On Belief and the Beauty of Not Knowing

I have never considered myself a religious person.

Not in the formal sense, at least. I wasn’t raised within a single, unwavering doctrine, nor did I move through life feeling anchored to one defined system of belief. Religion, as I understood it growing up, often felt structured in a way that required certainty, clear answers, prescribed practices, a very specific understanding of who or what God is, and where you stand in relation to that.

But belief? I’ve always had that. I did and do believe in a being, maybe even an omnipresent one, that made what we consider life, and everything beyond it, possible. All connected in ways I doubt we will even give ourselves the freedom to really consider, especially if we stay too focused on the differences in our beliefs and not nearly focused enough on the things that intersect.

Part of that probably has to do with how I was raised, which, in hindsight, feels less like a spiritual foundation and more like an interdisciplinary study. I was taught to believe in three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.

I had a Christian grandmother. A devout godmother. A father who was spiritual in a way that felt expansive and undefined. A stepmother who was not particularly religious at all. Then there was Catholic school from third grade through high school, not because we were especially devout, but because it was considered the better school in the South Bronx, and later, the more disciplined option. Religion, in that context, felt less like a calling and more like a requirement, somewhere between math and gym.

By sixth grade, I almost converted to Christianity.

Not because I had a profound, life-altering moment of spiritual clarity, but because everyone else was doing it, and the new priest was incredibly persuasive. It felt less like divine intervention and more like a very strong pitch.

I didn’t convert.

Not out of rebellion, but because my family didn’t think I was making the choice from an informed point of view and was wholly accepting one side of the story. They were right.

Then I went to a Quaker school for college, which introduced yet another approach, one centered on silence, reflection, and the radical idea that no one was going to tell you what to believe. You just had to sit with yourself and figure it out. Which, honestly, felt both freeing and probably more aligned with how early organized religion started: pondering life and circumstance, sitting with yourself, outwardly or inwardly offering up a question, and waiting for an answer.

It also made me think about the ways in which organized religion has so undoubtedly gone off course.

I want to be clear, though: this is not a hit piece on organized religion.

These are the musings of an almost thirty-year-old woman trying to reconcile the frustration she feels when organized religion is used to justify hatred, bigotry, sexism, segregation, and othering. Trying to find solace in spirituality because, for me, it has nothing to do with color, status, orientation, or origin, and everything to do with respecting the natural world around us and offering grace and kindness to the people around us. Yes, this shit is a daily struggle, but we wake up each day and try again.

There was a time when I used to hate organized religion. Truly. I couldn’t understand why anyone would follow something so blindly. And if I’m being honest, some days I still feel that way when I’m confronted with what that kind of unwavering belief can cause and can represent. There are very real harms that have been justified in the name of certainty. There is violence in moral superiority. There is danger in believing that your access to truth makes other people less worthy of dignity.

But age, love, and proximity have softened me in some ways.

Not softened my politics. Not softened my discomfort with exclusion or shame. But softened my certainty about other people’s reasons for believing.

I watched my godmother, seemingly overnight, become a devout Catholic. And in the beginning, I didn’t get it. I thought it was abrupt, maybe even a little baffling. But over time I began to understand that maybe she needed that transformation in her life as she aged. Maybe she needed a structure to help her feel some peace about what comes next. Maybe she needed a way to reconcile what she thought of as her grievances, to make sense of years of grief and fear, to feel held by something larger than herself.

That need feels very human to me now.

Not weak. Not passive. Human.

I think about a friend I love deeply, a gay man of multicultural descent, who cares so much about his religion and his relationship with God, even as that religion contains archaic and degrading rules about who he should and should not love. And still, he makes space for his relationship to God. Still, he finds something there that nourishes him. Still, he shows reverence for what that connection means in his life.

I can’t dismiss that.

And maybe more importantly, I don’t want to.

If anything, I’ve come to understand that my previous dismissal of organized religion, and my complete lack of understanding of spiritual religions of the diaspora, was doing me no justice. I wasn’t offering anything new to the discussion by shutting down at the mention. I wasn’t being radical. I was just being closed off. These books, these practices, these systems hold stories and multitudes. They are not written in stone, even when people insist that they are. The meaning and our understanding should evolve with us as we experience more, lose more, love more, and learn more.

There has been a lot of beauty in allowing myself to see that calling through the eyes of people I love. And there has been a surprising amount of freedom in being released from the closed-offness I was so willing to accept and live in.

Because the truth is, we are living in a moment where more people are beginning to admit that they feel something larger at work, even if they don’t have the language for it. There’s a shift happening, a movement away from rigid definitions of belief and toward something more expansive, more personal, more fluid. Less interested in being right and more interested in being in relationship: with self, with history, with nature, with the unknown.

Spirituality, in that sense, has become a language for navigating what we cannot quantify.

Which is ironic, because we have spent so much time trying to quantify everything.

We have systems for logic, proof, evidence, data, metrics, outcomes, optimization. We love a measurable result. And yet, even with all of that, there are still so many things that resist understanding. Grief doesn’t behave logically. Intuition doesn’t arrive on a schedule. And sometimes you just know something without being able to explain why, which, depending on who you’re talking to, either makes you insightful or suspicious.

