Into the Desert, Part 1: The Story

I’ve come and gone from Costa Rica, and now I’m leaving long-missed Michigan, with its leafy forests and wide lakes, for a stretch in hot, dry, urban Albuquerque. Perhaps the trip is part-whim, but it’s also a blindfolded baby step into something that’s been brewing in me for a long time now.

The Story

Back in April of 08, just over a year ago now, I was reeling, recently drop-kicked by a decision at my college in the name of my faith that left me feeling betrayed, suspicious, righteously angry, and alone. The rules of my church forbid me to follow the God of wide-open love I believed in, and the community I worshipped with was on the same page.

Scraping together the common ground we shared, I stuck around in hopes of continuing the dialogue. But I was spiritually homeless.

That month, I saw a one-woman performance of the life of Dorothy Day, a Catholic rebel stirring things up during the Depression. She became my anchor that April. If Dorothy could look the church in the face and say, on the basis of her faith in God and her sense of justice, that it needed to make some serious changes (i.e. serve the poor/oppressed), then so could I.

To me, the church, with all its hierarchy and prescriptive doctrine, was painting a portrait of a child bearing remarkably similar resemblance to the parent who Christ rejected two thousand years back. We had constructed a new building in the style of one that crumbled and fell from its heights.

Jesus taught to reject all established structures—to overturn systems of oppression and stagnancy—and to love with no rules. Love meant everyone—even the prostitutes—though we still have a hard time believing that today.

How then, I wondered, could we call ourselves Christians, “Christ-followers,” when this institution that claimed us as its own seemed to follow, more accurately, that infamous high priest fed up with a meddling 30-year-old rebel?

Instead, I believed, Christ called us to enter the wilderness, where there was neither bread nor wine, and make our home among the wild—the unbrushed, untamed, unruly humans of the world.

After informing the heavens of my intent to indict God’s church, I didn’t exactly trek into the wild, but I signed up to live with two religious sisters, which some friends considered just as crazy. Never mind that nuns are known for taking vows of obedience to the Pope, my current arch-enemy.

But the Dominicans were different. The house I joined introduced me to its namesake, St. Catherine of Sienna, a mystic from the 1300s who wrote letter upon biting letter to the Pope in her own day, and even traveled weeks on foot to deliver her mind to him in person. And the sisters I met made it quite clear that today’s women religious, by and large, are already engaged in the volatile, creative process of rebirthing the church from the inside.