Belief

I don’t always remember my dreams, but I remember this one, from a while ago: I died inside a car, the car was abandoned and rusty in the middle of a forest. So now I was dead, and away from the earth, in the center of a remote darkness. A presence was with me, I don’t know what type of presence, just some protective voice guiding me through death the way a doctor offers his arm to someone recently blinded. Everything around me was dark and empty, but in the distance I saw a small blur of light flickering on and off, with the speed of a steady heartbeat: one second of light, one second of darkness, one second of light again. What is that? I asked. The voice answered: that’s a universe ending and beginning again.

I like that dream because it felt true. There must be a scale for space and time radically more endless than ours, where the eons encompassing the beginning and end of our universe are just a quick pulse followed by another one. We don’t know much but this we know: the immensity we barely grasp is a small filament in a fabric of incomprehensible immensities.

I remember one fleeting moment from a Sunday spent with my family in Mexico City, years ago. They had tickets to Beethoven’s 9th symphony played by the National Philharmonic. I didn’t have a ticket (it was my fault). They went inside the theatre, and I stayed outside, deflated. I was in a small crowd of people, they were waiting for their boyfriends or their wives and I was just waiting for the concert to end. A young woman walked directly to me and asked unprompted if I wanted to go in. I said yes and she silently handed me a ticket for the first floor (the best seats), then she immediately went inside, and I lost sight of her. So, I got in, found an empty seat in one of the first rows, and was moved deeply by the music.

I remember an even smaller moment from a couple of years before that, when I was in High School. I arrived at Mexico City’s eastern bus station alone, after a 4-hour bus ride, at night, and stood in the line to purchase a ticket for a taxi. The man selling the tickets told me not to purchase one, not to take a taxi, to take the subway instead. I asked why and he wouldn’t say, he was calm, and serious, and adamant about it. People with his job just mechanically ask your destination, mechanically recite the price according to the distance, take your money, and print a voucher you hand over to one of the taxis lined up outside the station. I had no clue why this man, who looked and behaved like a reasonable person, wouldn’t want me to take a taxi that night, but I felt compelled to listen, and I thanked him, didn’t buy a ticket, got off the line, took the subway instead. I felt like the man in the booth knew something and wanted to save me, that I was being protected from a crime or a catastrophe.

I don’t have any set beliefs about God’s existence or inexistence. I haven’t experienced anything miraculous and inexplicable. My experiences, as you can see, are too subtle and explainable, barely even noteworthy. I just know I’ve come across many times the kindness of strangers and these events felt like the consequence of a more enigmatic kindness. Probably there was no magic there. Most likely there was no magic. But I like the idea of a magic so faint and restrained you can easily miss it, and I hold on to that idea for its beauty, rather than its likelihood.

I remember very clearly my aunt Alicia as she said goodbye to us, while dying of cancer, 5 years ago. She was several years younger than my dad, had a sharp brain and a prodigious memory, was a traveler, was the life of the party in every party. She had the best jokes and could tell them landing perfect punchlines, and she had the best laugh in the world: a loud, luminous laughter that expanded across space and would fill a room completely. I always wanted to be seated in the same table as her, it was the loudest and more interesting table of any family reunion. She could really cook, and draw, and paint, and tell a story, and speak in public. I remember her talented, self-assured in her talents, and strong. She wasn’t a morning person, and she was always late for things, and had a temper. She had no children of her own, but she loved and spoiled all of us, her nieces, and nephews, with generosity. She was loved deeply by her husband. One Christmas they both went on a shopping spree and spent a small fortune on toys for us (11 nephews and nieces!), when we were little, and her face beamed with a child-like excitement as we opened the presents. Dusk was her favourite time of day. She was a night person. She wasn’t religious. She went into her death bravely, unsure of what would happen. Maybe just darkness and silence and the end of all things, maybe not. Remember me, she asked us, as she was saying goodbye. In a moment of inspiration, Lilia (her older sister), said: we will think of you at dusk, in the moments between night and day, and Alicia smiled at the idea. So, I do, I remember Alicia from time to time when it’s dusk and the trees become powerful shadows against the sky. And when I do, I hope the mystery she is now can see through my eyes, from the mystery she inhabits, the blue light against the darkened trees. I don’t believe in this idea with conviction. I’m just captivated by it and can’t let it go.

I’ve been listening to “Hope, Faith and Carnage”, the series of conversations between Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan. I like when they talk about religion. Sean seems more firmly rooted in the non-believing side, while Nick is tentatively crossing into the believing group, pushed by the grief of losing his son. Nick says sometimes you have to believe not because something makes sense, not because something is likely or even true, you believe because you’re compelled by the poetry of an idea, and the idea is by itself healing, and does you good.

Nick Cave tells us that we will one day be touched by grief: a pain too violent and too overwhelming. No one escapes that feeling, he says: if you haven’t gone through that pain, it is waiting for you in your future. Since love exists and the ones we love can stop loving us, or their hearts can be stopped by death, we’re all bound for grief. That kind of pain will change you, Nick says, and can get you closer to the questions that can’t be answered through science and rational thought. Maybe the believers are the ones who have always known with more clarity than the rest of us how fragile we truly are, they have assessed the weight of our mortality, the depth of our wounds, and how much we need to be embraced by something bigger than ourselves. Maybe the non-believers are just the ones who can face that fragility without any outside help. I don’t think I’ll ever be a religious believer, the capacity to become one seems beyond my nature and out of my reach. Maybe, like Nick Cave says, I’ll get closer once my heart is truly broken. I know I’m not strong enough to accept a cold universe, a random universe, without any hidden poetry, without any hidden melodies sung just beyond our hearing range in mysterious, incomprehensible spaces. For now, I hold on to the promise of that music humming beyond our rational understanding. I hold on to that promise (without faith) because of its beauty rather than its truth, and that’s almost good enough.

Sometimes I don’t know if believing so faintly means I’m less rigid, or if I’m just less disciplined; hoping for veiled, beautiful mysteries, without having to suffer through the sacrifices and demands of religion. Maybe we all need to believe in something with a kind of faith. The world is broken. The world is broken and then made whole from time to time, through astonishing acts of collective courage, and innumerable acts of kindness. I’ve been a witness, I’ve seen the miracles, I’m a believer. This I believe with conviction, and determination; the way pilgrims do. There is a song to be discovered here as well, after all, among us human beings, in the small corner of reality we can fathom.