My Many-Boats Religion
*This article was supposed to be the last episode of my Religion Series on Instagram, but I decided a blog format would be better.
I grew up in a multi-faith household.
My mom is the typical Catholic who used to go to church every Sunday, and my dad is from a religion we call “Spiritism”. This is a relatively common religion in my state in Brazil, but it’s not very well known around the world. You can think of Spiritists as Catholics who believe in reincarnation. More on that later.
I have devout Catholics and Spiritists on both sides of the family, so the landscape of my childhood was rooted in these two universes.
My mom would take us to the mass on Sunday mornings, and in the afternoon I’d hear my aunt complaining that she has been stuck with her husband for the past 5 reincarnations, and in the next one she’s going to change things up.
Or later I’d hear my other aunt telling us about the conversations she had been having with this very old lady, and let’s just say that that old lady didn’t belong to the world of the living. There was never any fight between these both sides, not that I have witnessed. Growing up my understanding was that some people believe in some things, and some people believe in others, there was no right or wrong.
Catholicism
As for me, I guess my first religion was Catholicism. That’s because my parents baptized me when I was months old. One of the ways Catholicism was present in my life as a kid was in the books my mom got me. There was this series of adventures of a young girl who would travel back in time to see the stories of the Bible. I loved those books and was mesmerized by the images. I read them over and over again.
Now that I think about it, I think those were also my first lessons in ethics. The story about the man who stopped to help others in trouble on the road, or the man who walked miles to find his lost lamb— those were the stories those books talked about. My mom also taught us how to pray the Holy Father at night and that was a tender moment between us. Nevertheless, I didn’t have a clear idea of what a religion even was.
When I was 11 I told my mom I wanted to take the first communion. That was because my best friend was going to the Catechism classes and it seemed cool. Then I had a falling out with this friend and didn’t want to go anymore. But my mom said that I started it and now I had to finish it. This made me furious. I’d go to class and just sit on the corner thinking “This is all bullshit” or what other word my 11-year-old self could come up with.
Then I started to learn about the Catholic Church in my history classes in school, and all the killing, burning, and forced converting. Pair that with a very critical view of religion coming from my liberal friends and it started to rub me the wrong way.
Later in life, I learned the difference between individual practice and the Church as an institution, but eventually, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t for me. I didn’t fit in Christianism and Christianism didn’t fit in me. We’re like two pieces of different sets of puzzles. So I abandoned it.
Despite all that, I brought something from Catholicism with me. The prayers. I rejected Catholicism and the Church, but when I’m on a really dark and scary night, I still resort to praying. I think because it brings me a sense of comfort from those days with my mom.
Spiritism
After that, in my early teens, I turned to Spiritism. This created a special bond with my dad that I still share today.
The best image North Americans might have of Spiritism (or Kardecism) is the seances that were famous in Europe in the late 19th century, when people would gather around a table and try to communicate with spirits. One of the men of that time, Allan Kardec, became really interested in it and thought that if he could use science to study and test those phenomena he would get some interesting results.
After years of study, he got to a method that would give him not just short words or phrases as messages from the spirits, but complex answers to complex questions. This led to the creation of the Book of the Spirits, which people believe to contain revelations from the elevated spirits about the afterlife.
Spiritism is a religion deeply rooted in the philosophy and science of the late 19th century. One of the ideas that influenced Spiritism was the Theory of Evolution of Species, by Charles Darwin.
The idea is that in the same way that the bodies of living beings go through the biological evolutionary process, the human soul also is also evolving.
In the same way that the human body took millions of years to become what it is today, the evolution of the soul would also take millions of years, hence the need for reincarnation.
Humans would incarnate on the Earth to go through trials and tribulations that would make them more elevated spirits. And for the Spiritists the main tool of human development is love. Every bad deed that you do to others is considered a “debt”. In a later life, you would have the opportunity to help those you hurt in past life and pay some of those debts. And that’s how your soul progresses.
Despite all of that, Spiritism is still not seen with good eyes by a portion of Brazilian society, most notably the Christians, and especially the Evangelicals. My dad and I experienced this first hand one day when one of our distant relatives (an Evangelical woman) tried to convince my dad that Jesus had talked to her and told her to bring my dad and me (I was 13) into the “path of light” and away from the dark work. You can imagine how much my dad was not having it.
This happens because Spiritism relies on communication with spirits, and this is seen by some as “evil magic” or “devil’s work”. Which is interesting, because the thing that drove me away from Spiritism was how Catholic everything was. I would go to the Spiritist Center and they would read the Bible and spend the whole afternoon talking about Jesus. It all felt like a mass to me.
So I abandoned it as well. But as before, I brought something from Spiritism — the belief in reincarnation. I don’t know if I could say I have a religion, but I definitely have a belief — that this is not the only life we’re going to live, that there’s something in us that lasts longer than that. I don’t remember a time in my life in which I didn’t believe in it.
Wicca
So after that, I had a Wicca phase in my late teens.
Wicca is also known as paganism, or neo-paganism, which were religions practiced in Europe (especially in the North) before Christianism. You know the idea of the witch with the broom and the pointy hat? That imagery comes from pagan symbols and rituals.
The thing is that this was not seen as evil before Christianism dominated the area. Paganism was popular with the country’s population that depended heavily on the seasons and had to endure months of harsh Winter. Many of the symbols in Wicca are linked to the fertility rituals for plentiful harvests. They were demonized (sometimes literally) as a conversion strategy: this previous religion is evil, follow the new one.
