I catch myself touching the cross around my neck all the time.
It’s not intentional, and usually I don’t even realize I’m doing it until my fingers find the small metal pendant resting against my chest, tracing its edges, or twirling the leather collar. It’s a gift from my father, which he received from his own. I remember being surprised he would gift such a thing to me. A firm agnostic, my father was raised by two traditional Puerto Rican Roman Catholics, and upon my upbringing, I received a similar push into the church.
I was baptized at only a few months old, following tradition. Catechism every Sunday, years of lessons before I was allowed to take my First Communion. Eventually pondering a confirmation name, like I was stepping into a version of myself that belonged permanently to the faith.
But belief, at least for me, never truly clicked.
Even as a kid, I was the kind of person who liked knowing how things worked. I loved science classes, documentaries and having the world make a little more sense than it did the day before. When religion was preached to me, I tried to approach it the same way: asking questions, looking for explanations, trying to understand the logic behind it.
But consistently, the answers I got were different from the ones I had grown used to. Instead of evidence, there was faith. Believe that it is true, as that’s the least you can do to appreciate the miracle of humanness that God has bestowed upon you.
I continued to ask questions, about miracles, about why some prayers were answered and others weren’t, about how God could be everywhere at once but also watching closely enough to care whether I missed mass. I just wanted explanations.
For a while, this led to extreme anxiety.
If belief was supposed to come naturally, what did it mean that it didn’t for me? I remember sitting in church and watching everyone bow their heads in prayer, wondering if something was wrong with me for not understanding. Was I doing it wrong? The language around me never felt neutral. Doubt became distance, and distance from God meant sin.
Now, as I’ve grown older and life has caught up to me, I can’t help but find myself reaching for the idea of faith once more. Not in a religious way, per se, but the element of tradition and culture that I once was surrounded by.
Doctrine is made of absolutes. It asks you to accept truths handed down from somewhere higher than yourself. Culture, however, is a collective. It’s music and language and morality that’s been passed down for generations. It’s saying bendición to my grandparents when answering their phone calls, and knowing the stories of the Bible by heart. It’s the small cross resting on my chest.
When I think about the faith my grandparents carry, it isn’t the doctrine that sticks out to me right away. It’s the way it shapes their everyday lives. Rosary recitations during car rides, hanging insignias in their home. The way my grandmother’s voice softens when she speaks about trusting in God, with a steady kind of reassurance that things will somehow be okay.
I admire the fact they have found comfort in life as a part of something larger and more meaningful. I can’t say I share their belief in that way, and I still find myself returning to the same questions that unsettled me as a child. But I can recognize the comfort that faith gives them, and I often find myself longing for that same sense of steadiness.
I can still hum the music played during mass from memory, and the stories of saints and miracles have shaped my moral framework. Spiritually, I might not live inside doctrine, but I can find the remnants of it in the way I care for others.
Maybe that’s why I still wear the cross.
Not a declaration of belief, but as a connection to the world I was raised in. To my father, who once owned it himself, and to the grandparents who tried their hardest to make sure I was raised in the church. To a culture that shaped me before I had the language to question it.
And sometimes, without thinking, my fingers still reach for it. And in that small, absent gesture, I feel something close to what faith might be.