There’s a spa that I go to here in my town when I need a massage. I park on the busy street outside and walk into an old saloon, remodeled to be a Swedish spa. The building & wrought-iron gates alike are covered in green ivy. When you step through it into the courtyard, an Italian fountain greets you, along with tea roses and a small sitting area. The sounds of the city fade away, replaced by moving water and peace. Sometimes, just walking through that green gate is all I need to relax and let the stress that lives in my shoulders melt away.

After a sauna & massage, however, I face the same gate. There’s still peace, roses, & a fountain on this side. There’s still the city & cars on the other. And every time I face it, I have to make the same decision: to consciously leave the peaceful, protected space and to enter the stressful, LA world.

Until I saw the title of John’s new series, I didn’t realize how much it reminded me of my own journey out of Catholicism. It was a slow, painful process out of the safety of Faith toward the reality of Doubt; it was also a necessary step.

It began when I realized that I didn’t really believe in the tenets of my Faith (the major one being, of course, that there was a personal god; that he turned into bread, or even weirder, a person and killed himself; that there was a heaven after this life), although I believed I believed in them. And when I realized that the gate stood before me, I knew I had to walk through it. Around this time, my grandfather died and my sister had two miscarriages.

My father had flown [across the world] to be with him when he died. I woke up one night knowing that he was gone. I don’t know what it was that I felt, but it was not something that Catholicism had any kind of allowance for (a ghost? a connection that had been severed?). My father called minutes later to confirm what I already knew.

My sister was always the embodiment of Mary to me. The problem with a personal god is that a child’s mind (at least, mine) wants to visualize it. Or her. I knew my sister was not Mary, obviously, but she had all the qualities I was taught that Mary had. Her miscarriages affected me on a spiritual level. It was a classic why-do-bad-things-happen-to-good-people moment.

These two events are still so close to me that I can almost touch the walls of the garden, almost feel the peace that it used to bring. And still feel my heart break at leaving it behind (no almosts there). That was when I first saw outside the gate for the first time & knew that I had to leave. I see this journey as one that was necessary for my spiritual maturity: I had to leave the garden in order to see & experience the world.

I grew up in a family that managed to shelter me very well from the dangers of the Doubting world and it is only from outside looking back in that I can see that. My friends were only ones that were Catholic, I went to a Catholic school, and my agnostic or non-practicing cousins went to church when I stayed the night. Even in high school, a decidedly non-religious place, my best friend (was encouraged to be) the one whose parents were Catholic. We walked through the gate hand-in-hand.

I often am given a glimpse into gardens as I travel through the outside world; sometimes I am invited inside. The gardens are always beautiful, often welcoming, and always enclosed, protected. They can provide respite from the world, but always I must leave them.

I envy people who still live within the sheltered walls of a Faith that protects them from the world of Doubt outside, but no more than I cherish my own time in a beautiful garden. Wonderful while I’m there, and sweeter because I know my time there is short.