Why I'm not practicing Catholicism, for general audiences

Or, for the 3 or so followers of this blog: "RIP, Catholic.sh".

(Originally written towards a selection of Facebook peeps)

The general "why" or "what changed":

As some of you know, my spiritual life has been in a kind of chrysalis state since I was dismissed from Carmel almost seven years ago. It's as if the many Catholic labels stuck onto my interior goods lost their stickiness, a very gradual and quiet process I've been observing since then, ending in my losing basically all conviction in and taste for the things of formalized religion. This seems to have been a pretty natural outcome psychologically, given what went down at that time. (Unpacking that is handled below.) I acknowledge broken trust in itself has nothing to do directly with whether God exists or the Church is true, but it does have a lot to do with my capacity to freely submit my intellect to the Church's say-so as if it were God's. So although I do hope Christ rose from the dead, I'm sure I can't say that he certainly did, out of obedience. Perhaps predictably, this shift also bestowed a new gravity upon how arguments for Scripture and the historical Church as coherently inspired by one God only seem to work when proceeding backwards from that conclusion. 

Insofar as some may define "Catholic" as requiring that intellectual submission, I actually haven't been that for a while. I'd kept on sincerely identifying as Catholic at first, having no particular desire to be anything else, and I greatly benefited from the cultural closeness with some of my dearer Catholic friends, whose love and understanding I really needed in those early days. But the process of healing and standing on my own two feet again came to the point where my inner attitude has had to own its role as the force carrying me forward, and so it began to shape my outer practice as well. I can't say the Apostle's Creed and mean it, so attending Sunday Mass has lost its point. This also means I can't make all the promises necessary for marrying in the Church. So I haven't considered myself a member of the Catholic faith since around the beginning of this year.

The "what happened," the events in Carmel alluded to above:

(Please excuse the stuffy/legalese tone sprinkled below; I think it's useful to at least try to be precise in this regard.)

The Church proved itself untrustworthy when it broke a promise to me, which had been made in its official name, with all due form, and toward my specific person, when I took my vows. By "the Church", I mean the aspect of the Church I was directed to consider the conduit of God's authority and obey as binding upon my conscience: my superiors, with respect to whatever part of their will that was presented to me as an obedience. The promise that was broken was that the protection of my rights and obligations as a religious by means of due process in the event of a dismissal, which according to Canon law, requires such steps as documenting a religious' delicts, warning them, and acquiring the validation of the relevant extra-claustral authority, in my case the bishop. Although these delicts must be more serious in the case of a solemn professed, the rule also applies for one in temporary vows, as I was. An immediate superior doesn't normally have sufficient standing to dismiss an unwilling religious on their own initiative. 

The docility I had cultivated toward my immediate superior's will was, with respect to my rights as a religious, abused: I was told it was God's will that I should leave, and ordered not to tell the bishop the dismissal was against my will, with the warning that doing otherwise may make me appear obstinate and leave me unable to pursue religious life ever again. It was not revealed to me that the Prioress was unaware of this order, and I found out later that she had been misled about this being my choice.

It's easy for a reputable institution to decree with a seemingly divine level of force. The Church has issued rules in the name of God as binding upon the eternal welfare of a particular person's soul: an extreme amount of power, exerted on the scope of a single person's life. But, it seems to me, and even seems decently self-evident, that's not sufficient for authority. Authority would seem to presuppose a capacity for responsibility proportionate to the claimed force. So we should expect the Church to be able to keep its promises in that same name of God, issued in a fully valid legal process to even one person. As even one member of the Church bears the full threat of an officially-promised damnation, it seems that person should expect also to enjoy the full security of an officially-promised protection: a marriage vow, no less. I found out beyond any personal doubt that the Church is unable to maintain the latter. So it seems to me the Church's claim to a supernatural degree of institutional authority to "bind and loose" must be empty.

There's another way to explain the same event. While my trust in "the system" was well and duly broken, my trust in my superior's goodwill toward me never really was. As Carmelites, we were taught not to obey just the letter of an obedience, but our superior's intention for us, as best we could. I did as my superior told me out of a genuine belief that she must love me and be willing my good, so I should try to follow the spirit of what she was saying to me. Still to this day, I think I discerned rightly that her message to me was: "Go out and live: it's not really worth losing your whole life over this after all." That was the last command presented to me as an obedience, and I've been doing my best to follow it ever since.

I believe my superior, Sr. Teresa of Jesus, who is now the Prioress at Buffalo, mistreated my vows because she herself was suffering badly and needed to leave, but could not overcome the sunk cost and cognitive dissonance involved. When she saw I was also significantly struggling under the psychological pressure of the cloister, and because she loved me better than she loved herself, I think she deliberately tricked me out of the promise I would have never let go of on my own. Mother Teresa has since expelled two other sisters by similarly illegal means, with one canonical battle continuing til today.

