I Found God in My Gut
A Recovering Roman Catholic Finds God in the Weirdest Place
My mother gave me Miniature Stories of the Saints for my first communion. With its pages filled with graphic violence and women hearing the voice of God, I couldn’t help but devour this dramatic book. Six-year-old me thought if I made similar sacrifices, surely God would speak to me too. Driven by my naivety, I was determined to learn every rule my Catholic school taught me. Attempting to follow each one, hoping it would be sufficient, and God would answer my prayers. I did not want a symbolic answer, but a booming vocal answer from on high. Miniature Stories of the Saints had given me high expectations.
I did not find God in praying the rosary or at mass inside our school’s cathedral. And trust me, I looked and listened. I practiced everything Catholicism taught, anticipating I would earn God’s favor and response, but nothing. I kept track of all my sins, confessing them to our priest for forgiveness. His judgmental demeanor offered me no glimpse of a forgiving God. I never found God in perfection. And God knows I tried.
A Catholic mother and agnostic father made for interesting discussions about religion in our house. My mother was never big on questioning authority, whereas my father pushed us to question authority and groupthink. He would constantly emphasize that men created religion, not God. Any human creation would, necessarily, have flaws.
I began conceiving a version of God in the mess of being a flawed human. My agnostic father planted the first seed of this idea. He pointed out the story of an enraged Jesus flipping the tables of the money changers in the synagogue. This human reaction to injustice pushed against the ingrained idea that I had to be perfect for God. Here was God’s most beloved “having a moment” and God’s love never wavered.
This idea settled in and grew as I attended a public high school instead of moving on to the local Catholic high school. I left my monolithic pond and dove into the deep end of a diverse lake. A new world opened to me as I met individuals of other Christian denominations, faiths, and cultural backgrounds.
History class, no longer taught from a Catholic perspective, showed me the destruction that comes from humans using religion to justify colonization and cruelty. Joining my school’s theater and debate squad, I met the first of many friends in the LGBTQ+ community. Their friendships dissolved my learned belief that they were evildoers because of who they loved. Each piece changed how I looked at what my childhood faith had taught me about God’s love. It all felt unsettling, but necessary. Each new insight ground down the hard metal of ingrained Roman Catholicism.
During my Catholic education, I learned that it’s wrong to question God or my faith. Conversely, my father insisted that questioning old ideas was important when faced with new information. These opposing ideas made for a clunky relationship with the God I had grown up knowing. Suddenly, I was not sure how to pray to God.
In my senior year, I began working on an excerpt of the play A Shayna Maidel for my dramatic interpretation at speech tournaments. I would need to learn how to imitate a Yiddish accent. My mother’s Jewish friend worked with me on the accent and indulged my questions about her faith. In our last lesson, she gifted me a videotape of a musical I had never seen, Fiddler on the Roof.
Am I about to tell you that the movie Fiddler on the Roof shaped my relationship with God? Trite, but true, I am afraid. Not the movie plot, but specifically how the main character, Tevye, talks to God. Tevye does not do it in perfect places, with ritual prayer. Throughout his day, he grumps to God when things are down and thanks God when things are looking up. I felt kinship with Tevye. He was speaking to God as I did after leaving Catholicism. My “prayers” felt less clunky seeing Tevye speaking to God like a good friend. Without the formality and ritual, it felt authentic. It also felt more intimate, just the two of us without the baggage of what I had thought prayer needed to be.
My way of connecting with God carried me through college and into early adulthood. Even entering my thirties, it served me while I cared for my father as he fought an exhaustive battle with cancer for almost a decade. Nothing could shake my relationship with God, not even when my father died from cancer. It would take a global pandemic to disrupt our connection.
During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, my mother was living alone in Louisiana. We would video call her daily. Over time, I could see how lonely she was becoming in isolation. After taking precautions, she drove up to Michigan and stayed with us for a few months. She and I would attend the outdoor services of the little progressive Episcopal church I had joined here.
My mother had been feeling lost and was curious about my spiritual life. After I left Catholicism, she used to quiz me on my beliefs, driven by her fear for my soul. But this time, these were the questions of a person adrift and looking for an anchor. I answered her questions openly, prompting conversations about God and religion that I had never believed possible with my mother. My family invited her to stay longer, but after almost two months, she said it was time to head home.
Up to this point in the pandemic, my mother had been careful to follow preventative guidelines. Unbeknownst to our family, she signed up for a bus trip to Branson, MO with some high school friends. COVID-19 spread among the group during the trip. My mother had it by the time she arrived home. She fought it over several weeks, downplaying her symptoms when we would call. This was the time of overcrowded hospitals and the world attempting to understand the virus. My mother’s condition worsened, requiring her to be hospitalized and eventually intubated. My mother died of Covid-19 in an I.C.U. bed, and we were heartbroken.
I turned as I always had to talk to God, but something was different. It was like plugging an electrical cord into a dead socket. Nothing was there. It was just a void. A phone call with no one picking up the other line. I was angry. It wasn’t anger at God for my mother’s death; I had already lost my father and knew that this would eventually happen. I was angry at God because our constant connection had just evaporated. Who leaves someone in one of their darkest moments?
Over the next year, I grieved for my mother. In the beginning, my grief was thick, dark, and heavy. Time passed, and it became easier to carry. Eventually, I tried to talk to God again, but it did not feel the same. My prayers disappeared into nothingness, like speaking them into a dark void.
My mother’s death prompted me to take better care of my physical and mental health. I had always turned to one of my parents to reassure me I was making the correct choice or was on the right track; I did not fully trust my instincts. With no parents to turn to, I began working to trust myself more. I took daily walks to calm my mind, only listening to my body and the sounds of nature. The walks reset something inside, and I noticed I was overthinking less.
When faced with a decision, I applied a fresh approach. I would gather information to inform my decision and analyze it. But instead of allowing my brain to ruminate over the decision and create anxiety, I would tell God about it and then get quiet and feel. The change was not instant, but the more I practiced, I could feel something waking up inside me. It felt familiar, but I could not place it. More often, I could feel the answer to my question resonate from deep inside me. The more I practiced this, the stronger and clearer this voice became.
Whatever static remained in the connection between God and me, my breast cancer diagnosis in 2023 cleaned it out. You will never know silence until you are lying prone and half-naked on a radiation treatment table. It is your body, your fearful thoughts, and a radiation dose. Lying there, I would tell God about my day, dreams, and plans, attempting not to disassociate because of my fear. These one-sided conversations made the daily sessions tolerable and continued after treatment ended.
The cancer also allowed me to see the world with fresh eyes. Because I had faced the death of both of my parents and my cancer, fear had lost most of its sway over me. I wasn’t fearless, but now I was certain it would not destroy me. My new process of looking at a problem was also changing me. My brain would still analyze the problem, but now I understood that often the answer lies elsewhere inside of me. I noticed my hands lay across my stomach during these moments of quiet feeling. I was trusting my gut instinct after all these years at the ripe age of fifty.
A year later, someone asked me to run for public office. When it came time to decide, I relied on my new process. I thought about it and then I got quiet and felt. The process rewarded me with a loud and excited feeling of “yes,” and something else. At that moment, I recognized that feeling/voice. This clear response from my gut was the amalgamation of God and me. Not the disconnected deity of my youth, but the conjoined spark of both of us. For the first time, I could feel God was talking back to me through me.
Finally, I understood God had been trying to reach me all along. All I had to do was get quiet and listen to my gut instinct. Some discover God in the face of a newborn baby. Others uncover God in a tome of ancient writings. I had searched for God everywhere and found God in the last place I had ever thought to look. I found God in my gut and God was ready to talk.
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