A Lost Sheep Comes Home

Many times, as a Catholic pastor, I will get approached by parents who are upset about or grieving a son who has abandoned the faith.  It seems a weekly occurrence. Some wonder where things went wrong, seeing their son’s rejection of the faith as a failure on their part to raise the child correctly.  Some believe they did everything they could but that their son still rejected the faith.  For some parents, this is a deeply painful rejection not just of faith, but of themselves as well.

I suppose I get approached with this as much as I do because of my own story.  I was an agnostic.  I was one for a long time.  Officially I was about 4 or 5 years, but for much of my life before that, I was as well.  This might seem strange for those who know me and know I was in a High School seminary. 

I am reticent to write much about how I became agnostic as it would seem to be a condemnation of family, friends, and others of influence in my life.  I do not wish to do this as, with very few exceptions, no one tried to drive me into a lack of faith.  I will write, though, because it might be instructive to parents, teachers, my brother clergy, and even to the young man who has abandoned faith.

I will readily admit that no two stories are the same.  What contributed to my path is unique to me.  However, there are more things that unite us in the human experience than separate us.  Take from this what you want.   

A Tale of Two Gods

In my youth, I was presented with two very different gods. 

God A was an angry guy.  If He loved us, it was begrudgingly so.  He didn’t like us.  Sure, He sent His Son and all, but even that seemed like just another reason for angry God to be angry with us.  This God has a long list of the hell bound.  This God loved entrapment.  He allows us to be tempted and then slams us when we fall.  Love to this God, was a fearful submission.  He was an all-powerful bully.  Worship was appeasement; worship was stroking the eternal ego of angry god.  Angry god was like a cat…three strokes on the belly to make me happy, four strokes and I will gnaw your hand off!

God B was fluffy guy.  He was a peace, love, and crunchy granola type.  He was the smiling hippie who just oozed positive emotions.  Honestly, he was kind of really effeminate and hard to take seriously.  He was little more than a numbing agent when life got hard.  He was as effective at guiding me in life as a untrained golden retriever puppy.  I love Goldens.  Don’t get me wrong. There was, however, very little about this god that a young man, such as myself, saw as worthy of my time.

I wanted nothing to do with either version.  It seemed all wrong.  I couldn’t tell you why it was all wrong, but my gut told me it was.  That was problematic.  I was looking for an identity, especially in what it meant to be a man.  Either god’s definition of manhood, so much based in their own definition, left me cold.  I didn’t want to be the angry guy.  I didn’t want to be the wuss either.

Wandering

               My 7^th and 8^th grade years were brutal.  In sixth grade, when my family lived in Kentucky, my dad, siblings, and I converted to Catholicism from being kind of Protestants.   I got my first real good look at angry god.  My classmates started bullying me, friends abandoned me, and I felt isolated quickly.  I was told I was going to hell.  We moved to Missouri and I was put into a Catholic School.  I fared no better there.  Being excessively short and scrawny for my age, I was a prime target for bullying. It was the first time I was exposed to a religion class as a part of the regular curriculum, and it was there I got exposed to fluffy god.  It was also where I first had the first real doubts.  You see, we talked about fluffy happy Jesus who just loved, loved, loved. Problem was, that was far from my experience with those Catholics around me.

               Home life was little respite. The breakdown of family was starting in earnest and would drag out for the next 8 years.  Fluffy god wasn’t terribly effective at stopping the breakdown.  No matter how much religion we jammed into our lives, the breakdown didn’t stop.

               I ended up in high school seminary for one reason and one reason only: it got me out of my home and away from my home town.  Things were better at the high school seminary than at home.  Even there, though, it was still fluffy god.  I paid lip service to thinking about priesthood.  I had to.  The alternative was going back to what I was trying to escape.  I did love my family, even with all the dysfunction.  However, if I never saw my old schoolmates and the parish again, I would be okay.  I did like the pastor of my parish.  He was a good guy who did try hard.  He was the one thing that kept me attached to faith of any kind; at least a willingness to stay nominally Catholic.

               I had no relationship with God though.  I went to Mass every day.  I had to.  I prayed morning and evening prayer every day.  I had to.  I went to religion class 5 times a week.  I had to.  Honestly, there wasn’t too much loopy going on; but it left me cold.  I felt nothing.  I had some friends.  That was enough…that and it wasn’t my home town.  There was some comfort in going through the motions.

               When I graduated, I went to college seminary.  I went because it was expected.  I was on my way into drifting into the priesthood.  It was there that a new ugly beast arose.  In High School Seminary, we were taught to believe generally what the Church teaches.  But, in my first three years of college… not so much.  Whatever faith was there died.  Everything was an argument, even what we could call the persons of the Trinity.   Church moral teaching was at best a buffet in which each was presented in the worst possible light. I hated going to Mass and prayer.  I skipped quite a bit.  Everything seemed empty.  I struggled. I started dating girls in secret.  I was disconnecting from something I was barely connected to at all.

