Losing My Religion

It came to me after a dream. A memory of myself as a seven-year-old girl. Better than a memory. I was my younger self - a sense of my own innocence, pure and poignant like a violin melody. It was like stumbling upon a baby deer on a hike in The Angeles Forest: I got really still so as to not frighten it, pausing for as long as I could to savor the moment.

Until the age of seven, I lived in a modest ranch style house on a small residential street in Medellin, Colombia. My grandmother and my two aunts were my family. They were loving, kind, dependable and firm. I’d seen a black-and-white cartoon of a stork delivering a baby in a cradle to a young couple's doorstep. Without ever being told, I believed that was how I had arrived at my grandmother’s doorstep.

The house was quiet except for meal times when it was a flurry of activity to prepare and serve meals for the family: my aunts and grandmother, my private uncle, my contemplative grandfather and of course, me. My favorite meal was “carne en polvo,” a dry, fine ground beef served with a side of white rice and a dollop of ketchup, which I'd ask my grandmother to mix into the rice for me. The simplicity of that meal made me wiggle in my chair.

On most nights there were prayer circles at my house. The hushed tones of a circle of women and the repetition of the prayer which starts, “Padre Nuestro que estás en el Cielo,” lulling me into a kind of trance. We went to church twice a week and, if I ever got tired, my grandmother would let me rest my head on her lap. My grandmother, the great matriarch, ran a very holy house.

“God is always with us,” she’d say. “He sees everything we do, so we must be good. To show him we’re worthy of his generous love.” Her words weren’t meant to scare me. They were actually comforting. God was my accountability partner. In him, I had a friend and guide, someone to keep me on the up-and-up. He was also my protector and he loved me: no matter what.

God was as present as the great grandfather clock in our house, which would tick, tock away the day then CLANG, CLANG on the hour. My childhood ticked away in peace - playing, daydreaming, longing for something just at the edge of my consciousness…a distant memory of another family, elsewhere. I relished the quiet of that house because outside in the distant Medellin, it was all noise and mayhem. Ronald Regan’s War on Drugs was in full swing and Medellin’s own Pablo Escobar was enemy number one. Escobar was a caged tiger and Medellin was its rattled cage taking the lashings of a fierce animal, desperate for escape and freedom. Bombs were pockmarking the city - people were being gunned to death or stabbed on the streets.

I shared a room with my favorite aunt, Alicia. She’d sleep with a pillow over her head and snore. I’d lie awake, my eyes fixed on the curtains. The light from outside our bedroom window illuminated a figure just beyond. An ancient monk cloaked in a long garb and hoodie, stood guard outside my window each night, or so I was convinced. He’d walk ten slow steps in one direction, then turn and walk back the other way. His silhouette moved back and forth all night. I didn’t understand why he was there. I only accepted that mysterious forces were present and they made themselves known, only in the night.

Across town, I had an aunt who ran a hair salon out of her home. Her entrepreneurial husband, my uncle, always had a joke for me and took me on errands with him. Tio Jorge loved to laugh and became giddy over little things, like getting ice cream or eating fresh mango from one of the street vendors. To this day, it remains one of my favorite qualities in any person. Their six children, my cousins, were all jokesters - confident, outspoken and rambunctious.

“You never speak unless it’s something important, do you?” my older cousin commented. I smiled and nodded, feeling seen. For me, there was joy in observing people, soaking them in. I didn’t need to talk as much as everyone around me did. I loved visiting my cousins' house but also the moment I could come home to the grandfather clock, to the supervision of my three holy caretakers, and the song of my grandmother’s birds - we had two patios at opposite corners of that long house and melodious birds cooing at each corner.

Life in my house was similar to that in a monastery: peaceful, protected, and full of prayer. But I could feel other darker forces present. There was the night one of my uncles arrived at our house unannounced, maniacally drunk and cackling while my aunt served him coffee and begged him to keep it down. There was the night that my aunt and uncle threw a party on their terrace. It was a brilliant and warm night and cumbia rang from the rooftop. Couples of all ages danced, clinging to each other, and no one paid any attention to me. I could feel heat radiating between those bodies - and though I had no idea what it meant, I knew that someday I’d want that closeness. Someday that same palpable heat would light me up and then maybe, burn me.

