Faith Deconstruction: A Catholic Reply

1. What Faith Deconstruction Means

Faith deconstruction is the process of taking apart the religious beliefs you were handed and examining them one at a time to see which ones you actually hold. People who use the word are usually describing something that happened to them rather than something they chose: a claim they had accepted since childhood stopped working, and then the claim next to it stopped working, and the whole structure began to feel like it might be scaffolding rather than stone.

The word covers a very wide range. Some people who say they are deconstructing mean they have left Christianity and are working out what to put in its place. Some mean they have left a particular church and are trying to keep Christ. Some mean they still go to Mass every Sunday and can no longer say the Creed without a catch in the throat. The word itself does not tell you which of those is happening, which is one reason conversations about it go badly. Two people can use it and mean almost opposite things.

If you are reading this while it is happening to you, one thing is worth saying before anything else. The experience you are having is not rare, it is not a sign that you were a fraud all along, and it is not a sign that you were never serious. Very often it arrives precisely because you were serious. Paying close attention to what you were handed is what lets you notice when a piece of it does not fit, and the noticing is where a crisis starts.

What this page is and is not doing

This page is written from inside the Catholic Church, and it says so up front so you can weigh it accordingly. It will make a case. It will also try to state other positions in terms their own holders would recognise, because a page that misrepresents what you are wrestling with is worthless to you.

What it will avoid is the standard reply, which usually amounts to telling you that your questions are shallow, that you are looking for permission to sin, or that you simply need to pray harder. Those replies are common and they are almost always wrong about the person in front of them. Some people leave the faith for convenience. Many people arrive at a crisis after years of trying very hard to hold on, and being told that they did not try is both false and cruel.

Our companion guide on why people are leaving the Church looks at the same territory from the outside, with the survey data and the sociology. This page is addressed to you.

2. Where the Word Came From

The term deconstruction was borrowed from academic philosophy, where it named something quite different from its current religious use. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida introduced déconstruction in the 1960s, most prominently in De la grammatologie (1967), as a method of reading texts that exposes the assumptions and oppositions holding an argument together. Derrida was not writing about losing your religion. His technical sense and the popular religious sense now share little beyond the word.

The religious usage grew in English-speaking Christianity through the 2000s and became widespread in the 2010s, carried by blogs, podcasts and social media rather than by any institution. Much of it originated in American evangelical and non-denominational settings, where a generation raised inside a tightly bounded subculture began publishing accounts of leaving it. The adjacent term exvangelical appeared in the same period for people who had left evangelicalism specifically.

Two features of that origin matter for a Catholic reader. First, a great deal of deconstruction literature is arguing with a particular set of positions held in particular congregations: young-earth creationism, a flat-literal reading of every part of Scripture, purity culture, prosperity teaching, a pastor with no accountability above him, and a tight fusion of the faith with one national politics. Evangelicalism is a large and internally argumentative movement, and evangelicals themselves have published sustained criticism of every item on that list. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), the most widely cited evangelical definition of the doctrine, states that Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, which is a good deal more careful than the flat literalism many people were taught in practice. If you were raised Catholic, some of that list will describe your experience and some of it will not, and it is worth separating the two rather than assuming every objection applies to you.

Second, the word arrived without a shared definition, which lets it be used as an accusation. Some Christian writers use deconstruction as a synonym for apostasy, as though the term itself settled the question. That usage is unhelpful and we will not adopt it here. Taking a belief apart to examine it is a description of a process. Where the process ends is a separate question, and it is genuinely open.

The Catholic version has a longer history

Catholics have been doing something recognisable under other names for a long time. John Henry Newman spent years working through whether the Church of England could be what it claimed, and wrote the story down in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) after a public attack on his honesty. Augustine spent nine years as a Manichaean and several more as a sceptic before his baptism in 387, and the Confessions is largely an account of dismantling his own earlier certainties. Thomas Aquinas built the Summa Theologiae by stating the strongest objection to each of his own positions first and answering it afterwards, which is a structural commitment to taking the other side seriously.

None of that makes your crisis easier. It does mean the Church has no principled reason to be frightened by the activity, and a long record of producing saints who went through it.

