I’ve been thinking a lot about religion. I guess that’s what happens when you are dating an atheist.
I am also an atheist, or so I thought. The ironic label “Recovering Catholic” fits better, but it doesn’t account for the fact that I throw salt over my left shoulder after I’ve spilled it on the countertop, or how I sometimes whisper the first verse of a prayer before rolling dice at board games. It does, however, encompass something I began to understand a few years ago: a decade in Catholic school, as well as a lifetime in a Catholic country, left marks on me that are as difficult to see as they are to erase. The tattoos that my conservative Catholic teachers hated so much feel less permanent than their preaching—I was less than a year old when a priest gave my faith a shape, baptizing me not with needle and ink but with holy water that burned like fire and brimstone and shame.
And yet. And yet I still feel like a chapel is more than just a building. I still whisper “si Dios quiere” back to my grandmother when we speak of the next time we’ll see each other. I still make the sign of the holy cross with the same superstitious caution as when knocking on wood to ease anxiety. Religion to me is not just belief but also a common language—prayers are the words we use to augur prosperity and health to the lives of those we love as much as they are the humble acknowledgement of the greater powers that we cannot control. As with Spanish, I am still fluent in the language of religion even though I barely speak it on my day-to-day, and it is intricately tied to my conception of home and those who inhabit it. It is a reflex, a turn of phrase that first echoes on the roof of my mouth with the voice of someone who raised me, filtering out through my stained-glass teeth with the colors of my Colombian childhood.
Above all, religion was a story I was told. It was given to me in a book, its contents summarized and recited so often I could relate them back, its lesson memorized and stored in my mind alongside photosynthesis and nouns. Gifted student I was, I learned religion for the test and that week’s mass, and I sought approval from the authority figures around me: priest, teacher, parent, and god alike. I have since read a myriad of other books and understood this particular story is not for me—it doesn’t include me in its pages with the mercy and joy I deserve and claim, it doesn’t align with the life I lead or the morality I seek—and yet I keep it on my shelf. Just in case. It’s a classic, it might be useful one day, I tell myself. It might be true, a voice whispers from a far corner of my brain ,and I do not know if it is my own, or the church’s, or—
My faith, or lack of it, has nothing to do with god and everything to do with me. “The Binding of Isaac” was the first story that instilled doubt in me. The story of a father being asked to kill his own son—the son he waited almost a century for, the son he loved most—in the name of god was more than I could comprehend. Then came the history lessons about wars, and hunger, and centuries of cruelty, and no one could ever answer my questions as to where god was when all of that was happening. Religion stopped being a children’s fable and started feeling like a distraction, like an excuse. I stopped going to church and angrily declared myself an atheist because I refused to believe sacrificing earthly life was the key to a heavenly one. Catholicism, and Christianity as a whole, teaches us we must love god above all else. Because he gave us life, they taught me. Now that I am older, I wonder if it’s actually because loving an almighty father who cannot die is a much less fragile place for our faith than the love of a son who will. When everything else is always crumbling, this type of faith is a pillar I have never underestimated.
As time went on, religion didn’t evaporate completely from my identity. It is still tattooed on my skin, lodged in the roof of my mouth, but I do not use these parts of my body much when shaping my life anymore. My morality and decision-making is now molded by my secular hands, although I often wonder where the clay is from, what it is made of. I feel less like I don’t believe god exists and more like I’m pretty sure he does but I don’t want to believe it. Like a political party I do not vote for, a distant uncle I do not talk to, a movie franchise I lost interest in, god and Catholicism are out there, somewhere and somehow, for other people to engage in it. And sometimes, when it all gets too much, they are the places my mind goes to rest whenever it needs comfort, too. I can live with that.
My girlfriend said to me recently that, even though she hasn’t been back to her hometown in years and isn’t sure she ever wants to return, she can only picture herself getting older there. Religion is my hometown, I tell her. My address has since changed and its streets do not feel like mine, but it was the first place I lived in and knew life could be in, where I point to, by default, when I feel lost. When I am tired of the uncertainty, when I just need someone to talk to under my breath, when I run out of nuanced answers to the big questions in life, my tongue returns to the language of a god and my mind tucks itself in bed.
Tell me the story again, it prays, it might be true this time.
Miyin Delgado Karl is a Colombian writer, screenwriter, and poet currently based in Southern California. Her work centers around themes of immigration, dual identity, queerness, and Latin American folklore. Miyin currently works in film production and writes stories with equal measures of silliness and trauma.
Featured image by Stephanie Krist on Unsplash.
