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Late on a Thursday after costuming class I sat on the carpet in my teenage bedroom and wondered in my journal if I should be a nun. It had hit me like a stubbed toe that evening, this notion that I should give my life to Jesus in dramatic fashion and take vows. The nuns I knew could be divided into two categories: Catholic school teachers who tended to be old and bitter, and young, cheerful women who longed to serve God and sat certain in their choice. I thought that I could become one of the latter.

There were a few reasons I wanted to be a nun. One was that I was very afraid of Catholic marriage, because I knew I didn’t want kids. To get married in the Church you have to vow that you are “open to life,” and I knew I was not. Another reason was that it offered a road forward. I didn’t want to go to college, because I didn’t know what life I wanted. Being a nun would be all rules and decisions made for me, and there was an appeal to that. I also have always known that I want an unconventional life, and becoming a nun was about as unconventional as I could imagine.

But the main reason I wanted to take up vows was that I thought it was my calling. I felt like God was guiding me in that direction, and I thought that I could know that because I had a personal relationship with God. When I think about my faith at that time, I think about certainty. I was certain God was real, and that Jesus was his son, and that Jesus had died for me. And I was certain that God had a specific plan for me. I loved God, and God loved me, and I felt it in my heart and my stomach that I had a vocation.

This past Holy Week, I prayed for the first time in three years. I’ve avoided silence and meditation and prayer, because I’ve been afraid of what they would bring, and I was right to fear. I sat by my window and finally let myself look at that corner of my soul that used to belong to a Christian God, and I cried. I found myself saying certain phrases out loud, as though hoping that the God I believed in when I was seventeen would hear me. The line I repeated over and over was, “You left me.” Who left me, if I don’t believe in God?

But I don’t disbelieve in God. The difference between my faith until age 20 and my faith now is not a matter of God existing or not existing. It’s a matter of certainty and uncertainty. My conviction that I should become a nun emerged out of certainty that I have since abandoned completely. 

But I’m not content in this. I have this simultaneous dislocation from spirituality, and longing for divinity. I don’t think I’m the only person who feels this way. When my therapist suggested I find an ex-Catholic support group, every space I found online was bitter and certain. I want a space with room for me to acknowledge all the beautiful things I loved about being Catholic, about being religious in general. I want a space with room for me to acknowledge that that Church was never going to be my home. I want a space with room for an exploration of what divinity means beyond certainty.

So I decided to make that space. The title of this newsletter comes from a line in Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language:

Always act as if god did not exist because if god does exist, he is at best a bad novelist who merits neither respect nor obedience. It is never too late to try to change the course of the story. And it may well be that the imaginary novelist has not yet made his decision. It may well be that the ending of the story is in the hands of his character, and that that character is me.

To me, this quote gives me permission to take this lightly. God might not exist, and if they do, they’re just a novelist. I’ve spent a long time imagining that the stakes of my spiritual journey were incredibly high. After all, I was raised to believe in hell. But maybe it doesn’t have to be so serious. Maybe I can just explore divinity and explore my own stories from a place of curiosity. And the ending of the story is in my own hands.

I don’t know what I want the ending to be. But I know that I want to give more thought to these things than I have been. When I moved into a Quaker intentional community, I imagined that there would be a lot of opportunities for exploring spirituality. That hasn’t quite been the case, but I think that I have to take ownership of that. I haven’t gone out of my way to incorporate spirituality into my life here any more than anyone else. So if the ending of the story is in my own hands, I can shape my life to reflect what I want. Dedicating time every month to thinking about and writing about spirituality will be a part of that. 

On the first of every month I intend to send you an essay about something–gender, mental illness, Brideshead Revisited–that I connect with spirituality. I’m hoping these will be thoughtful, maybe a little funny, but mostly honest. Writing things makes them real for me. I want you to be a part of this construction of reality. 

If I had told that seventeen-year-old girl sitting in her room, deciding to become a nun, that god is nothing more than an imaginary novelist, she would have felt very sad for me. She would have felt certainty. I miss that certainty, sure, but I’m glad to be free of the burdens she carried along with that certainty. I wish I could send this newsletter back to her, but in lieu of that, I’ll send it to you.

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