3. What Is Actually Being Taken Apart

When people describe what broke, they are usually describing one of four things, and only one of them is the creed. Sorting out which one applies is the single most useful thing you can do early, because the four call for completely different responses and it is easy to demolish all four at once when only one of them was the problem.

A subculture

Much of what a religious upbringing hands you is culture: the music, the vocabulary, the dress code, the rules about dating, the books you were allowed to read, the assumptions about what a good family looks like. Very little of that is doctrine. Some of it is regional habit that would be unrecognisable to a Catholic in Kerala or Kinshasa. Losing your taste for a subculture is a real loss and it can feel like losing God, because the two were delivered in the same package. They are separable.

A political alignment

In many places Christianity has been fused with a national political programme so tightly that leaving the programme feels like leaving the faith. The Catholic Church's own social teaching sits awkwardly across the usual party lines: it holds an unconditional defence of unborn life alongside an unconditional obligation to the poor, the migrant and the prisoner, and it condemns the death penalty as inadmissible in the revision to Catechism 2267 promulgated in 2018. If you find that your politics and your church's politics have come apart, the Catholic tradition is a wider room than the one you were standing in. Our guides to Catholic social teaching and the just war tradition lay out the actual positions.

An abusive church, or an abusive person in it

Some deconstruction begins with harm: a pastor or priest who abused, a community that protected him, a leadership that treated a complaint as a loyalty problem. That is a different category from an intellectual objection and it should be handled as such. Section 10 of this guide is about it directly, and the Catholic Church has its own devastating record here, examined in our page on the abuse crisis and the Church's response.

A literal reading of Genesis

A great many crises begin at Genesis 1. Young-earth creationists hold their position for a reason they take seriously: they read the opening chapters of Genesis as a plain historical record, and they understand the trustworthiness of the whole of Scripture to stand with it. If that is what you were taught, then a geology course puts the evidence in front of you and the faith you were raised in on opposite sides of a table. The Catholic Church does not set the question up that way and has never required a young earth. Pope Pius XII in Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) directed Catholic scholars to attend to the literary forms the sacred writers were actually using, building on the encouragement of critical biblical study given by Pope Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus (1893), and the Second Vatican Council made the principle a standing instruction in Dei Verbum 12. The Catechism says the account of the fall uses figurative language while affirming a primeval event (CCC 390). Pius XII in Humani Generis (1950) permitted research into the evolution of the human body. Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest who proposed the primeval-atom hypothesis in 1931, later served as president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

If your faith was built on a reading that the Church itself does not require, then what collapsed was that reading. Our guide to Genesis and the creation accounts and our page on faith and science set out what Catholic teaching actually commits you to.

4. Doubt Inside the Bible Itself

The Bible contains sustained, unresolved complaint against God, and the Church kept every line of it. That is a fact about the canon worth sitting with, because it means the tradition had every opportunity to edit these texts out and declined.

Psalm 88 is the clearest case. The psalmist describes himself as counted among those who go down to the pit, accuses God of putting him in the lowest depths, and finishes with the line that darkness is his closest friend. There is no turn at the end, no resolution, no praise. The Church prays it in the Liturgy of the Hours to this day.

Job spends thirty-odd chapters insisting that the standard religious explanation of his suffering is false, and God's verdict at the end is that Job spoke rightly and his orthodox friends did not (Job 42:7). Jeremiah accuses God of deceiving him and overpowering him (Jeremiah 20:7). Isaiah says plainly that God hides himself (Isaiah 45:15). The cry from the cross is a quotation of Psalm 22, and Jesus quotes it as his own: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Mark 15:34).

In the Gospels, the man who asks Jesus to heal his son gives the sentence that many people in a crisis end up praying without knowing they are quoting it.

Jesus heals the boy. The man's uncertainty is not treated as a disqualification. Thomas refuses to accept the resurrection on testimony and demands physical evidence, and the risen Christ comes back and gives him exactly what he asked for (John 20:24-29). The two on the road to Emmaus tell a stranger that they had hoped Jesus was the one to redeem Israel, using the past tense, and the stranger walks seven miles with them before they recognise him (Luke 24:13-35).