A dream that feels too specific to ignore.

A moment that feels like it’s already happened before.

A pull toward something you can’t quite name, but can’t quite dismiss either.

We have been taught to distrust these things. To file them under coincidence, imagination, or “not serious.” But more and more, people are returning to them, not as fantasy, but as a different kind of knowledge.

Not less valid. Just less legible.

And this return isn’t new. It’s actually quite old.

Long before institutional religion, there were systems of belief rooted in nature, in ancestry, in cosmology, in the relationship between the seen and unseen. These systems weren’t always written down or formalized. They didn’t need to be. They were lived. Practiced. Passed down through gesture, repetition, story, and presence. They weren’t separate from life.

They were life.

But many of these systems were disrupted, intentionally. Colonization, migration, forced assimilation, these weren’t just physical or political acts. They were spiritual ones too. Entire ways of understanding the world were dismissed, reframed, or erased. Practices were labeled as primitive. As superstition. As something to be replaced rather than understood.

And yet, they were never fully lost.

They adapted. They hid. They moved through generations in quieter ways. In habits that didn’t need explanation. In objects that carried more meaning than they appeared to. In the way someone prepares food, or arranges a space, or repeats a phrase without fully knowing where it came from. In memory that isn’t always conscious, but is deeply present.

And now, there is a return.

Not a perfect reconstruction of what was, but a re-engagement. A willingness to look again. To ask different questions. To consider that what was once dismissed might actually hold something essential. This is especially true across diasporic communities, where spirituality has often had to survive under pressure, through migration, through violence, through reinvention, through code.

This is where spirituality and mythology begin to meet in a meaningful way.

Because mythology, despite its reputation, has never really been about fiction. It’s about meaning. It’s about the stories we tell to understand where we come from, what we value, what we fear, and what we hope for. It’s about creating frameworks that allow us to navigate existence, not just through facts, but through symbols, metaphor, and imagination.

In that sense, mythology is not the opposite of truth.

It’s another way of holding it.

A way that allows for complexity. For contradiction. For evolution.

Artists understand this instinctively. They know that symbols can hold what language cannot. That a ritual, an icon, a repeated gesture, a spiritual reference can communicate lineage, longing, protection, grief, resilience. They know that memory is not only intellectual. It is sensory. Material. Bodily. Communal.

The artists in Sacred Roots understand this deeply.

Their work does not present spirituality as abstract or distant. It presents it as embedded. As something that lives in the body, in materials, in memory. As something that is both inherited and actively shaped. They engage with ancestral symbols not as decoration, but as language. They treat ritual not as performance, but as structure. They approach mythology not as something fixed, but as something alive, something that can be built upon, challenged, and expanded.

Through their work, spirituality becomes visible in a way that is grounded, contemporary, and deeply personal.

And in that visibility, something shifts.

We begin to understand that belief does not have to be singular. That it can be layered, evolving, contradictory even, and still hold meaning. That it can carry both history and possibility at the same time. We begin to see that spirituality is not separate from culture. It is embedded within it. And that mythology is not distant from reality. It shapes how we interpret it.

For me, spirituality exists in that space.

Not in certainty, but in awareness. Not in doctrine, but in attention.

It shows up in how I move through the world. In how I think about time, not as linear, but layered. In how I consider connection, not as random, but intentional, even when I can’t explain it without sounding like I’ve been reading too many astrology charts. It shows up in small, quiet practices. In moments of stillness. In creating. In noticing. In the recognition that there is meaning in what we are drawn to, even if we don’t fully understand it.

And maybe more importantly, it shows up in a willingness to not know.

Which, for someone who likes control, is deeply inconvenient.

But also necessary.

Because so much of what is meaningful exists outside of our ability to fully articulate it. And forcing it into clarity sometimes flattens it. There is a kind of beauty in not knowing. In allowing something to exist without immediately defining it. In resisting the urge to label, categorize, or finalize. In understanding that uncertainty is not the absence of meaning, it is often where meaning begins.

In a world that prioritizes visibility, productivity, and proof, spirituality offers a different orientation. One that values presence over performance. Reflection over reaction. Intuition over immediate explanation. It doesn’t reject knowledge, it expands it. It asks us to consider that there are multiple ways of knowing, and that some of them have been undervalued not because they lack depth, but because they don’t fit within dominant systems of validation.

This is the work of Sacred Roots.

Not to define spirituality, but to make space for it. Not to offer answers, but to hold questions. To recognize that what we inherit is not only material, but energetic. Not only historical, but intuitive. That memory is not only stored in archives, but carried in the body, in the imagination, in the quiet, persistent sense that we are connected to something larger than ourselves.

And that perhaps, at its core, spirituality is not about arriving at certainty.

But about remaining open.

Open to what has been carried forward.

Open to what is still unfolding.

Open to the possibility that there is more, beyond what we can name, beyond what we can prove, beyond what we can fully understand.

And choosing, still, to trust that it’s there.

Even when we can’t explain it.Especially then.