The Shadow of the Cross
The church was supposed to be safe.
It was the place where people brought their pain and laid it at the altar, where questions found guidance, and where community made loneliness bearable. But what happens when the house of healing becomes the place that breaks you? When the voice that promised grace tells you to leave? That is what I mean by the shadow of the cross. It’s the darkness cast when love turns defensive, when faith begins to protect itself instead of the people who need it most.
When I was asked to leave my church, the wound went deeper than belief. I lost the structure that had ordered my life, the community that had named me, and the story that told me who I was in the world. The trauma was not physical, but it lived in the body all the same: the quickened pulse walking past familiar buildings, the instinct to edit myself before speaking, the ache of being known and uninvited. As an educator I later learned to call this what it is: the loss of safety and trust, the first principles of trauma-informed care. When those vanish, everything else begins to unravel.
People often say that faith and fear cannot coexist. I have found that they are usually twins. The same impulse that gathers people around a table can also teach them whom to keep away from it. I was told the exclusion wasn’t personal: it was about “doctrine,” “integrity,” “purity.” But doctrine cannot feel loneliness, and purity cannot sit with grief. Only people can do that. Fear had entered the sanctuary disguised as righteousness, and no one seemed to notice how cold the room had become.
The shock of that expulsion was disorienting. I didn’t yet have language for what had happened, only the sense that I had stepped out of a familiar story and into a void. I tried to explain the loss to friends, but even they were frightened by it; if my belonging could vanish so quickly, what did that say about theirs? So, I stopped talking and began reading. Reading was safer. Books could not exile me.
In time I came to understand that the damage was not only social but existential. The trauma of exclusion rearranges your sense of reality. It makes you question not only what you believe, but whether believing is even safe. The educator in me now sees this as a textbook trauma response: the collapse of the systems that make meaning. When trust and safety are gone, the mind searches for control; it rehearses conversations, replays arguments, and invents new rules that might have kept it from happening. But there are no new rules, only the slow work of naming what went wrong.
Naming, I have learned, is the beginning of recovery. When we do not name the wound, the shadow of it grows. The silence after my rejection was heavier than the rejection itself. Only later, when I began to speak about it—first on paper, then aloud—did I feel the weight shift. Writing became a small act of reclamation, a way of telling my body that it was safe to exist again.
That is what this essay is: an attempt to name the wound. Not to reopen it, but to understand how it formed and how, over time, it began to heal. The story that follows is not about losing faith so much as learning to see what faith had become, and what it might still be when it is stripped of fear. It is about trauma and recovery, about exile and return, and about the fragile kind of sacred that can survive both.
Exile and Anger
When I was asked to leave my church, the expulsion came with polite words. No one shouted. No one cursed. They told me they loved me and wished me well, and then they closed the door. I remember walking to my car in silence, the weight of those gentle voices pressing on me harder than any accusation could have. My body felt both heavy and untethered, as though gravity had forgotten which way was down. I didn’t know it then, but that confusion—the spinning, the unreality—is how trauma announces itself.
Anger came next. It wasn’t loud; it was slow and constant, a hum that colored everything. I tried to reason through it the way I had reasoned through scripture. I read theology and philosophy looking for language that could explain what had happened. But betrayal has no logic. I was angry not only at the people who had turned me away but at myself for still wanting to belong to them. I missed the rhythm of worship, the familiarity of faces, the sense of purpose that came from being needed. I had lost my community and, with it, my identity.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. College was ending, friends were scattering, and the ground beneath every kind of certainty was shifting. The church had been the last stable thing, the story that tied all the other stories together. When it disappeared, I was left holding questions that no one wanted to hear. The theologian in me wanted to keep arguing, but the body in me was exhausted. Every conversation about faith felt like reopening a wound.
I wasn’t ready to stop believing, so I looked for a smaller version of what I had lost. A few friends invited me to a house church. They were young, earnest Southern Baptists who wanted to recreate the Book of Acts in a living room. Each week we shared a meal, sang a few songs, listened to a short lesson, and ended with prayer. On paper it sounded pure, unencumbered by hierarchy. In practice it was another performance, just scaled down. The lessons came from a printed guide, and the prayers followed an unspoken script. Authenticity was the goal, but the anxiety to appear authentic made honesty impossible.
