On God.

Notes from an ex-Catholic on faith.

unknown artist | 21 April 2025

Pope Francis died on Easter Monday.

The day before, on Easter Sunday, my son had asked, “So if I was baptized Catholic, was I baptized by the Pope?” I chuckled at the question but then realized it was an understandable one.

In a show he’s watching, a Christian character and a Catholic character don’t get along. My son is trying to understand why this is. They both believe in God and love Jesus – what’s the problem?

He's been asking more about religion generally, trying to make sense of why we baptized him when neither his father nor I are religious. What does it mean to be baptized, is it a good thing, what about people who aren’t baptized?

Our son was born and baptized in England. It felt like a natural thing to do because both my husband and I were baptized and raised Catholic, though by the time we met in our 30s, we had long left the church. For me, I felt stifled and controlled by my strict Catholic and Korean upbringing. God had been used to instill fear – He was always watching and judging, the threat of hell and God’s wrath was always looming. How dare I complain about going to Bible study and Mass. How dare I ask to go to my school dance on a Good Friday when I should be mourning Jesus’ crucifixion.

For Catholics, there is an ever-present sense of inescapable shame. We are born sinners and our lives must be dedicated to earning God’s forgiveness. We are expected to accept this oppressive framework without question or dissent.

As a mother now, I find it impossible to see any truth in this narrative. On the contrary, I see that we all come into the world pure, precious, and innocent. As such, I can’t help but feel robbed of my childhood innocence. I think too many children are.

What I did gain from being raised Catholic was God’s uncontested existence. God just was. And the more I prayed – even if it was because I was forced to – the closer I was getting to God. The church and my mother could dictate their understanding of God all they wanted, but they could not control or interfere with my internal experience. I recited the mandatory prayers of Our Father and Hail Mary so many times that I still remember every single word today (much like the Pledge of Allegiance). But my secret prayer, what I did because I wanted and felt inspired to, was in writing letters to Jesus.

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In college, I traded organized religion for a yoga practice. I identified as “spiritual but not religious.” At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I used to say that going to yoga was my church now. Yogic principles included non-violence, kindness, compassion, presence, and devotion…it felt pretty close to religion to me.

I studied Buddhism and Hinduism, more tangentially and out of intellectual curiosity than as ritual. I felt comforted that the ultimate messaging of all religions seemed to be the same – be kind, be loving, take care of each other. Many of my fellow yogis talked about Jesus alongside Gandhi, Buddha, Mother Teresa, and MLK Jr. – they were all considered the Great Ones. I still continued to hold the God of my childhood in my heart.

More than 20 years after I had started practicing yoga, I abandoned it all, much like I had abandoned the Catholic Church. Intertwined with a devasting period of postpartum darkness, was my reckoning with the reality of the yoga industry. I was discovering that it was not the safe spiritual haven it claimed to be but yet another arm of white sup remacy. Wellness not actually for all but for the privileged few.

Being extricated from any external systems of spirituality freed me to seek my own connections to God, to the God of my own understanding. God to me feels like Mother Nature, the stars, the moon, the energy of love, synchronicities, water, creativity, dreams, inspiration, ancestral nudges. God feels like infinity, existence itself, life force, chi, the very matter of our beingness, our souls. God feels like goodness, like love.

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When I started seeing what was happening in Ga za, I felt something that couldn’t have been more counterintuitive. My faith deepened. Instead of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I found myself thinking: There must be more than this temporary human existence. Those precious, pure, innocent souls cannot possibly have just vanished in their martyrdom. They must have returned home.

I never knew much about Isl am beyond what I’ve been acculturated to think here in the so-called west. The lies perpetrated by Isl amaph0bia, of Mu slims or Ara bs being extr3mist and hateful. I was in college during 9/11, my psyche and values were developed enough to know not to preemptively hate or judge someone based on their identity, but my politics were far from informed enough to identify or interrogate the pr0paganda that is reinforced at all turns of American life, from mainstream media to schools and entertainment.

My own biases and ignorance became clear to me as I heard myself trying to rationalize what I was seeing:

• Ga za has always been a place of unrest.

• That’s happening over there.

• It’s tragic but there’s always collateral damage with w@r.

• There’s nothing I can do about it anyway.

But as I saw the images of children blown apart, crushed by tanks, snipered in the head, I knew that there was nothing that could rationalize what was happening. My heart was shattered, I was horrified and shocked. And I found myself praying harder than I ever had before.

In these images, what I also saw was Pale stinians praying and reinforcing their faith, amidst the most unjust of circumstances. I learned about how much Pale stinians love their land, not because they feel entitled to it, but because they have tended to it for generations. I was surprised to learn that Mu slims love Jesus as their prophet. Jesus, who had been born in Bethlehem, in Pal estine. Jesus, whom I had written letters to as a child.

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I am not making a case for religion, generally or for myself personally. I am not interested in adhering to any externally imposed and hierarchically gate-kept structures of faith. I respect those who are religious and I have no desire to judge or disagree with how anyone else experiences (or doesn’t experience) God.

I am also very much aware of the harm of organized religion which of course includes Catholicism. This is not intended to wash away any of that.

I reject all harm and abuse, and, I find myself deeply moved that it was the Catholic Pope who called Ga za’s only Catholic Church every single night for 18 months until his death. It was the Pope who said this was not a war, but cruelty, cruelty against children, bambinos. It was the Pope who has been one of the only world leaders to stand with Pal estine, to recognize and speak for truth, justice, compassion, and humanity beyond racial and religious divides.

I keep crying looking at this illustration here, at the top of this essay. Perhaps it is because it encapsulates a hope, a prayer for that purity of spirit that we cannot seem to create in this embodied human existence. A hope, a prayer that on the other side, the Pope has arrived in heaven and greets with open arms the martyred bambinos of Pal estine.

I am not religious, but my personal faith tells me that this is true. That their spirits live on.

May peace be upon them all.