While I was thinking about what I wanted to write about this week, I started to wonder how the journey began, the one that has led me to my current beliefs, those soul-deep things that I am absolutely certain about. The very best place to start would be, of course, the beginning - the time when I made my first life decisions and took the first steps onto a path and a life of my own making.
It was 1966, my family lived in Toronto and I was 11 years old. My mother was very ill. In fact she was dying, although I didn't know it at the time. I had been raised as a Catholic, attending church almost every Sunday but when Mom got too ill to get out of bed we stopped going. She was admitted to hospital some time in the Spring of '66. I would take a bus and then the street car to Holy Rosary church once or twice a week, on my own. There I would light a candle before slipping into a pew to say a few Hail Marys while I asked God to take care of my mother and make her well. Every night I said my prayers, asking for the same thing. I made sure to remind Him that my brother was just 6 and needed his mom. I promised to be good, to do all the housework, to do better in school, anything ... just make my Mom better, please. I even took confession every few weeks just to be sure I didn't have too many sins piling up that could be used to prevent my prayers from being answered.
So when my mother passed away early in October my young faith was shattered. I could not comprehend how a loving and caring God could take such a wonderful and needed person; how He could have ignored months and months of heart-felt prayers. My mother wasn't a bad person - she didn't deserve to die, and my family weren't bad either - we didn't deserve to lose her. Since there was nothing wrong with my family, the logical conclusion was that there was something wrong with my God.
I asked the priest at the church why God would be so cruel. He told me the usual "God works in mysterious ways" tripe, and that it wasn't up to us to question God's choices, we just had to accept them. This stuck in my craw for some weeks until early in the new year of 1967, when I decided to have one last chat with God. I told Him how He had hurt our family by taking my mom, how I mulled over all I had been taught as well as told about God and his Mercy, how I couldn't understand for the life of me how a benign, loving Deity could ignore the pleas of a child. I told Him I had come to the only conclusions left to me: either God ignores people's prayers and does whatever He wants regardless of how it hurts others, or God doesn't exist. Either way, I did not believe in Him any longer. He failed me when I needed Him the most, and in that failure He shattered my belief in the whole system of religion. I wasn't going to waste my time or breath on Him any more.
There in the darkness of my room that winter evening, I closed the door on God and the Catholic Church. Barely 12 years old, I refused to blindly believe. I didn't yet know what it was I wanted, but I knew for sure what I didn't want. Without hesitation, I turned from that closed door and headed off down the road of my Life. The sky was full of stars and I was not afraid.
So the Journey began.
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