Past imperfect: a woman finds healing and a new path to God with the help of an unlikely guide.

"Sounds like you should talk to a priest."

Talk to. A priest. Four words that had not occurred next to each other in my vocabulary for almost 30 years. Here was my own therapist--an ordained Baptist minister, for crying out loud, and an otherwise sensible guy--suggesting that I talk to a priest.

He didn't know, and I wasn't saying, that I had left the Catholic Church all those many years ago in fear and shame after a series of the kind of events that we've been hearing so much about lately. I didn't know what to make of it then. I was old enough to keep the secret, though, and to keep up the charade of parochial school, Mass on Sunday, and getting good grades until I left home for college. Eventually I was busy keeping up all kinds of appearances and making a mess of my life.

So now, after decades of devoted heathenhood, the G-word seemed to be turning up quite a lot in my thinking, and I didn't like it: God.

Instead of meditating, I kept having the urge to kneel and ... uh ... well ... kind of ... pray. Whatever that was. Ugh. My theory was that I must be depressed.

0he day, though, part of my job entailed welcoming the new Catholic chaplain at the psychiatric hospital where I worked. He seemed friendly enough and harmless. "You can just call me 'Father John,'" he said. Father John, like that old medicine.

I figured it would be a nice gesture to attend his first Mass, celebrated in a tiny chapel on a noisy hallway across from the main kitchen. It was the welcoming thing to do, I thought, and what could it hurt? Sure, I hadn't been to Mass in years, except for coasting through a couple of funerals. I had no idea what the prayers were anymore, but I wrote it in on my calendar, feeling virtuous as heck.

On the appointed day I sauntered down to the chapel, ready to commit my good deed and get out of there. Just inside the door was Father John, wearing one of those white things that priests wear, taking both of my hands in both of his, looking in my eyes and saying, "Welcome, Ann."

Whoa. All of a sudden, I was the welcom-ee, not the dutiful welcom-er, as planned. Something shifted inside me, a balance tipped. I felt welcomed as never before, ever, anywhere.

I sat down.

Patients whispered, "Hi, Dr. LeBlanc! I didn't know you were Catholic!"

"Well, I used to be," I said, hoping against hope that we weren't going to have to sing.

Within a few minutes we sang. It was awful. There was a yowling guitarist who sang off-key, myself, also off-key, a handful of patients, and a couple of supervising staff.

The chapel was so small that none of us was more than a few feet from the little altar. The responses were easy enough to follow, the reading was kind of interesting. Father John's homily was simple and acknowledged all of our need for healing, including his own.

By the end of the homily I felt pretty perky again. I had the little book kind of figured out, and it looked like we were in the home stretch. My good deed was almost done, and I had appointments to see.

We skipped that long "I believe in God" prayer and got right to the bread and wine part. Right. I remember this, kneel here, bread, wine, more praying, and ... Holy mackerel! There is a God!

All of a sudden I couldn't breathe, couldn't more, couldn't think a thing, wrapped, enfolded, overwhelmed by the shocking, unutterable immediacy of the physical presence of God. I wanted to dive under my chair, knowing that none of us was getting out alive, just waiting for the thunder, lightning, earthquakes, and tidal waves.

Everyone else looked pretty ho-hum, though. There was no smell of singed furniture, no smoking hair. The Mass seemed to be just going on.

I held it together through the test of it, trying to act more or less normal, and hightailed it out of there to call my therapist, who eventually said, "Maybe you should talk to a priest."

Well, Father John was the only priest I knew. I knew that a few years ago he had been removed from his parish. A man had accused Father John of having engaged in a sexually inappropriate relationship with him when he was a teenager, 20 years before. He had sued the diocese. Father John was sent for treatment. It had been in all the papers for weeks back then.

Now--a few years, many assessments, and long discussions with a pastoral council later--Father John had been placed in a small parish in the boondocks. His history was in the paper and on the radio again. He stood up and talked about it in church.

Eventually the word went out, "He's OK." Later it was evident that Father John was much more than OK.

And so I--a psychologist who specialized in the far reaches of mental illness, an evaluator of sex offenders and other criminals, a woman sexually abused by a priest--found myself driving to the office of a priest who had been removed flora his parish as a result of sexual impropriety. I had to pull over to the side of the road twice, nauseated with fear and anxiety, to collect myself.

On arriving, I observed that never before had I really understood what it meant when people described themselves as "weak with fear." Now I did.

Knocking at the door, I hoped that some poor parishioner had fallen ill and that Father John had been called away, that there was some crisis somewhere that only he could handle, that he had forgotten about our appointment and was out, that he had fallen asleep and couldn't hear my knock, that ...

"Welcome, Ann!" Oh God, he's here. And so we began.

Somehow, speechless with terror, I got to his office and sat down. He was warm and encouraging. I didn't say much. He was calmly, quietly supportive. I didn't say much. He didn't say much. I think he prayed or something. I choked out a part of the story. He listened. I didn't say much.

I came back the next week and the next and for many weeks. We had a lot to talk about, including what had happened with the priest back when I was young and other even worse things I had gone through in my life.

We started with the whole God business, what had happened in that little hospital chapel, the whole Jesus business, the whole Catholic business, and gradually worked our way around to the whole life business--which, it turned out, was inextricably intertwined with the whole God business.

