When I was in the eighth grade, filled with idealism and a strong belief in God, I sensed a calling to become a Catholic priest. Such was common for parochial school boys in the 1950’s. Almost every order of priests had “minor seminaries” in which qualified boys with some sense of initial calling were encouraged to enroll for high school. I never felt the least pressure from my parents; but, as was the common attitude of the time, it was a great honor to have a son who was a priest. I enrolled in the Franco-American minor seminary of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate; and on Labor Day weekend 1958 my family drove me from our home in Rhode Island to Bucksport, Maine.

Although they hardly exist anymore – thank God – minor seminaries were very common in 1950’s and 60’s. Such institutions began to flourish in the sixteenth century under the assumption that it was good to take boys early to properly train them intellectually, morally and spiritually for the priesthood. The training and schedule were still virtually the same in the twentieth century. As a high-school seminarian, a loud bell in an open dormitory room of twenty to forty students awakened me at 6:15 each morning. No talking was ever permitted in the dormitory. After washing our hand and faces we went to the chapel for morning prayers, followed by a short sermon, daily mass, and breakfast – again all in silence.

Almost every moment of every day was regulated, even the language we spoke – French until supper and English thereafter. We could only ever leave the campus with permission and only for a good reason. We were warned not to socialize with girls before we left for the Christmas vacation and before the long summer break. I dutifully obeyed. It all certainly made for developing discipline in one’s life as well as for very good study habits, though not for good psychosexual development. More than half who began as freshman dropped out by the end of sophomore year.

An example of just how much we lived in an isolated,  self-contained world is that we began daylight saving time one week before the rest of the country so that we could play softball during the recreation hour between supper and the evening study period. Of course, sports were mandatory for everyone.

For whatever reasons I thrived in Bucksport. I liked the camaraderie and the sports; and I did well academically. My sense of calling to become a priest deepened throughout high school. I was happy that I was where I belonged. In retrospect, I was also very innocent, naïve, and stunted in my emotional development. At any rate I applied and was accepted to continue on to the junior college seminary in Bar Harbor, Maine.

The junior college seminary was less structured and restrictive than the high school seminary. My spiritual life while at Bucksport, Bar Harbor, and the next year at the novitiate in Colebrook, New Hampshire was very conventional for the time. I don’t remember myself being particularly pious; but I believed in the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist; and I attended daily Mass as the high point of each day. I prayed, meditated as counseled, studied, and my sense calling to become a priest continued to deepen. I could imagine no greater vocation than to serve God and the Church. I believed; and I wanted to continue to the next step towards the priesthood and “religious life,” i.e., the life within my chosen religious community, by taking vows of poverty, chastity\celibacy, and obedience.

I internalized my vow of poverty from the beginning. Throughout my life I have wanted little and sought to live simply. That lifestyle certainly transitioned well into the second phase of my spiritual journey with its environmental dimension. I don’t remember if I ever believed that my religious superior’s voice was an expression of the will of God. I know that during my thirty years of religious life I was never really ever tested in my vow of obedience by being asked to do something I fully didn’t want to do. The vow of chastity\celibacy had a more complicated history that I describe further on.

When I took my temporary vows on August 2, 1965 I became a member of my religious order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. On that day it was announced that I would go to the major seminary in Rome for presumably the next seven years to study philosophy and theology after which I would be ordained.

It was very exciting arriving in Rome in the fall of 1965. It was the last session of the Second Vatican Council, a gathering during which all Catholic bishops in the world decide any and all matters of the Church. There is on average one such council every 100 years. In short and at the risk of oversimplifying, the Council had been called to modernize the Church and to welcome those aspects of the modern world that were compatible with the gospel. It was a time of great hope. However, in the giddy aftermath of the Council, combined with the cultural atmosphere of the late 1960’s, a time of upheaval ensued in the Church. Seminarians and priests left in great numbers. After centuries of suppression, the pendulum in the seminary swung in the opposite direction. I tell people that my seminary experience began in total suppression and ended it in total anarchy.

Arriving in Rome at the age 21 to begin my junior college year, I became a fulltime philosophy student for two years after which I would do an additional year to obtain a graduate degree. I studied at the Angelicum University, which taught the thirteenth century philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a beautifully built edifice of impeccable logic but, in my judgment, built on sand. Studying mostly thirteenth philosophy was a disappointing waste.

