#13 and #14 -- Religion Talk

I want to talk about religion today. I’ve mentioned before that I was raised Catholic. And I was devoutly Catholic. So much so that at twelve, I clearly remember promising God that at fifteen I would go into a convent to become a nun and serve Him. Fortunately, a couple of years after my fifteenth birthday, knowing well that I no longer wanted to be a nun, I went to confession and was relieved of my guilt by a kind priest who told me God wouldn’t hold against me a promise I made as a child.

Then, in high school I became a “devout” atheist. I had the time, since my three years of high school in Mexico, I somehow turned into six long and difficult years. I joke saying I have a “doctorate” in high school. But I will leave this for when I’m ready to talk about neurosis.

I remember being hungry for knowledge, a true bookworm. Nothing made me happier than having to spend all day in my school’s library. The book-covered high colonial walls of our library held an attraction that I couldn’t resist. What a true adventure to get lost leafing the dictionary, looking up a word and then moving from one to another word, forgetting about what took me to that humongous and magical book.

So in Philosophy class when a teacher explained materialism to us, I was caught. It made so much sense to me to answer the question, “What came first, matter or ideas?”. How logical to answer matter-of-factly, ”Why, matter of course.” In my mind it was sheer logic. The idea of God came later as we tried to explain our fears away when lightning struck and floods came upon us and we had no technology or science to explain them. God was the perfect answer.

So I declared myself an atheist and confronted the consequences, especially with my mother. I thought her and all like her ignorant, uneducated and trapped in the circumstances of the conditions of their lives. I wanted to have the words to explain the clarity of the books I was reading.

When I got married the first time, my boyfriend and I shared the same beliefs. Still, to make his mother and mine happy he proposed we go ahead and marry by the Church. I refused because it went against what I knew to be the truth and because I couldn't accept to be hypocritical. So we were married by a government bureaucrat. And, of course, like everybody else, we were so much in love that we married for life.

We were in our twenties, so we were broke. We were both in college and had no money. I had a roommate and the night before the Big Day she decided to bake us a “wedding cake” and I stayed up with her a big chunk of the night helping her make it and decorate it with raisins because she didn’t have chocolate chips. I loved Martha’s cake! To me it was a symbolical and faithful representation of the bride and groom’s honesty and sincerity and willingness to not have a shred of phoniness and fakeness. We were only able to gather enough scraps of gold to have one wedding band made: mine, a thin band of 10K gold. Honeymoon? Yeah, a happy three-hour bus ride to the city of Morelia and then to beautiful Patzcuaro.

A few years went by, then a sad divorce, a second relationship and at the ripe age of 38 I became a mother. We were not trying to get pregnant, but it happened. I could not believe it. My body was a woman’s body. I had to start believing it. I always thought myself too weird to have a normal woman’s life. And there I was, in spite of myself, “with child.” I could not explain this to myself. Only one explanation was possible in my mind. Definitive and absolute. I started journaling the day we found out we were pregnant. I was certain that this baby, however it came out, was a precious gift.

At that age, given my weight and other health concerns, I was considered a high risk pregnancy. At doctors’ offices I told anyone who would listen, “Go ahead and do all your tests. And if you tell me there is something terribly wrong with this baby, I will not allow an abortion. You don’t turn gifts away.”

Then when I held perfect little Valentina in my arms, I knew that God loves me, he has to. Wh else would he fill me with the humility and the awe of having a human being formed in my body, a body for which most of the time I held no love or appreciation? So I started having these internal conversations with myself about my atheism. An then I would often be surprised with moments of grace that I could not explain but through my knowledge of God.

Still, I could not reconcile with my Catholicism. That was a hard one. There were just too many questions I couldn’t answer through my old religion. But I began accepting to myself and to others my process of recovering God.

But my heart needed some form of spiritual ritual. At first I thought being ever grateful, ever prayer-full, and aspiring for humility would be enough. I thought talking intimately to God would be enough. But at some point I craved for some formality in my relationship with God.

So here I am, about three decades later, going to mass and even praying the rosary. I had to relearn the words to these Catholic prayers, but here I am, doing it. My husband Raul and Valentina have joined me with an open heart and most Sundays we go to church as a family. Some evenings I stay with Mother Angelica on TV to pray the rosary, responding in Spanish to her English Hail Marys.

When I feel my old doubts and questions simmering to the surface, I squelch them. I have no time for them. The things that still might not make sense to my logic mind I quickly try to disregard and choose to hold fast to my renewing faith. I talk to him and Mary every day, every day requesting the miracle of healing my broken body, but ultimately accepting the high grace of being alive.

When depression comes every now and then, and I am discouraged by even the privilege of life, I remember to look for my daughter’s face and smile. And then it comes, strong and purposeful, the remembrance of why I’m the mother of this cherished child…God must love me.