I tried to play along. I bowed my head when others prayed. I kept my voice even when the lessons felt shallow. But questions have a way of making people nervous. Mine were gentle at first: Why this verse? Why not another? What if doubt is part of faith? Each week the air grew tighter until one night, after the others had gone, our host pulled me aside. He said my questions made people uncomfortable, that I seemed “off-mission,” and maybe it would be best if I stopped coming for a while. I never went back.
That second exile hurt more than the first. With the older generation, rejection had felt paternal; with my peers it felt personal. We were supposed to be friends, equals. I left that house knowing I would not be returning to any church soon. I told myself I didn’t need one. I argued with Christians online. I drank. I tried to turn anger into certainty, but anger only burns clean for so long before it turns to ash.
Looking back, I can see that this was the lowest point of the trauma curve, the stage of disorientation that follows rupture. The safety of belonging was gone, and the trust that held meaning together was gone with it. What remained was a restless energy that kept me reading, searching, scanning the horizon for something that could hold. My old faith had taught me to seek salvation; my new instinct was simply to survive.
That is where the next part of the story begins: the long season of searching, when I cast a wide net across atheists and mystics alike, trying to find a language for a world that no longer made sense.
Casting the Net
After leaving the house church, I turned to books. They were safe companions. In them I found no judgment, no closed doors. My room became a kind of library chapel, its silence filled with the voices of others trying to make sense of the same ache I carried. I read everything that crossed my path: Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris—the so-called “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” They gave me language for anger. Their arguments against religion felt clean, rational, decisive, like sandpaper stripping away rot. I wanted to believe that reason alone could be enough.
But reason, I found, is a thin blanket. It covers the mind but leaves the soul exposed. When I finished their books, I was still awake at night. The certainty they offered was the same kind that had once wounded me: different doctrine, same tone. I needed something that would let me breathe.
So I kept reading. Thich Nhat Hanh, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Walpola Rahula. I was searching for a vocabulary that could hold both truth and tenderness. The mystics and the Buddhists spoke of stillness, of breathing, of attention without judgment. Their words met me where I was: restless, skeptical, wounded, but not ready to stop hoping that meaning might still exist.
Meditation began as an experiment. If prayer was talking to God, then perhaps meditation was learning to listen. I wanted to listen to my body, to my breath, to whatever silence waited behind the noise. I didn’t know what I was reaching for anymore: God, the sacred, the universe, or simply peace. What I wanted was quiet. I began using a simple mantra—so-hum—breathing in and out until the edges of my thoughts softened.
One morning, on my way to work, I was practicing mindful breathing in the car. At a stoplight, a bird drifted beside me, riding a current of air. It hovered outside my open window, suspended in wind and sunlight. For a moment, everything slowed: the traffic, the noise, even my heartbeat. My breath and the bird’s flight were the same motion, in and out, rise and fall. Time loosened its grip, and I felt what I can only call completeness. No revelation, no voice from heaven, just stillness. The kind of peace that doesn’t ask for explanation.
I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t have the words. But that moment became an anchor. I didn’t yet understand trauma language, but my body did: this was what safety felt like. It was the first time in years that my chest didn’t feel locked. The breath that had once been a struggle for control had become a form of release.
That morning didn’t erase the loneliness or the anger, but it changed their texture. I stopped fighting to harmonize contradictions. I began to see that my search had never really been about belief; it had been about belonging. About belonging to the world, to myself, to the quiet space that trauma had taught me to fear.
Meditation became my faith for a time. Breathing was prayer stripped to its simplest form, a conversation between the body and the present moment. It was, as I once wrote in my journal, a scientific way to pray. Nothing supernatural, just the fragile miracle of being alive and aware. And from that awareness, a small opening appeared. I found the willingness to be near religion again, not to believe in it, but to see what remained of its beauty.
That opening led me back to my grandfather and the Episcopal church, where ritual, rhythm, and community waited: different than before, quieter, more human. But before I could return, I had to name what I had learned in exile: that stillness is not absence; it is presence without demand.
Naming the Wound
For a long time I didn’t think of what had happened to me as trauma. I reserved that word for war, abuse, catastrophe, for things that left visible scars. But exile leaves its own kind of mark. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between spiritual and physical danger; it simply learns what is safe and what isn’t. When I walked into a sanctuary, even years later, my chest tightened before my mind could explain why. That, I would later learn, is the body remembering.