I asked my seminary superior not to do a third year of philosophy; but he would hear none of it. He informed me that all philosophy students who came to Rome continued on to a post-graduate degree in philosophy. It led to my first vocational crisis. At the beginning of 1968 during my third year of philosophy I announced that I needed time off; and I was granted permission to live with the Oblate priests who staffed the parish in International Falls, Minnesota. I taught the seventh and eighth grade in the parochial school for a year.

Before leaving Rome in the spring of 1968, I experienced a turning point in my attitude towards the teaching authority of the Church. To that point I had always reverentially deferred to my elders who were more experienced and learned than me. That all changed in 1968 when Pope Paul VI could not find a way out of the morass of condemning artificial contraception in the sexual act between husband and wife. His encyclical reaffirmed the teaching of his predecessor. As a seminarian I carefully read the pope’s encyclical at the end of which I muttered something to the effect, “No matter how many learned theological distinctions one makes against the morality of artificial birth control, if the conclusion lacks common sense, it’s bullshit.”

After returning to the States later that spring and in the years immediate following, various priests were silenced for stating their own personal conclusions about birth control. Sometimes they were even publicly reprimanded by their bishops who supported the pope. What I began to learn and became more convinced of with time is that the first and most important quality to becoming a bishop is loyalty to the institution and the pope. I know I never wanted a position of authority in my religious community or in the wider Church; and I already knew that loyalty to the institution and the pope were not my strong suit.

After teaching for a year in Minnesota I felt renewed in my calling to become a priest and was ready to begin my theological studies. My US Provincial Superior granted me permission to do my theological studies in San Antonio instead of Rome. Some of what I learned in theology made me question but never lose my faith. For example, in studying the New Testament gospels, I learned that there were three periods of development in the writing of each gospel. The first was what Jesus actually said and did, i.e., from approximately 0 to 30 AD. The second was what the early church, in its oral tradition, taught what Jesus said and did, i.e., from approximately 30 to 60 AD. The third period was what each gospel writer, with his own goal and audience in mind, wrote about what Jesus said and did, i.e., from approximately 60 to 100 AD. By the end of the course I wondered, “Who was the real Jesus? ” It didn’t shake my faith because I believed that Jesus was fully God and fully man.

Because spirituality and sexuality are oftentimes so central in our lives, I think they are intimately connected even when the connection is not apparent to us. When I took my temporary vow of chastity, i.e., celibacy, at the age of 20, I agreed with what my novice master had taught me and the other novices. I had never masturbated. I was still a virgin. Probably a combination of loneliness, the culture of the late 1960’s and beyond, more critical thinking on my part about celibacy, the sexual drive, “love” and rationalization all came together so that I had four sexual experiences while in the major seminary and later as a priest – from a one-time, immediately regretted occurrence to a relationship that lasted over a year and for which I felt no guilt until months after it ended.

I make absolutely no excuse for my sexual behavior. At the same time I know enough first and secondhand stories of other seminarians and priests to know that that my story was not unique. I think my peers and I all took a vow of chastity, expecting to be always faithful to it. But no matter how much religious fervor, zeal, and determination one has when taking such a vow, things change.

At some point, I decided that I needed to be faithful to the vow of chastity\celibacy that I had taken even though I no longer subscribed to the teaching I had learned. Its spiritual meaning and value in my life were only that I be authentic and honest with myself about the public vow I had taken. The vow had become a cross to bear so that I could continue doing the ministry, which I judged important and which was so meaningful to me. I realize that the “experience of the cross” such as suffering and a continuous difficult situation in life can become an integral part of one’s spiritual journey; but if I integrated celibacy in that way, that integration was a minor part of my spirituality because I have no recollection of it.

As an aside, the life of a Catholic priest is at least solitary if not also lonely. In our information age during which sexual crimes and scandals of the Catholic clergy have become public knowledge, I think that instead of being a shining star in the Church’s crown, celibacy has become a blot. Mandatory celibacy is unenforceable. It’s obviously for the Church to decide whether accepting only males who are willing to make such a vow is in the Church’s best interest and whether requiring such a vow is unfair to those for whom making the vow is psychologically and\or spiritually a bad choice. Given my obedience to not socialize with girls during my high school and junior college winter and summer vacation periods, I know that in retrospect my vow of chastity was an immature and an unhealthy psychological and spiritual choice for me and, I suspect, for most of my peers.

