Waltz Time – Entry 12 – My Religion

Waltz Time – Entry 12 – My Religion

“Faith is not certainty. Faith is the courage to keep asking the questions.”

I began to wonder about what you said, 'Everything happens for a reason', and started to reflect. The words settled in me like a riddle. Was there truly a reason for everything? Or did we simply make meaning afterward, stringing together the scattered pieces of our lives into something that looked like order?

I was not the model Catholic schoolgirl. I was the one who craved attention, who asked too many questions, who could never quite fit into the mold the Church pressed upon me. Being almost a year younger than my classmates only heightened the sense that I was out of step. Perhaps I should have had another year of kindergarten, but instead I found myself small, restless, and a little defiant among children who seemed to know the rules better than I did.

There was a girl in my first-grade class named Barbara who became my partner in mischief. She was wild in a way that thrilled and terrified me. She couldn’t sit still, couldn’t resist pushing boundaries, and I often found myself swept up in her orbit. Together, we drove poor Sister Althea absolutely crazy.

The nuns of the 1960s were imposing figures to a child. Shrouded in heavy black habits that erased their shapes, they seemed less like women and more like shadows moving through our days. To me, they looked like oversized penguins, their faces pale ovals framed in starched white, with thick wooden rosaries cinched at their waists and a heavy crucifix of the suffering Jesus dangling at the end. That crucifix terrified me. The image of His body hanging there, nailed and bleeding, swaying against the folds of fabric, felt harsh and unrelenting to a child who barely understood what it meant. I used to wonder what lay beneath all that cloth. Did they laugh? Did they cry? Did they dance when no one was looking? Or did they sleep fully dressed, never shedding the armor of their devotion?

What I do know is that they didn’t seem trained to manage children like Barbara and me. Their certainty came not from psychology or patience but from discipline—sharp, swift, and humiliating. Corporal punishment was the norm: the sting of a ruler across the knuckles, the shame of being singled out before your peers, the ache of punishment that did not distinguish between guilt and innocence.

The day Barbara stole my chocolate milk is burned into me. Chocolate milk was my one small luxury—I couldn’t stomach plain milk, so my parents allowed the compromise of adding chocolate. Barbara knew this. She grabbed my carton and ran, taunting me, laughing, holding it high like a prize. Something in me snapped. I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t going to cower. I tore after her, shouting with all my might: “Give me my chocolate milk!”

The classroom erupted in chaos—Barbara shrieking with delight, me chasing like a storm. And then Sister Althea swept in. No investigation, no sorting of truth. Just swift judgment. Barbara and I were both struck by the hard book cover across our backsides. I can still hear myself cry out: “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

But there was no listening. No mercy. Only punishment. And then came the dreaded walk to the principal, Sister Innocenta—her very name felt like a cruel irony. Her office meant one thing: our parents would be called. That was when the fear truly set in, not for what had already happened, but for what awaited at home.

Moments like that shaped me. They taught me that authority was not always just. That adults could mistake curiosity for disobedience, innocence for sin. And as I grew older, my restless spirit showed itself in other ways. I asked questions that scandalized the sisters: Did Jesus fart? Did He ever have a girlfriend?

To me, these were innocent attempts to understand the humanity of someone I was told was both man and God. To them, my words were irreverent, even blasphemous. Each question brought reprimand, a ruler’s sting, or a note sent home.

Looking back, yes, I was a bit of a wise ass. But beneath that bravado was a child trying to comprehend rituals that weighed too heavily on her small shoulders. The endless talk of sin, the incense and kneeling, the pressure to confess what I didn’t understand—it all seemed so far from the simple joy of being a child who only wanted to laugh and play.

The Church told me I was already broken, already in need of forgiveness. That never sat right with me. How could the small rebellions of a child, the innocent questions, or the chasing of a stolen carton of chocolate milk make me unworthy of love?

Those early experiences left me in limbo. I didn’t lose my faith, but I lost my certainty. I began to suspect that God might live outside the pews, somewhere beyond rulers and punishment. Somewhere in laughter, in movement, in the freedom to ask questions without fear.

That was the beginning of a shift, a seed planted in a restless little girl that would one day grow into a very different philosophy of faith. And years later, when I sat in a diner and felt holiness in the ordinary, I recognized it as the same truth I had been chasing since childhood, only now revealed in a different light.

You made me believe there was another way to see life, that we could move in rhythm with it, trust the process, and simply go with the flow. So I did. I jumped in and took the chance with you. From that afternoon forward, I knew something extraordinary was unfolding, something that lived between faith and love and changed the way I would see the world forever.

💞