Working in education gave me language for what my faith had taken and what it would take to recover. Trauma-informed care begins with five principles: safety, trust, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. Looking back, I can trace how each one was fractured by religion and how healing required relearning them, one by one.
Safety was the first to go. In my church, safety was conditional. It was offered to the obedient and withheld from the doubtful. I had learned to measure every word, every question, by its potential to offend. Fear replaced belonging. To heal, I had to find spaces—libraries, classrooms, meditation cushions—where I could breathe without scanning the room for danger.
From safety follows trust. Once broken, it is slow to rebuild. I had trusted the church with my vulnerabilities, and it turned them into liabilities. The hardest part of recovery was learning to trust myself again: to believe my own perceptions, to honor the small voice that said this isn’t right. Naming the wound was the first act of trust.
Then came choice. In the old faith, choice was suspect; obedience was the measure of devotion. Meditation had quietly restored that freedom. Each breath was a decision: to stay, to notice, to continue. Later, in the Episcopal liturgy, I found that same permission. I could sit or stand, speak or stay silent. Participation was an invitation, not a requirement. Choice became holy.
Collaboration and empowerment grew out of that freedom. I stopped seeing religion as a hierarchy of the saved and began to see it as a communal art project: something we make together, imperfectly, to remember what goodness looks like. Empowerment, in that sense, was the ability to bring my whole self into the room: doubt, intellect, and all.
Trauma experts often say that healing is not about erasing the past but about integration. It is about teaching the body that the danger is over. For me, integration meant realizing that I could return to ritual without surrendering autonomy. The breath that had once been my only prayer could coexist with the prayers of others. I didn’t have to believe the words to find them beautiful.
Naming the wound did not make the pain disappear, but it gave it shape. And once something has shape, it can be held. That, I think, is what faith at its best has always been trying to teach: that the act of holding—our stories, our sorrows, one another—is sacred work. For the first time in years, I began to believe that religion might still be capable of that kind of tenderness.
The Long Return
After years away from church, I began going with my grandfather to his Episcopal parish. It wasn’t a conversion so much as a visit, an act of affection. I had gone with him before, usually on holidays, but this time felt different. I no longer needed to defend or explain myself. I was simply tired of staying outside.
The first Sundays were quiet. I sat beside him, following the rhythm of standing, kneeling, and sitting. No one asked me for a testimony. No one demanded to know where I stood with God. The liturgy unfolded like a well-worn poem: words older than memory, shaped by centuries of repetition. I could whisper them or let them pass over me; it didn’t matter. The beauty of the service was that belief was not required for participation. I could be in the room both with and apart from what was taking place.
It was the safety I had been missing. There were no hidden tests, no sudden turns of judgment. The congregation’s welcome was mild, untheatrical, genuine. The ritual itself carried the weight, not the personalities. For someone who had lived for years on high alert, that steadiness felt like grace. I didn’t have to perform sincerity; I only had to show up.
What surprised me most was the relief of being passive. In my former church experiences, worship had been a contest of enthusiasm: hands raised, hearts on fire, every prayer required to come “from the heart.” At the Episcopal church, everything was written down. The prayers were already there, waiting. I didn’t have to invent holiness; I could borrow it. The liturgy gave structure to what had once been chaos inside me.
In time, I began to participate more. I read the lessons on Sundays and helped serve the Eucharist. None of it felt false, even though I no longer believed in the supernatural story that framed it. I served honestly, as a human being among human beings, sharing bread and words that still carried meaning even if the metaphysics had fallen away. The church accepted that. They didn’t mind my doubts as long as they came from an honest place.
Ritual had become language again, not law. It reminded me of what the theologian Paul Tillich called “the courage to be”—the quiet confidence that meaning is found not in certainty but in participation. Each week I felt a little more human, a little more at home.
When my grandfather died, I kept going for at least a while. The decision surprised even me. I wasn’t seeking forgiveness anymore, and I wasn’t pretending belief. I was practicing presence. The church had become what I once hoped it could be: a community gathered around shared gestures—standing, singing, breaking bread—not to prove anything, but simply to remember that we belong to one another.
