A reader writes:
The bubble popped for me two years ago. My still-practicing Catholic friends tell me compartmentalize. The Vatican is not Your Church, forget about them. Intellectually I can understand this rationale. But in my heart, compartmentalization does not jive because I know each of our lives is interconnected.
I still have enough faith to believe in God and in the Holy Trinity. But that’s about it right now. As a 53 single, professional woman, educated in a Catholic high school and university, I am in the desert. That’s ok. Others have been here before me, including Thomas Merton, one of my heroes:
“Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.”
I feel very largely the same way. And I pray for the hope that is one of the three cardinal virtues. Not optimism: who could have that right now? But hope.