As I search within myself for some manner of a deeper understanding of the unknown and what exactly defines my faith I often wonder why this has even happened in the first place.  What drove me to seek God when I’d abandoned all thought and belief in such an idea in the first place?  Had I really denied the existence of God at all?  Or did my Catholicism render itself dormant, waiting for a day to reemerge?

I remember the very day I denounced my family’s faith.  Sometime in the spring of 1986 as I sat in church on a Saturday afternoon I wondered what I was doing still attending a Catholic high school when my parents, who were on social security by that time, could not afford it.  We’d just gone through a series of troubles with one of our two cars and it looked like we really needed to get a new one to replace the clunker.  But, we didn’t have the money to make payments on a new vehicle.  I thought that this was absurd.  I was more than half way through my freshman year at Bishop Gallagher High School and I really did not like the time I’d spent there.  I’d received a decent education for the most part but, save for a few friends that I’d attended Our Lady Queen of Peace with, I grew to loathe most of my schoolmates.  I was a bit of an outcast and found comfort with other outcasts, naturally, which set me up for a pretty miserable time in my day-to-day interactions.  Just after the Eucharist, as my parents and I sat in the church pew, I turned to my mother and flatly told her that I wanted to go to public high school in my forthcoming sophomore year.  My mother looked stunned.  You see, this was a big deal because I was not only saying that I didn’t want to continue with my Catholic school education, but it was the first step into denouncing the Catholic Church as a whole.  For a strict Polish Roman-Catholic family, this was a huge red flag for insubordination, especially while we had a Polish Pope.  What was I thinking?  Why did I do this in the middle of mass, anyway?

A few days later, after my dad caught wind of my declaration, my mother and I argued a bit about my choice to leave Bishop Gallagher.  This was no haymaker of an argument.  No, this was more of an argument with my father by proxy, so my mother wasn’t so vested in it.  Basically, I was supposed to understand that my father was upset with me for making such a choice.  Did I understand that correctly, though?  Was I to understand that he was upset with my choice to leave the school, knowing full well that I’d probably stop going to church as well?  Indeed, he was giving me the choice and voiced his opinion accordingly.  This was amazing to me.  All he wanted to know was exactly why I didn’t feel a pull to go to church any more.  With the simplest of answers, I told him that I disliked the marriage of money and religion.  I’d become sick of the constant badgering for money to keep the parish alive.  I said that I didn’t believe that they needed to bother everyone for money because God didn’t care if we worshiped with a makeshift stone altar and some sticks set alight.  My father was silent and accepted my reasons.  Normally a reasonable man, I’d assumed that his well-balanced reason didn’t extend into Catholicism as well.  This was a man that would tell me when I was a child that God was watching me if I was being bad.

I did it.  I took my first step away.  I pronounced myself an agnostic; I looked the word up in the dictionary.  I was free from Catholicism.

But was I?  Was I free from it?  Or was I afraid of it?