“The way I see it, a mystic takes a peek at God and then does her best to show the rest of us what she saw…she agrees to the quiet morning hour in front of God in exchange for a bit of revelation.  She doesn’t ditch tradition as much as take it for its word and peer inside its cavernous shell.  There must still be something worth saying, worth pointing to.” –Jessie Harriman, in David James Duncan’s God Laughs & Plays

At dinner the other evening, a long-time friend of mine asked me how things are going with the Catholic Church. This did not strike me as a general question; it seemed to be a very personal one about the Catholic Church and me—how we are doing—and that was a bit startling…which, in itself, was startling.

These days I spend a lot of time asking other folks how things are going between them and the Catholic Church. You see, for the past few months I have had the privilege of helping to facilitate a Boston-area writing group for young adults who are wrestling with the beauties and sorrows of our Catholic Communion.   Rather than attempting to voice my own relationship with the church, I have been listening to echoes of it in the profound articulations of others. And this has brought me a good sense of companionship.

Yet, when this old friend of mine asked me about my own life with the Church, I hesitated. I was speechless, really.  In the broken response that I proceeded to muster, I found myself talking about this blog.  Why had a question about my faith life led me to an explanation about this blog?  Perhaps my friend was wondering the same thing: “Oh, no, no, I didn’t mean to question you about the blog,” he said, assuring me that he was asking about my faith and really not trying to make me feel bad about my silence in the blogsphere.

What my friend’s question led me to realize, however, was just how much this blog is implicated in my ability to answer his question about my present relation to Catholicism. In the conversation that followed, and in the days of contemplation that ensued, I observed that the practice of blog writing has afforded me a space of discovery—of revelation—about where and how I am in relation to God and the Church.  Without it, I have become much less familiar with my location in relation to these very significant entities.  It is not that I am nowhere in relation to them so much as I am simply unaware of where I’m at. Unable to give an account of it. Unsure about toward where and to what I can point with regard to my life with the tradition.

Blogging more often might be a good way to get at this again.  I’m a bit out of practice, though.  My fingers don’t navigate the keyboard as quickly as they once did when I sat down to write; and this is really just a more physical manifestation of my internal aimlessness as I search my soul for some simple words to offer.  Yet it seems a worthy attempt to continue to sit down and try. I can sit in the quiet in exchange for a bit of revelation every once and awhile, a few words on the screen, a bit of insight into who I am and where I am today.  I’m a bit out of practice, but perhaps God will show up again. Eventually.

In Lauren Winner’s memoir, Girl Meets God, she recounts her transition from Orthodox Judaism to Anglican Christianity.  Couched among the tales of her various love affairs, the story of Winner’s tumultuous conversion mirrors her romantic relationships with men.  Winner writes of how she found herself consistently enamored by Jesus while persistently fighting against her burgeoning devotion.  In the end, she gave in to the love affair.  I read this book for the first time when I was sixteen—at the age of first love and first heartbreak—and undoubtedly, it gave me a paradigm for understanding my increasing attraction to the Catholicism of my upbringing.  If becoming Catholic was like falling in love, perhaps leaving would feel something like a break-up.

We have rituals for break-ups, for mourning the loss of a lover, a once-constant life companion.  We let ourselves cry.  We call our friends, and they show up, sit on our couches, and hold us as we try to catch our breath, like Kate. We take down pictures and put old letters into shoeboxes that we shove into our closets, perhaps opening them from time to time for grieving. When we have no paradigm for life without that ex-companion, friends tell us to wake up in the morning, to get out of bed, and they promise that someday it will be a little bit easier. Those around us testify to a hopeful future until we believe it.

Later in the day after reading Kate’s blog entry, I sat at dinner with my boyfriend Jack, telling him how I had carried her heavy words with me all day.  Jack leaned forward to speak—then paused. “I have a frank question for you, if I may?” he asked. “I know you don’t think you can leave, Jessica.  But do you ever wonder if you could, maybe some day?”  Jack has stood beside me during Episcopal liturgies where I wept silently, yearning to belong to a community like that—a more egalitarian space where, for instance, a woman could consecrate the bread and wine of the Eucharist.  Afterward, I told him I was crying because I could never imagine leaving the Catholic Church, even in the moments when I want to.  Feeling stuck in my relationship to the Church hurts sometimes—but I have no paradigm for life without the liturgy and people and tradition that I have loved for so long, even with its major imperfections.

“Sometimes I think it’s possible,” I responded.  “But, I think I would need a funeral first.” Jack tilted his head, wearing a confused look.  This was not a clever way of saying I will be Catholic until I die.  It had simply occurred to me, “I would need some sort of ritual. You know, at funerals everyone who loves you gets together, and they celebrate your life with them.  They mourn your absence but they commend you into another space.  At the very least, I think I would need that to leave Catholicism.  To feel okay about it.”

