Are you familiar with those ubiquitous online quizzes? What colour are you? What is your spirit animal? Are you a sex goddess? Well I need a new one. What spiritual path with bring you fulfillment? Because I have to tell you I am feeling spiritually empty at the moment. At a time in history well religion is literally a free all you can eat smorgasbord I am starving. I have long considered myself a liberal Catholic; if only because that is the tradition I was raised in and I was most comfortable with. However I have also said that I think that lots of other religions both mono, poly and atheistic have a lot to offer the world and I don’t believe that any other them are the ONLY true religion. Truly it baffles my mind that any one could think there is only one path to God.

Though I haven’t been a practicing Catholic in a number of years I am fairly certain that this year I stopped being Catholic in my heart, which is were it really counts. I have wanted to stay Catholic because of its beauty, its mystery and its connection to my Mother. However I can no longer give faithfulness to a religion that stands in direct contradiction with so many of my core beliefs. I feel as though I went to bed with a passionate young lover and woke up 10 years later next to a man I barley know and have nothing in common with. We have been walking through our lives next to each other but we have no connection. It is time for a divorce and I am sighting “Irreconcilable Differences”. That is pretty funny actually since neither the Church nor I believe in divorce.

So if the Catholic Church and I are not speaking but there in still a god shaped hole in my… soul… heart…universe...where do I turn?

I don’t want to be a Johnny Come Lately, a band wagon jumper or a wannabe. But how do you window shop for a new spiritual belief? Can you just wander in and try it on with out committing to a sale? Can I take it for a test drive, maybe over the weekend and bring it back Monday morning if we don’t jive?

If I have already some firm morals and values do I even NEED a structured belief system? Well I suppose the answer is yes since my values have not already filled the god shaped void. Not to mention that I often find myself longing to belong to a community. Maybe that sounds a little “Made for TV- Special” but I think it is actually biological, evolutionary. Community is a safety net, a warm blanket, a hot cup of tea. Community is the giving and receiving support and assistance. It is the exchange of idea around a coffee table and listening to someone’s fear at 3am. And while I certainly have a wonderful group of friends who I can call on to help me bail water out the basement or lay a new floor or go to a movie with and just laugh. Spiritually speaking I am out in the woods alone.

I married a man who is very private about his religious/spiritual beliefs if he has any. I don’t have a problem with that but I can almost understand how for so long mixed religion marriages were frowned on. It is complicated some days to be in a relationship were each person has such different beliefs, different needs, different views of the universe. While we certainly don’t have any conflict in our marriage my belief or his lack thereof we also don’t have any symbiosis. We went into our marriage with our eyes open to the others convictions and we accept our differences gladly but I can imagine that it would be comfort to be in a more spiritual union with your spouse; like having a religious gym buddy. Okay I know that sounds lame, but at the same time I think you know exactly what I am talking about.

As for my friends…I have no idea. Faith and Spirituality are not things we tend to talk about. We talk about movies and books and music. We talk about our husbands or kids and our parents. We talk about whatever game champagne we are playing (we are geeks after all), we talk about what we would do if we won the million dollars. We talk about our jobs, our stress and our dreams, heck some of us even talk about sex. But talking about religion? That would be gauche. 

Because of this I know very little about how most of my friends feel about the subjects of Religion and Spirituality. A few I know are actually practicing Catholics. A few are lapsed Christians mostly Protestant or Catholic and only while they were children and their parents controlled their Sunday mornings. The most devout people I know are a small handful of Pagan/Wiccans who really seem to genuinely involved and happy with their spiritual conviction.   I presume however, with no evidence to back it up, that most of my friends are Atheists. I don’t have a particular feeling about that. I don’t think it is good bad or other wise but from time to time I do wonder “I am the only one with the God shaped hole?” If so what does that say about me? About the society I live in? Were times easier, people nicer, families happier, the economy better, teenagers better behaved back when the majority of people had some religious affiliation at least for an hour a week? Or does my yearning for spiritual fulfillment point to me being genetically inferior and not getting on the evolutionary train? (Just to clarify by this I DO NOT mean to imply that I do not believe in Evolution. I mean that I am not highly evolved.)