For those of you who have read my About Me page, you know that I was raised in the Christian Church. My uncle was an elder in our church and my whole family, cousins and grandparents included, went to our Pentecostal church most Sundays. I no longer identify as a Christian, but probably not for the reasons you think. I am forever grateful that I was brought up in what was to me such a loving religion.
I moved around a lot in my life, by the time I was eighteen I had lived in five states. After we left our family’s church, we stopped going as much. By the time I was in high school, we only went on holidays. I started going to a Catholic high school, which is about as far as you can get from modern Pentecostal with still being in the Christian faith. Seeing this foreign form of what it means to be a Christian for the first time, I started to question everything. To be clear, I am in no means bashing or being negative about the Catholic faith as a whole. Every religion has wonderful people. I am not even bashing my high school. My beliefs were just different, and I had been in such a bubble I was shocked by how diverse Christianity could be.
My first year out of high school I went to a Christian college. I lost all of my faith there, again, not for the reasons you think. In a school of barely 2,000, four kids tragically lost their lives that year in four separate incidents. It literally felt like one person was dying after the next. I had never really experienced death before, and although I was not close to any of these people, it was a lot to wrap my brain around. That people my age can die unexpectedly. Death had already been taking a toll on my life, but this shook me to my core.
I craved nothing more than to feel God’s presence, something that I can only describe as my entire body lighting up or goose bumps times a thousand, but nothing happened. I prayed for answers, and got nothing return. I now see that I had to go through this phase of darkness because it was all part of the plan, but at the time it was a rock bottom and lead to me losing my faith. I cried more frequently, often for no reason. I couldn’t sleep alone because I was afraid something might happen to me and no one would be there to help.
Jump forward to me transferring schools because I felt like I had to get the hell out of that death-hole. I started yoga and to put that whole story, which you can read here, into one line, my entire life changed. I began studying other religions, particularly eastern religions, and was blown away by the synchronicities. Hinduism has so much in common with Christianity. Buddhism can go hand in hand with Wicca. The list goes on.
At the core, pretty much all religions have the same base – love. The stories may differ, but the morals don’t. I found my faith in this. Across the globe, before people of different religions began to intermix via travel, people were coming up with the same results. So, this is why I no longer consider myself a Christian. I do not want to put myself in a box. I am a little bit of everything and I am nothing, and that is beautiful to me.
So, what is Christianity to me? Christianity is loving everyone as if they were your best friend. It is living without judgement of the world around you. Christianity is praising the higher power that created us and is in each and every one of us. Christianity is fair and just. It is, in a word, and like pretty much every other religion, love. Do I celebrate Christmas? Hell yes. But it is to gather with my family more than to celebrate the birth of Jesus. How do I practice religion? In meditation, yoga, being in nature, honoring my body by eating a plant-based diet, many more ways and living each day with compassion and kindness. Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading about my own personal beliefs, and kindly I ask that you respect them, even if you do not agree.
Love,
Cazmera