Paul, writing about knowledge of God to a church he was scolding, concedes the limits outright: we see now through a mirror dimly, and we know only in part (1 Corinthians 13:12). And the Letter of Jude gives the Church a direct instruction about how to treat people in your position.

Anyone who tells you that Scripture has no room for what you are experiencing has not read it carefully. For the wider question of why suffering is permitted at all, our guide on the problem of suffering takes it up at length.

5. The Dark Night of John of the Cross

John of the Cross gave the Church its most precise account of what it feels like when God stops feeling present. He was a Spanish Carmelite friar (1542 to 1591), imprisoned for nine months by members of his own order in Toledo for pursuing the reform he had undertaken with Teresa of Ávila, and he wrote his most famous poem during or shortly after that imprisonment. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

His term noche oscura, the dark night, has been so widely borrowed that its original meaning has blurred. In popular usage it now means any bad patch. In John's own writing, set out in The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night, it names something specific: a period in which the felt consolations of prayer are withdrawn, in which spiritual practices that used to produce warmth produce nothing at all, and in which the person often concludes that they have done something wrong or that they were never sincere.

What John says is happening

John's diagnosis is that the beginner in prayer is attached to the feelings that accompany God rather than to God. The consolations are real and they are given as encouragement, in something like the way a parent makes early lessons pleasant. Their withdrawal is a change in method. He distinguishes the night of sense, in which the pleasant feelings go, from the deeper night of spirit, in which even the sense of one's own spiritual competence goes.

He also names three signs by which a person can tell that a dry period is this rather than laziness or sin: they find no satisfaction in prayer or in worldly substitutes, so the dryness is not simple distraction; they are anxious about serving God and worry that they are failing him, which is the opposite of indifference; and they cannot meditate discursively as they used to, though they can still remain quietly attentive. The second sign is the one worth underlining. Distress at the loss of God is evidence of love, and the person feeling it has usually taken it as evidence of failure.

Two cautions belong here. First, John is describing an experience in the interior life of prayer, and he is not describing clinical depression. The two can look similar from outside and can occur together. If you are unable to get out of bed, if you cannot eat, if you are having thoughts of ending your life, that is a medical situation and it needs a doctor, not a spiritual reading. The Church has no teaching that puts medicine and prayer in competition, and treating depression as a purely spiritual failure has done real harm.

Second, the dark night is not a promise that the darkness will end on a schedule, and John does not offer one. He offers a description that fits, which is worth a great deal when your own experience has stopped making sense to you. You can read more about him on our page on St. John of the Cross, and about his collaborator on St. Teresa of Ávila.

Thérèse of Lisieux and the wall

The same thing happened to a Carmelite three centuries later, and she wrote it down while it was happening. Thérèse of Lisieux, who died of tuberculosis in 1897 at twenty-four, spent her last eighteen months in what she called a trial of faith. In her manuscripts she described a wall that reached to the heavens and blotted out the stars, and said that the thought of heaven, which had been her joy, now brought only conflict and torment. She wrote that she was seated at the table of sinners and asked God to let her eat there for as long as he wished. She kept praying acts of faith throughout, and said she had written more of them in that period than in the whole of her life before. She is a Doctor of the Church, declared so in 1997. Her account is on our page on St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

6. Teresa of Calcutta and Nearly Fifty Years of Silence

Teresa of Calcutta lived nearly fifty years with almost no felt sense of God, and almost nobody knew until her private letters were published a decade after her death. The collection, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, was edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk of the Missionaries of Charity, the postulator of her cause for canonisation, and published in 2007. The letters were written to her spiritual directors and superiors, including Archbishop Ferdinand Périer of Calcutta and the Jesuit Joseph Neuner, and several of them she had asked to have destroyed.

Source: the letters quoted and paraphrased here are those published in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday, 2007), edited with commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk MC.

What they show is this. In 1946 and 1947 she received the intense interior experiences that led her to leave the Loreto sisters and found the Missionaries of Charity. Then, at roughly the point the new work began around 1948 and 1949, the sense of God's presence went, and it did not come back except for a brief period in 1958. She described the interior state as darkness, as emptiness, as a loneliness in which she could not feel that God wanted her. She wrote of praying and hearing nothing in return, and of the pain of smiling at everyone while carrying that inside.

