God doesn’t see us.
Religion by definition is a system based on beliefs and mores on a higher divinity capable to rule (and sometimes judge) the lives of the people that follow and practice it and God the supreme being.
Growing up in Mexico under the catholic religion is just as common as being aware of the corruption spread in Mexican politics. My first memories involving religion are me being 5 years old, going to a mass on Sundays with my most formal outfit, listening to things I didn’t understand, awkwardly shaking hands with strangers and ask for 10 mexican pesos to my parents after all those efforts.
When I was little, I truly believed that God existed and that many people knew him. I never thought of him as a man (I write this as I refer to him with a male pronoun, I know) but as a ball, a ball that would radiate light and that would listen to people while being in the clouds. That was my first image of him with the little reasoning my mind had when I was 6 years old.
As the years went by, my idea of God started to changed as my understanding of the world started to grow. I didn’t understand his importance, I didn’t know if he really would do all the favors people say he did, but I still thought of him as this white ball sitting in the clouds.
After attending catechism for 6 years since my childhood till my teenagers is that knowing about God was preached to me as someone whom would help people but also judge them. It seemed like he disapproved a bunch of things that didn’t seem truly important. Not a single adult ever explained to a group of children back then the importance of believing in something, of having faith, we weren’t taught who truly God is and the importance of relying on him, in having faith. By the time I was 15 years old I didn’t know how God looked like anymore.
By definition the word Faith is the personal hope and belief on the existence of one or more Gods that manifests over the need of wanting to posses evidence that shows what we believe in. Therefore, my definition of prayers is the power of asking for stuff just because we believe in these things.
I must confess that during my teenage years I didn’t believe in anything I wrote in the previous paragraphs, in many places of the world religious fanatism is synonym of both very low cultural and social development. My friends also wouldn’t believe in those things so for a time God stopped existing in my mind. Also, I thought it was impossible to believe that as a gay man I could ever accept those ideologies.
Until one time my parents started to teach me their “faith” in two Saints that we’d visit every 6 months for years in the north of Jalisco. My parents have asked to one of them for my well recovery after me going through a surgery when I was 5 years old and they promised that if everything went well they would visit their resting places every 6 months no matter what for the rest of their lives, which they did.
At 18, I was fascinated by how my parents would keep sending prayers to these Saints and seemed like they were granted just like magic, so one time I, on my own decided to ask for my first favor and started to pray at a church of one of these 2 Saints, after a month my prayer was heard.
So out of respect, I thought it was necessary to pay my dues and I also committed to visit these places every 6 months with my parents and would even put money for gas, as they were long trips and that way, I’d do my part of the deal. As the years went by every wish/prayer I ever asked for would come true and little by little I started to experience the faith that my parents would tell me about. Faith was the power of manifesting things if you wished them hard enough and you were to believe your actions were deserving of, now I had built my own definition of what Faith meant to me.
So, I started to talk to God, when good or bad things would happen, before going to sleep, prior to a job interview, when I wandered alone in places I shouldn’t have had and I must recognize God became a “friend” that I was embarrassed to acknowledge to my other friends. In the past people were judged for not believing in God and now it seemed like is the other way around, whatever might be, it shouldn’t be the case.
God doesn’t see us, but we see him everywhere, when we look around and we can still talk to the two or just one of the people who brought us into this world, when we wake up in the place that years ago wished we were, when we get the job that we were urging to land, when we love someone that doesn’t share our bloodline, when we go to sleep knowing everything’s alright and when we learn the most from our worst experiences.
In no way am I suggesting to believe in God, or implement religion onto anyone’s lives, I simply know now after all these years that having a sense of what “my god” looks like and what he is, has given me strength to endure with difficult things and has given me a path to walk on. Believing in something higher than ourselves could often help us get through challenges in life. At the end of the day my generation strongly believes that people’s personalities are defined by the day you were born and that future can be predicted based in such, both things can be hard to believe and respectable to do.
Believing in god is not a synonym of believing in the bible.
On my 26th birthday an actor of a tv show I was obsessed as a teenager wished me a happy birthday outside of my house, how could that even be possible? Most of the things I ever wanted have actually happened to me and God was the one I’d ask for them. So yeah, now I’m sure I know how God looks like, I’ve seen him myself quite a few times, everyday and everywhere.
x, Alejandro.
