Looking Out

When I was little, I would go to church with my family every week. I sang in the choir, completed my sacraments, and waited to understand the almost hypnotized state I would see my parents, neighbors, and teachers enter during prayer. With their eyes closed, mouths murmuring, my eyes would watch the people around me following their choreography of mass. I would deploy all my attempts of play; making faces with friends, going down to the basement to secretly dance on the stage, harmonizing psalms with the people in my pew, looking out the colorful stained glass windows. I waited for the spirit to move me, and sometimes at church I pretended it did, but as I grew and learned more about modern, globalized christianity - particularly catholicism - I couldn't understand the church as my ultimate home of God. Guilt and hope laced together in a superficial suppression, but I admit to you that I still search for a divine spirit to guide me, for a bright light to transform sunrays into stories on the wall that glow in the morning. Now I just do so elsewhere - in the memory of a night with my friends, in the park at dusk, in the cities I've lived in, while dreaming in the night and in the day, in the minds of people I love. Knowing now that a wide variety of architecture can offer sanctuary for my questions, no matter how abstracted they might be from the construction I have always known, I can see colorful light in any story, even if I don't know where they will end.