Wiccans today celebrate 8 main festivals that survived ancient times. They’re called Sabbaths and are connected to the seasons of the year. You have 4 main festivals (Summer and Winter solstices and Spring and Autumn equinoxes) and 4 smaller ones in between. If you look at them, they are similar to holidays we have today — like the Ostara fertility festival in the Spring Equinox (March 21st) that uses the eggs and the rabbits as symbols of a new life that is starting to sprout. Does it ring any bells?
To me, Wicca brought me this deep sense of connection with the rhythms of nature. More than spells or rituals, I loved feeling that my life was synced with a bigger cycle of life and rebirth that ruled every living thing on the planet. Wiccans are expected to sync their activities to the seasons of the year, using the bursts of energy in the Summer to grow and expand and the cold Wintertime to pause and reflect.
The only problem was… I was living in a tropical country in which the “cycle of seasons” consisted of 11 months of summer and one month with some few dead flowers. The correlation was not there. I couldn’t see the manifestation of this symbolism, so eventually, I abandoned that too.
But what I brought with me from Wicca was the love for the seasons. When I moved to Canada in 2016 and started to really live the seasons every year, I was in (Wiccan) heaven. I still hold a deep fascination with the transformation of everything around me as we move from Summer to Autumn, to Winter and Spring.
Umbanda
After that, I had an Umbanda phase in my 20’s.
(Yes, yet another religion, thank you for making it this far in the story).
Umbanda, along with Candomblé, are the two main Afro-Brazilian religions brought by Africans who were forced to cross the Atlantic to work as slaves. Brazil was the world’s biggest recipient of the transatlantic slave trade, with 4 million men and women being transported there over four centuries (the US received 300,00 for comparison). This makes African culture a strong presence in Brazil.
And yet, if you make a list of all the religions that are frowned upon by the Evangelicals, Candomblé and Umbanda are at the very top. As a Spiritist, I was often careful with whom I talked to about my religion. In Umbanda, people avoid even putting a sign on their temple, for fear of it becoming a target.
Afro-based religions in the Americas (another example is Santería in Cuba) are surrounded by misconceptions from the general public, who more often than not have no idea of the overall philosophy behind those religious practices. Think of how many times you saw voodoo symbols in some horror movie. Those are someone’s religious symbols.
Umbanda is also deeply rooted in nature and has a lot of reverence for the ancestors. This is often translated to Black religious communities in Brazil as a deep sense of respect for the elderly members of that community. Umbanda followers believe that their long-gone ancestors are not really gone, but they continue to offer their wisdom to the younger generations. They’re called guides and during the Umbanda sessions there are special members of the temple that can incorporate those spirits, and they can talk through them.
Umbanda entered my life at a time in which my problems were so overwhelming that I felt completely lost. The idea of a guide seemed everything I needed at that moment.
Going to the temple (they’re called “terreiros”), I had the opportunity to talk to one of those guides. And if you are the type of person who believes in spirits and some kind of energy that surrounds us all, this was my most spiritual experience, by far.
But forget the image of a religious leader surrounded by light on the top of an altar. This guy was waiting for me sitting on a little stool smoking a cigar. He motioned me to sit on the stool in front of him. Without saying a word, he put his hands on my shoulders and blew the cigar smoke over my head. All my problems immediately vanished. All of them. It’s like he blew them away. It was something I’ve never experienced before.
I still hold that experience and Umbanda very dear in my heart, but when I moved to Canada I was forced to abandon it because in Toronto there are no terreiros. But I’d love to go back.
Buddhism
And I had yet another religious phase.
This lasted most of my adult life and I’d say I’m still in it. I’ve been studying Buddhism on and off for more than a decade, and a lot of its philosophy made its way into my habits and my way of seeing the world.
In a nutshell, Buddhism started with a man called Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in South Asia in the 6th century BCE. He was a wealthy prince who grew up very protected in a palace. One day, on a walk, he witnessed for the first time an old person dying of illness. This had a profound impact on him, and he left the palace to live a spiritual life.
One day he had a revelation that is described as the 4 Noble Truths: 1. That suffering will come for every human being. 2. That the cause of that suffering is not the suffering itself, but the attachment we feel towards everything good in life. 3. That if we let go of that attachment, the suffering will end, and 4. That the path to achieve that is the Noble Eightfold Path (which includes meditation, but I’m not going to get into the details).
I used to be more active with my practice, meditating daily and going to the Buddhist temples we have in Toronto. Routine ended up getting in the way, but I still treasure what I’ve learned. The teachings often come in the form of short lessons, and there’s one that’s my favourite. It goes like this:
If one day you’re walking down your path in life, and suddenly you look up to see the very Buddha standing in your path, you should kill the Buddha.
Let me explain.
Refraining from any form of attachment also means refraining from putting people on pedestals, even religious leaders. Some people get so enamored with the idea that they found their guru that they hold them in higher importance than the lesson that the guru is trying to teach. Religion, the Buddhists say, should be like a boat. Is a boat that you get on and that can take you to the place you need to go. But when you get there, in order to move forward, you need to abandon the boat.
I think that’s what I’ve been doing all this time jumping around religious practices. I’ve travelled in many different boats and despite having abandoned every one of them, I still brought valuable things with me from every journey. In that context, Buddhism is also another boat for me. One that’s currently taking me to my next destination, but one that, eventually, I might have to abandon as well, when the right time comes.
