Until recent years I had never thought much about spirituality, let alone my own, whatever that might be. Instead, I have spent more time thinking about organized religion, and about my flight from it that evolved over my early decades. As I have described that journey in the earlier essays in this series, from my teen years onward I increasingly experienced the Catholicism that I had been taught to be a source of personal unhappiness rather than liberation from it. This
experience certainly did not seem in line with the Resurrection story.
But what would fill the space in my life created by my abandonment of the faith of my youth? That I never thought to even consider this question is itself worth considering. My exit from religious practice and my growing agnosticism could have left me alone in the existential sense. What to believe in if not my Church and its creed?  What to think if the Church shamed members for sexual orientations and identities, condemned them for marrying outside of the faith, and forced females into second class status? If the religious guidance that had been drilled into me since age five was no longer meaningful to me, what was to direct and even comfort me on life’s infirm road ahead? Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder”
