The Church Girl’s Guide to Wanting More

This piece was written by one of our dear readers—a woman with something real to say. Each month, we handpick the best submissions for Dear Reader because we’re after that PROVOKED bite: truth, intelligence, and heart. These stories come from women our age—women who’ve lived enough to know better and still care enough to tell it anyway. Because being seen and heard matters. Because storytelling is how we stitch ourselves to one another. And because when one woman speaks her truth, another finally recognizes her own. — Susan Dabbar, Editor in Chief

I didn’t lose my faith when I came out in my 50s. I finally stepped into the life that had been waiting for me all along.

I acknowledged my sexuality in my early 50s.

It didn’t arrive gently. It came like contraband—frightening, almost impious—not because my faith condemned it, but because my body still carried beliefs I had been raised with inside. Desire felt like opening a sealed file stamped DO NOT READ, written in a language I had been trained, long ago, to fear.

At that time, I was an ordained minister in a progressive denomination. Married to a man. A mother of four. My theology had room for complexity. My nervous system did not. This wasn’t heresy against God. It was heresy against the conditioning that had shaped me long before I had language, choice, or consent.

Midlife didn’t invent my queerness.

It revealed it.

The Safest Place—and the First Silence

For a long time, church was the safest place I knew.

I grew up Catholic in the 1970s: plaid skirts, knee socks, nuns who could silence a room with a glance. My home life was chaotic, but my weekdays were ordered by Mass, moral lessons, and ritual. Church was where the air calmed down. Candles flickered. Adults spoke softly. In my child’s mind, church and God were inseparable. God lived there.

I was a good girl. Obedient. Modest. Helpful. Trained early to notice everyone else’s needs before my own. Desire—especially female desire—was something to be managed, redirected, or ignored. If I was going to have a spiritual life, it needed to fit inside the container I was given: neat, tidy, unquestioned.

Sex was reserved for married heterosexuals. Anything outside that narrow frame was unspeakable—or sinful. Queerness didn’t exist except as rumor or warning. Silence did most of the disciplining. It shaped us far more than sermons ever could.

Like many girls, I drifted away from church as a teenager. I had questions about God, bodies, and worthiness, and I had no idea I could ask such questions. By then, I was already a “serious sinner”: sexually active, living with my boyfriend, undeniably alive. Girls like me didn’t approach the altar. We dragged shame behind us like a veil.

I returned a decade later, pregnant with my first child. I wanted ritual, grounding, mystery—something larger than the chaos of life. I came back carrying a baby and a quiet grief about belonging, sex, and holiness.

Eventually Catholicism didn’t fit me or my beliefs anymore. It wasn’t what I wanted my children to learn. My spiritual path wandered—through Evangelicalism (yes, really), and eventually into the progressive United Church of Christ, where doubt isn’t a threat and God doesn’t panic about complexity. My faith and spirituality evolved. My body lagged behind.

Old scripts about womanhood and sex lived under my skin like dormant landmines. I knew my sexuality existed, but I kept it boxed up—taken down occasionally, examined with care, then returned to the shelf.

Waiting.

When Desire Tells the Truth

Midlife transformation is life refilling your emotional archives. Suddenly you realize entire life memory files have been mislabeled. For women who come out later, the clues were always there: the girl you were “obsessed with,” the ease you felt around women, the grief that made no sense at weddings—your friend’s or your own. Midlife doesn’t create new information; it hands you the keys to the filing cabinet.

Women raised in religious spaces—Christian, Jewish, Muslim—share a familiar training. Desire is something to control, not follow. A good woman doesn’t take up space with her longing. She sacrifices. She endures. She’s praised for patience and self-denial.

We inherited this architecture:

Be kind.
Be grateful.
Be modest.
Be helpful.
Be selfless.
Be small.

Be anything but a human with a pulse.

So when desire shows up in midlife—whether for intimacy, truth, autonomy, or a life that finally fits—for some of us it doesn’t challenge faith. It challenges the blueprint for womanhood we were handed and told was holy. It asks a dangerous question: What if you were never meant to contort yourself this way?

Many of us wonder if we’re selfish. We’ve raised children, tended marriages, cared for parents, and held entire emotional ecosystems together through sheer willpower. Wanting something for ourselves feels scandalous.

This is the unspoken liturgy of faith-formed women: If I want more, something must be wrong with me.

But what if it’s the opposite? What if this is a spiritual awakening? A desire to know God, the Universe, Jesus, Buddha, Mohommed, the Ultimate Concern, your Higher Power in a way that it is intimate, personal, and guided by seeking the ultimate Truth for your soul’s journey?

Midlife desire isn’t reckless—it’s clarifying. It’s the audit you didn’t schedule but desperately need. It’s your whole self—spiritual, emotional, physical, intellectually—finally speaking in one voice.

Refusing To Erase Myself

My life now doesn’t resemble the one I was trained to imagine, but it does resemble me. I’m still a mother. I still love fiercely. I no longer confuse goodness with disappearance.

This is where the heresy begins—not against God, but against the belief system absorbed before we could question it. A theology of womanhood shaped by childhood religion, family, and cultural conditioning that taught holiness as self-erasure. Becoming whole doesn’t threaten faith; it threatens rules we lived by unconsciously for decades.

Midlife transformation doesn’t break your life. It illuminates the places that were already buckling. It invites us to become participants in our own existence rather than caretakers of everyone else’s comfort. If you were raised in religion, this can feel radical—even dangerous. Not because God is offended, but because culture is.

A woman with longing is a woman with agency. A woman with agency is notoriously hard to control.

You don’t owe anyone a smaller version of yourself. Wanting more isn’t selfish—it’s self-recognition. It’s trusting that your body carries wisdom your doctrine never named. It’s the courage to say your life isn’t over; it’s still unfolding.

If you’re a midlife woman feeling the first tremor of desire for something different, know this: nothing has gone wrong. You’re not betraying your faith or your family. You’re becoming too alive to remain hidden.

And this—this brave, unsettling, sacred unraveling—is where the real work begins.