My meaningful and happy life came to a crashing end in early October 1990. During that late summer and early fall, as I continued as a fulltime peace pilgrim, averaging 15 miles a day as I crisscrossed the state of Maine, I stopped daily at parishes to speak on “Making Peace with Creation” that highlighted the environmental teaching of the Church.

That previous spring I had been asked to represent my province on a national peace and justice committee of the five US provinces. At the end of September someone gave me a ride from Kittery, the southernmost town in Maine, to Lowell, Massachusetts where the four-day meeting would take place. One evening most of my fellow priest committee members went to someone’s house; and I chose not to go. The next morning on the back porch of the rectory one of them reported to me on the previous evening. Each person had been asked a series of religious question to which he could only answer yes or know – not, for example, mostly yes but partly no. One example was, “Do you believe in an afterlife?” I was stunned at the answer “no” that was given by more than one to that question.

That Saturday I was given a ride back to Kittery, Maine; and I walked northwest to the next parish where I preached at the weekend masses. As I walked from there to the parishes in Sanford on Monday and to Biddeford on Tuesday, I began asking myself, “How would I have answered those questions if I could only answer yes or no?” From there I went on to other questions and began reflecting in depth. Sometime on Tuesday I realized that I no longer believed. Did it all happen very suddenly? Yes; but I knew that I had hit a brick wall through which there was no passage. With the benefit of hindsight months and years later, during the previous two decades I had built theological buttresses that supported the cathedral of my belief. When one buttress gave way, they all began to crumble. Everything collapsed in two days.

I continued my peace pilgrimage through Maine until my itinerary and speaking engagements ended just before Thanksgiving. During my days of walking I wavered from total loss to hopeful, future possibilities. Through it all I never hesitated in my decision that I must leave the priesthood. The verse from John’s gospel came to me as an almost daily refrain, “The truth will set you free.” I have since learned firsthand that other priests and Christian ministers whose non-belief is similar to mine have chosen to continue in the ministry. As one said to me, “I still find the stories very meaningful.”

My biggest loss during those last two months as a pilgrim was the profound loss of the Christian God who had been at the center of my entire life. I was also losing the life that gave me meaning. I was losing the only life and profession for which I had trained and in which I had happily lived. All was ending.

When I returned home for Thanksgiving, the only words I could tell my family was that I had decided to leave the priesthood. I could say no more. When pressed by my brother and sister-in-law, I lied. I never told my parents the reason I left. With their being older and thinking more about death, I couldn’t bear to tell them that I no longer believed in their loving God who would welcome them into an immortal life.

Beginning my new way of life was the most difficult transition in my life. There are a number of things about my former life that I have missed; but I have always known that I made the right decision – the only decision I could make. During the remainder of my professional life I learned to find a different kind of job satisfaction in two non-profit organizations, first as the administrator of a national organization that provides stipends to health care students who perform needed health service projects and in my second job as the executive director of an environmental organization.

After decades of stunted growth in my psycho-sexual development I learned how to relate to women on all levels. I had three consecutive partnerships that eventually ended. Five months after meeting Karen I knew for sure that I had struck gold and that I could live a happy marriage with her. We married nine months later and have enjoyed wonderful years together on many levels. She has been the greatest gift in my life. Now, as we deal with my cancer, our love and communication deepen in a different way as we share our common and different thoughts and feelings about the present and the future. I now also experience her love as she physically cares for me. My biggest regret in dying is that I will leave Karen behind and be the cause of her grief.

I think that for most of us leaving a religion behind, the clearest notion in the beginning is what and why we are leaving, whether it is because of teachings or any number of other reasons. For me it was the string of questions that I had been able to only half ask or answer. Suddenly, my previous answers were inadequate and no longer true.

For a few months after leaving the priesthood I continued to go to a Catholic church on Sunday, partly because it had been a cornerstone of my religious practice, partly because it offered a time to reflect, and partly because it offered a weekly transition place from my only religious community since birth.

Over these past decades, I have continued to occasionally read articles and listen to recordings about theology. In the process I become more convinced than ever that my spiritual journey moved in the right direction. For example, not long ago I listened to lectures on “How Jesus Became God.” It brought together what I had come to know in other ways, namely, that the varied, early Christian views of Jesus’ nature were by the fourth century condemned as heretical with the only orthodox view being the one found in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, one of the last books of the New Testament written about 70 years after Jesus’ life, and declared a dogma in the fourth century that is enshrined in the Nicene Creed, i.e., Jesus the pre-existent Son of God.

