feel like a bird with a broken wing.”3 This was the way I felt for a long time.
In this book, I have tried to grapple with the important questions of life, with my journey and the mystery of the human soul as I have tried to grow spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically. I have tried to open up a path that is grounded in the Scriptures, in centuries of Christian spiritual writing, and developmental psychology. I have also tried to offer down to earth truths from my own life, as well as profound truths from the great tradition of Christian spirituality. Weaving the parts of my story together has been like making a tapestry. It’s like trying to put all of the pieces of a puzzle together without knowing the final picture.
I Was Gone Long Before I Left is my story about living in a Catholic monastery for twenty years as a member of a religious community. For fourteen of those years, I was also a priest. It explores the reasons why I went to the monastery, why I stayed, why I eventually left, and what I have learned. Maybe more importantly, I have tried to understand the painful process I went through to make the decision to leave.
From the beginning, I want to make it clear that in writing this book, I have “no axes to grind.” I am not bitter. I seek no revenge. I don’t want to punish anyone. Moreover, I am not anti-Catholic Church and have no need to disparage religious life. I simply want to share my story—my journey, hoping that it will be helpful to others.
Over the years, I have come to believe that all of us try to make the best decisions we can with the information we have at our disposal at any given time. For a variety of reasons, sometimes it takes a long time for everything to come together in our lives that enables us to make those decisions which can dramatically influence the direction of our lives. This is the way it was for me.
As a psychotherapist and spiritual director for over twenty-four years, I have tried to help people make all kinds of decisions about their lives. Many times, these have been extremely painful decisions that have been very difficult for them and others. It is my hope that this book will validate their decision making process and give encouragement to others as they struggle to make decisions in their own lives. Finally, it is my hope that my effort to write this book will bring continued healing to those wounded parts of my own life.
Anne Morrow Lindberg, in her book War Within and Without, said that “one writes not to be read but to breathe . . . one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one’s mind, to dissipate one’s fears, to face one’s doubts, to look at one’s mistakes—in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one’s joy, but also to disperse one’s gloom. Like prayer—you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to grace.”4 It is in this spirit that I invite you to join me on my journey.
1. Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, 81.
2. Quoted in Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. See also www.goodreads.com/quotes/ernesthemingway.
3. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle. www.notable-quotes.com/teresa_of_avila.
4. Lindberg, War Within and Without. www.goodreads.com-work-quotes-106051-war-within-and-without.
Part One
Why I Went to the Monastery
1
My Journey Begins
“The Longest Journey is the Journey Inward”
(Dag Hammarskjold)
It was October, 1979 and the autumn leaves were changing to shades of bright reds, orange, and yellow. I went into the woods to find my favorite bench which overlooked the Severn River. It was a beautiful spot which always seemed to invite me to prayer. It was probably my favorite place during my days when I lived at St. Conrad Friary (Monastery) near Annapolis, Maryland.1 It was actually the second time I had been assigned there. The first time, in the mid 1970s, I was the assistant novice master teaching the novices about our Capuchin Franciscan way of life. This time I was trying to finish writing my doctoral dissertation on Cardinal John Henry Newman at Catholic University.
These were difficult days for me. For the last several years, there was an intense aching in my soul. I seemed to be lost in a baffling crisis of spirit. For some months, I was aware of a growing darkness within me, as if something in my depths was crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unloved parts of me and came with a tremendous force. At times, they seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. Years later, I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.
A. The Autumn of My Discontent
It was a frightening time for me. I knew I couldn’t go on this way. Years of depression, headaches every day, stomach ulcers, and digestive problems were telling me that something had to be done. In one sense, I was standing on the shifting ground of midlife. I was thirty-seven now and had come upon that time in life when one is called to an inner transformation, to perhaps a crossing over from one identity to another. When the winds of change swirl through our lives, especially at mid-life, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey. But that requires us to confront the lost and counterfeit places within us and to release our deeper innermost self—our true self. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.
However, that autumn of my discontent, should not have surprised me. For years, I had been struggling with these issues and questions. Should I stay in religious life or not? Was God inviting me to embrace this darkness and discover a deeper way of being? A deeper relationship with Him? These seemed to be the same kinds of questions I had been struggling with for the last seventeen years.
In a sense, I should have remembered that the life of the spirit is never static. But it can certainly be upsetting. We are born on one level, only to find some new struggle toward wholeness waiting to be born. That is the sacred intent of God—to move us continuously toward growth. During these times of turmoil, we are invited to recover everything that has been lost or orphaned within us and to restore the divine image imprinted on our soul. And rarely do significant shifts come without a sense of our being lost in dark woods, or in what T.S. Eliot called the “vast interstellar spaces.”2
As I sat on my favorite bench in the woods on that autumn morning, I wondered how I could escape the emotional, psychological and spiritual pain I was in. The familiar circles of my life left me with a suffocating feeling. My religious structures were stifling. Things that used to matter were no longer important. Things that had never mattered became paramount. My life had curled up into the frightening mark of a question.
Nevertheless, in spite of all this, I always continued to go about my responsibilities. I would work on writing my dissertation through the morning and early afternoon, pray through the day with my brothers, sometimes see people for spiritual direction, and generally participate in our community life. I have always been very accomplished at fulfilling my duties, even during a crisis. Outwardly, I appeared just fine. Inside, I was a mess.
In one sense, I wanted things to go back to the comfortable way they were before. I wanted to “snap out of it” so to speak, and had ordered myself to do just that on numerous occasions. But it was sort of like looking at an incoming wave and telling it to recede. Simply demanding it, didn’t make it happen.
For a moment, I thought about my external, everyday self—the self I presented