Looking back, that was the beginning of reconciliation. A reconciliation not with doctrine, but with the human form of faith itself. I had come to religion not as a vassal seeking pardon, but as an equal participant in an ancient art. It was no longer a contract between sinner and savior; it was a collaboration between people learning, again and again, how to care.
A July Monk
When I told my friend, Father Steve, about my years of wandering, he listened without surprise. He knew my story. He knew how the church had hurt me, how I had drifted through anger and silence, how I had rebuilt myself through breath and patience. He nodded and said, “You might find some peace in the rhythm.” By rhythm, he meant the monastic life. Through him I learned about a program that allowed laypeople to live with a monastic community for a month. He thought it would do me good. He was right.
I went with no expectations of revelation. I didn’t imagine the month would restore my faith or answer my questions. I went because I was ready to listen again, not to sermons but to silence.
The monastery was small, tucked among trees and stone walls weathered to the color of ashes. The first morning began before dawn. A bell rang in the dark, and the brothers moved quietly toward the chapel, their steps measured, their robes whispering against the floor. Lauds. The first prayer of the day. The chant rose like a hushed breath in a shared lung: no strain, no performance, just presence. It reminded me of meditation, the same cycle of attention and release.
Living there, I began to understand what faith without fear looks like. The men were not saints; they were survivors. Some had entered young and stayed their whole lives; others had come to the cloister after rejection, loss, or weariness with the world. They carried their wounds lightly, not as secrets but as companions. No one spoke of perfection. The goal was persistence.
Each day followed the same rhythm: prayer, work, silence, prayer again. I tended the garden, washed dishes, folded linens, picked berries, and baked bread. The labor was simple but intentional: what one monk called “the practice of presence.” Trauma, I learned, fractures time. The past intrudes; the future overwhelms. The monastic rhythm stitches time back together, one small act at a time. The bell rings, and the body remembers where it is.
In the afternoons I often sat in the courtyard reading Merton. He had once written that the task of the monk is not to flee the world but to “reach the heart of the world through prayer.” I began to see that prayer did not have to mean words or belief. It could mean attention, gratitude, a willingness to hold the world gently. Every practice of faith I had ever known—chanting, kneeling, breathing—was simply a method of returning to presence.
The brothers treated me as one of their own. They knew I didn’t believe in the same way they did, but belief wasn’t the point. One of them even shared the Buddhist texts he was reading with me. They asked about my work, my students, and my journaling. They thanked me for joining their rhythm. I thanked them for trusting me to share it. That trust, the freedom to be fully myself within a sacred space, was healing in ways I couldn’t have planned.
By the end of my time with them, I understood what Father Steve meant by rhythm. It wasn’t the repetition of duty; it was the steady pulse of belonging. The monastery offered what trauma had taken: safety, trust, and choice. I could rise or rest, speak or stay silent, believe or not. The holiness was in the continuity, the refusal to turn away.
Leaving was bittersweet. As I packed, one of the other July Monks pressed a small rosary into my hand. A simple cord of tied knots and a crucifix. “A reminder,” he said, “of our time together.” I knew he didn’t mean our many conversions. He meant the work of attention, the daily labor of keeping one’s heart open. I left the monastery the same way I had arrived, full of questions. But now the questions felt less like wounds and more like invitations.
Religion as Art
When I came home from the monastery, I saw religion differently. The question was no longer whether its stories were true, but whether they were beautiful. I had stopped measuring faith by its claims about heaven and hell and began to judge it by the worlds it made possible here. The sacred, I realized, is not supernatural. It is human. It is the art we make out of longing.
At the Episcopal church, I began serving again: reading the lessons, helping with communion. It wasn’t an act of belief but of participation, the kind that feels honest because it doesn’t ask for pretense. I was transparent about my doubts; they didn’t mind. For the first time in my life, I was in a religious space where belief was not a condition of belonging. That freedom changed everything.
When I stood at the lectern, reading words that had been spoken for centuries, I didn’t hear them as pronouncements from above but as poetry from below. In speaking them, I added my voice to a chorus of human voices reaching toward meaning. The creeds, stripped of obligation, became works of collective imagination. Their beauty was in their endurance, in the fact that people kept saying them even when certainty faded. Like any great art, religion persists not because it is infallible, but because it helps us bear our finitude.
