Life is suffering, I know.

Hi. Before you can think it, let me say it: who am I to talk about pain and suffering, doubt and faith? An upper middle class white girl who, comparatively speaking, doesn't have a leg to stand on in terms of knowing what it feels like to suffer, a person cocooned in a tightly knit socioeconomic safety net and, to date, has skirted by without knowing personal tragedy or true risk. 

 

But there's something about suffering inside of your own mind that feels so raw and so tangible that the relativity of your experience compared to the rest of the world holds little weight. Rock bottom despair comes in as many varieties as there are human beings on this planet, but I believe the path out of it is the same for all of us.

 

And it's this: we have to find a pinpoint of light, grasp onto it with all of our Being, and follow the path where it leads.

 

There is no other way.

 

The rest of this post is my story about finding that pinpoint of light amidst my own darkness, a piece I have been afraid to write for a very long time. It's highly personal, and talking about faith is as dangerous as talking about politics, because it's an arena where facts are sparse and opinions are aplenty. But it's become impossible to write about things like confidence and fulfillment without addressing it.

 

So here we go.

 

It's the spring of 2017, early on a Saturday morning. Sun is streaming through the east facing windows in our living room, demanding attention, offensive in a way that I can't quite articulate. I'm sitting on the floor with my back to the couch, gripping my knees to my tightened chest, tears silently winding down my face, rolling over my cheekbones down my nose, angling around my nostrils and lips and salting the sides of my mouth. My heart is beating so rapidly I can feel it in my eardrums. My thoughts are alternating between bald, rapid terror and a kind of blank despondency I've never felt before.

An outside observer would think I had nothing to be sad about, that I had it all: an amazing husband, a gaggle of fabulous friends, an incredible job, a gorgeous row home in the city, a BMW, a big bank account, you get the idea. What did I have to worry about?

The reality was, I was suffering from success, the kind that resulted from focusing on the wrong things.

 

At the time, my marriage was holding on by a delicate thread, as an enormous wedge of slights, stupidity and selfishness bulged at the seam of six years and a shared mortgage. Wes had left the night before, with the dog and the car, to take care of his dying father. He'd quit his job, which wasn't going great anyway, with a loose plan to help his primary caregiver mom until his dad passed. Which could be weeks, or months, or never.

 

We'd fought about it, plus everything else, for months. He'd get angry and lean in to the fight, and I'd shut down, withdraw, book a hotel room for the night. We'd get over it, drink too much, then dredge it up again when we were even less prepared to handle it than before. I'd defend my position and cut him down, exhausted and sick of listening to the advice about how you could either be right or be happy in a marriage, but not both.

 

When he left, I expected to be relieved. Instead, it triggered a profound sadness and emptiness that I suspect had been there all along.

 

Underneath all the stress and existential panic, I was bored, self-disgusted, acutely aware of my own capacity for selfishness and apathy. There was no meaning in my life, to my life: I was living it to please others, suppressing the potentialities of my unrealized self, and unwilling to reveal who I was out of a gripping fear that I could not be accepted, respected and loved.

 

On the floor next to the couch that day, plagued with doubt, I searched my mind for a pinpoint of light in the dark nothingness I felt, trying to recall one thing, anything, that I could regard as indisputable, an immovable foundation where I could settle my flailing feet and walk forward.

 

"It's supposed to be God," I thought to myself, Catholic guilt surging at my lack of belief, spotty mass attendance record, and the Google search inquiries about the process of unwinding myself from a marriage to someone who'd recently converted, not for me per se, but because of me.

 

There's a culture to Catholicism, at least in the conservative-Irish-family-from-Chicago sense, that is part of the very fabric of my identity. My dad's a deacon. My mom is in a Catholic women's group that some people refer to as "the Brides of Christ" behind their backs, where the nature of their meetings involves carrying out the will of God over wine and Costco appetizers. In my home growing up, Sunday mass was mandatory (it still is if we happen to be there for an overnight on a Saturday), the decrees of the Church dominated the sociopolitical environment, and the holy days of obligation were obliged even if no one really knew what they meant.

 

Although I knew the Hail Mary and the Our Father and the Nicene Creed by heart and could follow the stages of mass in my sleep, it lacked meaning for me. I found it impossible to distinguish between the dogma and orthodoxies of Catholicism, the rote recital of the Rosary and familiar lull and rhythm of mass, and the faith and spirituality it all aims to teach.

I was what my Catholic teachers would call “a doubting Thomas,” or a person who refused to believe without personal experience.