               Even with all this, I still thought I was going to be a priest.  Heaven knows why, I didn’t believe.  I ended up transferring seminaries my senior year.  A part of me knew that if I were going to make the next step, then a change of venue was going to be necessary.  I wish I had gone to that seminary all along.  This story might have taken a different turn.  There, I got the closest I had gotten to an encounter with the actual God.  But, right on cue, the second semester of my senior year, my parents separated for the last time.  God once again seemed impotent.  I was furious.  My fury was picked up by the review board for the theologate and they recommended I wait till the dust settled before I went on.  In my mind’s eye, the impotent god’s failure was complete.  I went back to my practical agnosticism.

               Going home, now in New York, religion became something I couldn’t abandon altogether. I still went to Mass so as not to scandalize my family.  The pastor, though, was an idiot who loved angry god.  Our fights were many.  Even with that, once he found out I had been a seminarian, a full court press was started to get me back in the seminary.  I went.  It was a huge mistake.  The place I went for less than one year was such a troubling place where faith was drained and in its place an uberliberal anti-faith rose, that I finally was convinced to quit going through the motions.  I left the seminary and the faith.

Give Me Something to Believe In

               During my time in the desert, the one place I found any solace was in music.  I listened to the radio quite a lot.  In 1990, a song by Poison, called “Give Me Something to Believe In” was released and became a hit.  It nailed where I was in my life.  The song,  a heart wrenching ballad written by the lead singer after the death of a close friend, is the pleading of a man who sees so much pain and strife, so much hypocrisy, and wants something to make sense of it all.

               I wanted to believe in something.  I wanted all of this to make sense.  I had tried the whole religion thing and found it wanting.  I wasn’t angry so much as I was despondent and confused.  If God was who I was told He was, why did my family break up?  Why was I bullied by those who said they believed? Why was there pain?  This led to my owning agnosticism.  I could never make the jump that creation spontaneously happened, so atheism was out.  However, I figured there might well be a god, but who He is is inaccessible to us.   We were all just grasping at straws trying to make a god who fit our own predilections.

               Like my other approaches, this didn’t fulfill me either.  There was still some longing there and I had no idea where to go with it.  Like so many others, I tried to fill that longing.  I became the master of keeping up appearances.  Deep inside I was restless and getting more and more resentful.  That resentment found its way in my attitude to ‘organized religion’ as a farce that preyed upon those honestly seeking for truth and towards the ‘true believers’ who sneered at those who didn’t believe as they believed.  When I was seeking a deeper bond somewhere, religion drove me further and further away.

Toy Soldiers

               Nature abhors a vacuum. So does the human heart.  I found solace in many things as well.  I worked.  I worked a lot.  I dated.  I had a knack for picking poorly.  That might have had something to do with looking in bars for something.  If I couldn’t walk out with a girl, at least I could walk out with a buzz. I found that with alcohol (beer specifically, hard liquor and I just didn’t agree) took the edge off from the emptiness.  I went from wanting it to needing it.  I was good at keeping up respectable appearances, though. I may be many things, but I am not stupid.  I knew where this was going.  I was just having a hard time hitting the brakes.

               Without God, it is said, all things are permissible. Maybe all things aren’t legal, but laws can be changed.  My attempt to find something I could believe in was heading south.  I knew it.  I remember one night lying in bed with the radio on.  The bed felt like it was spinning.  I hated that feeling.  I remember an  old song coming on, ‘Toy Soldiers’ by Martika coming on.  It is sad song about someone struggling with an addiction.  When the line, “How could I be so blind to this addiction?  If I don’t stop, the next one is going to be me.” was sung, it was like a dagger to my heart.  It was probably one of the hardest cries I have ever had.  I was on the wrong road.  I had this emptiness and I believed I had nothing to fill it.  That night marked the last time I went out to a bar to get drunk.

               I cleaned up my act.  But I was restless.  I thought I needed a change of venue.  I had the girl I loved, the job I loved, but it wasn’t enough. I took the first promotion from my company that got me out of New York.  Maybe a new beginning would help things.  So off to Missouri again I went.

Hole Hearted

               I have to admit I was a bit of a hair band kind of guy.  Of all the albums I had, it was Extreme’s ‘Pornograffiti’ that I liked the most.  I was especially fond of the harder rock songs on the album.  The two acoustic songs I didn’t really care for.  My neighbors in the condo heard it more than once.

               How is this relevant?  Well, you see, I put my heart and soul into the new position.  Once again, though, it was unfulfilling.  I ran into a few friends from my years prior in Missouri.  They were people of great faith.  In just a few discussions, being very careful to stay off of the topic of religion, in started to occur to me that maybe the hole and emptiness I had could only be filled with one thing: God.  Honestly, I bristled at the idea.  I tried religion, heck, I was going to be a priest.  It didn’t work.   But it would not leave me alone.

