For my entire life I have participated in the catholic faith. As a child I was brought to church every Sunday. I was forced to go to Sunday school, attended a Christian middle school and attended a catholic high school. Religion has been forced down my throat as long as I can remember. I became very bored and uninterested with it very early on. Yes, I was learning, but that didn’t mean I firmly believed in what I was learning. I know all these Bible stories and different lessons, but I don’t really care about them. I remember going to church and not being able to fall asleep in those tough wooden benches. The sermons I had sometimes resonated but that was a long time down the line. It took me around the time between the ages of ten and thirteen to understand, but I remember going to church with my sisters when around four or five years old just walking back and forth across the benches waiting for us to leave. I started going less and less and made my return a few years later and started Sunday school.

           Sunday School. It was a place I dreaded. I had to wake up at 8 o’clock on a Sunday morning to get to the church’s Sunday school at 9 o’clock. For the most part it was like regular school except every class was about Catholicism. The school operated by grade, so I was with kids around my age. What I hated was that I never made friends that easily, but I’ve always been bad at that. A lot of the kids already knew each other, and I was the odd one out. It was always difficult for me to open my mouth at times but its not that I couldn’t, I was just scared to speak up. I was already tired of going to church, having to go to a class and then having to attend a mass right after was awful. The thought of the end of Sunday school was amazing was what I thought.

          The adventure of a confirmed catholic can be long. In my experience you have to formally experience your first communion. Communion is believed to be the breaking of bread as the body of Christ and the wine as the blood of Christ. During a mass you are allowed to come to the altar and take part in communion. In my and many other churches children aren’t allowed to take communion until a certain age. Try to understand that I went to Sunday school for a few years just to eat a piece of bread that was blessed. That’s only the halfway point to confirmation. It took me three more years before I could be confirmed in the church.

          I remember when I went through the most important time in a Catholic’s religious journey, Confirmation. I was finally confirmed in the church! I remember when my Sunday school teacher told me at 13, “Now that that you’re confirmed you can decide when you want to come to church”. I haven’t been to that church since. It started off as a break from getting ready every Sunday, to “do I even believe in anything they are saying?” Catholicism is completely faith based. Believing in Jesus is like having a blindfold on and doing a trust fall with someone who walked away and believing they’ll come back to catch you. I remember learning a few of the technicalities of Catholicism in school and it is not for the weak. To believe in something with barely any concrete evidence is difficult. Many historians believe Jesus was a man recognized for miracles, but he was probably doing modern science, or he had really good luck when in front of the right people. It is confirmed that Jesus was a man that walked on this Earth thousands of years ago but hasn’t been acknowledged for anything else the Bible has said about him.

          In high school I had a religion or “theology” class my freshman year and I realized that I’m not really sure about religion. I remember learning about the Holy Trinity, let me explain it to you to the best of my memory and ask yourself “How much does this make sense?” God the Father, God the son and God the Holy spirit make up the trinity. They are all God, but none of them are each other. The father is not the son, the son is not the father, the spirit isn’t either of the two, but they are all God. The reason they aren’t each other is because they allegedly came into existence before time itself had begun but before one and the other. That’s the reason one is the father, one is the son, and one is the spirit, because they appeared in a certain order. Now that you have heard about one of the few concepts that Catholicism has to offer do you understand why you must need 100% faith? I sadly can’t put my all into that.

          Lately I haven’t been believing in anything. My sisters still go to church while I spend my Sunday like any other day. Sunday is just the second day of the weekend or the first day of the week to me. I think my belief in God is tied to who I am as a person. Being someone who takes things literally it’s hard for me to believe something that solely takes faith. I have come to realize that I’m not a true believer in God, but also not unaware that there is a God out there.

          I don’t want to be one of those people that cry out to God when they are in trouble. I think it’s hypocritical. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. To me “Oh my God” is a popular saying, In the church they say don’t say the lord’s name in vain. My belief in God is faint, its not something I always think about. Without prayer or God in my life I find that I’ve never really relied on him to begin with. There weren’t many moments when I thought I need to pray, it was always initialized in a controlled space. I am not a true believer in God. I don’t know what I believe in. I live life day by day. To those who believe in baptizing their babies at birth I think they should wait, let them decide if they believe in this or that. I think religion is something sacred, something someone should truly believe in.

          For me I’m not sure if I’ve ever believed in Catholicism, at some point I definitely did, but the belief in God kept fading as life went on. Prayers just became a routine and nothing I actually meant. There was no sincerity in my words or sincere thoughts through my actions. I stopped taking part in communion and finally, the idea dawned on me, “Am I really firm in what I believe?”