to do a good job where I was, I only heard in response, "Are you sure I asked you to do all of this? Did I?" And I began to realise that I had made many assumptions that I thought were "God's will" which he had not asked me to do at all.
What that season showed me was that I could not be myself because survival required me to be who others expected me to be. I have only learned to have a sense of who I was through external validation, and that meant it was never safe to just "be myself". Yet it became so clear over time that God's desire and will for me was the one thing I simply did not know how to do: BE MYSELF.
In the end it was the crystallisation of this recognition that helped me to realise it was time to leave the job. After a change in parish priest, it became evident that what my new boss required of me on the job was even further away from who I authentically was and that it was a complete mismatch with the gifts that God had given me. Furthermore several incidents happened under this new leadership which made me realise that I would not be psychologically and emotionally safe. That was when I realised that it was time to leave.
I knew when I left that full-time ecclesial ministry job that I would need a sabbatical. And it was not just physical rest that I needed. I felt like I had been stretched beyond my capacity in order to remain loving and cooperative on that job. I had suppressed and bypassed so much emotion because that was the only way to keep doing the job I believed God wanted me to do. I had lived in a way that was incongruent with God's design for me and I had been broken by it.
When I finally stepped away from that role in July 2014, I did not feel anything. Not gratitude, not joy nor sadness, not even relief. The truth was that I was numbed because even though I had left the job, that was still my parish, and my body continued to feel extremely unsafe there. It took me several more months to realise I could not even attend mass at that parish because the continued exposure kept me feeling wired, especially when parishioners tried to find out why I had resigned. I felt exposed and examined. Eventually, I stopped going to mass at this parish completely.
It would take me another 8-10 years to become able to recognise and name the various harms and abuses I had both experienced and been complicit to during my time in full-time ecclesial ministry. At the time I left the parish job, I would say that I was still pretty much the same person from before I went into full-time ecclesial ministry. I was not more integrated or whole, in fact I had become even more wounded and broken. Yet that was exactly the grace that helped me to realise that I needed far deeper healing and integration than I had thought I did.
At this point in time deconstruction was not yet even on the horizon for me. I was still one hundred percent committed as a Catholic in the way that I knew. I was still committed to being the best, holiest Catholic I could be. I was still committed to loving and serving the Church in the way that I understood it. I thought I just needed some distance and time to heal and learn how to become myself as God had asked me to. What I did not realise at that time was how becoming my true self would first require me to let God undo the scripts that had formed who I had become.
Like the man in the story I had started this sharing with, I thought that I had changed by going from the "tavern" into the "monastery". I thought that diverting all my energy, zeal and gifts to God's kingdom was already a full conversion. Yet I was still the same fragmented, wounded, insecure and fearful person underneath. That was what my time in parish ministry had helped me to recognise, and it prepared me for what God had planned for me next.
(To be continued in Part 8 of Being Catholic After Deconstruction)
Journeying with you,
Read Part 1 .
Read Part 2.
Read Part 3.
Read Part 4.
Read Part 5.
Read Part 6.
Responses