I first walked into La Sagrada Familia beside someone who believed, sincerely, that Adam and Eve once walked the earth alongside dinosaurs. His faith was almost tender in its certainty. I found it comical, yes, but also unsettling. There was little he could teach me about history or theology, yet his devotion to symbolism far exceeded mine.

I came from a tradition without temples. Raised under Lucumí, a branch of Yoruba spirituality, faith was never pinned to stone or crowned with spires. It lived in chants and drums, in blood and feathers, in laughter that echoed back from the land itself. We prayed not for forgiveness, but for shelter and health. Faith moved. It breathed.

Inside the basilica, while he wandered in awe beneath bending ceilings and rising buttresses, I stood still. The grandeur did not move me. The light was beautiful, but theatrical. Hollow despite its height. Imposing, but not safe. What moved me instead were the people. They had watched this monument grow stone by stone across generations, faithful not only to what it was, but to what it promised to become.

Days later, beneath the smoke of a swinging censer in Santiago de Compostela, something shifted. Briefly, painfully, I believed. Not in God, but in Mary. In endurance. In a woman asked to carry divinity and sorrow at once. And then the smoke choked me, the spell broke, and faith dissolved with fresh air.

What lingered was the question. Not about belief itself, but about the systems that dress it in marble and gold. Can faith survive outside its steeples? Or did we build monuments because we were afraid it might otherwise float away?

It All Begins Here

It All Begins Here

It All Begins Here