I have been detoxing from my scrupulous religiosity for a good many months now.
The first thing that happened is I gave myself permission to miss Sunday Mass. This was big bc I had an almost compulsion to work around that weekly ritual. Now, having missed a few Sundays, I am able to still attend without it feeling like a must. My husband and son really still like going, and since it's been a family tradition for us all these years, and we haven't found a replacement yet, I still go. My son in particular enjoys serving at the altar, and since we have a move coming up where he won't be able to continue serving at the new location, I want to give him the opportunity while we still can.
The shift in thinking from "Sunday obligation" to "family tradition" has allowed me to still get some spiritual benefit from the liturgy. I'm not sitting there angry at having to be there, or at having to listen to preaching I disagree with. Technically I'm not sitting much anyway since we attend an Eastern Rite Catholic church ;) . Rather, I focus on what I find enjoyable - the beautiful interior, the ability to sing/chant 90 % of the liturgy, watch my son doing something he takes great pride in, and this lets me turn a blind eye to any message that might come across as problematic for my deconverted sense of truth and justice.
Perhaps tied for first place was also my prayer life. I stopped praying. It wasn't that difficult. At the height of my most recent religiosity, I recited the Modeh Ani (Jewish morning prayer) in Hebrew and English upon opening my eyes in the morning. I recited prescribed prayers in front of our prayer corner, with icon veneration and metanoias (venerations). For a time, I covered my head with a scarf as well. Slowly, the practice dwindled to an evening family prayer where we just cuddled together in the dark and prayed. This is the practice that needed tweaking once I made the conscious decision that I have deconverted. I had to stop dragging my family through my spiritual quest, as I had been doing and they had graciously come along for the ride. Besides, gathering together right before bed was a good practice. It's just that what was said and done during it had to get tweaked.
We kept a couple of rote prayers we cycle through as a way of continuity, and we sign a favorite hymn or just the Our Father together. But the focus of this time together has shifted to non-spiritual things. We go through and say what we are grateful for (which may or may not be seen as spiritual). Then we say something we like about each other, including ourselves. This started as a way of strengthening sibling bonds between my oft quarreling kiddos. We then mention something we're working on ourselves that may need some accountability and/or what we need from each other in the coming days, as a way of encouraging open communication and humility.
But otherwise, my so-called prayer-life has been getting replaced by a meditation practice. In the past week or two, I've crossed into prayer during one of them - I do miss having a personal God to talk to, Whom I believe to have my back no matter what. I hope to eventually land there, but for now, it's still marred by a very religiously dogmatic lens that I don't want to reintroduce into my spiritual life.
Probably the most freeing change as a result of my deconversion has been the process of revisiting my worldview as a whole, and reassessing my politics and ethics without reference to "what the church says". I have returned to a more liberal political viewpoint, and I had to face head-on the single issue that always prevented me from truly and fully embracing leftist ideology: abortion. Roe v Wade was just recently overturned, while I was very much still religious and unapologetically Pro-Life. It was that day that I told my children about abortion. I had been dreading the topic, but I felt elated when it was overturned. I wanted to explain to them why I supported some candidates and not others, when the only reason was really their stance on abortion. But now that I was revisiting the issue, I realized that it's way more complicated than I was led to believe, way more nuanced, and there really isn't a single clear solution to the problem, aside from universal voluntary abstinence which apparently is a no-go for a lot of people who are much more vested in their sexuality than I am.
I remember giving a talk at a women's retreat where I shared that feminism had become a type of religion for me.... Or was it environmentalism? Either way, I was criticizing myself back then for letting something "other than God" replace my sense of direction in life. My lifestyle and actions were seen as worshipping ideals other than God, but really, this was only true if "God" were defined as the war-lord of the Hebrew Bible and not the Universal Source and Destiny of Taoism. To worship the God of Nature - the only God that it makes sense to worship - means to do many of the environmental actions encouraged by "the left". Starting with not being wasteful. Valuing natural resources and the contributions of all species to life on our planet. Dismissing materialistic and convenience-based practices in favor of ones that build life up. Really, I was becoming more "pro-life" by expanding my acceptance of ALL life, all lives, not just those from a narrow set of issues supported or opposed by the church (abortion, embryonic stem cell research, artificial reproductive technology, capital punishment, euthenasia...). There were issues of life that never got touched with a ten-foot pole by adamant pro-lifers - the exceedingly high suicide rates among trans and gay youth, the plight of children neglected and abused by religious extremists, sexual harassment and abuse and rape of young women. Immigrations was an issue that was embraced by the Catholic church, but not by Evangelicals, who have warped into the American Nationalist Christianity of MAGA Trumpism.
At any rate, I realized that if there ever was a disconnect between my religion and my conscience, the problem was not my conscience! Even though that is precisely what is taught in catechism - that we have to "form" our conscience. That we don't know what's right or wrong unless we are taught it from an authority wearing vestments at the altar. Talk about gaslighting! I am so done with being gaslit from my codependent upbringing in a family of an undifferentiated mass! I'm supposed to doubt the still, small voice inside of me (in spite of what the Bible says (1 Kings 19:11-13) in favor of trusting external authority? Based on what evidence? Their lived experiences were somehow more trustworthy than my own? Ahh, and there's that pesky word - evidence.
I realized that I was becoming more scientifically minded. I wanted to study formal logic and critical thinking. I wanted to use reason. And while I do recognize that reason is not actually a perfect guiding light, it beats brainwashing every day of the week. I kept coming back to this word: nuance.
Neither religions - any of them - nor the strictly secular, atheistic resources I started to dabble in were actually correct. Everything in life and in the world is nuanced. Nothing is actually black or white. Imagine the blow that had on my autistic brain!
So my deconversion is now complete, but my deconstruction is ongoing. I no longer believe in the literal dogmas of Christianity - none of their variety, nor the competing monotheistic options of Islam or Judaism. Now begins the exciting part of figuring out what I DO believe then, and what that means for my spiritual practices, how I share these things with my children, how I make moral choices in life, and the inner dialogue that I carry with me. See, I was once diagnosed with mild OCD, which may or may not be a valid diagnosis, but it points to the scrupulosity with which I tried my best for decades to "be a good person". I measured myself using artificial metrics that no one could live up to (Virgin Mother, anyone?). Was there any wonder that I constantly second-guessed myself? That I deferred to others even against my better judgment? That I had a hard time establishing healthy boundaries with my mom? Religion not only didn't help with my mental health, it made it worse. Now that I'm free of it, I can start to rebuild my life on what is truly good, beautiful, and well, true.