Two things about her case are worth holding together, because people tend to seize on one and drop the other.

The first is that this was not a private quirk of an unusually gloomy temperament. She founded and ran a religious order operating in dozens of countries, went to Mass daily, made her confession, prayed the hours, and kept the whole external structure of the faith running for five decades while feeling nothing behind it. What her letters record is the absence of consolation rather than the loss of belief. She kept believing without the reward that usually accompanies believing.

The second is that she did not pretend. She told her directors the truth, repeatedly, in language that shocked people when it was printed. Some commentators on publication read the letters as evidence that she had been a secret atheist. Her own directors read them differently, and so does the Church: Neuner's counsel to her was that the darkness was itself a share in the interior suffering of Christ and in the abandonment felt by the poor she served, and after that she was able to hold it as something given rather than as a punishment.

Her case is the most useful one for anyone in your position, because it destroys the assumption underneath a great deal of religious advice: that a real believer feels something. She did not, for half a century, and she is a canonised saint. Our page on St. Mother Teresa and the dark night goes through the letters in more detail, including the criticisms of her work.

7. The Difference Between Doubt and Despair

Doubt and despair are different conditions, and the Catholic tradition treats them very differently. Doubt is uncertainty held by someone who still wants the answer. Despair is the conclusion that the answer no longer matters or that it is permanently out of reach for you in particular. The first is a normal feature of a thinking life. The second is the one the tradition warns about, and the warning is protective rather than accusatory.

What the Catechism actually says

The Catechism draws the line inside doubt itself. It distinguishes voluntary doubt, which disregards or refuses to hold as true what God has revealed, from involuntary doubt, which it describes as hesitation in believing, difficulty in overcoming objections connected with the faith, or anxiety aroused by its obscurity (CCC 2088). The distinction is about the will. A person who has decided in advance to reject a claim regardless of the evidence is doing something different from a person who cannot see how a claim can be true and wishes they could.

Nearly everyone who describes themselves as deconstructing falls into the second category. The anxiety aroused by the obscurity of faith is a remarkably exact description of what the experience feels like from inside, and the Catechism puts it there as a difficulty rather than as a sin.

Newman's line

John Henry Newman, who converted from the Church of England in 1845 and was canonised in 2019, gave the most quoted formulation of the distinction in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua: ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt. His point is that unanswered questions accumulate in every serious life, and their accumulation is not the same act as deciding the whole thing is false. You can hold a great many open problems and still hold the central claim, in the way a physicist holds unresolved problems without concluding that matter does not exist. Newman had spent decades in exactly that condition before he moved. His page is here: St. John Henry Newman.

Why despair is treated as serious

Despair, in the Catholic sense, means ceasing to hope for salvation from God or for help in obtaining it (CCC 2091). The tradition treats it as grave because of what it does to a person: it closes the door from the inside. Someone who believes they are beyond reach stops asking, and the asking is the thing that keeps the road open.

That teaching is often misused. It is turned into a bludgeon against people in the middle of a crisis, as if the pain itself were the sin. Read the Catechism's own definition again: despair is about hope for salvation and help, and it is a settled state. Sitting in a church car park unable to make yourself go in is not despair in that sense. It is grief. The two feel similar and they are different.

One more distinction is worth making, because it saves people a lot of unnecessary guilt. Anger at God is not unbelief. It is a form of address. The psalms are full of it and God does not appear to object. Nobody argues with a being they think is absent.

8. What the Church Actually Asks You to Believe

The Catholic Church asks for assent to a defined body of teaching, and that body is smaller and more ordered than most people leaving a church assume. Knowing where the boundaries actually run matters when everything feels equally uncertain, because it lets you find out which of your questions are load-bearing.

The Creed is the core

The centre is the Creed recited at Mass, formulated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and completed at Constantinople in 381: one God the Father almighty, one Lord Jesus Christ, consubstantial with the Father, incarnate of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, risen on the third day, the Holy Spirit, one holy catholic and apostolic Church, one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Everything else in Catholic teaching is connected to that and derives its weight from it. Our guides to the doctrine of the Trinity and the resurrection of the body take up the two clauses that generate the most questions.

