Where I Return Now

I have been thinking a lot lately about prayer.

Not in the way I once understood it…
but in the way it has quietly become part of my life now.

There was a time when I only turned to God when things fell apart.

When my world became chaotic…
when something felt unmanageable…
when I didn’t know where else to go.

That was when I prayed.

I can remember being younger, riding my horse, Pete, by myself.

Bareback.
Just a halter to guide him.

No one else around.

And I would talk to God then.

Not in a structured way.
Not with the right words.

Just…talking.

I grew up in a home that held a lot of tension.

My brother was gay, and while he was accepted fully, it created something in our home that I didn’t yet have language for. I felt it before I could understand it. I carried it before I could name it.

There was anxiety there.

Unspoken.

Unresolved.

And even then…
I knew there was something bigger than me.

Something outside of the situation.

Something I could turn to, even if I didn’t fully understand what that meant.

My dad signed my brother and me up for Bible camp when I was ten.

Bethany Bible Camp in Scotts Valley, California.

Two weeks.

Two weeks of actually opening the Bible, of learning what fellowship meant, of sitting in something that felt different than anything I had experienced before.

We had gone to church growing up, but I didn’t understand it then. It felt distant. We were often separated into rooms where we did crafts about Jesus, but I didn’t yet feel connected to it.

Bible camp was different.

It felt real.

Later, when I attended Santa Clara University, something shifted again.

It was a Jesuit school, and I chose it because it kept me close to home. But what I didn’t expect was how much it would shape my faith.

I began going to Mass every Wednesday night.

It wasn’t formal or rigid the way I had imagined church to be. It was warm. Inviting. Students played guitars. We sang contemporary hymns. It felt safe.

It felt like a place I could belong.

One of my professors, Father Phelan, noticed me.

He pulled me aside one day after class and asked if we could talk.

I remember thinking I was in trouble.

But we didn’t talk about school.

We talked about my faith.

We talked about my relationship with God.

And then he asked me something that stayed with me.

“Miss VandenBerghe, why do you not receive the Holy Communion?”

The answer felt simple to me.

“I’m not Catholic.”

He smiled in a way I’ll never forget. There was a kindness in it, and something else…something knowing.

“You don’t need to be a baptized Catholic to receive the Holy Communion,” he said. “You already have His spirit in you.”

We began meeting during his office hours.

We studied the Bible together.

And that spring, I was baptized at Wednesday night Mass.

My life moved forward in the way life does.

I was married in the church.

We baptized our children.

And as a young mother raising four kids, I found moments where I would drop them off at school and drive to the Catholic Church on North Street in Greenwich, just to sit and pray.

Those moments always brought me peace.

But as life became fuller, busier, louder…

my relationship with God became quieter.

Not gone.

But inconsistent.

I would return to Him when things got hard.

When something broke.

When I didn’t know what to do.

But I didn’t stay.

And I see that clearly now.

Because in this season of my life…

everything has changed.

Grief has a way of stripping things down.

It removes what no longer holds.

It exposes what is real.

And it asks you to build again…from a place that is more honest than before.

This is where my relationship with God deepened.

Not in crisis.

But in consistency.

And strangely…

sourdough became part of that.

Because the practice is the same.

You don’t rush it.

You don’t force it.

You don’t show up only when something has gone wrong.

You show up every day.

You feed it.

You tend to it.

You pay attention.

You stay.

And over time…

something changes.

Not just in the dough.

But in you.

Prayer has become that for me now.

Not something I reach for only when I am overwhelmed.

But something I return to daily.

Quietly.

Consistently.

Before my feet touch the floor.

In the kitchen.

In the middle of the work.

It’s not always words.

It’s not always structured.

But it’s there.

And I’m beginning to understand something I didn’t before.

That faith, like sourdough, is not built in the moments of urgency.

It is built in the moments of return.

In the repetition.

In the attention.

In the willingness to stay, even when nothing feels like it is changing.

Because that is where the transformation happens.

Not in the crisis.

But in the consistency.

And for the first time in my life…

I am not just turning to God when things fall apart.

I am walking with Him in the everyday.

And that…

has changed everything.

Warmly,
Kathy
Art of The Crumb