Faith in Stone, Faith in Stillness

I first walked into La Sagrada Familia in 2018, accompanied by someone who was raised Christian. His infatuation with churches, cathedrals, basilicas, and the justifiable miracles of Christianity was both comical and doubt-inducing. Comical in its sincerity and ignorance, for he believed that Adam and Eve once walked beside dinosaurs. The idea that Eden could resemble Jurassic Park made me realize that there was not much he could teach me about his heritage, but I did not dismiss the fact that his faith in symbolism was stronger than mine.

I grew up in Cuba, under the influence of the lucumí religion; a branch of Yoruba culture that emphasizes the spirituality found in nature. We do not have temples, churches, or cathedrals dedicated to our Orishas (religious deities). Our belief resides in the spiritual connection with the land and deities whose essences are woven into the fabric of the world. We connect with our divines through chants, dances, echoing laughters, and reverberating drums. We dress our saints with colorful feathers, animal blood, sea shells, and rust. Faith is boundless and untamed. We pray, not for forgiveness, but for shelter and good health.

We both struggled with the other’s traditions and understanding of faith. He found disgust in my sacrificial practices—killing a chicken was too much, but he could rationalize sacrificing a lamb to God. I, on the other hand, had many thoughts on his faith’s manifestation of power and hierarchical structure, but did not express them out loud. He believed, and I knew that there was nothing I could or should have said or done to shake that up.

We circled the basilica before entering. We both observed how meticulously the apostles and saints adorned the facade, and I couldn’t help but wonder: when have we ever hung pictures or statues of ourselves outside our house?

Once inside, I stayed motionless while he walked around the basilica in awe of every tile and crevice. Emotionally moved by how the ceiling bent and how the buttresses rose. I silently admired his admiration, but I could not connect with it. The basilica did not move me.

Not its gothic grandeur. Not the tourists pirouetting and wielding cameras and selfie sticks like cruciform swords. The stained glasses told a story with its passing blue and orange lights, but all I felt was the coldness of its theatrical stage: hollow despite its height, shallow despite its depth; filled with dancers who couldn’t dance, and people who couldn’t pray. Imposing, yes, but not impressive, not saintly, not safe. I remember how pliable its stone felt, not because of architectural weaknesses, but because of how impressionable they made it look. Don’t touch this, don’t touch that. Were they afraid a million hands would strip away the holiness inscribed on its walls?

This was no longer a sanctuary for god and his creed, but an attempt to stretch faith by giving it too much room. To pin the sacred to stone so it wouldn’t float away. To canonize the land and enclose both faith and the divine.

No, what moved me was the people’s conviction. The people of Barcelona saw something else entirely; something a tourist could not see, least of all, a non believer.

They had witnessed this monument grow stone by stone, year by year, from church to basilica: an evergreen child growing under their eyes, partaking in their wars and their strives for independence. Not yet functional. Not yet sanctified. But fully thankful and faithful to them. The sanctity, for them, was not only in what the basilica was, but in what it promised to be. It was already a living monument of generational devotion dating back to the 1880s, when the first stone was placed. Each tesserae represented a fulfilled miracle that added to an inheritance of beliefs passed down not through marbleized doctrine, but through their blood, body, and soul. This basilica belonged to them.

And so they returned to something primal; a kind of innocence similar to my companion’s ignorance. Like children newly smitten by the world’s delights. They stood in awe; not of God, but of the act of believing. The basilica was their dusk and dawn. Faith made visible, restrictively touchable, but photographable; and to those who kissed the floor upon entering, palpable. Faith, converted into architecture.

A few days later, in Santiago de Compostela, I visited the cathedral that marks the end of a thousand pilgrimages. Same story, different narrator. An overelaborated facade meant to display the intricacies and complexities of the Christian [Catholic] faith.

