Editor’s Note : A Clergy Project member and new contributor to the blog tells us about her painful experience leaving the Catholic Church. Stories like this are important to hear as a reminder that it’s not just fundamentalist Christians who are drastically affected when they doubt and ultimately discard religious beliefs that encompassed their lives. If I thought God existed, I’d thank him every day for letting me be born into a casual Catholic family that made it easy to drift away from the foolishness, while maintaining an appreciation for the human-made art and music that the church inspired.

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By Ashley Lavana

For years I tormented myself. I tried to think of every excuse I could in order to avoid admitting that my faith was not what I had always hoped it was: REAL. I had invested too much. My thoughts, my desires, my free time, my student debt, my travels, my music, my employment, my marriage and family were all based on faith.

I had been a missionary, music minister, and a theology student. My life had been campus ministry, evangelization and spiritual encouragement. I was a wife and mother of six children. How could I be struggling as much as I was? Was I not holy enough? I must not be praying enough. I must not be getting something right.

Of course I had always strived to find “balance” in life between faith and reason (fides et ratio), work and prayer (ora et labora). I believed in the saying,

“Pray like everything depends on God but work as if everything depends on you.”

But it wasn’t working.

My love for God was palpable.

Jesus was as real to me as my own self. The Bible was my guide and the Church my mother. Jesus was my Savior and my Lord. But I was a mess. I was having anxiety issues and marital struggles. I was unable to attain the peace that surpasses understanding. I had to face the limitations of faith. How could Divine Revelation be so impotent?

If I had not gotten so desperate for truth, real truth, I would have never had the strength to make the decision I came to. It was a terrifying and tormenting experience. Could I have been wrong all along? Had I given my life to wishful thinking?

For a period of a month, I chose to stop focusing on faith and devote myself completely to focusing on life. Real life. Not the life I fancied in a vision, deep in prayer. Not the everlasting life I was promised in heaven.

I came to some self-preserving realization that if I did not help myself in this life on earth, first and foremost, that there would be nothing else.

As I let my faith slip to the background, I began to accept how pointless much of it was to real life. Religion had provided community, mindfulness, music, art and hope. But I began to realize, through experience, that I did not need religion to have those positive things. The benefits of religion could be found without the superstition.

I was letting go.

One day, while sitting down to teach my children their religion lesson on angels and demons, the pictures of supernatural beings and mystic revelations were so averse to me that I could not bring myself to finish.

How could I teach my children such ridiculous stuff?

The last step for me was saying goodbye to Jesus. I loved him deeply until the very moment I chose to stop believing he was real. Still, I was tempted to pray and to find comfort in a creator. But it was also refreshing to feel my conscience healing, to stop worrying about supernatural forces and to focus my calendar on something other than the liturgical seasons.

As my paradigm shifted, I began to see life in a much more balanced way. The issues of religious division, the ugliness of Church administration and the letdown of spiritual leaders all began to make sense. I realized I had substituted religion for maturity. As I see it now, religion fights to take the place of psychology, medicine, reason, science, family and philosophy. It seems like such an easy answer to just lay down our lives at the foot of the cross and “let Jesus take the wheel.”

Three years have passed since I said goodbye to Jesus.

I do not regret the decision. Life makes so much more sense without constantly considering invisible, unprovable possibilities. A life without faith, for me, means maturely embracing life as it really is. Perhaps religion helped me for a time, when I was a child. But there comes a time when we must put aside childish things.

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Bio: Ashley Lavana I was a Catholic convert as a teenager and devoted my young adult life to ministry as a Christian musician and campus minister. I got my BA in Theology, worked in the Church and did mission work before getting married and having six children. In 2012, I abandoned my faith for a life of reason. My blog, www.catholicismontherocks.blogspot.com, has helped me to deal with this adjustment.

>>>>Photo Credits: By Martin Schongauer – http://www.abcgallery.com/S/schongauer/schongauer12.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1008230

By Bernhard Plockhorst – http://eu.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD–10302816/SP–A/IGID–1009314/Blessed_Are_the_Children.htm?sOrig=CAT&sOrigID=12124&ui=6C19473B2A154BB399A10A16F08022BB, watermark and copyright notice removed, color corrected, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2005014

By [1] – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1144216

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27127270