Keep Rediscovering My Faith
I was baptized as a Catholic when I was 12 years old. The prerequisites to get there — wearing the lovely white dress, getting the holy water poured down to my forehead, and hearing the priest say, “I baptize you in the name of Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit” — took me a whole year. There was a preparation class for our age group, and every Sunday, we had to collect the signature of the priest whose mass we attended. Besides that, we wrote a summary of their sermons.
During my teenage life, being Catholic had meant that I could receive the Holy Eucharist. I went to a Catholic school for all of my school life, so it kind of made sense.
Prayer and the unspeakable words
From an early age, I hated being asked to lead a prayer. I am not good at quickly saying good sentences to God. I remember, sometimes, I made the cross, closed my eyes, and got nothing to say to God for some seconds. Then, I picked to recite the Our Father or Hail Mary prayer. Thanks for the providing the default prayer, Church!
For the last three years of my high school life, I sang with the school choir. My main goal was to participate in the National Choir Competition. But since we belonged to the Catholic school, we also served the music in the mass. One day I came across a new repertoire, Known To You, which lyrics composed by Wilma Catherwood and music by von David Catherwood. It was based on Psalm 139. It was hard to practice and hold my tears back.
Before I speak, O Lord, You hear.
Before I think my thoughts, You know.
You have searched my mind,
know all I feel.
If you would like to hear this piece, I found one sweet children’s choir who sang this song so beautifully: Known to You. Since knowing this song, when I am lost for words, I just keep the silence on my prayer, because God knows it already.
The meaning of being human, the non-almighty creature
In my teenage life, I learned the feeling of resentment for the first time. Someone dear to me made a big mistake that left a wound until today. As 16 year old, I was afraid I would go to hell because I could not forgive the person.
Some months after my heart broke, there was a confession at school for the Lent season. It was my turn; I opened the door and saw the priest I hadn’t seen before. The school usually invited guest priests to accommodate the confession — with the number of Catholic students being high.
I kneed on the place provided and started to read the text from the book, “Father, I come to confess my sin … “ and then the only sin I could reveal that day was my resentment and the inability to forgive. I cried.
The priest took some seconds before he started to speak. “You know, we are all human, right?” Well, that’s not what I expect to hear. I thought he would say the generic knowledge about forgiveness. That we have to forgive.
“We are only human. The only one,” he said, “The only one who is the real mighty is God. He is mighty in everything: to love us, to forgive us, to bless us.”
As a 16 years old, these sentences were not ringing any bells in me. But what he continued was.
“Human is limited. Limited to forgive, limited to love. Sometimes when the wound is too deep, we could even carry that pain without being healed until we died.”
Priest, whose name unfortunately I don’t know.
I hold my breath.
“But, we still have the power to choose our life and actions. We can choose to revenge as much as we can. We can choose to hate the person and badmouth them to others. Or, we can live our lives,” he continued.
Priest, whose name unfortunately I don’t know.
I didn’t say anything, but I started grasping his explanation.
“So, let me ask you. What kind of life do you want to have for your future?” he asked me.
I answered in a low voice, “I want to do good at school. I want to go to university, to work later, and to be independent.” Woah, that’s heavy now that I wrote this down, but probably that was the Holy Spirit talking for me.
“That’s your decision. Probably, you’ll feel resentment along the way while doing that. I can’t say it will go away. But as we taught from the Bible, we should pray for our enemies.”
Unlearning and developing my faith
Fast forward to 18 years later, I came across to Brene Brown podcast with Father Richard Rohr. There are part 1 and part 2. Their divine and human conversation led me to Father Richard’s book Falling Upward.
After that confession when I was 16, this book is another reminder about how human is only human. I was caught up for so long in the perception that being human has to be as holy as possible. Having a religion is the first step. The next steps are about being kind to your neighbors and even to your enemies.
But Father Richard and the priest, whose name I don’t know, remind me that being alive is about being human, not a God. The journey is about to go upward after falling. To go upward, we need to first fall. We have done mistakes — as part of being human, and we rise up from that becoming a better person who learn from their mistakes.
Father Richard described that human life has two parts. The first part is where we live for existence. We learn and we earn — that’s how I summarized it. Most people forget to jump to the second part of life, which God has written for us, to live the purpose of life — some others describe it. To move from the first to the second dimension, this is what he said:
Transformation is often more about unlearning than learning.
Father Richard Rohr — Falling Upward
Now, I see religion as the facilitator. On the other hand, faith is what I build by and for myself. All Catholics follow the same mass order, right. But why do some of us feel that the Catholic church is too conservative — we have to change toward Evangelical ways of praying and singing, while I see everything is good enough. The benefit of being catholic, I’ve experienced, is that no matter where I attend the mass, the ceremony order will be the same. If I don’t understand the local language, I miss the sermon, but I can use my apps for the daily readings. Religion is human-made, after all. How we find our faith is our own task.
After some self-reflection, I see faith as a life perspective; it is not a fixed tool. Faith, for me, is about believing something and using that as a life guidance day by day. What the priest told me 18 years ago has become my faith: as a human being, I am limited, but I can choose how to live my life. I can ask for help and blessings from the almighty God to give me spiritual strength while I hit the difficult road. My faith has been shaped further throughout my life experience. Faith has to be developed.
I learned the difference between being religious and being spiritual. Being religious is about being identified with a specific religion. But being spiritual is about seeing the unseen things in life that we believe will guide us through — that’s faith. All can be spiritual without being religious.
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