2025-03-03

"To be a true Catholic, one must love Silence."

This has been in my mind for a long while now, and I think it's where I am rooted in when it comes to the exploration of my faith--even if I don't actually practice religious acts and in believing a single God. But I was still raised a Catholic and I haven't met a single person who was able to explain to me the main function of prayer. I have prayed in the past as a child and most of them contained a list of wishes, hopes, and requests for a reassurance. Needless to say that I have stopped doing it since I went to college and roamed this world open to whatever it gives me as an explanation to why is there an ominous presence of the absence of God.

I studied literature and was engrossed with Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy." To me, those were just cool texts that offer an alternative perspective of interpreting the sacred texts. I reveled in its creativity and imaginative depictions of Hell. But what I didn't know was I have been starting to form the foundations of what I will eventually believe in despite my lack of exposure to divine teachings.

Eventually, I reveled into the idea of void and nothingness. Everything that hinted at an active participation or expression of faith leads me to understanding this process as throwing oneself into the void. This nothingness is the actual equivalent of God that is silent and only reveals Himself through ways that the mind does not expect: in denials of its own self. I have taken this to the heart up to the point of actually applying this method to myself. Albeit the conditions were different and my motivations were not spiritual or religious in nature, it was a kind of self-emptying of my own understanding of myself or what I came to know about myself and my relation to art.

It happened in a long silence. That was my 40 days in the desert scenario. I tried a lot of things to fill this void that I created within myself. It is an exercise of self-abnegation but done without a goal in sight. I just did it intuitively because there was no other way for me to go forward. Continuing towards the path I knew was the way to hold on to my ego--presenting me a vision of myself that I used to love and want for myself at the time but it never brought any promise of stability. One would say that doubling down on that path is a leap of faith. But I took an entirely different path so I won't exactly be able to articulate how it would turn out. I may also argue that even not taking that route was also a leap of faith based on my own experience that led me to who I am today. All I can say that when I was in that moment of deciding which path to take: the silence was deafening.

There were no answer present. It is clear that I must cease thinking and evaluating. The risk is all the same. I just needed to choose the kind of person I wanted to be. I didn't know it back then but in hindsight, I'll say it was between a life of honesty or glory.

After the time of choosing, I would say that I have spent that time confining myself to silence: that is forcing myself not to write anything or publish anything. For some reason, I also did that intuitively. I can only say that it is possible that I hold the act of writing as a sacred activity, especially in the direction of creating art through the written language. What I meant to say to myself at that time was I possessed a power that I did not deserve.

What followed was silence and I deleted every notion of what I used to believed what I can do. All the while I am using that very skill to help myself get a living wage enough to keep my sanity afloat. I have never prayed. I have never written anything that would merit a violation to this covenant that I placed on myself.