One of the most significant discoveries I made in 2024 was that my cherished Catholic faith - as I have known and experienced it for most of my life - has been a trauma response. That is, the way I have understood, absorbed and practiced my Catholic faith has been from a place of compulsion and need for love and security which puts blinders on me such that this faith - genuine as it was - could not reach all parts of me.
This faith - so needed as a security blanket in a life internally wrecked with chaos and lack of stability - had been a much needed anchor and boundary that gave me certainty about right/wrong, who was in/out - and it had been within this security that I had come to encounter God and had fallen in love with Christ.
...the way I have understood, absorbed and practiced my Catholic faith has been from a place of compulsion and need for love and security which puts blinders on me such that this faith - genuine as it was - could not reach all parts of me.
When I was 18 years old I fell in love with Catholic apologetics. I bought and read books filled with inspiring and convincing arguments about why my faith was "the One True Faith" over others. Learning to explain and defend my faith when it was challenged by others gave me a sense of confidence and pride in my membership to an entity that was universal and which was assuredly "the right one". I was filled with zeal, passion and conviction about the truth of my beliefs - but my faith at this stage of my journey was completely separate from my inner self. Faith gave me something to escape into, something to aspire to (to be a saint which I understood at the time as 'being perfect'), but it had nothing to do with receiving God's unconditional love for me.
Throughout my twenties and early thirties I had powerful conversion experiences of God's love for me even as I experienced more evidences of my brokenness. Whenever I had a conversion experience, I was filled with hope - and yet, because the deeper patterns of dysfuction in my life and relationships have not been healed, that hope often led to frustration.
Everything about my faith and spiritual life was keeping me striving for perfection and obedience to something "outside of myself", but I was still starving inside no matter how many times I had experienced God's love for me.
Why were things still the same? Had I not grown in spiritual maturity? Everything about my faith and spiritual life was keeping me striving for perfection and obedience to something "outside of myself", but I was still starving inside no matter how many times I had experienced God's love for me. I was still incapable of seeing myself and loving myself without fear - shame remained crippling whenever I did something wrong. I was still failing miserably at becoming more authentically loving toward others. There were times the urgency felt so desperate - what was I doing wrong? What was I missing? Why was it that striving to be the "best Catholic disciple" I could be wasn't leading me to the transformation I so often read about?
There were times the urgency felt so desperate - what was I doing wrong? What was I missing? Why was it that striving to be the "best Catholic disciple" I could be wasn't leading me to the transformation I so often read about?
In the years since 2016, and especially in the last five years since the global pandemic of 2020, God had led me deeper and deeper into realisation that my Catholic faith as I have learned, understood and experienced it could NOT bring me into union with God or with myself. That same Catholic "faith" could not make me more wholly human, more fully alive, or more my true self in Christ. No, there was actually something else - some other 'ingredient' - that was necessary that was quite distinct from belief (creed), quite distinct from liturgical worship, religious doctrine or practice. This 'ingredient' at times subsists within the religious dimension of my faith, but it was not confined by it and very often can be found outside of the clear boundaries I had learned to adhere to earlier in my journey.
What is this ingredient? I find it hard to name because in many ways I have found that this ingredient - this grace - is God/Christ himself. It is the Holy Spirit who blows where she wills, always dancing just outside of the periphery that my need for certitude imposes upon me, beckoning me to join the cosmic dance of the Trinity into becoming who I truly am in God.
It is the Holy Spirit who blows where she wills, always dancing just outside of the periphery that my need for certitude imposes upon me, beckoning me to join the cosmic dance of the Trinity into becoming who I truly am in God.
It is impossible to get to know God without distortions from our own traumas and the traumas of our family tree, culture and that of the historical Church herself. As I answered God's invitation into healing and integration, I have come to appreciate how much of maturing in our relationship with Christ is about allowing God to undo what we have built up in the first half of our spiritual lives so that we can be rebuilt again as a new creation in Christ.
As I learned more about trauma and healing, I have recognised how organised religion can so easily lend itself to the traumatised seeking certainty in an "organising principle" that gives meaning to our lives. It is too easy to cling to the externals - the rituals, doctrines, commandments, theologies and even spiritual devotions and practices - without allowing God to break into our hearts and transform us from the inside.
As I learned more about trauma and healing, I have recognised how organised religion can so easily lend itself to the traumatised seeking certainty in an "organising principle" that gives meaning to our lives.
I came to recognise how my interior lack of secure love with God and myself led me to cling stubbornly to firm intellectual convictions about my faith. Arguments and explanations that seemed irrefutable (because of a sense of the absoluteness of God mediated from a top-down authoritarian structure assured of its apostolic succession) gave me a wonderful felt sense of security that I did not have in my primary attachment relationships or with anyone else in my life.
