As a kid who went to Catholic school, I don’t know exactly when I stopped believing in Catholicism. It was pretty early, for sure before 8th grade, possibly as early as 4th grade. As a young child, I had no more objection to mass than any other fidgety kid who didn’t want to interrupt their play to listen to old people talk about something they didn’t understand. The brand of Catholicism I grew up with left behind the mystery and awe, but kept the rules, which were unevenly applied. So the rules against abortion were much more stringently applied than the rules against the rape that led to the abortion. The rules against homosexuality were sacrosanct, but the rules regarding how priests treated young children in their care were not. It was much more important to follow the rules than to be awestruck, to see and feel how we are connected to the rest of creation. I was a curious kid with nerdy interests, like my electronics kit, or more mystical, like palm reading. Turns out, if you are a nerdy, eccentric kid, there are few people in the world less Christ-like than junior high girls who attend Catholic school.
In high school, I was agnostic and came to understand that if there was a God, they must be so far beyond our comprehension that arguing with certainty that your God was the correct one seemed ludicrous. I had a month long Catholic-phase in college. The highlight of that phase was when my dad called my apartment when I was at a retreat. My roommate told him I was at a church retreat and he responded, “No, really, where is she?”
After that bit of Catholic dabbling, my first draft of this piece said I didn’t really put any thought into God or religion again for about 22 years; that I lived a life based purely on rationality. There was no need for faith or belief, I only needed evidence, and if I didn’t have that, there was nothing to believe. That wasn’t true. I fact-checked myself by looking back at old journals. Reading what I wrote showed that I’m a seeker and a believer by nature. I learned about all sorts of traditions, but because I didn’t feel strongly that one face of God was the right face. I didn’t find any consistently satisfying.
There were a few important things that started to shift so that I experienced spiritual realms in a new way and opened to my ancestral spiritual traditions specifically.
The first was having children. I’ve written before about how earth-shaking having children felt for me. It was the first time I truly felt the value of the feminine. Life felt interconnected in a deeper way. Plus, once I was a mom, I needed my intuition and compassion on a daily basis. I wasn’t going to be able to reason with a toddler, so it was time to employ a heart-centered approach rather than a head-centered one. There are few things that force you into a state of human being rather than human doing than nursing a baby in the middle of the night. I read The Red Tent around that time, which opened my eyes to older spiritualities that had reverence for women and women’s bodies. My mind was slowly beginning to embrace the value of new ways of knowing beyond evidence, thinking, and practicality.
My relationship to wild plants has also been instrumental. I started by simply picking Lamb’s Quarter leaves about 10 years ago. Then 5 years ago, I enrolled in my first foraging class. As motherhood helped me attune to my intuition, my interactions with plants deepened. I started asking permission to harvest. I “hear” whether I can harvest a plant by tuning into the sensation in my solar plexus. If it feels open the answer is yes, if it feels tight, the answer is no. This led to more spiritual encounters with plants. One vivid example: I was sitting on our deck in the evening, about 3 years ago, early in COVID, grieving that there are not many older people in the world stepping into the leadership role of elderhood. This thought hit me like a bolt of lightning. The oak tree near our deck is about 20 years old, growing on land that was most recently monoculture farmland (in other words, also without elder trees). The message I received from the tree was, “Don’t worry, we will learn to be elders together.” It felt very sweet, reassuring, and supportive, but was also a call to action.
Between listening to my intuition more as a mother and opening to connecting to plants beyond a transactional relationship, it strikes me now that this was the beginning of my return to animism. Animism is the belief that everything around us has a spirit—rocks, wind, waters, animals, plants—and that we can connect to these spirits and learn from them. It’s clearly different from the predominant worldview in our culture, but it immediately resonated with me as true. If I follow my lineage back far enough, I find animists (as would you).
When I look back, the incitement of the third major shift surprises me. In the summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd, I was listening to Resmaa Menakem speak with Krista Tippett. Menakem is a trauma specialist and therapist who focuses on somatics, or the experience of the body. He said, “If we are to survive as a country, it is inside our bodies where this conflict [between races] needs to be resolved” and “the vital force [behind] white supremacy is in our nervous systems.” His compassion was so striking,
So the idea that people could go through a thousand years of the Dark Ages and come out of that unscathed — 500 A.D. to 1500 is when we’re talking about, when we say the Dark Ages. So you mean to tell me that the level of brutalization…Flaying, whipping, here’s the thing. Land theft, enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, genocide — all of this stuff happened for a thousand years, and then that body came here. This is why I say, white people, don’t look for a Black guru. Don’t look for an Indigenous guru. Find other white people, and start creating a container by which you can begin to work race specifically.
