Leaving Faith Behind
By Ron Broglio
Ten years of possessions fit into an army green canvas duffel bag. I heft the bag into a minivan, and my fellow Jesuit scholastics drive me a few miles down the road from our historic New Orleans house uptown on Saint Charles Avenue to my new home: a ramshackle former barn, now an apartment.
For years we were a team. We studied theology together, immersed ourselves in weeks of silent meditation in remote spiritual centers, worked in Catholic social services in Tijuana barrios and housed homeless families in the Crescent City. Now I was leaving the spiritual order with its vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. I was also leaving the bonds of meaningful friendships and identity we shared.
I unload my bag in the dirt driveway and turn to those who I considered my brothers in the Society of Jesus, those who saw my years of struggle with religious life and who supported my long search for peace. As they drive away I wave goodbye, feeling bruised and numb.
Anyone getting to know me eventually asks the obvious question—the one they have wanted to ask but held back until it felt safe to do so: Why did you leave the Jesuit Order? It took me a while to script a sufficient answer. “Chastity is hard” usually works and sometimes gets a laugh. Or there is the earnest “I had a community but did not feel connected” or the muddled “I battled feeling depressed and unhappy until I was exhausted and couldn’t fight it off any more.” But as with most major life changes, the actual reasons are complicated and difficult to express.
Looking back, I now realize some of the signs of unhappiness that led me to leave. One stands out.
It was the 1990s and I had recently graduated from a college that doubled as a monastery. As a Jesuit-in-training, one of my jobs was teaching in a Catholic high school in an affluent suburb where well-placed teens were given a traditional private school education. In the first years of the Jesuits, it is common to have assignments in new locations to experience a range of occupations before selecting how to best serve the order. Mine was at that school.
“As they drive away I wave goodbye, feeling bruised and numb.”
Everyone was friendly and welcoming to me as the new, young guy, and they were happy to show me the routines of high school life and ministry. One afternoon after teaching Beowulf to rambunctious sophomores, one of the younger priests asked me if I was interested in therapy sessions—to help him accrue clinic hours for his advanced degree in clinical psychology. Happy to assist, I signed up.
Later that week I visited his well-appointed office where he introduced me to a tabletop sandbox in the corner of the room and beside it an array of small objects—toy cars, musical instruments, various species of tiny trees, miniature people, doll-sized household items and a miscellanea of plastic animals. I was to choose any of these I liked and arrange them in the sandbox. Pretty simple, child’s play…which was the point. But because I knew nothing about therapy, it took me by surprise. Task dutifully accomplished, he asked me to talk about the various items I selected and how I felt about them.
Here is where it got tricky. I didn’t talk. About anything. Trying to be smaller, I shrunk in the plush chair that suddenly felt uncomfortable. I felt myself withdrawing from what was supposed to be child-like play. The carefully crafted neutral space of the therapist’s office had become like a calculated trap, and I didn’t want to be there.
“The carefully crafted neutral space of the therapist’s office had become like a calculated trap, and I didn’t want to be there.”
I had spent years trying not to express emotions, and now this man sitting across from me wanted me to talk about these toys and how I felt about them? He pointed to a few objects and pressed me. Then he mentioned a small red valentine-shaped heart sitting singularly on a little sandbox dune.
I broke down in tears. I couldn’t speak. Probably a sign, right? Why did this pop symbol for love cut through me and create a shaking emotion that ran so deep I did not have the tools nor language to express what I was feeling? Religious life had allowed me to wall-off and avoid working through complex problems in my emotional life. Unknowingly, I had negotiated the world with a stunted ability to handle uncomfortable feelings about love and affection. Instead, I learned to offload my deeper feelings to prayer and the sacraments.
I don’t remember much after that. There was Kleenex to wipe away tears, and some attempt at conversation. Over the next weeks, I returned a couple times for sessions and managed to scratch the surface of a few basic relationship dynamics—but then I got on a plane to my next assignment.
Looking back now decades later, it is hard to understand why I thought I could ignore these problems. My teen years and subsequent religious life had been founded on an unspoken premise of being alone in the world and judged unacceptable on the cosmic scales. My parents divorced when I was thirteen and my father moved on with his life. Growing up in the conservative Christian South, I was told to be the man of the family. The shattered pieces left after the divorce were my responsibility, and I had to take care of my mother and brother and the house we lived in and figure it out on my own. I carried that worldview with me into my college years and then religious life.
The turning point that ended my Jesuit vocation came several years later while on a biennial leave to see family. I was visiting my father who lives in London, and whom I had not seen much over the previous fifteen years. It was my first time in the city and by luck of circumstance, a good friend from my Buddhist-Christian meditation group was also in London on vacation.
“I didn’t have to suffer to prove my devotion and gain acceptance. Then came a rush of being loved…I was free.”
My friend and I toured the Tate Gallery, British Museum, Tower of London and myriad other obligatory sites. During the following week, while walking the labyrinthine streets or pausing for a tea, I would find myself without thought, judgement or concern and slipping into a simple feeling of happiness. One evening while having dinner at a local curry house, amid the crowded seating and the soft drone of recorded sitar music, I looked across the table at my friend. He had a balanced spiritual life, a good relationship with his parents and his girlfriend, and was a deeply kind and joyful person. Then I realized something more. Without spending his life proving to be worthy, God loved him as he was.
That may seem obvious, and intellectually I already knew it to be true for us all. I had studied the theological debates about faith and good works, but at that moment sola fides and sola gracia were not on my mind. In the next instant I did not think but felt my own situation. What about me? I didn’t have to suffer to prove my devotion and gain acceptance. Then came a rush of being loved. It was not that I was getting a hug from God but simply and powerfully a sense of peace for who I was without a need to exert inhuman efforts to be considered worthy of living. I was free.
There is a phrase in the New Testament about Paul’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity while on the road to Damascus: “Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight at once.” My transformation from the Jesuit order into secular life was something like that. I would return home, talk with the priest in charge of my spiritual life, sign some paperwork and then begin packing the duffel bag I used to travel from one assignment to the next. Freed from self-imposed and institutional mind-forged manacles, I stepped into a wider world unafraid.
Some years later I would leave faith behind altogether—a conversion story for another time. But that miniature heart on a little sand dune and then one serendipitous evening in London started me along a road of self-worth, acceptance and love.
Ron Broglio, a professor of English, writes books and essays about nonhuman comportment in the world and produces exhibitions on contemporary environmental art. Broglio is the director of the Desert Humanities Initiative and associate director of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University.