Humanism is my religion now

once asked two nuns why they took the veil, both said it was the clothes.

By then, I might have cited similar reasons for my faith. I became Catholic because of gothic cathedrals, canters that sang hymns into the spires, incense that drifted from gold censers, and yes, dramatically dressed nuns. 

Mine was a romantic faith, more aesthetic than it was spiritual—at least at first—and that is very much by design. An essential teaching of the Catholic Church is known as via pulchritudinis or “the way of beauty”—it’s why they build cathedrals and invest in art and sing in choirs—because the Catholic Church believes you can simply fall into your faith through the absorption of beauty. 

That’s very much how I did things. I loved how rich it all felt, how steeped in tradition, how ancient. I loved touching my fingers to water that had been whispered over, making the sign of the cross against my lips, reading some of the first words ever written about my faith, discovering illuminated treasures in the archives of the Marian library. A decade into my faith, I was finishing up my graduate studies in Mariology, the study of the Virgin Mary, when I had lunch with the nuns, my teachers.

Throughout the course of my studies, I became agnostic. It wasn’t a lack of faith thing, but a lack of source material thing. The further back I researched, the more I couldn’t get on board with all that was added to the Jesus story in the centuries after he died—I had effectively researched my way out of my religion. Ultimately, I decided that I did not believe Jesus rose from the dead or that he was God, and that ended my religion. But it did not end my practice of beauty.