Once inside, it did not matter where you wanted to look, the golden altar supported by golden angels illuminated in golden hues was all one could see. Even when facing the opposite direction, the resplandor from the altar and the heat from the surrounding candles made it feel like a small sun was shining behind me. I smirked at the irony of plating their silver with a layer of gold leaf in an attempt to mimic divinity and purity. Gold, a resplandecent metal whose purity and shininess determines brittleness, and whose strength is found in the mixture of other materials, but on its own, only equates to frailty. I wondered if leaving the altar shine in pure silver would make me appreciate it more. There was beauty and uniqueness, yes! But there was something unsettling in the excess and their desire to hide. Behind its purity, there were traces of divine opulence bloated with guilt, avarice, and hidden shame. Whoever designed this altar cared more about opulence than they did about realness. Still, the faithful arrived in waves, heads bowed, and cameras lifted, even after mass had started.

At the center of it all swung the botafumeiro, a silver-plated censer weighing 60-something kilograms that oscillated above the crowd like a metronome of righteousness, piety, and devotion. Left to right, gauging religiousness by flinging incense into every corner of the cathedral, perhaps even targeted toward those of us unsure if we belonged there at all. I stood beneath the burning air, thick with the scents of charcoal and the familiar sanctimonious sermon. Then, something shifted. Briefly, quietly, and suffocatingly painful, I believed.

Not in God. Not in miracles. Not in the paintings and sculptures of the canonized. But in Mary. I believed that a woman could hold so much pain and still be called holy. That she could birth not a messiah, but a symbol of endurance, of unity, of resilience. In that moment, she wasn’t the ageless virgin, she was the threshold. The gate and the bridge between mortality and divinity. And I wanted to cross it.

The idea of her existence felt so real and comforting that I was willing to trade my life for hers just so she didn’t have to feel her pain.

I felt sorry for her, for everything the world had put her through. I needed to embrace her, and in turn, embrace my mother. To let them know that they weren’t alone in their suffering, that there was a a heaven as a reward for a mother’s suffering. I wanted to hug her and tell her that people would honor and revere me, her son. That I was alive and happy. To run and swing my arms wide open before her saintly presence. I wanted to replace the dammed tears with a smile on her story. I wanted to tell her that I would have given humanity’s future up if I knew that my ascension meant her perpetual sorrow.

Then I stepped outside. Because I’m asthmatic, and the smoke, just like my mother, tends to be too much. The fumes were filling gaps faster than faith could reach, and I was choking on it. And just like that, Mary vanished. The spell broke. Faith, whatever form it had taken, dissolved with the fresh air. I inhaled, clear and sharp. And the sacred exhaled.

But the moment faded. Almost as quickly as it came. And I was left wondering, not about Mary, or the censer, or the sanctified stone, but about the system that made such belief feel so distant, so theatrical, so conditional. I wanted to hold onto it, but couldn’t feel the warmth on the cold stone of the cathedral nor the smoke of the censer. So I wondered, once again, about the difference between religion and faith.

Can the Christian faith survive outside its steeples? Outside its dogmas and doors and gilded thresholds? Can it still speak when stripped of its kaleidoscopic stained glass and incense, when no one is watching and no one is paying?

And if it can, then why did we bury it in so much marble, gold, and guilt? Why did we build a religion based on the son, but not on the miraculous mother? Why did we wrap something as personal and intimate as faith in velvet mantles, tiaras, rituals, and hierarchy? How did a movement born in light robes and sandals become a religion built in metal and stone? Carpenter, not Smith, not Mason!

We did not begin with cathedrals and gods. We began with surprise and awe. With the ache of looking and not knowing what looked back. Before we had words for heaven, we had shivers beneath Shango’s thunderclouds and reverence before Prometheus’s flame. Before we begged for mercy, we simply listened. To rivers that never slept, to winds that chilled our bones, to the breath between birth and rot. It was not belief we held in those days, but attention. The sacred was not a doctrine. It was a pulse. A sensation that arrived and lingered without explanation.

But awe is not easy to quantify. So we did what we always do when faced with the infinite: we gave it edges. We built forms to hold it, to bind it, to name its shape. We carved our fears and wonders onto caves, painted it onto ceilings and walls, wrote it into laws. Drew borders between sky and heaven. Made maps of the invisible. And whatever we could not explain, we delegated it to God.

