This month marks the 30th anniversary of what possibly counts as the most important personal decision I have ever made. This decision was to break with the structures that had previously ruled my whole adult life.

On a February day in 1975, I signed official papers from Rome, releasing me from the Jesuit society and the Catholic priesthood. At age 47, I faced the world for the first time as an independent adult without the intimate support of the religious family that I had joined a quarter century before.

A few year later, an ecclesiastical iron curtain shut down against priests applying for church approval of their release, part of a new policy of Pope John Paul II to keep clergy from leaving. I had escaped in time.

As I walked down Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue that morning, I felt as if I had taken myself back and reclaimed the freedom I had willingly surrendered at the end of adolescence. It may have been winter outside, but for me the season of spring had emerged interiorly. I was taking on a new stance toward the world, and the prospect excited me.

One night, twenty years earlier, I had dreamed of leaving the Jesuit Society, only to wake up in a sweat and discover with relief that it was not true; now it had become true, but I no longer felt any terror in it. Some apprehension about my being on my own, yes, but I also felt a strong admixture of relief and anticipation. Leaving would not be a horrible, irredeemable mistake as it had been in the dream, but a deliberate action that I had taken and would not regret.

No longer was anyone around who would protect me; from now on, I was responsible for myself as I had never been before. But that was part of the adventure of setting out in middle age toward an unknown future in the world.

Thirty years later, people still ask me why I left. In response, I tell these questioners there are two explanations. The first takes hundreds of pages, the other only two words. These words are: “I changed.”

Of course, this shorthand version merely hints at the countless events, outer and inner, that transformed me as an individual and the church to which I belonged. Incidentally, my leaving the priesthood and the Jesuits did not involve leaving the church, contrary to what many people have assumed.

In later life, I continue to place great value on the spiritual tradition into which I was born. However, I do confess disagreeing with authority in the Catholic Church seriously enough to be glad that I have not had to represent it officially during these last thirty years.

Strangely enough, at the time of leaving I felt greater admiration for the Jesuits than I had for many years previously. To me they remained members of an organization that had shown remarkable courage in making radical changes following the lead of the Second Vatican Council in the middle 1960s.

In leaving their ranks, I did not have to slink away under cover of night. Despite walking away from them, I retained the friendship of many of my former colleagues and have always welcomed further association with them.

Looking back from the vantage point of these thirty years, I feel my decision was appropriate, perhaps even wise. I wanted to change the angle by which I looked upon the world, and that has proven of much value. Greatest among the gifts that leaving made possible have been marriage and parenthood, of course, for which I feel highly privileged and deeply grateful.

In much of my first career, I would have scrupled to leave. Certain biblical texts ran through my mind from time to time, especially the saying of Jesus about the man who put his hand to the plow and then abandoned it. The Lord called such persons “unworthy,” a label that I shuddered to have applied to me.

I also thought about the promises Jesus made to disciples who left everything to follow him. Had I, by turning away from the call, forfeited the reward in heaven that had helped motivate me to leave home in the first place?

Fortunately I came to feel liberated from detached, literal readings of scripture, enough so as to reject these misgivings. The personal, unconditional love that I had become convinced God felt for me was enough to overcome these negative thoughts before they could become scruples.

This latter conviction became the ultimate reason for the freedom that enabled me to leave. I had made a theological and spiritual discovery that proved powerfully liberating. God’s love was active in my life, I came to see; and it enabled me to follow where my heart led.

Looking back over three decades, I see my first vocation as good and providential; similarly, I judge my life since then as a time of grace and blessings.

Richard Griffin