The Moment Faith Got Complicated

To begin with, I almost had to talk myself into Catholicism. I had questions—about the role of women, about whether I could truly live up to what the Church asked. But then came the Eucharistic Congress (see previous posts), and something in me settled. I committed.
For about a decade, I was a good Catholic wife and mother. It fit. Or at least, I made it fit.
Then we moved to Germany.
At first, the move strengthened my faith. We had come expecting to be part of a youth ministry, we lived next to the local church, and our lives revolved around it. It felt purposeful. Grounded.
But somewhere along the way, something shifted.
I still can’t fully name what changed. My husband remained deeply rooted in the German Catholic community. Meanwhile, I began building a life outside of it—working for an English-speaking company, finding my own sense of belonging there.
And the questions came back.
The role of women. The expectations. The quiet feeling that I didn’t quite fit in the way I was supposed to.
What once felt certain began to feel… fragile.
My husband has a saying: “The Church is perfect. It’s the imperfect people in it who mess everything up.” And maybe that’s true.
But I had reached a point where I couldn’t separate the two.
I couldn’t ignore the human side of the Church anymore—the flaws, the tensions, the places where things didn’t feel as they should. What had once been background noise became impossible to tune out.
I found myself more at peace in nature than in a pew. More drawn to something expansive than structured. I was searching for a space where women and men stood as equals, where I didn’t feel like I had to shrink parts of myself to belong.
And so, I went back to something I had known before.
Wicca.
In Wicca, I regained a sense of peace I had once felt in Catholicism—but had lost along the way.
The Goddess I turned to didn’t come with expectations or structure. I could find her in the quiet—among the trees, along the sea, in moments of stillness. There were no intermediaries, no complicated systems. Just space. Just presence.
And, maybe most importantly, no people.
My practice became solitary. Personal. Quiet.
And for a time, that was exactly what I needed.
But peace without people is a different kind of peace.
In stepping away from the mess of people, I had also stepped away from something I didn’t quite know how to define at the time—the quiet, steady comfort of the sacraments.
I missed Reconciliation—the strange mix of vulnerability and relief.
I missed the Mass, the way it stays the same no matter where you are or what language you’re hearing.
I missed the rhythm of it, the grounding of it.
And, slowly, I realized I even missed the people.
Imperfect. Messy. Human.
The very thing that had pushed me away… was also part of what had once held me.
It turns out, faith was never meant to exist without the mess of people—and maybe that’s what makes it real. Somewhere in that tension, between solitude and community, I began to understand that my relationship with God hadn’t gone anywhere. It had just… shifted. And I was learning to see them differently than I had before.