We turned our attention into an allegiance. Our sensation into a scripture. Our awe into orthodoxy. What began as a tremor in our chests hardened into a blindfold we called “his work”. We named him God. And then we asked where He lived. And when the answer was silence, we built Him a house. Was it out of devotion or out of fear of his wrath? Did we ground the divine to expedite the absolution of our crimes?

Who decided God needed a thousand homes? Why did we build temples and thresholds and golden gates to something we claimed was already everywhere? Did we housed Him to humanize Him, as the Greeks once did? Or did we try to give form to what we feared would otherwise remain invisible? We sinned, we hid, we prayed. Then we stepped outside, rinsed, tithed, and repeated.

And so, in His name, we built temples, and then empires. What began as shelter grew teeth and hunger. Faith shifted from presence to permission. No longer found in the wind or the water, the sacred was buried in scrolls, sanctioned by liturgy, sealed in legitimacy. And the moment we strayed from the script, we were cast as heretics: uninvited, unclean, unsaved.

The priest replaced the whisper. The altar replaced the tree. The stained glass filtered light that used to be free. And worship, once a tremble in the chest, a caress in the skin, became a performance of power, a choreography of control. A ritual of symbolic cannibalism. An architecture of affluence and influence, sanctified by hierarchy and shrouded in monarchical robes.  We stored our faith in echoing chambers designed to amplify our voices for fear of his silence. Anointments? On whose authority? If we ever want the world to hear our prayers as it once did, we would have to tear down the barriers that made faith harder to reach!

Or are we trying to compensate for Mary’s homelessness? For the silence she was given in place of sanctuary? She is the miracle for God’s sake! The one who birthed divinity in a stable, a barn, or a cave. So why did we, out of delusion or guilt, respond by gilding cathedrals and dismissing her pain? Why do we anoint men who God himself did not bless? The miracle disappears from most pulpits with an echoing silence because we forced her to an eternity of sorrow and pain. God once blessed a woman, but now only men are allowed to talk to Him?

Perhaps this was inevitable. We are a species obsessed with performance and permanence. We cannot bear the thought that something sacred might disappear if left unguarded, unwritten, unnamed. And so we build. We level mountains and carve our fears into monuments,not out of reverence, but out of dread. We believe that unless the holy is housed, it will flee.

We scapegoated Pilate for nailing Christ to the cross, and then we proceed to keep him there for an eternity to honor his death more than his life. We kill him every time we celebrate his death. We honor that he died for us, and keep asking him to die some more. Each time, crucifying him into that cross, restraining him with sermons that he wouldn’t approve of. Reminding him that he was not allowed to live, but that he is free to die. His suffering minted, sold, sculpted, and framed. His name used to subdue those who do not share that faith.

We confuse memory with marble. Stillness with enclosure. We build towers no longer to reach the divine, but to remind ourselves that it was once nearby. We etch names onto stained glass as if forgetting them would unmake the miracles and their lives.

But in all our building, did we preserve the sacred, or did we bury it beneath the edifice’s weight?

Is the earth not a dome vast enough? We already have a direct view into the heavens, and yet we insist on building roofs between us and the sky, as if divinity only listens indoors. We block out the stars, then paint their likeness above the altar. We obstruct the original just to replicate it. As if awe must be framed before it can be felt. As if we could do better than those to whom we pray.

“Yes, God, bless me, but knock first.

Come quietly, for you work in mysterious ways,

and tend to punish in waves of destruction and quakes.

Drift through the cracks.

Be with me after I sin, but not while I commit the crime.

Enter through my stained and tainted windows,

the ones you placed on my face.

Let me blink when I err, and open them to judge others on your behest.

And if my plead is still too quiet,

and my whispers you cannot hear,

here’s my tithed soul,

begging that you remain gilded.

That you remain mine.

That you remain near.”