               One night, while playing the above mentioned album, the song ‘Hole Hearted’, came on.  I had been distracted by trying to figure out my life and I heard in the background, “If I’m not blind, why can’t I see that circle can’t fit where a square should be.”  Right words at the right time.  It occurred to me that what I had spent the last 4 years doing was trying to fill a hole with something that wouldn’t fill it.  It was time to give this god thing another chance.

               It was timid business though.  I knew that I still wanted nothing to do with either angry god or fluffy god.  I went out and tried to find God on my own.  This, too, was unfulfilling, because I caught on rather quickly that all I was doing was creating a God I could be comfortable with.  It seemed to me that that was already done by others.  If I was going to do this whole God thing, I wanted to find the real one.

The Road Home

               For me, I started out with a basic question, “If I were a God who created, why would I do it and what would I desire?”  That led me to find the God of Judeo-Christianity.  Unlike other religions, where creation was bad and man especially evil, in Judeo-Christianity, God created on purpose and with a purpose out of love.  This made sense to me.  How then all the turmoil?  It made sense to me that if that creation turned on Him by not loving Him back, that the obvious result would be turmoil.  That He doesn’t destroy that creation and start again however much it deserves it, spoke to that love.  The whole Jesus event then made incredible sense.  If a God who loves His fallen creation really loves them, He will do what is necessary to draw them back in without destroying them; He would destroy what separated them.

               What then was I to do with a lifetime of seeing His followers not getting that?  What was I going to do with those followers who presented Him as angry god or as fluffy god.  If I were going to re-engage in faith, I had to search for what was authentic, even if what was authentic challenged me to my core.  In fact, I was hoping that an encounter with God would shake me to my very core.  I wanted to get as close to that creator who loved as I could.

               Why, then, do I need a Church?  Can’t I just find this God on my own?  Why? Because I knew there were other people looking as well.  There were other people who wanted something to fill that emptiness just like I did.  I started looking at what various churches taught about God.  I saw a lot of the angry god and fluffy god.  It was St. John Paul II that captured me.  I would read what he would write and listen to his words and it became clear that what he believed…that’s what I was looking for.  His god was neither angry nor fluffy.  Then as I looked at what the Church actually taught, I realized that I had found what I was looking for in the last place I wanted to find it.  I had written off Catholicism as hijacked by crazies. 

               I was content to be a layman who would engage in this.  I could be a teacher.  I could volunteer.  The problem was that the more I engaged in faith, the more empty the rest of my life seemed.  I had found my love.  I wasn’t ready to commit though.

The Steep and Winding Trail

               I remember the first time the thought crossed my mind about maybe I was actually called to priesthood all along.  For a split second, I felt sucker-punched. No.  I came back in a way I never had before.  I was willing to engage in an eternal relationship with God.  I would be a proper spokesman for Him, but on my terms.  I was okay with there being a fire as long as I could direct its path.  I would soon find out that fires purge and it would be painful.

               I was drawing closer to the God that had so evaded me in my younger years.  I suppose a better way of putting it, wasn’t so much God evaded me, but I hid from Him.  Either way, the closer I got, the more I became aware of what needed to change.  Changing was not going to come easy.

               When I finally consented in my head to at least looking at seminary again, I found it was going to be a steep uphill battle.  I, who had wanted things on my own terms, was going to be put in a crucible.  I hated it then.  I see the absolute necessity for it now.  All that I had accrued while working in the private sector eventually dissipated. The vocational director of the diocese remembered me from years past and hated me.  He had no interest in my being a seminarian and actively fought it even after I was accepted in the seminary.

               My old girlfriend was not one to give up either.  Having that safety net under me made letting go all the easier when things became hard.  One of the hardest purgings in my life was letting go of that safety net.  God wanted my full attention.  This time I couldn’t run away from the current reality.  This time I was going to have to stand my ground.

Epilogue

               Decades have passed since those days.  It is a lifetime ago.  My relationship with God and His Church grows.  However, I have not forgotten what those days in the wilderness felt like.  I have not forgotten how I got there, what I did when I was there, and how I got out of there.

               I know that not all stories, not even the majority of stories, end as mine did.  I know there are still many young people, both men and women, who wander.  They may not call it that.  They might angrily deny they are; I would have.  But we should never lose hope. 

               We are told that the Good Shepherd looks for his lost sheep.  I was one of those lost sheep.  He found me.  That’s why I dedicate the rest of my days looking for the lost sheep…even if they don’t think they’re lost.     

               God used what he could to get my attention.  A few well-placed songs, my searching and restlessness, even my pain, to get me back where I needed to be.

               I end with this.  I imagine that many wander for the same reason I did. They were presented a god, angry, fluffy, or otherwise that bore little resemblance to God and balked at it.  We have to do a much better job in our catechesis in presenting the fullness and truth of God.   We want something we can believe in.  We crave it.  St. Augustine, another famous wanderer, put it best, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”