When the church door closed, the sky opened

When the Church Door Closed, the Sky Opened

After my mother died, I felt alone in a way I didn’t have words for.

The kind of alone that sits in your chest and makes the house too quiet. The kind that makes you pick up the phone and remember there’s no one to call.

So I went to church.

I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. Grief goes to church. Broken people go to church. I sat in the pew with my hands folded, waiting to feel held. Waiting for the God they talked about to show up and put me back together. But instead, I felt smaller. Judged. Watched. Like my grief was too messy for the bulletin, too loud for the hymn.

That’s when mental health crashed into my life. Or maybe it was always there, and the loss cracked me open enough to see it. The anxiety. The depression. The nights I couldn’t sleep and the days I couldn’t get up. I tried to pray it away because that’s what I thought religion wanted from me. “Have more faith.” “Give it to God.” As if my brain chemistry was a spiritual failure.

Social media didn’t help. I’d scroll and see other people’s families, other people’s moms, other people’s easy prayers. I’d post something raw and get a Bible verse in response, like that was supposed to be medicine. It just made me feel more alone — performative grief, performative healing, all of it watched and liked and judged.

Church and social media had one thing in common: they both told me who I was supposed to be.

And I wasn’t her.

So I left.

I freed myself from religion. Not from God — from religion. From the building. From the rules that said I had to grieve a certain way, heal a certain way, believe a certain way, or I didn’t belong.

And when I left, I found me again.

I remembered who I was before the pews and the posts: the 90s girl with the Hello Kitty stationery who wrote to pen friends and believed people were good. The girl who ran Global Teen Club with her mom. The girl who knew how to sit in silence and still feel peace. That girl wasn’t gone. She was just buried under “should.”

I don’t believe in churches or religion anymore. Not the kind with walls that keep people out. But I do believe in spirituality. Deep, wild, uncontainable spirituality that connected me to me again.

The spiritual realm is so big that religion gets lost in it.

Religion is a cup trying to hold the ocean. It’s one language, one map, one door. But the spirit world? That’s the whole sky. It doesn’t care what you call it. It doesn’t ask for your membership card. It was there when I was 15 writing letters. It was there in the hospital in 2023 when I couldn’t speak. It was there when I sat in my car after my mom died and screamed and something bigger than me screamed back, I’ve got you.

So many people believe there’s only one way. One church, one book, one path. And that belief turns people away from each other. It teaches us to judge when we were simply told to love. It makes us gatekeepers of a God who never built gates.

I’ve been judged. I’ve been told I’m “lost” because I don’t go to church. But I’m not lost. I’m home. I’m in my jeans and sweatshirt, doing PhD homework, talking to the universe in my own words.

My mom is gone. But I’m not alone.

Because the spiritual realm didn’t leave when I walked out of church.

It followed me.

It is me.

Religion told me to be good.

Spirit reminds me I already am.

And that’s the difference.

One made me hide.

The other helped me come home to myself.

*Cathrynmharris