My Relationship with Religion
By: Isabella Strom
Tags: Experience, Religion, Catholicism

I wasn’t always into religion like my peers. Some people I knew would always go to church every Wednesday and Sunday with their family. I never did, I always acted as if I went to church on the weekends, thinking that was how I could fit in with my friends.

My family isn’t as religious as most. My father grew up in a Baptist home, but eventually, as he grew older, he became non-denominational, meaning he is respectful of any Christian denomination. My mother, on the other hand, was born into Catholicism and still follows that religion to this day. My parents made the decision not to force religion on my siblings and I because they respect whatever we believe. With this decision I was never baptized as a baby and our family never went to church unless it was an occasion that involved my Mom’s side of the family.

When I was around 10 or 11 years old, I started to become interested in religion, specifically Catholicism and how it works. I had my grandmother buy me a monthly subscription for books with devotions for that month. There are two definitions of devotion, the love or loyalty for a person or activity and the second definition is religious observations. In a way, both definitions intertwine with each other.

I would say my own prayer for my family and close friends, after that I would say the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary’ once before I would finally drift off to sleep. But I slowly stopped doing it just because I felt like it wasn’t important to me anymore. I did feel a little guilty that my grandma spent all that money for me not to read the monthly devotion books that kept coming in. I was really disappointed in myself because I lost faith in that moment and I felt God didn’t love me as much as the people who went to church every week and the people who were baptized.

While in my break with God, I felt like my world was slowly falling apart. I started falling out of love with myself and religion because when you are friends with constant church-goers, you feel like you’re so out of place because you have no idea what they’re talking about when they talk about disciples or scripture. It wasn’t until the passing of my great-grandmother and my grandfather when I started being infuriated with my faith. I thought at that moment “Why would God take the most important people in my life away when they were supposed to help me pave the path to my future?”

Depression and anxiety have been on my shoulders since I was about 12–13. This was one of the reasons I decided to get back into going to church and trying to bring my faith back into my life. I let my mental health guide me to wherever it wanted to take me, and slowly it started to control my life.

It wasn’t until September 2018 when I started to make religion a part of my life again. One of my best friends helped me push myself back into the groove of religion. She started taking me to adoration with her and her family, who are very religious. Then she invited me to go to RCIA, which is Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. In RCIA classes, you can learn more about Catholicism and they introduce you to the idea of Baptism, even if you are above the age recommended, which is an infant.

For RCIA classes, I go to Prince of Peace with one of my friends and my sister. There is a priest who leads the discussion with a room full of people. He has a slideshow he presents in front of everyone and everyone is allowed to speak their minds and ask questions about the topic. After the class-wide presentation, everyone splits up into groups and has their own little discussion about the topic, go over the notes they took and what they’ve learned that night. One night my friend Lisa, my sister and I asked if we could do our own group after the presentation since we were the only teenagers. They said of course, so we went to own our room with some snacks and we just had an amazing talk about the presentation and with our extra time we just hung around and told stories to each other and I have never laughed so much in my life.

We started going more often I realized how much I missed being in the religious scene. Scripture is sacred writings of a certain religion. I started getting really into scripture, I started writing down quotes that really spoke to me and I reflect on it and how it makes me feel.

One quote that has always stuck to me is “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isaiah 41:10). The reason this quote has always stuck with me is because when things get tough, instead of putting all that weight on my shoulders like I used to, I’ve tried to hand my problems to God himself by praying about it and looking for solutions as well. Sometimes, I feel like he can only do so much to help. With that, I try to help myself out as much as possible, which is more than I used to do for myself in earlier years.

Over the course of these couple of months, I’ve truly become happier with myself. I’m not sure if its because I have found myself into a religion I like and that is so accepting of others, but I’d like to think so. If younger me saw what I was doing today I think she would have gone into religion earlier in her life. I feel like she would be happier and have less stress on her shoulders about ‘acting religious’.

Today, I’m happy with the friends I have and I’m grateful that God put them into my life for a reason and helping me understand my purpose. I feel like I understand why some people do this just out of the blue, maybe they need help just like we all do.