In my opinion the Christian God story was a great step forward from the ancient world religions with their oftentimes-capricious gods. However, I think that the Christian era in Europe and North America has been gradually passing and that Christianity will claim a smaller and smaller percentage of the population in the developed world.

After that first religious step of realizing what I no longer believed and what I was leaving behind, the second step was figuring out what was my new spiritual path. I began asking and answering questions like, “Who\what transcends me? What do I believe? Towards what do I strive? To what am I willing to give my life?” I first settled on the philosophical transcendentals that I had learned in my philosophy courses: Truth, Goodness and Beauty. In some ways these are a humanist continuation of my previous spiritual journey. For example, giving oneself to the ever-elusive search for Truth, never knowing for sure that one has achieved part of it, is similar to searching for and living within the mystery of the Christian God who is Truth.

Although the foundation of my ethics continued to be Christian, within a few years I added a new dimension that went beyond the mainly human-to-human ethics of Christianity to an expanded ethic that includes all life. It is summarized in Albert Schweitzer’s Reverence for Life. In short, I am in solidarity with all other life. I share with every other life “the will to live.” The human ethical response is not only respect and reverence for my life and that of my fellow humans but to have the same for all life. We can only ever kill life out of necessity. A minor example of what I do now is to capture unwanted insects in the house (I kill mosquitoes) and release them outside. “I respect and have reverence for your life; but this is my space. Out you go; and I will make every effort not to kill you or damage your space.”

The internalization of my vow of poverty forty years ago, which I summarized above, transitioned well into an environmental ethic as an important component in my new spiritual journey. I continue to want little and live simply; and I reject the consumerism of our society. While I make conscious decisions such as driving a small car and installing solar panels on the roof of our home, I realize that my middle class existence in the United States probably puts me in the top fifty percentile of humans causing environmental damage. I am painfully aware of my personal limitations in caring for our Earth Home.

In 1993 my then partner and I adopted an old wether (a castrated male goat). Woody became much more than a pet. He increasingly touched my soul during his three years with us. I became much more aware of what united rather than what divided us. I began experiencing him as my brother. Twenty-four years later I still refer to him as “my brother Woody.” He concretized for me like no other previous experience that we are all indeed one. I first experienced through Woody that all living beings are my brothers and sisters and cousins.

My species is part of the tree of life that traces it’s beginning to the planet’s first organisms.  I am in awe of life in its many manifestations. I enjoy it. I rejoice in it. I celebrate it. I am humbled by it. Life is one. For a brief moment in time I am part of this amazing symphony of life. The other mammals are my brothers and sisters. The birds and the frogs and fish are my cousins. The trees that surround me when I sit in the woods are my more distant cousins. I marvel that the rhythm of the trees’ lives is not so much measured in the daily rising and setting of the sun but rather in the seasons of the year. I am in awe of life in its many manifestations. I enjoy it. I rejoice in it. I celebrate it. I am humbled by it. If there be any named gods, they are Father Sun and Mother Earth.

Since marrying Karen, I have experienced part of the Goodness of the divine in our relationship. We both have a spark of the divine within us, individually and hopefully together as a couple. We strive towards greater truth and goodness in our relationship and with all of the earth community. This part of my spiritual journey is possibly similar to the divine that many of you experience in your partnership or marriage.

As I have grown older, my spirituality has included an ever-increasing attitude of gratitude. I have been granted countless, overflowing gifts and blessings. I have been enriched beyond measure. My life has been an amazing journey. Thank you. Thank you.

During this second, multi-faceted phase of the my spiritual journey I have continued to find it important to be part of a community in which I am at home and which supports me in my journey. I am a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church, a non-creedal denomination that supports one’s individual search for meaning as the community strives to live peace and justice.

As activities in my spiritual journey, I value mindfulness meditation although it has regrettably never been a daily practice. On a more regular basis I sit on the front porch of our home that is in a rural setting or in the center of the labyrinth that I made, mostly in the woods around our home with wide wooded spaces separating the path. Walking the labyrinth and sitting at its center or simply sitting on the front porch of our home are usually meditative or contemplative experiences. One day I am attuned to the beauty, sights, smells and sounds of the natural world. On an other day I experience a greater oneness with Earth and its life. On another I find myself reflecting on my journey or the events or questions in my life. On another, insight and meaning may come to me.