Published Essays: Asking, seeking too much

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I do not believe in God.

People in my community always said He is everywhere. Of course He’s everywhere, I thought 10 years ago: He was framed on our dining room wall, seated with a bunch of people eating bread and drinking wine; He was displayed on our bedroom window. He always had a special corner in the house where mom would light candles before a paper portrait of Him. He was always on TV every 3 p.m.; He was always in my pocket; Mom would hand me that beaded necklace before I’d go to school. He was always in my CLE books: still, unsmiling, strange.

For eight years I was educated by Catholic schools that tried to fill me with the significance of believing in God, but instead I felt they injected me with a rather strict culture: memorizing Bible passages, filling in the blanks with the Eight Beatitudes, reciting the Apostles’ Creed and the rosary every morning before the flag ceremony. I did not really complain about these “routines”; I was too innocent to care and too gullible to ask why I was supposed to learn the sign of the cross and to give P5 during the offertory at Sunday Mass.

Learning about the nature vs. nurture theory, I can say that I was nurtured to believe in God with a rich religious environment and society that worshipped Him in a unique way. With this I have come to draw a personal picture of Him, and have granted Him a mortal existence in my everyday life: I would thank Him for the new day every morning, talk to Him before I go to sleep and recognize His presence for every competition and elocution and dance performance and exam I had to overcome.

As time passed by though, I began to ask questions. Just like young Jesus in the book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, and probably just like the author Anne Rice herself, my curiosity grew like wildfire as my environment gradually changed. Such change, however, I never considered to be a big deal or a revolutionary turn in my life as a Roman Catholic, as I began to look through a “new lens” of religion. I just became a little disturbed that as I explored this new world even with a descriptive perspective, my own picture of God, once a crystal clear view of Him as written in the Bible and of Jesus’ life as coherently described in the Four Gospels, seemed to blur a little, like clearly seeing yourself on a still pond then becoming distorted into a ripple.

The bright, detailed painting fading into a slightly indistinct work of art was gradual. Back in high school, after being pampered by two Catholic schools run by nuns, I learned of other ways of worshipping God with strange names like Iglesia ni Cristo and Born Again. I began to wonder why some of my classmates did not do the sign of the cross or did not attend our Mass at school. I once attended a seminar spearheaded by Born Again volunteers and they praised my God with religious songs that I had never heard in our own church. They sang with such passion and enthusiasm that they always closed their eyes, and I deeply wondered why my community was never like this and people didn’t sing very loud like they did.

At one point I feared this difference in religion would mark a sensitive border line, defining my social place and my friends at school. I felt compelled to box others according to religion when it should not have been. I later realized that such thoughts actually prevented me from discovering the uniqueness of people’s ways of living and their different cultures which have fascinated me ever since. But the questions surged like a landslide.

For one thing, growing up in a Roman Catholic-type environment, I was always made to conclude that good people are those who believe in God. But then as I tried on different lenses, I met people who were equally good and kind but didn’t actually believe in God. It was a strange and overwhelming discovery, yet it further blurred my view of God and more questions poured down like hail.

I struggled to keep my faith and tried to “see with eyes unclouded” by emotions when I took a class that dissected the existence of Jesus Christ born of a Virgin Mary. His unlikely existence, Jesus being a gay or an abnormal person in biological terms — it’s science bumping into religion, after all. Reading texts on the views of atheists and non-believers of Christ, watching the Da Vinci Code, all these new perspectives were overwhelming, yet confusing all together. Did Jesus really exist in the first place? How could he have been XY if he had no paternal origin?

But these questions were never rhetorical in any way. These were questions born out of curiosity, out of my itch to learn more about my belief and of others’. After all, my conscious acceptance of a God is an essential part of my life, and a very interesting part of one’s life holding a timeless controversy and conspiracy that has united and divided man throughout history.

These questions were also born out of the values I learned during high school and in my first college year: to keep asking questions, and treating every answer in a descriptive point of view. My mentor Josephine Bonsol keeps telling me to know the facts first before anything: before judging others’ religions, before starting to act like a hypocrite who memorizes every word in the Bible but gossips about his neighbor right after he steps out of the church; before starting to doubt the existence of my God.

I sometimes fear I ask too many questions and bother too many people. But Anne Rice taught me to keep asking questions, just as seven-year-old Jesus did.

I sometimes fear I seek too many answers and may not find or understand them all. But Jesus taught me, in his life as a young lad who cried and laughed and experienced nightmares just like the rest of us, to continue to find the answers and not to fear.

I continue to ask questions, and accept answers as they are, just as Jesus — kid as he was, once upon a time—did. Until then, I do not just believe in God; I follow His ways.