The hierarchy of truths

The Second Vatican Council stated something that is directly useful to anyone sorting through a pile of collapsed beliefs: there exists an order or hierarchy of truths in Catholic doctrine, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith (Unitatis Redintegratio 11, echoed at CCC 90). The resurrection of Christ and a devotional practice at your grandmother's parish are both part of Catholic life, and they do not carry the same weight. A crisis about one is not automatically a crisis about the other.

Catholic teaching is graded. At the top sit the dogmas defined as divinely revealed, which call for the assent of divine and catholic faith. Below that are doctrines the Church proposes definitively. Below that again is authoritative teaching that calls for religious submission of intellect and will without being irreformable, and disciplinary rules that have changed before and can change again. The Friday abstinence rule, the age of confirmation, the language of the liturgy and the practice of clerical celibacy in the Latin Church all belong to categories that have varied across history. Confusing a discipline with a dogma is one of the most common causes of an unnecessary crisis.

What assent does and does not mean

Assent means holding something to be true. It does not mean feeling certain, and it does not mean being able to defend it in an argument. Faith in Catholic teaching is an act of the will informed by the intellect, and the Catechism is explicit that faith seeks understanding and that the believer wants to know better the one in whom faith has been placed (CCC 158). Questions belong inside faith rather than outside it.

The Church also holds that faith and reason cannot ultimately conflict, because both come from God, and that methodical research carried out in a genuinely scientific way never conflicts with faith (CCC 159, quoting Gaudium et Spes 36). If a genuine finding appears to contradict a doctrine, the Catholic instinct is that one of the two has been misunderstood, and the work is to find out which.

There is also a category that a lot of people leaving conservative Protestant settings do not know exists: the Church has never taught that everything in the Bible is a literal historical record, and it has an official body of teaching about how to read the different kinds of writing in it. Our page on how Catholics read the Bible sets out what inspiration is understood to mean and what it does not require.

9. The Questions That Come Up Most

Certain questions recur in almost every account of deconstruction, and each one has a substantial Catholic literature behind it. None of these is answered in a paragraph. What a paragraph can do is tell you that the question has been argued over for centuries by people of real intellectual seriousness, and point you at where the work is.

If God is good, why is there so much suffering?

The oldest objection, and the one Job is about. The Catholic answer runs through free will, the reality of a genuinely fallen world, and the claim that God's response to suffering was to enter it rather than to explain it. That answer satisfies some people and not others, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Our guides on suffering and free will work through it.

How can a loving God send anyone to hell?

Catholic teaching on hell is more restrained than the popular picture. The Catechism describes hell as self-exclusion from communion with God, chosen freely and persisted in to the end, and the Church has never declared that any particular human being is in it. Our page on what the Church teaches about hell lays out the distinctions.

What about everyone who never heard of Christ?

The Second Vatican Council addressed this directly: those who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ, yet seek God with a sincere heart and try to do his will as they know it, may attain eternal salvation (Lumen Gentium 16). Our guide to Catholic teaching on salvation covers the range.

Isn't the Bible full of contradictions?

The Gospels differ in detail, the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 are structurally different, and the historical books contain numbers that do not reconcile. Catholic biblical scholarship has worked on all of it in the open for well over a century. The reading strategy set out in Dei Verbum 12, which asks what the human author was actually trying to assert in the literary form he was using, dissolves a large share of the apparent contradictions and leaves genuine difficulties standing as difficulties. See the Bible and the deuterocanonical books.

Why should I trust an institution with this record?

A fair question and the hardest one. The Catholic answer distinguishes the holiness of the Church's origin and sacraments from the conduct of the people running it, and points out that the New Testament itself records apostles who ran away and one who betrayed. That distinction is true and it can be used as a dodge. Our page on the scandals tries to state the record without softening it.

Was it all just made up later?

The historical questions about the resurrection, the formation of the canon and the development of doctrine are real historical questions with a large literature on both sides. The Catholic claim is that the doctrine developed the way a living thing grows rather than the way a forgery accumulates, which is the argument Newman made in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). See Sacred Tradition and the Reformation.

