I’m not religious, but I pray the rosary every day.

When something good happens to me, I pray. When something bad happens, I also pray, but not as freely. I hold back a bit. Somehow I know prayers can’t save me, not from pain, not from sorrow, not from danger, not from death. 

I'm uncomfortable praying for light in the darkness of the night because I know I have to go through the night to make it to the day. If one day I don’t make it through, I have faith it will not be on account of neglecting to pray or God forsaking me. I just know I’ll find myself elsewhere, maybe in heaven or in some other place, on a higher plane in my soul’s evolution.

I don’t know how I’ve come to these conclusions. My mother is Catholic through and through. My father was an agnostic or so I thought, until he started reading the bible from cover to cover and over and over a few years before he died suddenly on his way to work. I went to Catholic school from nursery to sixth grade and then, in high school, to a non sectarian school, then back to Catholic school, then to a Presbytarian school, and then to the University of the Philippines in Diliman, where God, in my college years, was taught not as a religion subject but as a concept in a philosophy class.

I guess God was in the many books I read as I came of age, from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince to Neil Donald Walsh’s Conversations with God, from Yann Marte's Life of Pi to the Dalai Lama’s The Art of Happiness, from Sister Wendy Beckett’s Meditations on Silence to maybe even the movie-to-book adaptation of George Lucas’s Star Wars.

When Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses became so controversial—it was banned in many countries and Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering all Muslims in the world to kill its author—I wanted to read it also because, I think, on some deep, unconscious level, I was hoping to find God there, too. Alas, it proved too hard to read—and my copy, which I “smuggled” from New York (it was such a thrill, though the thrill was mostly imagined, that I had a dangerous book in my possession on a transatlantic flight), passed from hand to hand that I do not remember whose hands it finally ended up in, though I hope he got to read it enough to constitute a kind of punishment.

Back when my mother would have us pray the rosary every night on our knees, I used to think it was a form of penance. My Catholic school upbringing never failed to remind me of how unworthy I was of God’s love that I found it perfectly normal (for a while) to suffer through 53 Hail Mary’s every night even if I was just mumbling along with the words I didn’t understand.

What I didn’t find normal was how intrigued I was by the likes of Judas Iscariot and Mary Magdalene. We had an old book of biblical portraits and I was always drawn to Judas looking so lost and persecuted, his eyes brimming with suspicion and defiance. Though my sisters found him so scary, I felt mostly sorry for him. There was a depth of character about him that I felt like exploring, perchance I could find traces of regret and remorse and therefore redemption. I didn’t realize then that it was the beginning of my affair with the anti-hero in whom I’d always found the good trapped in evil.

No wonder, as a pop culture fanatic, I've my list of favorites full of the likes of zombies and vampires, Fatima Blush as played by Barbara Carrera in the Bond film Never Say Never Again, Conte Dracula (Gary Oldman!), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, General Zod and Ursa in Superman 2, and and the late Cherie Gil, the contravida actress, not the person.

I believe in the all-present, all-knowing, all-powerful God, so I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that there could be an equally present, knowing, and powerful opposite force in the universe. While I agree that we were all created after the image of God, I suppose that it’s hard to put all that presence, knowingness, and power in a body, with arms and legs and eyes and nose and gender to match. I am convinced that God’s image is infinity, the divine length and breadth that stretches out boundlessly inside each of us. It’s not our body, which is a shell that sooner or later turns to dust, but our soul that, like God, lives on forever.

Mahatma Gandhi, the man named Mohandas whose honorific mahatma represented exactly how high-souled and venerable he was, once proclaimed that God had no religion. He also said that it was “better in prayer to have a heart without words than to have words without a heart.”

No wonder I feel a certain comfort in prayers, though I don’t exactly subscribe to all the words I need to say when reciting the mysteries of my faith. After a few repetitions, the words soon lose all meaning and I fall into a meditative state. The words serve only as a mantra or a chant, a kind of ohm, whose only purpose is to center my mind or to make it ride an alpha wave or to erase it for the time being. It is the best way, through my inner universe, without consciousness, that I can plug into divinity, all-present, all-knowing, all-powerful—in a word, God.