But how could I not be? The more I learned about the world, the more my Catholic foundation faltered underneath me:

 

How is it possible that an all-knowing, all-loving God could exclude from his kingdom entire swaths of humanity who happened to be born Buddhist, or Jewish, or Muslim?

 

It's not possible, and I knew it.

 

Who among us mere mortals can truly claim to know and speak for the creator of all Being?

 

None of us can, and I knew it.

 

Why do mere mortals raise their limited understanding of God to the status of an absolute?

 

Because they're totalitarians, I thought at first. Or maybe just highly susceptible to pride, hubris and fear? Or perhaps they genuinely believe they've found the truth and can stop learning?

 

Where could I find the essence of God, of Being, amongst the clutter of manmade interpretations?

 

I'm not sure if I can.

 

I got stuck on the question, so I stopped thinking about how to find faith in God.

I resided in a state of spiritual complacency for a long time, until I finally hit rock bottom that Saturday morning. My existential despair led me to start questioning the very nature of Being, and Meaning, and what this was all for, anyway. And I found this tiny pinpoint of light within myself: despite my years of rationalizing, there was still a piece of me that believed in something-not-quite-human, something beyond comprehension, something bigger and more powerful than me.

I could start there, and figure out how to find faith as I explored that tiny pinpoint of light within me.

 

I set out on a mission to take my doubt seriously, question my own orthodoxies and what I thought I knew to see if I could find something, anything, that was immune to my skepticism. I was searching for the foundation on which my faith could be built, and I cast a very wide net.

 

My seedling of faith in something-not-quite-human was established not in my Catholic upbringing, but in philosophy. Specifically, I remembered learning about the concepts of good and evil requiring an omniscient judge, and exploring whether I could establish something as intrinsically terrible, something that runs counter to the very nature of God or of Being. Among the talk of cultural values and whether it was OK to allow a trolley filled with people to plummet off a bridge in order to save a baby, some truths emerged:

 

Creating unnecessary suffering and pain was intrinsically terrible.

 

Alleviating unnecessary suffering and pain was intrinsically good.

 

(The Holocaust and subsequent Nuremberg Trials tested and proved this on a global scale.)

 

So I cultivated that seedling of faith at first with philosophy, then theology and began reading as many perspectives on faith, God and why we're all here as I could. I learned how we can explore Being and God in all forms of human thought, in science, in music, in art, in mathematics. And it helped me to resurface what I'd learned in my Catholic upbringing, helping me to differentiate the nature and essence of God from the orthodoxies and traditions.

 

And I built my foundation of faith on a number of truths that were immune to my skepticism:

 

• That I have the capacity for evil, as does every human being

• That I am responsible, to the best of my ability, to alleviate unnecessary suffering and pain

• That meaning is found in using my time and abilities to make things better, instead of worse, for others

• That faith is built on humility, open-mindedness, learning and growth 

• That God and Being can be experienced in a multitude of forums

• That faith is highly personal, and can only be developed by taking doubt seriously

 

Taking my doubt seriously and exploring my faith allowed me to build it, to strengthen it, to return to those elements of my religious tradition that celebrate the nature and essence of God, and to allow for humility, openness and flexibility to learn and grow as part of my connection to Being.

 

Creating this foundation of faith also allowed me to begin exploring my spirituality, the part of myself connected to Being and to God, what my Catholic teachers meant when they talked about developing a personal relationship with God: spirituality is recognizing and experiencing a connection to God within yourself. It's a connection that I could not recognize or experience when I was shrouded in judgment, fear and negativity, but one that is now the biggest source of confidence in my life. While I believe you can only explore your spirituality by going inside of yourself, I did a lot of searching and reading on this topic specifically and will write a separate post on what I've learned.

 

If any of this post resonates with you, these books may be as helpful to you as they were to me (not my comprehensive list, just the ones I most often recommend on the topic of doubt and faith):

 

• Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Naht Hanh

• Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

• Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander

• The Ancient Stoic Art of Joy by William B. Irvine

• The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

• The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel

• Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach

• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

• The Divine Dance by Richard Rohr

• Scary Close by Donald Miller

• How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen

• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

• Called to Create by Jordan Raynor

 

If you made it all the way to the end, thank you so much for reading. I'd love your thoughts and ideas for further reading on this topic in the comments.

 

Also, please do me a little favor and share this post with one person who you think would like it, because there is a good chance it will help them.

 

OK, chat soon.