A Spiritual Awakening Away From Traditional Faith?

Old paradigms fall, but the search for truth remains

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It’s been four years since my faith escaped me like a thief in the night.

Four years since I decided, in defiance of everything I have ever been taught, that I would no longer be darkening the doorstep of a Catholic church every Sunday, because I no longer believed what was professed there.

Four years after forty-three of doing the exact opposite.

I never had a “fallen away” phase.

And from age fifteen to age forty-three, I was intimately, actively, energetically involved in defending, sharing, teaching, and discussing the Catholic faith.

A month or so ago, I tried going back.

I saw my wife struggling to get our boys up and out the door on Sunday. I knew that I was setting the tone, and that it was not the one I wanted to set.

I have the benefit of a lifetime of religious formation and a moral code to match. I obviously do not believe in or live by every teaching of the Church these days, but the bulk of my ethical framework remains rooted there even now.

But my children are another story. They need the foundation to live moral lives, and I don’t know how to give it to them in a non-religious context, where every principle lacks the force of divinely-decreed objectivity.

The truth is, during the last few years of our collective and observant Catholicism, we dragged them nearly an hour to a parish in a bad neighborhood (it’s almost always a bad neighborhood) so we could go to the best Mass we were aware of in the diocese: a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) offered by the Fraternity of St. Peter — before the utterly incompetent pastor of that parish made a series of decision that ultimately closed the deal for me on finishing my departure, which was already in progress. (It’s a long story I never willingly revisit, but I wrote about it here and here.)

And at that parish, which was several sizes too small for the congregation, we would sit with countless other families in the overflow area in the parish hall, watching every Sunday Mass on screens, the gathered faithful kneeling devoutly in front of wall-mounted televisions week after week, sending deeply mixed messages to our little ones about the symbolism of the liturgy (which looked like nothing but a boring TV show) and diminishing even further any sense of the sacred.

I learned, around the time of my own leaving, that my two oldest sons had already more or less lost their own nascent faith. They could not articulate this at the time (they are much better about it now, and we had a great conversation the other night in which my oldest son in particular laid out an extremely logical case for why he couldn’t subscribe to all that we were asked to believe) but their disinterest was clear long before we stopped attending. One slept through every Mass, the other simply spaced out.

So to return to the present, here we are, in a new city and a new state, and my wife has been trying to breathe some life into the dying embers of our once vibrant familial Catholicism. She never stopped believing, but she grew angry with the Church for her “knavish imbecilities,” as Belloc would have referred to them, and at the way I was treated by so many people after my public fall from grace.

I couldn’t stand watching her struggle. I had to help.

So one Sunday morning, in early December, I fought every impulse I had in me telling me to stay away, and got dressed for Mass. My oldest son, now just weeks from being a legal adult, chose to refrain. We will continue our discussions, but I respect the way he has thought this through, and will not repeat the mistake my parents did of making religion a fear-based obligation at its core.

Everyone else came with us.

And it was awful.

Not horrific. Not scandalous. Just tedious, infantilizing, mediocre, Hallmark Channel-movie-grade pablum.

Not a single thing about it that felt transcendent. Immanentist. Participatory. Dominated by a focus on the human, with no sense whatsoever of the divine.

The kind of thing that makes you lose your faith, not deepen it, if by no other mechanism than pure dilution.

A homeopathic religion, with one in one billion parts sacred mystery.

My 15 year old son said it made him “want to throw up.” “There’s nothing holy here,” he added.

Still, we did it again the next week.

And then again, for Christmas, but I couldn’t make myself go.

But today, it all came crashing back down.

I couldn’t do it. My wife couldn’t make herself leave. The boys didn’t get out of bed.

“If we’re going to try to do this, we need to find something better,” I said.

We are not at all sure where to find it. A different parish? A different rite? Eastern Orthodoxy?

No answer feels like the right fit.

And while I try to talk to the God who may or may not be there with some regularity, I still don’t believe in the central narratives of Christianity.

I just don’t like where unbelief takes people, and I don’t want my kids winding up there.

As I wrote about in my reflection on the visit to my cousin’s wedding last month, I still prefer the company of believers to non-believers. (Or at least, the company of former believers who retain that sense of decency and decorum.)

This isn’t even Pascal’s wager, though I suppose there’s some of that mixed in. It’s something else.

But Catholicism feels to me like a failed and dying thing, and I can’t escape that.

In fact, in the past few days, I've gotten two different messages from two formerly staunch Catholic men who have lost their faith.

One of them, similarly to myself, worked directly for the Catholic Church or on her behalf in various positions for many years.

Since I went public about losing my own faith, I've heard from folks like this somewhat regularly, but not with any great frequency. They are somewhat few and far between, but it is not a negligible number. Typically, when I receive a message from someone along these lines, they usually thank me for speaking out about my own deconstruction, because there is a real stigma around doing so, and a fear of repercussions for even admitting out loud what they are going through.

One of the two men who contacted me this past week said that he's reticent to share what he's going through with family members or even his spouse. (There is a real aspect of cultishness in Catholicism when you leave - people judge you, pity you, close ranks behind you, gossip viciously about you, and so on. It’s not an entirely different experience than leaving an actual cult, which I did when I left the Legionaries of Christ as a young man.)

These men who reached out to me did not want to lose their faith, just as I didn't. They were practicing, devoted, and very involved. They have families whom they love, and those families can be hurt by this. But they can’t deny the truth of where they are. Each found himself overcome by the sense that the things they have always believed in — at least in large part — just aren't true.

The logical contradictions have piled up.

The doctrines have worn thin.

The devotional stories turned out to be full of holes.

Like me, these men lost faith not through the pursuit of some depravity or the justification of some sin, but through intellectual objections that finally worked their way to the surface against lifetimes of conditioning never to entertain such doubts.

But I don't get the sense that despite the struggle to disambiguate their religious understanding from their rational understanding of the world, that either of them are comfortable with the idea of atheistic materialism, just as I am not. One of them wrote to me explicitly to thank me for recommending The Telepathy Tapes, because it gave him a sense of hope that had been missing from his life for quite a while. The other speaks fondly of a number of aspects of the faith and a desire to find his way back, out of the fog, to an eventual holy death.

What's interesting to me is that I have this nascent sense of some kind of spiritual awakening going on. As though the old religious paradigms which served some real purpose are simply no longer holding up, but the desire to seek transcendent truth remains.

Maybe God is real, but the stories we have told ourselves about him are not.

I don’t know.

Of course, this sense I have could be wrong. Religious people will no doubt insist that I am. I don't have anything definitive to offer on this in any case. It's just a sense, that first tingling of the familiar pattern recognition kicking in, telling me these aren't just disparate incidents, but somehow connected.

I also suspect that 2025 will be a year of ontological shock, of the kind that will challenge classical faith.

Of shattered worldviews.

Of new understandings about the abilities inherent in our human race, the existence of other intelligent life, and perhaps even some insights into the as-yet-hidden mysteries of the Universe.

But I am no prophet, so make of all this what you will.