In his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, he spoke about how long trauma can live in our genes and how we can engage in healing our ancestral lines. This piqued my curiosity, so I reached out to Lindsay Sudeikis, who facilitates ancestral healing sessions. In these sessions, she guides a “journey.” It’s a visualization of sorts, although that term doesn’t quite capture it. Within the first session, I connected to an ancestral guide from thousands of years ago when our culture revered ancestors and was healthier emotionally and culturally. The guide on my father’s mother’s side had black hair, fair skin and blue eyes. She wore animal skins. I learned practices to connect with her, including swimming in our nearby lake.
This was really the beginning of my return to Catholicism; the religion of my ancestors as I know it. As far back as I know, all of my ancestors were Catholics, and were generally quite devout. I read The Way of the Rose around that time, and learned from Lindsay’s deep scholarly and spiritual understanding of the Our Father and the Hail Mary prayers, which offered context beyond what I received in Catholic school. At this time, I still wasn’t ready to reclaim Catholicism, but I was ready to reclaim the rosary. So I began to pray the rosary for my ancestors. I mentioned The Way of the Rose to my mother. She interpreted the fact that her wayward, lapsed Catholic daughter recommended a book about the rosary as a sign from God.
Lindsay also taught a class on animist Christianity, which opened my eyes to a way of being Christian that I had never encountered before. This version was immersed in the natural world, engaged with the past and present injustices of the church, and didn’t cede a place in the church even though it’s different from current dogma.
The following year, I began working with
, an adulthood initiation guide. I was motivated to start working with John both because I felt that I was at a breaking point because of the pandemic, and because I had been curious about a traditional process called “adulthood initiation.” Adulthood initiation is about facing emotional and spiritual challenges in order to find what Bill Plotkin calls your “unique ecological niche” or how your soul was meant to serve the world. It is akin to the transition from a caterpillar whose job is to consume and consume to butterfly, who is pollinating in service to the ecosystem at large. Adulthood initiation is about helping to traverse that messy cocoon phase and to return with gifts to share with your community after the journey.The work John and I have done has been varied and deep, but the work that felt the most transformative for me was developing the emotional bandwidth to face grief, anger, fear, and shame rather than run away from them. John also introduced me to prayer as a way to face things in life that are beyond my control, without trying to control them.
This is really where my prayer life expanded beyond the rote memorization of the rosary from years of Catholic school. I read Birthing the Holy, which encouraged readers to rewrite the Hail Mary in their own words so it might resonate more than rattling off 10 Hail Marys in 2 minutes.
Here is what I came up with:
Blessed Miriam, who is cloaked in the sun Wild-hearted mother to us all Your son, Yeshua, showed us the way of radical kindness and whole-hearted love for the world Queen of Heaven, Greenest Branch Please grant me grace and peace in uncertainty The humility to let go of understanding And the bravery to fulfill your divine intent for me Open my eyes, ears, and heart to help from you and all of creation
The culminating experience of the adulthood initiation process was a vision fast. I hit a few bumps in the road in finding when and where this could occur. Planning for my fast required a whole new level of prayer and surrender. It would take a miracle to get my passport on time. So I pulled out all of my spiritual tools, journeying with nettle and my ancestors for advice. My ancestors gave me specific recommendations on offerings to bring to Wales, but most importantly, they asked me to write a prayer song. I had never written a song before. Ever. I had only written about 3 prayers. This felt like a reach, but a few nights later, I lit a fire, sat out by that fire, and tried to quiet my mind. Suddenly, a melody felt like it was uploaded into my brain. Soon, words to fit that melody arrived as well. And the very next day, I received the email that my passport would arrive on time. I still find myself trying to “be reasonable” and chalk that up to coincidence from time to time, but what does that serve?
Since then, I’ve rekindled a weekly-ish mass tradition. A couple weeks ago, I attended a meeting for our parish’s women’s Lectio Divina, a group that comes together to focus on personal study of a bible reading. This gathering filled a deep longing for connection across multiple generations of women.
My version of Catholicism is far from traditional, as it is combined with animism and Dance Church, a wonderful gathering for expressing devotion or just the joy of movement. I have dabbled in Catholicism before, so who knows how long I’ll stay, but now my spirituality feels rooted in the ways of my ancestors. I can feel them and their desire to help guiding me.
I’ll leave you with the words of one of my spiritual guides, the aforementioned Hildegard von Bingen, “I am the fiery life of divine substance, I blaze above the beauty of the fields, I shine in the waters, I burn in sun, moon, and stars.”
Burn On, Not Out, the project I mentioned last week, is still in its groundwork phase. Through that community, I plan to take by the hand those who crave creative and spiritual practices, but don’t know where to start. I hope to illuminate the path forward. Then, I want us to connect about the treasures we find along the path. As I forge ahead in the planning stages of this project, please consider sharing your thoughts in this survey.