Content Warning: contains brief references to eating disorders.
It’s not that I haven’t tried. It’s not that it doesn’t appeal to me. The concept of religion has always been something I’ve struggled to make peace with.
My name is Latin for ‘pious’, and I think I am a very pious person. I’m devoted, passionate. When I find something to worship, I worship it with my entire body and soul, and then ultimately, with nothing at all.
I was raised Catholic. When I first started questioning my belief in God, around the middle of primary school, it felt like I’d unlocked a superpower. My granddad had given me an illustrated children’s edition of Richard Dawkins’ The Magic of Reality, and it quickly became my Bible, its pages so much stronger and glossier than the thin, shaky tissues of the New Testament.
Over the next few years I became bitter toward religion and almost aloof in my rejection of it. At school mass, I sat in my pew while everyone else received communion, as though on hunger strike.
As I grew older and my identity became more unstable, I found myself looking for something beyond the rational to give me a sense of groundedness in the world. My discovery of science as a child provided me with many of the same things that faith had — a set of rules and explanatory phenomena, authority, and ‘sacred texts’. What science didn’t have, though, was the symbolism, the rites, the holiness and sanctification.
Throughout my adolescence, I looked for meaning in everything. I pursued that elusive sense of purpose and transcendence in one burning obsession after another. I was an avid Swiftie, then a committed communist (the irony of that progression is not lost on me). I memorised various Shakespeare soliloquies and recited them in my head. I martyred myself in a dogged pursuit of the ‘perfect’ ATAR, then in a restrictive relationship with food and my body.
Piety, faithfulness, sin, dogma. To varying degrees, all of these preoccupations provided me with an ordering force beyond and above myself. If I followed these rules, I knew what to do. The rules told me what was right and what was wrong. They told me if I was a good person or not. They told me who I was, because I — quite frankly — had no idea.
As much as I opposed the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church I was surrounded with, I would be lying if I didn’t feel some kind of pull toward something greater than myself while singing Handel’s Messiah at the cathedral in my school choir. When I looked up at the sweeping arches of the ceiling, I’d think sometimes, God, is there really nothing up there? Did that mean that all those churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, all that religious art with its innovations for oils and linear perspective, all those songs and psalms — they were all for a big fat nothing?
Worse, though, was the persistent idea that it wasn’t all for nothing, it was for a beauty and a truth that for whatever reason, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t believe in.
There’s an idea that all humans are born with a ‘God-shaped hole’ in their core. Ascribed to 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal, the phrase reflects an ungraspable emptiness, and a longing to be filled by something beyond this plane of existence. Religion has developed across every culture, ancient or modern, eastern or western, since the beginning of human society, which lends this theory support.
For me, religion is so powerful because it taps into an incredible array of human needs and propensities, entwining philosophy, evolutionary and behavioural psychology, and social relationships. It feeds our need for storytelling and a sense of origin, our need to make art and find symbolism; to be part of a community, to have an individual place in a broader and ordered whole. Ultimately, I think it all comes down to the central human experience of doubt. It lingers there, in the shadows of certainty, never quite able to be fully reconciled or turned away from. Doubt remains. It knows we know of it. It knows that none of us, not even the most committed theist or atheist, can help but cast our eye over its corner from time to time.
Religion — and all the other quasi-faiths I have followed throughout my life — are alluring because they profess to offer certainty. That is comforting, but it is an illusion. I used to hate uncertainty, but now I think we should embrace it, and learn to be okay with not knowing all the answers all the time. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard understood religious belief as a “leap of faith” — a conscious, personal decision to believe in something that defies rational understanding. Descartes’ famous maxim ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (I think therefore I am) reads ‘Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum’, in full. This translates to ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am’. Doubt is the starting point of all inquiry, all thought. Doubt is the centre of who we are as human beings, as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) suggests in his famous homily in Conclave (2025).
Earlier in my life, when I looked at the world and saw the infinite mess of belief systems and ideologies, I tried to slash down any alternate possibilities but the One Truth that would give me all the answers and sanctify me. I don’t mean in a holy way — a give-me-entrance-to-heaven way — I mean sanctification in a broader sense of fulfilling a purpose, longing, or devotion. I mean sanctification in the sense of feeling right.
I still remember setting up the liturgy table in primary school, billowing waves of green or purple or gold as covered the table in cloth, then laid it with glass beads, rosaries and heavy candles. But as much as it taps into everything that is beautiful in humanity, the other source of religion’s power lies in its ability to tap into everything that is bad about us as well — division, competition, and an awful streak of shame and self-denial. Sometimes, it’s like we’re trying to punish ourselves for being human.
In a practice known as the ‘discipline’, Saint Dominic would whip himself to express repentance and ‘mortify’ his flesh. In the fourteenth century, Saint Catherine of Siena cut off all her hair and ate nothing but vegetables and water. By age 33, she starved herself to death.
Seeking transcendence and purification beyond our earthly selves can be a beautiful experience. For some, it’s expressed in the pursuit of social justice, or creativity. For others, though, that aspect of faith seems to leave us profoundly disembodied and even more empty, when it was the thing that promised to make us whole.
In the past few months, I’ve come crashing right back down to earth. It’s been painful, tragic, incredibly messy, but ultimately, it’s been a relief. I’ve wanted rules and I’ve wanted religion all my life, but really, all I want to do right now is lie down. Surrender to the chaos of it all. There is mud and seaweed all over my face and in my hair and I refuse to wash it off, and I refuse to deny my body, and I refuse to try and make myself into something other-than-human because that is what I am. This is my spirituality; I use that word deliberately, as opposed to the word ‘religion’. There’s no God here. Maybe there’s no faith either. But there is holiness.
I am resolved, in a strange mix of spite, resentment, and the shaky sheer love of me, to go about my time now doing human things. I want to eat the sweet, cool flesh of a fish; I want my teeth stained red from bloody pomegranate. I want to stare into the yellow eyes of a cat and wonder at how little I know of her. I want to float on my back in the ocean like a globby starfish, I want my legs to carry me back to shore.