I still love the sisters of Buffalo very much, and cherish the fact that they've taught me some of the greatest things I know. Only, I couldn't have predicted what the entire content or fallout of that knowledge would turn out to be.

The Tree, or why words suck

Things are better now. I seem to be on a path to repairing things with my family, and my identity freefall seems to have slowed. It feels like lot of parts that had been moving in me are aligning again around a center. Not perfect peace, but much better.

But that's hardly an interesting update, let's throw in one of those languishing draft posts:

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I have things I want to say to rationalists. I think I currently suck at genuinely explaining rather than persuading, and exposing how I arrived at a given conclusion ahead of why I think the conclusion is right. 

But, one can dream. I hope one day I can have learned enough to write something awesome that has something to do with this:

I have a strong desire, on the level of a life's goal, to explain something I consider key to securing an understanding of the full extent of our biases. It seems to be something often, and paradoxically, and ironically missed by those who'd most want that understanding, due to their identifying strongly with their rationality. 

It's good to identify with your rationality, because then you'll love it and perfect it, and cultivate a taste for uncovering influences that could secretly hurt it. But it can be bad, inasmuch as the more you identify with your inner warrior against irrational biases, the deeper the horror implied if you should ever come to recognize your target's location within the center of your actual beating heart. I might begin to wonder how much my warriorship was motivated by avoiding the worst truth of all, myself as an irrational actor. But if this is truth, it's a really important one to update on.

I think what I perceive, if true, could make this discovery easier, by showing how it makes sense for us to be in this predicament. As it seems to me, the Moloch behind the curtain is the origin of words, which results in their unconsciously dual purpose and dual effect.

To illustrate this, please picture a tree, which is the human soul. (Or "human brain-and-heart", "human thoughts-and-emotions" -- whatever you like.) 

The tree's form consists in the trace of two motivations, two flows of energy: one goes up, one goes down. The upward energy is our motivation to absorb the light of truth, to grow (inwardly) loftier and more diverse through meaningful contact with the outside world. The downward energy is our motivation to stay alive, strengthen pathways to basic survival needs, and wax peaceful and secure among our dearest tribe: the people we most rely on to locate or orient our identity and role in the world. 

We rely on words to make progress in both realms. The tree forms branches by means of words: words implement the distinctions necessary to understand and predict the world. The tree also forms roots by means of words: they allow us to implement the connections necessary to identify with and communicate with our tribe. 

"Implementing distinctions" and "implementing connections" are opposites. That's the first problem.

Worse, the connection impetus of the roots has a certain power advantage over the distinctions impetus of the branches. The world of roots -- paths of connection, emotional experience, purpose, and desire -- are the context in which each of us came upon our most foundational words, in addition to just being the "proper" purpose of words from the perspective of human evolution. The connection impetus is both where our words' heartfelt meaning comes from, and their primary concern. The roots are necessary to the branches; the branches much less so to the roots.

The way we form our concepts and beliefs with these words reflects this. For all our conscious reaching toward the correct, objective distinctions and associations between concepts, the words we use to do this remained pinned (in proportion to their meaningfulness to us) in their subconscious origin, the emotional power that bestows their turgor. It's to this extent our words are at the mercy of those associations with which we acquired them.

It doesn't have to be hopeless. If our branches succeed in finding sunlight, that energy can be used to feed the roots, growing new ones and deepening them in a better place. Our love of real knowledge in the world can and must enlighten our emotional territory, to make it more aligned with reality and its more accurate distinctions. We should do the hard, slow work to evolve our whole root system into a structure better than the default, one that maximizes both sunlight access and water access, according to a proper understanding of the constraints bestowed by the terrain -- wherever it was our seed happened to drop. 

The way in which I think this process usually fails is through horror at recognizing the sheer level of irrationality we'd be uncovering within ourselves, particularly in those words, phrases, concepts and associations that run deep into our childhood. To succeed, we must learn to understand that this is actually a signal of the power these words contain, enough to become motivated to uncover that power so as to bring it under our conscious sway. We can also be motivated by a different fear: the quest to control that power is ignored to our peril. That's the force that will go right on controlling our path whether we like or not. It must be recognized, respected, cooperated with, and won over just as some massive wild animal would be made tame. 

As messy as our start may have been, this is the energy allotted to us -- perhaps in the form of a religion, or some other way love was conveyed to us that we may recognize as false or having false elements -- and we must respect it for what it is. 

Probably the inevitable example is the word God. If you once believed in God and are now an atheist, and you still find yourself feeling any bit of disturbed emotional reaction to that word, you should invest a decent effort to find out why. That disturbance isn't due simply to some inherent falseness in the word, unless you also feel the same disturbance at the word flurfleboopagetti. There is energy trapped behind that word that once fueled you, but now is working against you. Part of you may be assuming something like, "God once existed and was there for me; but now, he does not exist and is not there for me."  

But this is false, because whatever was true then is true now. Find a way to release any such energy and let it flow toward you again, because it's yours and belongs to you.