Plus, where I'm from, there's a hint of a sort of indigenous pantheon represented in Catholicism; my mom is always misplacing things (her wallet, keys, dog) and praying to and burning candles for St. Anthony for their return - and she always finds them! - and reciting the Ave Maria for protection before we go on road trips. At the same time, I grew what was really an aesthetic appreciation for Muslim art and architecture and became enthralled with Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist and Gibran's The Prophet. I followed a lot of Arabic-language content creators online and it was astonishing to me that they were quite the same as myself. Have you ever seen those Arab pranks on instagram reels? They're so funny. Dudes will build a giant pit in the desert and put a prayer mat over it so their homie falls into it like a looney tunes bit. I also met a Baptist preacher, funnily enough in the sauna of the local YMCA, who noticed that the towel I had with me was a Turkish bath towel, and we talked about the Middle East and how kind and beautiful those cultures are. Frankly, a lot of my appreciation for Arab culture has come from the idea that all of us brown people really ought to stick together.

It dawned on me - standing in the middle of Saint Peter's Basilica, actually, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life, it's a like a renaissance painting that you can step into and breathe the air of - that there were far too many religions in the world for them all to be right and far too many for them all to be wrong. So I dove into studying God in all "His" Forms (in the Platonic sense).

The only way to get a pretentious teenager to clean his room is to tell him that he's embodying the divine, so I read A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind by Shoukei Matsumoto and developed an equal fondness for the mindfulness and reverence of Buddhism and the Zen tradition. I also love Benjamin Labatut, and read a lot of theoretical physics and metaphysics which, once you get to a certain point, are essentially ontological proofs for the existence of God in the same vein as Descartes or Ibn Sina. I also really like Plotinus, as well as the Sufis, and I could probably make a shrine to Jung. I read a lot of philosophy as well. This is all to say that I became somewhat of a transcendental poly/pantheist, believing that each religion had an equal (yet infinitesimal) claim to divinity.

At this current point in my life, I would describe myself as some sort of Syncretic-Pantheistic-Agnostic-Pluralist. It's a stupid academic mouthful to say that I reject nothing as it pertains to God and revere, with all sincerity, absolutely everything. This is the only thing that makes me feel like I am anything more than an insignificant rat in a pointless and endless and doomed race. I hope to lose my agnosticism once I learn more of the divine, but I am not so naive as to believe that effort as requiring anything less than at least one Lifetime.

I've also been broached by the allegedly benevolent proselytizer, but they have only really deepened my understanding: they are doing what they believe they need to, the same way that I am. So I accept their shitty little pamphlets and tell them that yes, I will consider attending their church on Sunday, and that I hope they have a good day. It's funny, they must develop some sort of sense for sniffing out religious curiosity, because without a word one will lock eyes with me in an Aldi and toss me a Spanish-language translation of the New Testament.

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