Please note that this post is not an attack on anyone’s spirituality. If you are a practicing Catholic, I wish you all the best, but this post may not be very comfortable for you.
I’m doing exposure therapy from my fraught time living in and working for a high-control sect of the Catholic Church. In addition to other triggering activities (such as listening to Salvia Hostia and using tons of incense lol), my therapist has recommended I read triggering literature and journal my experience for us to discuss.
I’m NOT looking for explicitly religious texts like orthodoxy or Jacques Phillipe, or even literature that just has that Catholic flavor like LOTR. My list so far is made up of rereads, including Brideshead revisited, end of the affair, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kristen lavransdatter, priestdaddy, God themselves, and George Herbert. I’d really like to read something new to me that packs the same punch as the authors and works listed above. They can be by practicing or deconstructed individuals, which is a very weird sentence but I hope you catch my meaning.
Any other suggestions? I thought about adding Michael O’Brien, but I think his stuff might be unreadable outside the Church (I read about half his books while I was still devout and found them a bit much even then). Books I haven’t read before but might work (and I’d love feedback!) include brothers k and mark Twain’s Joan of Arc. I feel like Russian or French literature might hold the answer.
I’m not looking for things that will just infuriate me, nor am I looking to better understand the faith. I just want to trigger myself enough to work through. So more than a motif, but less than a treatise, if possible. Thank you!
by whistful_flatulence