10. When a Church Did the Harm

Harm done inside a church is a different problem from an intellectual objection, and treating it as an intellectual objection is one of the standard failures of pastoral advice. If a priest or pastor abused you, if a leader used Scripture to control you, if a community closed ranks against you when you reported something, then no argument about the historicity of the resurrection addresses what happened. The apologetics answer is answering a question you did not ask.

Several things can be said plainly here.

Christ's own language about religious leaders who damage people is the harshest in the Gospels. He reserves his anger for the ones who load heavy burdens on other people's shoulders and shut the kingdom of heaven in their faces (Matthew 23:4, 13), and for those who devour widows' houses while making long prayers (Mark 12:40). He says that anyone who causes one of the little ones to stumble would be better off thrown into the sea with a millstone round his neck (Mark 9:42). Whatever else is true, the abuse of religious authority is condemned in the strongest terms by the person the whole thing is about.

The Catholic Church's own record on this is appalling and the documentation is public. The reports commissioned in Ireland, Australia, the United States, France, Germany and elsewhere established a pattern in which abuse was concealed and offenders were moved. Nothing on this site is going to explain that away. Our page on the abuse crisis sets out what the investigations found.

Source: the national inquiries referred to here include the Ryan and Murphy reports in Ireland, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report in the United States, and the CIASE (Sauvé) report in France. Their findings are published in full by the commissioning bodies.

Practical things that are worth doing

• Report it. If a crime was committed, it belongs with the civil authorities first. Every diocese now maintains a safeguarding office and a reporting procedure, and reporting to the diocese does not replace reporting to the police.
• Get real help. Trauma is treated by people trained to treat it. A spiritual director is not a therapist and a good one will say so.
• Take the space you need. There is no obligation to keep attending a building where you were hurt. Changing parishes, or stepping back for a season, is a legitimate act and not an abandonment of the faith.
• Separate the person from the sacrament. Catholic teaching holds that the validity of a sacrament does not depend on the holiness of the minister, a principle settled against the Donatists in the fourth and fifth centuries. What that means practically is that the man who harmed you did not have the power to make your baptism worthless.

One further note for people leaving high-control religious groups specifically. If the community you left controlled information, punished questions, isolated members from family, and taught that leaving meant damnation, then some of what you are experiencing is the aftermath of coercion rather than a theological crisis. Our page comparing high-control groups and historic Christianity sets out the markers, and our guide to the prosperity gospel covers one common form of financial exploitation.

11. Where to Take Your Questions

Questions need somewhere to go, and the most common reason a crisis becomes permanent is that there was nobody to ask. A person with a hard question and no one to bring it to will usually stop asking, and the stopping is what does the damage. A few concrete places, in rough order of how easy they are to try.

One honest person

Find one person who will hear the whole question without flinching and without rushing to fix you. That might be a priest, and it is worth knowing that priests hear this constantly and that many of them have been through it themselves. It might be a friend who has held on through something similar. What matters is that they can sit with an unanswered question for longer than five minutes.

Spiritual direction

Spiritual direction is a long-standing Catholic practice: regular meetings with someone trained to help you notice what is happening in your interior life. Directors are used to dryness, dark nights and long stretches of nothing, and they will not be alarmed by yours. Most dioceses, retreat houses and religious communities can point you to one, and many directors are lay people or religious sisters rather than priests.

The reading, done properly

Read the strongest version of what you are doubting and the strongest version of the answer. Reading only the critics or only the apologists produces a distorted result in both directions. On the Catholic side, the primary texts are more useful than the summaries: Augustine's Confessions, Newman's Apologia, John of the Cross, Thérèse's manuscripts, the Catechism read by topic rather than cover to cover.

The practice, kept small

When belief is unstable, practice often carries the weight for a while, and that is a normal and respectable arrangement rather than hypocrisy. Going to Mass while unsure what you believe is what a large number of Catholics in history have done, including several now on the calendar of saints. Keep it small enough that you can actually do it. One prayer, one Mass, one psalm. Teresa of Calcutta kept the structure for close to fifty years without the feeling, and the structure held her.

Time

Almost nobody resolves this in a month, and decisions made at the worst point are usually bad ones in either direction. You are permitted to stay unresolved. The tradition has a word for a person who keeps walking without seeing where the road goes, and the word is pilgrim.

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