Finding Faith, part 1: When Your Childhood Church Misses the Mark

Finding Faith, part 1: When Your Childhood Church Misses the Mark

Erica Goode

Disclaimer:  The below blog post is my story and my story alone.  It is not reflective of anyone else’s beliefs or my beliefs of any religious organization as a whole.  I believe that anyone can have a close connection with God, regardless of their religious or non-religious affiliation.

I was raised totally and completely Catholic (Roman Catholic, to be exact).  I was baptized in a beautiful white gown, with my Godmother by my side, at the ripe age of 3-months-old.  There was some family drama around my sister’s baptism years earlier, because our parents baptized her (and later me) in the Roman, not Byzantine, Catholic church.  Yes, there is more than one type of Catholic, and everyone thinks their Catholic is the best.

I haven’t asked the details on the drama, and no one seems to care to talk about it decades later, but from my understanding, there was no, or at least far less, family drama at my baptism.  There was a beautiful white cake with a cross on it, though.

So, at 3-months-old, I was officially a Pope-abiding, rosary-carrying Catholic.  I attended church every Sunday morning in our old, stained-glass, brick church with hundreds of others.  As I grew up, I attended CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, now known as “religious education”) every Saturday morning from 1st grade to 8th grade.

(As a side note, please don’t send your children to church every weekend morning.  They will be miserable.  I can’t even count how many episodes of Garfield I missed out on.  How many lasagnas did he eat without me ever knowing?  I’ll never know.)

I spent every weekend morning at church…because that’s just what you did.  Believe me, I asked many times in those 8 years if I really did have to go, and “yes” was always the answer.

I took part in every “sacrament” that was on my childhood religious upbringing path: baptism, first reconciliation, first communion, and confirmation.

Because…that just what you did.

One time, around 7th grade, I asked if I had to do the next sacrament of confirmation.  The answer was “no, it’s your choice”.  My snotty 12-year-old response was quick and sharp, “Great, because I don’t want to!”

Somehow that didn’t fly with my parents.

(For the record, I was a delightful child…heavy sarcasm included.  Feel free to pray for my parents, even decades later.)

So from birth until the end of high school, I did all the churchy things – all the religious education, all the memorized prayers, all the Hail Marys, all the Our Fathers, all the confessions, all the wearing of my “Sunday best,” all the teen retreats, all the “stations of the cross” reenactments, and all the youth group meetings.  I. Did. It. All.

Though, to be fair, I never could quite remember the Apostle’s Creed.  Sorry, Sister Mary.

Ironically, with all that time and effort I spent in church during my younger years, I never quite felt an actual connection to God…or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, for that matter.  Maybe my memory is failing me, but I don’t remember there being a heavy teaching on how to actually feel connected to the Holy Trinity.  But I sure knew how to say my memorized prayers and fill out a CCD workbook.

There was a running joke (but not really a joke) in my house growing up.  Every Saturday that I would come home from CCD, my Dad would ask me what I learned at church that morning.  My response was the same every week: “Be good and pray.”

Every. Week. For 8 years.

“Be good and pray.”

The truth is, if you hadn’t gathered it yet, nothing deep and spiritual ever sunk into me on those Saturday or Sunday mornings at church.  I went because I had to go, and that was it.

I did enjoy the many youth group ski and canoe trips, as well as the opportunity to chase after Catholic boys on spiritual retreats.  They were not spiritual for me.  I just wanted to flirt with boys. 

Youth Pastor advice:  If you want to keep your church teenagers on the right spiritual path, I would advise against letting them be alone with the opposite sex in the following places: church storage room, church bus, back of the church, front of the church, church pew, forest, lake pier, ski lift, hotel room, hotel hot tub, parking lot, playground behind the church, that weird room in every church that is just for extra folding chairs…you get the point.  Who am I kidding, keep them away from the same sex too.  Just don’t let your teens see anyone.  Ever.  You can let them out of their rooms when they’re 27.

Whether it was because of my bad childhood attitude (a very real possibility) or teaching that always seemed to focus on rote memorization and rituals, I never developed a deep understanding of faith or built a connection to any spiritual being.

Oops…sorry.  After all, I think that was the whole point of all the time my parents sent me to church for the first 18 years of my life.

So, as you could imagine, as I packed up for my first year of college 3 hours away and said goodbye to my high school church youth group, I also said goodbye to any chance I had at a spiritual impact in my life.

I stepped onto my college campus and was officially a loud and proud atheist.

I never once attended any church at my university.  I didn’t seek out any young adult groups.  And any Bible or New Testament that someone handed me on a street corner went straight into the trash can on the next street corner.  (I was a peach through my college years too.)

I did attend church with my family when I came home from college on Christmas and Easter, but silently and rudely rolled my eyes during any kind of prayer.  I showed up to make my parents happy but didn’t believe a lick of it.  It all seemed so dumb.

I was a spiritual disaster.

So you know, it seemed like the mess that I’d become was specific to me.  I see people with the same exact upbringing happily attended church in college.  Why it sticks with them and not with me, I’ll never know. And my youth group, almost 20 years removed, churned out some upstanding Catholic adults.  One of my church friends even became a Priest!

But not me.  I was the fate-believing, God-denying, Bible-ignoring black sheep of our Catholic family.

And that’s how I spent many years of my life.  Nothing would magically change when I graduated college.  At least, nothing immediate…

Finding Faith, part 2: The Prayer That Changed Everything

Finding Faith, part 2: The Prayer That Changed Everything