She spent six months travelling, by herself, in Guatemala, where she volunteered with several NGOs. She was surprised by some of the fries she made. "They were Christians but not like the Christians you see on TV - none of the prosperity gospel crap," she said. "In fact, exactly the opposite. I began to think, Maybe I'm a Christian."
Burhan's family was nominally Catholic. She had attended a parochial school through third grade, and Mercyhurst and Canisius are both Catholic institutions. But when she went to church as a child, she said, "I'm pretty sure I was only in it for the doughnuts." When she was twelve, the Boston Globe published its "Spotlight" articles about child abuse by priests. She said her feelings about the Church, which had been "not spiritually mature," turned angry and hostile. "Here was this institution that had perpetuated colonialism, and now it was hiding a bunch of pedophiles."
At Canisius, though, she experienced a spiritual awakening. She was working on a physics problem one day, thinking about limits and infinitesimal values, and suddenly she felt overwhelmed. "The Jesuits talk about seeing God in all things, and you can see God in all things through the infinite," she said. She began meeting regularly with a Jesuit spiritual director, who introduced her to the Examen of St. Ignatius, a demanding daily prayer exercise, which she described to me as "mindfulness on steroids."
As Burhand became interested in Catholicism, he social life changed. "I no longer had people to listen to John Cage or Frank Zappa with," she told me. Her new friends were "middle-class suburban campus-ministry members who liked belting Disney songs." She had no real regrets, thought, because she had "fallen in love with God."
from "Promised Land" by David Owen, a portrait of climate activist Molly Burhans