Eventually I found myself saying words that I thought I could never say to another human being, much less a priest. It took a long, long time. Father John would listen and ask questions. I would read books he gave me and ask questions. There were many protracted silences. I began to find out about prayer, about mercy and compassion.

There were times when our pasts collided, when we communicated poorly and at cross-purposes. Sometimes I panicked and ran. Sometimes Father John managed to grab me by the scruff of the neck before I got too far away, and sometimes I had to come back on my own and start again. Sometimes it was all too horrible and difficult and we sat and prayed silently together.

Father John walked me through all of it with gentleness, humor, and patience. I learned to look calmly at painful past events, at my own failures and self-deceit, and to appreciate my strengths in a new way. I learned to turn to God, rather than keep trying to kick him in the teeth.

It helped enormously that a few years before, Father John had had to overhaul his own life, to confront sinful parts of himself with great pain and honesty, and to grow. There was no pretense in that office, no room for it on either side. I already knew the awful truth about Father John, and we had already talked about it. There was plenty of room for my own awful truth to come leaking and gushing out.

In time, and with great difficulty, we found our way to the sacrament of Reconciliation. Eventually I went to Mass in a real church. I sat in the last pew, terrified, and Father John came and sat beside me. He took both of my hand in both of his and said, "Welcome, Ann."

Over the next couple of years I heard him speak openly in homilies about his time in therapy, to acknowledge his frailty, and speak regretfully of his own failings. In time he coached and guided me as I approached my own much larger, much less welcoming parish and began to form relationships there.

He encouraged both trust and caution as I uncertainly met new priests, tried out unfamiliar activities, and experienced the bumps and bruises of entering a new community. More than once I fled to his office in tears, vowing to join some other religion--any other religion--or to sack it all and just pray in my living room, alone. I'd expound on the Complete Stupidity of All Catholics. He'd tell me stories of some of his own experiences. We'd laugh and pray and I'd try again.

Eventually he was transferred to a big parish in the northern part of the state, where they already knew about his history. We called and e-mailed. I went north to visit, and we would get together when he came south. He was worried about how he would be received, but the word had already gone out: "Father John is OK."

We spoke of the pain of his leaving the first parish that had embraced him after he returned to pastoral ministry, and of coming to love his new parish as well. He poured himself out in caring for his parishioners, and they took him into their hearts. I learned more and more about the boundless joy and evident gratitude with which he celebrated Eucharist.

It's four years now since I first sat in the back of Father John's church trying to think of how I could sneak out with no one noticing. Today my own parish community is the center of my life. I get to be a lector and every once in awhile, if there's no young person around, the altar server.

It's my second year on the pastoral council, and I help with the stewardship efforts in our parish. I organize our Bigger Than Huge Clean-Up Extravaganza. In the summer I bring flowers from my garden to church. My husband, who isn't even Catholic, comes to potlucks and dances and once baked a batch of cookies for a church meeting when I got home too late to do it. He says I'm calmer now and don't get ticked off nearly as often as I used to.

My life is more full than I could ever have imagined, and more peaceful. Making time for prayer, for the sacraments, for friends and family has replaced other more frantic, less fruitful activities. I can give and receive love and friendship, knowing that intimacy with God is the foundation of it all. I'm whole. Deepest gratitude is my first and most profound response.

Father John doesn't have a parish anymore. He can have no public ministry, cannot wear clerical clothing, and cannot present himself as a priest. He can't live in a rectory or have any kind of position that has anything to do with the Catholic Church. One strike, he's out.

There's no taking into account his changing, the lack of other offenses for more than 20 years, the very public disclosures, his success in parishes that knew his history.

There's no room to acknowledge how the humility engendered by his very evident brokenness is just what God used to help me, and many others, find our way home. There's no counting how many of us found safety in his office, knowing that we would find a sometimes scarce commodity: the great gentleness of someone who knew for sure that he wasn't any better than anyone else.

Maybe this is a good and necessary policy. There are many, I know, who believe that it doesn't go far enough, that priests like Father John should not only be removed from ministry, but from the priesthood altogether.

In exceptional cases like this one, though, I can't help but think that there should be room to weigh the individual situation, the clear evidence of healing and change. If any religion allows for the possibility of conversion, it should be ours. Personally, I wasn't looking for it, didn't want it, tried strenuously to resist it when it carne, and certainly wouldn't have picked Father John if left to my own devices. But God didn't put him in front of my nose by accident. Maybe we should take that into account, too.

Father John has an apartment and is looking for a part-time job to supplement a small retirement. He tells me that this is not the door he wanted to go through, but that it is the door God is asking him to go through now. He intends to go through it graciously, with dignity and gratitude.

He tells me that Sundays are very difficult, even tearful, days, but that he's finding joy in unexpected places, in learning new ways to be with people, in having great draughts of time for prayer. He's thinking of making a retreat, maybe at the place he was sent for treatment when the disclosures about him were first made--a place of healing and conversion.

Sometimes I wish he would be more angry. It turns out: All of those things that he told me about God's will and acceptance and forgiveness? He really believes them.

I'm still working on it.

By ANN LEBLANC, a forensic psychologist in Maine and the author of How to Go to Confession If You Don't Know How (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2003).