I sat at my writing desk in my mid-thirties, a blue-ink Bic ballpoint in hand, moving quickly across my custom-colored stationery as I wrote to the Catholic priest I had known since boyhood. Though I hadn’t communicated with him in years, it felt natural to convey what I understood about God’s work in history and the life of Jesus.
The sentences came quickly, almost like a stream of consciousness. There was no pause to question what I was saying. What I was writing felt straightforward and factual, almost self-evident.
I finished the letter with the sense that I had said what needed to be said.
At the time, I wouldn’t have described this as believing something. It felt more like stating what was already the case.
Years later, while trying to reorganize a box of old correspondence, I came across an envelope with his name on it. Inside were several letters he had written in response
One in particular stood out. In it, he said that after reading my letter, he had thought what a loss it was to the Catholic Church that I had not become a priest.
“It’s your church’s gain,” he wrote, “but our loss.”
I remember reading that and recognizing something familiar in it. The same sense of certainty that had been present when I wrote to him was reflected back to me in his reply.
Looking back, that period of my life carried a particular momentum. Situations were addressed and resolved. Questions led to answers that felt complete and final.
That didn’t remain.
I watched the wife of a close friend load her minivan with belongings, her three children beside her, and drive away from the home they had shared for twelve years.
There had been no visible break, no noticeable conflict. One day she was there, the next she was gone. Where had she gone? What would happen to her and her children?
I remember standing there, waiting for some way to understand what had happened. Thoughts began to form, but they didn’t settle in the way they once would have. Nothing fully closed around it.
That wasn’t an isolated moment.
I began to notice it in other situations. During that period, questions arose that the answers I had once taken as complete no longer settled. The familiar sense of resolution didn’t come.
At one point, after an experience that brought up strong physical and emotional reactions, I sat with someone who offered a way to understand it.
As he spoke, I could feel something well-known beginning again, the movement to organize what had happened into something that could be understood and settled.
I started to follow it, with the sense it might take me somewhere I hadn’t been able to reach before.
It felt like it might finally come together.
Then I stopped.
Not because it didn’t make sense. Not because it was wrong.
But because the same movement was there again, the pull to be taken somewhere I hadn’t been able to reach before.
I saw the movement itself.
The attempt to resolve, to fix.
That movement was there again.
And with it, everything I had turned to before.
It was all there.
But it no longer held.
Over time, other things began to fall away.
Books once cherished no longer held my attention. Programs and podcasts that once promised to lead somewhere no longer held their pull.
What remained was not a new conclusion, but no conclusion.
And yet, nothing else seemed to stop.
Conversations continued. Decisions were made. The day moved as it always had.
What was no longer there was the sense that something still needed to be settled.
I’m sitting at my desk again now, writing this.
The same movements are still here. Thoughts form. Words appear. Memories come and go.
But they don’t land in the same way.
What stands out is not how that earlier certainty disappeared.
What stands out is that it is no longer here.
And there is no clear sense that it needs to return.
Just this, as it is, in the middle of an ordinary moment.