Today I told my spiritual director that I was an atheist.

I’d say that he took it surprisingly well, but actually I wasn’t a jot surprised. His response was just as considered and wise and useful as I’ve come to expect.

I started meeting with Fr Angus for the Sacrament of Reconciliation during Advent. I’d found it such a powerful and useful experience on our parish pilgrimage to Walsingham that I wanted to take it up regularly. After having asked Fr Daniel’s advice about suitable confessors and undergone a certain amount of procrastinating and faffing, we began that discipline. After a short while it became clear that actually, important and useful though confession is, there’s a point of frequency above which it starts to feel repetitive and rote. We discussed this and agreed to move to taking a more general approach to spiritual growth, which would include, but not be limited to confession.

He’s very good. His way of thinking about and relating to God makes a lot of sense to me, and gave me some useful ideas about how to start thinking about and resolving the tension of alieving but not believing in God. I still have a lot of work to do, but before I started meeting with him I'd been letting my faith drift and stagnate a bit, whereas now it really feels like there's some important growth going on.