Second grade was the first time that I figured out that smart girls, even well behaved ones who knew all the books of the Bible backwards and forwards, weren't really good enough and might actually be threatening. Our pastor cornered me one day and asked me what I would say if he asked me to preach next Sunday. I was so flattered because this man was smart and funny and he was talking directly to me instead of my parents. When I told him that yes I would like to preach one day, he lectured me about not understanding my place as a woman. He warned me to beware of the sin of vanity because I was too proud of being smart and pretty and God didn't like that.

Looking back, I see that exchange as the beginning of a long struggle. There was a part of that little girl who understood even then that these God-fearing men weren't always right. In the many years since, no matter how I've tried to justify it, I've never quite reconciled keeping my faith with that hurt and humiliated second-grade self. After I fell in love with a Catholic boy and the liberation and feminist theologians of the progressive part of his Catholic tradition, I thought for a while my problem was solved. With all my heart, I believed that the change and openness promised by Vatican II before I was even born would come to pass eventually and in the meantime I could work in the system because I had a calling to ministry which was going to make it all worth it. I thought if I tried hard, got the master's degree, proved my worth and goodness to a different set of collared men that the outcome would be different.

In fairness, it was different and I'm sure I've done some good work in Catholic religious education during the past ten years. There were wonderful moments of grace when I touched other people and when their lives and stories transformed me. I have always felt the presence of God in my life and in my work. Still, here I am with both a master's degree in theology and a bright, beautiful daughter of my own, wondering all over again if that pesky second-grade self wasn't right after all. The men who hold the power of the institutional church are not always right but I can't do much about that except decide that it's not good enough for me anymore. I need to work in a place where I'm a true colleague, not just a glorified volunteer or a second best substitute because we don't have enough priests and aren't likely to have enough any time soon. There are so many more places to minister than in a church building and it's time I find them.

The scary part is that I don't know what all this is going to mean for my faith. For the first time ever I don't know exactly where to find God and I haven't got the energy or the desire to try one more faith community or make it work somehow. There's a silence in my prayers which could mean that I'm utterly lost but which I hope means that I'm finally ready to let go of all the stuff I thought I knew and the parade of church people I wanted so badly to please. I find that I don't want to go to Mass every week right now and that choice means that I'm giving up a big part of my identity. Maybe this is the only way to bury my Christian past and the expectations that have spiraled out of control in me.

Ironically, I hope that leaving church ministry is the way to forgive all of those God-fearing, institution men and to forgive myself too for the harm I've caused in my own often ungodly pursuit for power and acceptance in the church. I'm just stumbling through it right now, trusting in the larger paschal mystery that what we bury can rise to new life somehow.

In the end, maybe what I bury leads me back to a life in the church or maybe, like when I fell in love with wonderful Catholic boy, it leads me to places I never thought I'd go but which will be well worth the journey. This one thing I do know: God's irony isn't just for me alone so I imagine that Jerry Falwell is experiencing a seismic shift in his faith too as he meets the Maker! It seems oddly fitting that our journeys coincide once more.