The most profound danger in watching an institution fail is the temptation to let them take your faith down with them. But the sacred does not belong to the corporation. When you realize the machine is hollow, you don’t lose God; you simply learn to find Him in the wilderness.
In the third and fourth centuries, as Christianity became intertwined with the Roman Empire, many believers feared that comfort and political influence were beginning to reshape the Church’s spiritual priorities. In response, the Desert Fathers withdrew into the wilderness of Egypt and Syria. Not because they had abandoned the faith, but because they longed to pursue it without the distractions of status, wealth, and imperial power.
Their witness became a reminder that intimacy with God has never depended on proximity to earthly institutions.
There was a time I wasn’t sure I would ever walk into another Catholic church again. That distance had begun long before my employment with the diocese and for reasons I wasn’t ready to talk about for years. Working for one would have sounded impossible. But once I was back, I spent years in the presence of a magnificent liturgy, ancient history, and deep spirituality. But I also watched that beauty become a shield that sometimes obscured unhealthy systems and abusive patterns.
When I finally walked away from the diocese, I initially worried that severing ties with the institution meant leaving behind my faith altogether. But the exact opposite happened. I discovered that my faith had survived the institution. In many ways, it had been waiting underneath it all along. I learned that Christ didn’t build His church on a foundation of diocesan bylaws and human resources manuals.
The New Sunday
I was sitting next to my oldest son on a fallen log near the edge of the woods, the quiet morning air a sharp contrast to the fluorescent-lit conference rooms I had spent the last decade in. The only sound was the rustle of the trees and the wind moving through the grass. My children chased bright kites across an open field while the wind carried them higher than any steeple I’d seen in years.
“Do you miss the incense?” my oldest son joked. “What I actually meant was do you miss the Sunday routine?”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. For the first time in years, my stomach wasn’t tight with anxiety over some impending Sunday Mass crisis.
“I miss the sacredness of the sacraments. But out here? The silence feels more like a cathedral than any parish I’ve ever been to or worked for. The institution doesn’t own God, and they certainly don’t own my peace. I just had to step outside the building to find it.”
Separating from a toxic religious organization is not a loss of faith; it is often the prerequisite for a deeper one. It’s easy to come away believing that the institution is the sole gatekeeper of the divine. That without its approval, you’ve somehow been cut off from God. Now, left without their administrative blessing, you are lost in the wilderness. But the wilderness is where prophets are formed.
The richness of the faith, its liturgy, history, and spiritual traditions, is not the private property of any one institution or leader. Throughout Scripture, the wilderness is rarely a place of abandonment. It is where God strips away illusions and speaks with clarity.
Sometimes leaving the institution is not leaving God at all. Sometimes the wilderness is where you finally hear His voice again.
“I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her” (Hosea 2:14).