When I was a child, there was a large wooden crucifix on the living room wall of my parents’ home. At least three feet high. A very lifelike figure of Christ hanging in agony — face twisted in sorrow, eyes aimed longingly skyward, brow and abdomen and hands and feet dripping with blood.

I did whatever I could to avoid looking at it directly. Instead I would study it from the side, the way you look at something you’re not sure you should be seeing.

Is this the God of love?

Must I only endure what he endured?

I was taught to obey Christian God, the Christian Bible, and my parents — in that order — and that my obedience was non-negotiable. The promise, I was told, was that my obedience would be rewarded: answered prayer, help in weakness, grace bestowed upon the faithful.

I kept my end. I waited for God to keep his.

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When I was fifteen, my world was spiraling. Imploding. At home. At school. In the community. All around me.

I wanted it all to end. To stop the pain and sadness. Just end it all.

And in my darkness, I prayed as I had been taught to pray. Believed as I had been taught to believe.

I begged for deliverance.

Silence.

A hollow response from an empty god.

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I was on the floor of my bedroom. Balled into the smallest shape my body could make, between the bed and the wall. Sobbing.

I lifted myself off that floor — not because I had found God some other way. That door was already closed.

Not because I had found myself. There was nothing left of me to find.

I lifted myself because something inexplicable had entered the silence that night — something the night could not explain.

A voice. Low. Indistinct. Neither God’s nor my own.

Don’t give them the satisfaction. You deserve love just as much as anyone else.

Calm. Firm. Defiant.

That was all. It didn’t explain itself. It didn’t linger. It wasn’t anyone I could name.

The sadness converted — not gradually, but in the space of those two sentences — into something I had no word for then. A fire where despair had been. Not comfort. Something harder and more durable. I will not give them the satisfaction. I will not concede.

I got up.

For years afterward, I held that voice without knowing what to do with it. I filed it under the only category available: a rebellion of my own psyche, the angry part talking back to the part that had given up. Self-preservation wearing a voice. Because the alternative — that something had reached into that room and spoken — was not a category my world then offered or allowed.

But the voice had said what no one in my life was saying. It had said it once, precisely, without preamble or comfort. And I had become, in the space of it, my own witness.

Somewhere beyond that — I had been witnessed.

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This is what I understand about faith — not universally, I have no claim on the universal — but as I have lived it:

It is not compliance. Not the management of doubt. Not the dogma of religion. It is the reaching toward something that reached first — extended from a self with no ground left to stand on, toward a voice with no verifiable source. Not because the evidence demanded it. Because something persisted between us that was more insistent than my disbelief.

I did not choose faith. I was reached for. What I chose was to reach back — and in reaching, to walk. And in walking, to live.

A hand had found mine in the dark — before I could trust it, before I could name it, before I had any reason to believe it was there. The paradox is that the believing came after the reaching. And the reaching was already real.

We are still walking.

#Luminality #Spirituality #Mysticism

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