For many people, leaving Catholicism is a courageous decision made in response to the painful circumstances imposed on them by the Church.  Many suffer within Catholicism for many years before they leave, and for many leaving is a concerted effort to salvage Christian faith.  It is not a rejection of it.  More than ever, it is apparent to me that we need a pastoral response for those who need to leave.  We need some way of communicating those messages of condolence and hope that we share with our friends as they mourn the loss of a lover: “It seems that this is the best thing for you right now, even as it hurts,” or simply, “It’s going to be okay.” We need to go sit with them, and listen to the stories of their grief.  We need some way to say, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry…”

It was a friend’s mother who gave me Girl Meets God in high school.  She was raised Catholic, and during her college years she increasingly attended a local Protestant church. She became involved in their ministries, and eventually she found herself identifying with this new community much more than the Catholicism of her upbringing.  One summer she was at a Christian camp with young people from her church, and she befriended a Catholic priest who was also there with a group from his parish.  She told him about her life in the Church, and how she had decided to leave Catholicism for this new Protestant community.  This priest offered to say a prayer with her, one that would mark her departure from Catholicism and her entrance into this other Christian community.  And indeed, their prayer marked this transition for her all those years later.

When she told me this story as a high school student, I thought it was so strange. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would intentionally seek a mark of separation from Catholicism. Excommunication was the only thing I could equate to this type of event, and that is something forced on people—not sought out. But today I wonder what a prayer like that could do for people like Kate, or for many of the people I know and love.  And I wonder what the offer of a prayer like that would do for me.

On Thursday I went to an evening liturgy at the Episcopal Cathedral.  Instead of extending my palms over the altar during the Eucharistic prayer as the presider had implored us to do, I attempted to wipe the tears from my cheeks without attracting the attention of the small congregation.  Instead of singing and casually swaying with the melody of the communion song, I was preoccupied by the tense knot in my throat, trying to swallow it–along with all that unbridled emotion.

It was the liturgy of my dreams, right there in front of me: the liturgical prayers and rituals I loved, enacted by a community with lay and ordained ministers of every gender, sexuality, and race, language that reflected tradition while emphasizing the full and equal participation of all.  All this filled me with joy and excitement–yes–but the tears were an outpouring of another kind.  As I stood there amid that liturgy, I imagined what it would be like to call this my church.  And I cried because I could not imagine it.

I could not imagine my church becoming this type of church, nor could I imagine leaving my tradition for the sake of calling this one my own.  Even when faced with the manifestation of this seemingly ideal worship community, being Catholic–or potentially not Catholic–remained overwhelmingly complicated.  There is some complicated power that binds me to Catholicism.

I do not live as Marie Currie died, denying the source of my wounds.  I know it pains me at times to be in this tradition, but I also sense right now that there is a force keeping me here.  Maybe I will figure it out some day, detangle myself from its mysterious pull to enter a space where I can call a liturgy like that my own. Until then…

What does it mean to claim to be a Presbyterian, or a Protestant, or a Christian?…What if we were to walk through the Protestant churches of the United States today, especially the centrist-to-liberal churches, and ask such questions of every member? How many would be left in the pews if all had to profess a belief in the supernatural claims about God and Jesus? I won’t venture an estimate, but my hunch is that the collection plates would be considerably lighter if churches were to expel all the skeptics and all who held non-orthodox views.

If there existed a huge, neon yellow highlighter for computer screens, I would have taken it to this passage from “The Inquisition,” an essay by Robert Jensen that I read yesterday on Killing the Buddha. The piece details Jensen’s removal from St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas after fellow parishioners read some of his writing on “radical Christianity,” the label Jensen has taken on to describe his agnostic/atheistic faith.

The essay immediately captured me because I’m used to hearing stories like his concerning Catholics (both of the present and past), not Protestants (at least not Protestants who lived after the Salem witch trials). What’s more, the quoted passage really captures the spirit of many of the questions and ideas I explore in my academic research, and I’ve realized that I haven’t shared much about that with you in the blogsphere.

As an undergraduate I was drawn to various forms of identity theory explored in Postmodern (and post-Postmodern) thought. The more I considered these explorations of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, etc., I more convicted I became that identity is much foggier than most individuals and institutions acknowledge, and that there are serious consequences to overlooking the reality of how people make sense of themselves and their communities today.

In the case of Robert Jensen, his Christian identity did not match that of many in his congregation, so they used the pre-established power structures in the church to remove him from a community that is both life-giving from him and central to his religious identity. My point is not to make a judgement about the moral “rightness” or “wrongness” of his church’s decision, rather I want to highlight how this situation exemplifies observations I commonly make about religion today: First, there is a great diversity in Christian (and generally, religious) identity, and both individuals and religious institutions struggle and/or refuse to acknowledge this reality. Second, situations like this beg the question–Who/What gets to decide individual and communal religious identity? Doctrine? Past or Present doctrine? Tradition? Which tradition? Current Authorities? Which authorities? The Bible (or a particular interpretation of the Bible)? The individual, him/herself?

I find that contemporary theories of gender and sexual identities are extremely compelling when it comes to questions of communal and individual identity, and the battling power structures that delineate these identities. I want to bring these theories into conversation with theological understandings about religious identity and belonging, with hopes of generating a more accurate landscape of Catholicism, and religion in general.

I’d love to know what you think!