The tossed empty space/ Of cloud rack when the moon has passed away

     At first it was a relief- the freedom- the release of that long, fierce intellectual tension between what she believed and what she knew to be true. At last she could gaze with quiet eyes on the shouting and posturing from pulpits, the forced intimacy and saccharine emotionalism of flocks and know herself to be utterly apart from them all without the old guilt, the old surge of confusion.
They repulsed her, exhausted her with their heartiness and jocularity, the strained smiles and artificial sympathy or agreement they demanded of one week after week.
But there were other moments, heartbeats of still beauty when she was alone and the world had ceased to jostle and roar around her when she felt keenly the depth of her loss. At these times she was caught, as always, by the delicate coloring of the sky, the arched loveliness of cedar boughs stretching overhead, and the emptiness of it hammered at her heart.
Before, there was the glory of gratitude, the delicious sense of complicity with a creative God, this artist God poised always in exquisite concentration upon each detail of His world, who spread His treasures before her in the solitude and silence as though he were gladdened by her gladness and her wonder.
She was lost now in this pathless maze of uncreated beauty, this blur of art without its artist. The joy was gone.
There was a weight in this new, tired cynicism which dragged at her with a dull ache. She couldn't un-see what she had seen- that her lifetime of dogged faith in rigid, carefully crafted doctrine- all her finely tuned dogma, the passion, the tenderness, the repentance, all these triumphant centuries of church history with its tales of shining heroism- were built on nothing were all insubstantial and unsubstantiated as air. Only her belief in them had imbued them with life, and this earnest belief had faded and then vanished entirely.
The betrayal cut so deep, was so rooted in pain and abandonment, that its aftermath was paralyzing.
She could not rebuild, could not construct a new framework of faith. The world was empty of magic of symbolism- only its bewildering, meaningless loveliness remained.
Impossible to revel in her liberty. Empty to accept the smug congratulations of those others who had wandered, like her, from the fold, many of whom seemed to wriggle and gambol like puppies in the excess of their delight in their own cleverness, their assurance that only their keen intellect and deep wisdom had made possible their escape.
She turned to the familiar landscape, the gentle trees with their lace-like intricacy, their tracery of twigs as fragile and dainty as the bones of birds. The exuberance of flowers, the ecstasy of light and shadow in a grassy field were waiting, unchanged. She clung to their beauty in her anguish of loneliness and found at times more agony than solace. They seemed so distant and lifeless, so separated from the warm and living personality which had once seemed to animate the universe.
The isolation only seemed to grow in intensity.
Each day she lived the same shock and despair as she realized that her hypocrisy and silence were the last links with the only world she felt at home in, as the weight of her deferred unmasking crashed in upon her. She despised the old world and loved its inhabitants. She cringed at their triteness, their clumsy speech, their absurdity, but she could not bear to break loose definitively from their warmth, their stability, their familiar reassurance. She still craved their approval and respect. The world she saw outside, its materialism, its secular citizens, its vivid scorn for her roots repulsed her no less than her past. She stayed, utterly alone, and the thought of escape remained one of utter loneliness.

She had always felt a deep core of quiet, a silent watchfulness within her. In the old days, it was a vibrant silence, a source of strength and compassion, an inner rest.
Now she was trapped in the quiet in a kind of mute despair, choking back any expression of the grief that throbbed in her head and writhed in her belly. There were all the things which must not be spoken aloud, not to him, not to them. There was the futility of speaking unheard, unwanted words. There were long nights of strangled tears and the harsh, frantic days when she longed for merciful darkness. She clung to silence, curled up protectively upon herself, desperate to hide her tapestry of naked nerves from further torment. In the end, the silence bound her, left her crouched hopelessly cradling a dark and secret shame, a tired disillusionment with existence. Life was strain, every muscle tensed against a coming rejection, a final separation from the only friendship and community she had known.
Her very body mocked her, betrayed her, bled her into utter weariness. Its brokenness locked her behind new walls of isolation, separated her from the comforting physical world. There was no god whose passing cloak she could clutch at in the midst of a crowd, no hope that faith in divine mercy would restore her. 
Even suffering was meaningless. She felt an object of ridicule. Self-pitying, melodramatic, absurd in a world of shifting allegiances and doubtful honor.
She dreaded their pity and their prayers.
There were words for the gathering darkness, the plodding misery, the raw emotions, the exhaustion. Depression. Anxiety.
They twined themselves inextricably throughout the fabric of her lost faith, but the weaving was still too narrow, too recently begun and too haphazard for her to discern any pattern.