Serving communion brought this truth closer to the body. The ritual was simple: bread, wine, the words, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven.” I said them with care, not conviction, understanding them as metaphor: the act of feeding one another as the real sacrament. It was not about salvation; it was about sustenance. In those moments, I felt part of something larger than belief. I was part of a choreography of care, a shared creation of meaning.
That sense of artistry extended to the liturgy itself. The movement of bodies, the rise and fall of voices, the colors of vestments shifting with the seasons, all of it formed a living composition. Where my earlier faith had demanded constant performance, this one invited collaboration. The service belonged to everyone: priests, readers, choir, and congregation. Together we shaped the space, holding silence, releasing sound, mirroring the same rhythm I had learned in the monastery: attention, offering, rest.
I realized that trauma had once made me fear this very structure. The old church used ritual to control; the new one used it to connect. In trauma-informed terms, the liturgy restored choice and safety. I could step forward or remain seated. I could sing or listen. There was no punishment for hesitation. The structure itself provided stability without coercion, the difference between a locked church and an open one.
Slowly, I began to think of religion as a kind of shared craftsmanship, a gallery of human attempts to frame the ineffable. The theologian John O’Donohue wrote that beauty “is not something you see; it is something that sees you.” That line stayed with me. The beauty of religion wasn’t in its answers but in its attention. It lied in the way it invited us to look carefully, to linger. Every prayer, hymn, or ritual was an act of noticing: of saying, This matters. Let’s make it beautiful enough to last.
In that sense, religion and art have become inseparable for me. Both are born from the same impulse: to give form to wonder, to turn vulnerability into meaning. Both require community. Both are fragile. And both, at their best, are generous.
When I was confirmed, I did it with open eyes. There was no dramatic return to belief, no sudden clarity about God. It was a gesture of participation. It was a way of saying that I could belong without pretending, that I could love the form even if I no longer shared the theology. Standing beside my grandfather, I felt closure for one journey and the beginning of another. The path that began with rejection had led me here: back to ritual, back to beauty, back to the human work of reverence.
That Which is Sacred
When I look back now, I can see how the whole journey was shaped by fragility. Everything I once thought permanent—faith, community, even the sense of who I was—broke apart. What I found in the ruins was not certainty reborn but a gentler kind of strength: the willingness to keep showing up even when nothing feels secure. That, I think, is the real work of healing: to learn how to live without guarantees.
Fragility used to frighten me. In my old faith, weakness was sin and doubt was failure. But trauma taught me that vulnerability is not the opposite of faith; it is its condition. The sacred depends on it. Only what can break can be cherished. Only what ends can be loved fully while it lasts.
In the Episcopal church, in the monastery, in meditation—everywhere I found meaning again—it was the same lesson repeated in different forms: pay attention, care for what you can, let go of the rest. Religion, stripped of fear, is simply the practice of reverence. Sometimes that reverence takes the shape of ritual or liturgy; sometimes it’s just a quiet breath at a stoplight, a bird suspended in air. The form changes. The attention remains.
I still don’t believe in the God I was taught to serve, but I believe in the work that belief tried to do. I believe in beauty, in community, in the ordinary sacraments of care: the shared meal, the moment of silence, the door left open for whoever needs it. Those things are enough. They are what make life bearable, what make it sacred.
There is a phrase from trauma care that I often think about: re-integration. It means gathering the scattered pieces of experience into a story the body can live with. That is what these years have been for me. They represent a re-integration of the sacred into the ordinary, a return to the world on human terms. The locks have been replaced with hinges.
I no longer seek redemption in the old sense. I seek coherence, beauty, and gentleness. I try to treat the world the way I once hoped God would treat me: with patience, curiosity, forgiveness for its inconsistencies. In that practice, I have found a peace that belief alone could never give: the peace of being fully human.
The locked churches of my childhood will still stand for a while, their lights out, their sanctuaries sealed against risk. But somewhere, I trust, a door will remain open. When I look for it, I will find a light burning in a small chapel, a congregation breathing together in quiet trust, a person pausing at a stoplight to notice a bird. These are the living sanctuaries, fragile but real.
Maybe that’s what salvation looks like now: not perfection, but participation. Not certainty, but care. The courage to stay tender in a world that rewards hardness. The faith to keep the door unlatched, the light on, and the breath steady.