How I Found My Way Back

I left the Church the year I started university. It was not a dramatic departure — no argument with a priest, no crisis of faith, no single moment of decision. I simply stopped going to Mass, and then stopped thinking of myself as Catholic, and then stopped thinking about it at all. Sixteen years passed.

I was not unhappy during those years. I had a career I cared about, relationships that mattered, a life that felt full. I did not feel the absence of faith as an absence. It was more like a room I had closed the door on and forgotten about.

In 2018, I was cleaning out my apartment before a move. In the back of a drawer, I found a Miraculous Medal on a thin chain. I recognized it immediately — my grandmother had given it to me when I was twelve, the year of my confirmation. I had worn it for a few years and then put it away.

I held it for a long time. I thought about my grandmother, who had died in 2009. I thought about the girl I had been at twelve, kneeling in the church where I had been baptized, taking the medal from my grandmother’s hands.

I did not put it on. I put it in my pocket and finished packing.

Over the following weeks, I kept taking it out and holding it. I am not sure why. It was not a conscious spiritual practice. It was more like a habit I had developed without noticing — reaching into my pocket during a difficult shift at the hospital, or sitting with it in my hand on the train home.

I started reading. Not devotional literature — I was not ready for that. I started with history: the story of Catherine Labouré, the origin of the medal, the accounts of the early years. I found myself reading for hours. I was not looking for faith. I was looking for the story behind the object in my pocket.

The story led me somewhere I had not expected.

I went to Mass for the first time in sixteen years on a Sunday in November 2018. I sat in the back. I did not receive communion. I held the medal in my hand throughout.

I cried during the Agnus Dei. I did not know I was going to cry. I did not fully understand why I was crying. Something that had been closed for a long time opened, and what came out was not grief exactly, but something adjacent to it — a recognition of what had been absent, and a kind of relief that it was possible to return.

I have been going to Mass regularly since then. I received the sacrament of reconciliation for the first time in sixteen years in the spring of 2019. I wear the medal now — the same one my grandmother gave me, on the same thin chain.

I am not the same person I was at twelve. My faith is different — more questioning, more aware of complexity, less certain about many things. But it is real. It is mine.

I do not think the medal caused my return. I think it was a thread — something I could hold onto while I found my way back to a door I had closed a long time ago.

My grandmother would have said Mary put it in that drawer for me to find. I am not sure I would have believed that at nineteen. I am not entirely sure I disbelieve it now.