Declarations_Of faith

There are times when time itself almost feels like water running down on your body washing away all shame, guilt, and regret. Sometimes it is true with taking a shower, soaking all sins on your skin like a sponge absorbing excuses and mistaking them for reasons in doing what you think is right, until it all drifts away to the drain. This shower takes years. You become a new person baptized by age. Bathing becomes the beatification of an old self as a gesture of gratitude for experiencing a type of suffering that has birthed this newfound consciousness. As time withdraws from your body, a corpse is being lifted from your chest into the air by an unknown being in the shape of light. This is the mystery of faith.

I pray into the darkness of reason—of walking into an empty hallway untouched by light. The walls are fragments of an unlived life, where unrealized dreams reside. In this house of hallways, where no artificial light may occur, faith is the only source of illumination. It is a false light that allow me to navigate through these halls. We do not invite ourselves here but only the image of ourselves. I imagine that the walls are made of mirrors, and I see every movement in my body in the darkness. I trust my body that it moves the way it should move. Just how I imagine it. Then, one foot in front of the other. Let my fingers caress the walls of this hallway like tracing a map. But this map is an empty plane. Legitimized by language, I find myself—inside this house of hallways—going back where I came in. With the exit right behind me, tracing my footsteps proved to be much more difficult. The existence of the exit depends upon my utterance. I knew that the exit is not the real exit because I doubt that it is. In doubt, things become what they are not, and all names become a misnomer. Doubt destabilizes language and only faith makes everything true.

The entrance is the place that extinguishes all doubts. As I trace back my footsteps, the terrain changes. The map changes. Faith held all the walls of the hallway the same, but it wasn’t enough to give me the vision of what is about to come.