The Most Important Thing I'll Write: Breakfast Tea and Faith

I've been on the verge of writing this post for about a month now and I just haven't known the right way to go about it. I know that some of what I will write below won't make a lot of sense. It will even be a surprise to some of the people I have been close with.

But I've spent this morning listening to music, reading, and I think this is a part of my life that I should share (and English Breakfast tea somehow gives me courage to talk about the messy stuff).

Those who have been within the center of my faith life, which is limited to perhaps only two or three people, know that I have struggled for years with how I practice that faith.

When I first started my college career at the University of South Dakota, I was beginning to form deep spiritual questions about why I believed in Catholic teachings. I had grown up Catholic, had been moved by the unique experience of growing up going to mass at a Newman Center, and before going through confirmation I had encountered a plethora of theological challenges and engaged in other spiritual practices beyond the Catholic church, I wanted to be certain of the choice I was making.

At 16, I was as certain as I thought it was possible to be about something and I went through the sacrament of confirmation.

Just a few years later, when I moved to Vermillion, South Dakota, I found myself feeling isolated, scared, and incredibly uncomfortable in my uncertainty. I felt that I wasn't being honest with myself, my faith, and the people around me. Even my boyfriend at the time didn't know how absolutely lost I felt in my faith and life. There was one really bad span of three days where I didn't leave my room, I stayed in my bed, I didn't eat, didn't talk to anyone, and didn't really talk to myself. I mostly just slept and felt absolutely worthless.

For a long time I blamed myself for "giving up" and for being "too weak" to continue pursuing my athletic & academic journey at USD. Today I am better able to recognize that I was running on spiritual "empty" and that the center of my life had massive holes in it; when the peripheral pleasures of my life frayed, there was very little to hold it together.

It was soon after I made the decision to transfer schools at semester, to come home.

While this helped marginally and being around a group of people and family that were supportive and loving was an immediate relief; there was still this lingering sense of incompleteness.

I tried to fill it with track, training, and school but the more desperately I tried to fill that space the more lost I would feel when those things didn't work out the way I wanted.

There was even one point where I went on a trip to Tennessee to be apart of a massive young Catholic's gathering. While most of the trip was really fruitful, with a very real foundation laid in the appreciation of the spiritual gifts that are the sacraments, there was one particular moment that would haunt me for years after the conference.

I decided to sit in on a speaker talking about LGBTQ and the church. It followed a very pervasive tone at the time of "hate the sin, love the sinner" but it was deeply disquieting.

Up until that time, I had only told two people that I was bisexual.

Even today, while I never actively hide it, I doubt there are many who know outside of even my immediate family.

After that talk, I met with the speaker, a priest, and confided in him my sentiments and thoughts on the topic. I was for the most part, kindly, told that what I felt was "unnatural" but that it didn't change God's love for me.

Needless to say, it broke me.

I wandered around after that conversation trying to legitimize a God who would allow me to be unnatural in the eyes of fellow human beings and yet still claim to love me.

I had come to my faith searching for something to bind the broken pieces of my life and had instead felt shattered.

It was one of the greatest crisis I had ever dealt with. While wandering around I stumbled into a quiet room that had been set up for adoration, and I laid myself down on the ground before the makeshift altar and cried.

After that conference, the deep holes in my spiritual life were no longer hidden beneath the layering attempts to patch them with personal desires. They were laid bare to my scrutiny.

This rawness would become, two years later, the foundation of my faith.

Little over a year ago, I started going to church again on a fairly regular basis (I say fairly because I am not perfect and have definitely been prone to enjoying my Sunday mornings in bed while living in London).

I started reading the bible critically, engaging in historical and cultural contextualization of the text with the support and guidance of some of the most attentive and loving people in my life namely Shane, my best friend Taryn, and Father James. Without them, I doubt I would have gotten to where I am.

Through their guidance I have reconciled the fallibility of the Church with the unconditional love that I know to be God. I believe in the teachings shared and practiced by the first Christians and I struggle in many of the same ways they struggled with the complexity and simplicity of the call made through the bible, the writings of great theological minds, and the whole notion of a Church of sinners.

It hasn't been easy and it is a daily challenge to engage in a faith and religion that I don't always agree with, but it is infinitely more satisfying than the naivety that I had once used to engage with the cornerstone of my life and the deep regret of its absence that marked the past few years.

Most importantly, it has given new intensity to the path I am walking. Studying isn't just about my personal desires but rather about trying to answer the call I know is being placed before me.

Spiritual journeys, are in my opinion, a deeply personal, vulnerable, and fragile space. I am very serious when I say that sharing this part of my life is incredibly difficult.

Even now, I am looking at this post and I have to fight a deep instinct to delete it.

But my faith is a key reason of why I am studying here. It is part of what keeps me going when I am struggling to have patience with the world. If I only ever wrote about my experiences here, the people I met, and what I was studying it would be a fundamentally limited view of who I am, and why I am here.

In particular, I see my life as means of service and I want to use the gifts God has given me to serve the disenfranchised, specifically those living in poverty caused by forced displacement and alienated by the stigma of 'disability'.

I believe the call to stewardship in my faith is a necessity, complacency in my view is the death of meaningful relationships; especially with God. Words, as frequently pointed out in scripture, are nothing to actions (Isaiah 58: 6-12 and Matthew 23: 23; 25: 31-41).

Being in relationship with God and with the rest of humanity means recognizing the innate dignity of human life, advocating for fairness, justice, grace, and mercy, and loving with all my flaws the way Jesus taught.

I am not sharing this because I have somehow seen my faith journey to its completion but rather because I am still struggling, still failing, and trying. Nor do I share this because I sense that it will somehow be motivation or inspiration for others, as I shared above, faith journeys are deeply personal; I share this because this is again who I am.

It is why I am here.

Without this post, all of the other ones don't mean crap.