I came to know God. I grew to love God. Yet God was always defined and confined by the religious structures and explanations of my Catholic faith. I learned only to see God and myself through lenses that were outside of me because THIS is one of the consequences of trauma in one's life - we lose a sense of our own identity and seek it through an external mirror that tells us who we are.
I learned only to see God and myself through lenses that were outside of me because THIS is one of the consequences of trauma in one's life - we lose a sense of our own identity and seek it through an external mirror that tells us who we are.
So God was real, and yet always distant. I was confident in the truth of my faith, and yet that faith did not transform me or make me feel more at home in my own body. That faith had walls that kept me from seeing and loving anything or anyone that was "profane", who was not "of God" - even though simultaneously my faith taught me that I should love everyone! I used to feel crazy trying to bridge this seeming impossible gap between keeping ourselves holy and yet opening our hearts to all - nobody taught me how this was meant to be done, or even what it meant in practice.
But God was working through it all, and every stage of the journey serves a purpose. What I had not expected was how healing and growth led me to more necessary deaths to my Self and to the way I believed.
Somewhere over the last few years I grew weary and even disgusted with presentations of the gospel or of the Christian faith that did nothing to help me connect me with the reality of God in the painful, messy, clearly dysfunctional reality that was the world, the Church, society, my family, and my own life. I could no longer hear or comprehend arguments and preaching or even quotes from saints and Church Fathers that seemed only to point to the "rightness" or "truth" of the Catholic faith with no connection to the mud, the earth, the humanity that God chose to be incarnated into.
I could no longer hear or comprehend arguments and preaching or even quotes from saints and Church Fathers that seemed only to point to the "rightness" or "truth" of the Catholic faith with no connection to the mud, the earth, the humanity that God chose to be incarnated into.
There were many times when I told God, "I'm done with being Catholic - it doesn't make sense to me anymore!" I meant it. All the things about Catholicism that I used to take great pride in, that I basked in being able to share with others, it all tasted like dust. The hypocrisy that was not only individual but systemic in the lives of the faithful - the religious culture that somehow enabled, facilitated and kept hidden abuse (spiritual, emotional, physical and sexual) in church spaces and in Catholic families tore apart all the former structures of my belief and faith.
It came to a point sometime in late 2023 when I told God, "I can no longer in good conscience and with integrity be Catholic in the way I used to be. If it is your will that I remain Catholic, you will have to show me how."
All the things about Catholicism that I used to take great pride in, that I basked in being able to share with others, it all tasted like dust.
These past twelve months of 2024 has been God responding to my heartfelt ask in ways that I could not have anticipated. All of it has gone so deep into my being that I needed time to digest and absorb it, contemplate on it, before I could really share anything of it.
As you can probably tell from my content in the last few months of 2024, my sharings have been becoming deeper and more raw. All this is happening as my sense of self and belonging to God has grown more integrated and my perspective towards everything - including my Catholic faith - is being slowly re-shaped from a place of wholeness rather than trauma.
...my perspective towards everything - including my Catholic faith - is being slowly re-shaped from a place of wholeness rather than trauma.
You can look forward to more of this trajectory in 2025. That is, if this serves to support you where you are in your own journey! And if this does not - if this just feels too much, too radical or "wrong" for you and it is destablising you in your walk with Christ in a way that does not bring you closer to Him, then this is your cue to unsubcribe / unfollow me. Where I am now I sincerely believe that God not only allows for but actually celebrates the great diversity of where his children are - including where we are in our interior journeys.
In these last couple of days of 2024, I wish you the peace that the world cannot give which is also the peace that subsists within us even when we cannot sense it in our suffering. That peace has a name - Jesus Christ.
Reflection
- Do you find yourself asking questions you never used to ask about your faith?
- How does it feel in your body to give voice to those questions?
- Do you feel safe or unsafe to let your questions come forth before God?
- Dare you believe that these questions that seem to threaten your sense of inner safety may actually be your path to a more authentic and integrated faith?
- How might the way you believe and participate in your faith be different if you enter it from a place of wholeness rather than as a trauma response?
Related Podcast Episode
EP 135 | What's the Difference between Spiritual Fervour and Spiritual Maturity?
In this episode, I delve into the transition many of us experience from spiritual fervour to spiritual maturity, especially during deep healing and integration. I discuss the differences between these stages, focusing on their characteristics and how we respond to suffering.
By sharing my personal experiences and insights into the stages of faith development, I aim to reassure you that losing initial spiritual passion is a natural part of maturing in faith. Join me as I offer a look at how this journey helps us love more like God does. I hope this gives you hope and a new perspective on your spiritual path.
Journeying with you,
Responses