My school, San Juan Bosco, towered over the neighborhood of Belen - it looked like a combination between a church and a castle to my childhood eyes. Suddenly there was news from America. I was to leave Medellin and come to live in California, with my other family. On my last day of school, after mass services, the nuns approached me in the church.

“We have a gift for you, Liliana,” their faces warm and loving. I loved the nuns, even though I knew my older cousins hated them. They handed me the most beautiful painted print of the Virgin Mary carrying baby Jesus. Both mother and son’s eyes fixed on me, baby Jesus’ arms outstretched as if wanting to embrace me. The background was a powder blue sky adorned by a constellation of stars in the shape of a heart. The print was glued over a small 6x5 wooden block so it could be hung. “All the nuns have prayed over it - take it with you to America. It will keep you safe and close to God.”

“I love it so much. Thank you, I will!” One of the beautiful gifts of childhood, to borrow a quote from Rumi, is that for a period of time we live life as though everything is rigged in our favor. I was loved. People were praying for me. I was special. I was heading to America, to be with my mom, brother and sister! I was headed to California - home to Disneyland, where the streets were paved with candy! And nothing could ever hurt me. Right?

For reasons unknown, that print never made it with me on the plane to my new homeland. That print wasn’t with me when I met my mother at the airport, or when she introduced me to a complete stranger who she referred to as my father. I had parents - I wasn’t delivered to my grandmother by a stork. I had been left in the care of my grandmother - and not contacted much at all - by these two strangers staring back at me.

Childhood can end abruptly but it can also end in waves. A huge tsunami came crashing down on me at LAX airport that day and for the next year. Maybe Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz said it best. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” Except there was no Toto to hold onto. There was no Mary and baby Jesus to remind me that elsewhere a team of people were rooting for me through prayer. There was no God here. God had stayed in Medellin with the nuns and my grandmother. Magic had stayed in Medellin, with the old monk guarding my window. From that day on, I charged forward - never wanting to look back - hustling to feel seen and loved. God was dead to me and I was alone in the Universe.

Once in my twenties, at my most lost, I was at my sister's house. I looked up and there was the print of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. Worn over time, but clearly the same one given to me. And there I was - one bloodied raw wound, exposed.

“Where did you get this?” My heart a rock in my throat.

Not knowing its history, my sister said “The aunts gave it to me on our last trip to Colombia. Isn’t it beautiful?”

“This is mine. It was given to me by the nuns when I left Colombia!” I said it sharply, unlike the way I normally speak - in defense of something stolen from me. Something lost. I wanted to tear it off her wall, run home and lay in bed with it, crying. How far removed I was from the child who’d received that print. I had been drawn to heat many times and it had burned me. I was melancholic and felt alienated from most of my family. And I had lost all connection with God. With magic.

My sister, one of the kindest souls alive - and one of my greatest protectors - saw my reaction and understood instantly. She went to the wall, grabbed the print and handed it to me.

“Take it. It’s yours,” she said, smiling.

The Universe is always speaking to us - my grandmother would say it’s God. And that moment was no exception. Having that precious relic from my childhood staring me in the face again - finding its way back to me after twenty years - I was being called back to that little girl. She was in desperate need of my attention - in dire need of love from my adult self. And fortunately, I listened to the call. My long healing journey began not long after that. That was over twenty years ago. A lot of hard personal work has been done to heal the past. I now understand what led my parents to send us off to Medellin. And I try to live once again with a third of the conviction I had as a child: as though everything in life is rigged in my favor.

The print still hangs in my office. It’s a reminder that I’m protected. I am loved. Someone out there - mostly these days, my amazing mom - is praying for me. And that will always give me comfort. I don’t go to Church anymore, even though I know it would please my mom. I’m a very spiritual person though, who believes in the power of prayer. I consider myself a child of God once again - and not God as the old patriarchal figure I used to hear about. This is a much larger all encompassing presence. A force alive in all things, which we can choose to tap into or not. It guides and protects me and always sings the same refrain: love is the greatest force alive, give it and receive it freely, because without it we would not survive.