I was raised in a world of certainties.

It was a typical Catholic upbringing during the early to mid 60s. Church each Sunday, cathecism once a week, a big first communion party, confirmation instruction, etc. God loved us all, I was taught, and spoke to us through the Church. No meat on Friday. Nuns sang and played guitar (and occasionally flew). Our lives were set out for us within the framework of a paternalistic Church that taught us that they had the answer to everything. Overall, it was a happy childhood, filled with security and affection.

In school, I was one of those annoying kids who was always asking questions and never taking anything at face value. I think that many of my teachers thought I was bound to be trouble when I grew up. Yet overall, I took the attitude that all our problems would work out as long as we had faith. This was how my family had been raised, and this was the expected attitude as I became older.

Then adolescence began to knock on the door. I reached maturity during the Vietnam era when many people began to ask whether were we really making things better for people by sending troops to bomb and shoot those we were supposedly helping. Traumatic events like the Chicago Democratic convention of ’68 and the Kent State killings disrupted the cozy world I had known. Drugs and free love were creeping into our culture. African Americans and women were demanding to be noticed as equal members of society. Coupled with all this questioning on my part was the fact that, as I went through puberty I realized that I wasn’t quite wired sexually the way most of the other boys I knew were. Many of the sermons I was hearing in church at this time dwelt on subjects like abortion and birth control and virginity, topics that seemed a bit trivial considering the upheaval I saw around me.

Yet I did pretty much what I felt was expected of me, and I still felt a yearning to truly understand God and be a part of his family. I continued to go to church each Sunday, and in fact became more focused in my religious observances. I even made inquiries around the time I graduated from high school about joining a religious order as a lay brother. Yet I still felt that I was a square peg. I couldn’t quite muster up the unquestioning obedience that seemed to be expected. I began finding my church life becoming less and less meaningful. By the time I finished college, and especially after I moved away from home, it became apparent to me that the numerous questions troubling me weren’t going to work out right by just “having faith.”

So I became convinced that there were no certainties. I had no patience with pat answers to anything. Faith seemed childish. God became a great “perhaps.” Religion in general I equated with superstition and basically stopped attending church altogether. My family began to speak of me as the “village atheist,” although at this stage I considered myself more of an agnostic. I argued constantly with my family about religion and just about everything else. Truth was relevant, and I believed that no one could know for certain the right or wrong of any given situation.

Yet I wasn’t happy. Far from the liberated and sophisticated man of the new era I thought I should be, I began to feel spiritually alone. Whenever I was frightened, sad, or even angry, I felt that I had no place to go and no one to share my feelings with. This went on for nearly 15 years, during which I was a “freethinker” on the outside, but spiritually adrift inside, until one evening I had a conversation with one of my best friends while sitting on his back deck drinking beer. I made the comment that I thought religion was mere superstition and that God, if he did exist, really didn’t care too much about us. My friend was one of the last people I would have thought would have come out with such a question, but he asked me: “It sounds like you’re real unhappy with many of the people you’ve met, but exactly how has God Himself done you wrong?” Talk about a statement that leaves you speechless! The seed was planted, and over the next few months I began to wonder if maybe I had been a little too quick to discard my beliefs.