I spent every Sunday surrounded by detail-ridden carved crosses, old-fashioned just-ironed best-dress outfits, and with the faint taste of dusty unrisen discs of bread on my tongue for about the first thirteen years of my life. If you’re still unfamiliar with the sensation I’m speaking of, allow the sound of a shrill organ to play a few something yards behind you, its echo enveloping you to the point of feeling as if the walls themselves are seeping the melodic noise. Maybe, if you would, picture joyous chatter riddled with a respectful and always-cheerful dialect refined decades ago, and the unique exaggerated laughter caused by the casual reuniting of loved ones, or thin carpets draped over far-too-old wooden planks to both bring a softness to your feet and a formality to the building it acted as the floor of. And afterward, if you were lucky enough to know multiple fellow church-goers (I always was), picture slightly sweet pastries, antique velvet chairs surrounding pastel rugs in a pale blue living room, the clinks of porcelain cups, unshod feet in stockings or long-socks, and most noticeable of all, peaceful, wholesome and yet deafeningly loud socialization of aunts and uncles, parents and children, cousins and cousins.

To put it more bluntly, I was raised Catholic. My father was Episcopalian but much weaker in his faith than my mother in hers, and so her preference was prioritized. She was one of the ten children of Ruth “Nana” & Frank “Papa” Conroy, and she turned 40 before I turned 5, so her family had plenty of time to grow in number before I became a part of it. It was far larger than any other I’d heard of in Boston, Massachusetts or Chesterfield, Missouri; the Conroy children married and had kids, the kids had kids, the children sometimes got remarried twice or thrice and had a handful of other kids, and trickiest of all, sometimes the children married into families with twice as many kids as we had and so their kids became the kids-in-law which, because we pride ourselves on hospitality, were treated as simply the kids. It seemed that someone was always getting married or getting pregnant. Weddings were about as common as parent-teacher conferences, baby showers often following the same trend only a handful of months later. My too-nice-for-school frilly pale dresses (which I wore against my will) often got more use than all my swimsuits in a full year. Somehow, each member of the family remained (or attempted to remain) equally as devout as the last, and just as determined to keep the family beliefs alive and practiced.

I grew up with God (other common aliases being: The Man Upstairs, Lord, Heavenly Father, your/our Maker, etc.) as a sort of third parent, except He could never be given the benefit of the doubt of “just having a bad night” (for He never lost his temper without reason or made mistakes), albeit giving discipline just as strictly as those who could. Everything that ever happened to me, according to all adults in my life, was His doing - every achievement I had was His to be accredited for, every disappointment was a direct offense to Him, every struggle I endured was a test of will He’d given me, and every inexplicable thing that occurred was simply part of a grander plan of His that a feeble human mind like mine was never meant to understand. There was no separation of Him and my world in absolutely any case. He was simply a factor of life that one acknowledges often but only passively, such as gravity or hunger, and He was spoken of to be as factual, essential, ever-present as gravity and hunger were.

There is a time in every child’s life - so is the nature of being human - where they begin to question absolutely every aspect of their existence. Naturally, for me, this included our dear Maker. This, as one could assume, arose panic and hostility from every person who knew me and of me. When I began to ask why our Lord gave three-year-old-children cancer, the most tragically unfair test of them all, or where the most gentle and humble atheist would go after they died, the response was always a vague reassurance that the Heavenly Father has our best interest in mind along with an immediate change of subject. To these inquiries of reason, from all I can recall, the response was not once a straight answer.

However, when the answers were made to justify rather than explain, they were often verbose and abundant. Queers were created the way they were as their ultimate test because the Lord knew that they were the aptest at resisting temptation; they were the holiest of us if they resisted, but the most damned of us if they chose the path of impious pride and lust. White and black people were both perfectly fine in their own right, but the Lord made them different on purpose, and that we shouldn’t pretend they’re the same, hence why they shouldn’t marry one another. If a woman trusted her Lord fully (as all women should), she should know that she’ll be rewarded with eternal peace and joy if she does His bidding, and so she should’ve chosen a sooner path to Heaven over living and allowing her body, the home of her Lord, to be raped. God’s hatred was as pure as His love and should be revered with equal devotion and intensity.

As should be obvious, this raised tremendous alarm, being someone who believed (and believes) in basic human autonomy as well as respect and compassion for all life. I became more and more estranged from the Catholic Church (both institution and faith) as I aged, to my mother’s and extended family’s dismay, from uncertain to apathetic to actively loathing. (Of course, this is not to say that there is not a single good person of Catholic faith, nor that Catholics should be condemned or shamed, but rather that my views stray very far from that of my experiences of Catholicism.)

I (to my now reprehension) became the trademark twelve-year-old atheist pessimist nihilist, complete with a black band tee and a beanie, if only because I felt as if there were nothing else sensible to become. Emotions were nothing but ploys to be manipulated to accumulate some form of wealth or advantage, humanity was inherently wicked and cruel by its nature, and if something was not benefiting me in some practical form, it was useless and should be discarded. There was no God as he was fabricated to quell fear and to gain money and power, nothing mattered because we’re all gonna die and our species will go extinct one day and we’re all on an insignificant floating rock in the middle of nothing and love is just a chemical in our brain that makes us breed. I held almost nothing but the dread and grief that the world was ending and there was nothing that any of us could do about it. I became miserable, not only due to my supposed revelations, but because I perceived the stances on them as unwavering fact - that it was not reasonable to believe anything else. Happiness was naivete. Sorrow was a natural state of being. Looking back, I am filled with both utter humiliation as well as pity for who I once was. Nobody proved me wrong, even as my beliefs were nothing further from the truth.

Now, the next paragraph or so may seem entirely unrelated to my previous points, reader, but I must ask a favor of you. I must ask you to be patient with me, and trust that my point will get across if you stay with me. I thank you in advance.

The Golden Records are two 12-inch gold-plated copper disks placed on the Voyager space probes launched by NASA. The probes themselves are designed to study the outer Solar System and interstellar space beyond our Sun’s reach. The record, placed upon the craft in case it were ever to come into contact with other intelligent life, is a kind of time capsule, intended to tell the story of our world, our species, and our way of life to extraterrestrials. It includes our position in the solar system, a basic explanation of how our mathematical system works, photos of human beings in day-to-day society, our technology and infrastructure, sounds of nature and wildlife, non-verbal sounds of human beings (footsteps, heartbeats, etc.), an eclectic selection of music taken from countless cultures ranging from wedding songs to symphonies, and - that which strikes me most - a greeting spoken by a native of all 55 languages. It will be about 20,000 years until Voyager leaves our solar system, and another 10,000 years until it will even come close to another star, but the Records are designed to last for approximately 5 billion years. (For reference, that’s about 500,000 times longer than the timespan between the beginning of human agriculture up to now.)

It touches me, in a way, to know that after I and all of my descendants will have passed, even after our own planet begins to falter in health and eventually be mercifully put to sleep by our dear Sun’s flourishment and growth, even after we become the stardust which crafted the world that let us become, our memory may be held by another again. In millennia, when we will no longer breathe, a record may play of a baby’s footsteps pattering against the polished kitchen floor of a hard-working father’s apartment, or perhaps the gentle laughter that can only come from a best friend’s inside joke. The soft and welcoming voice of a university student, or a heartfelt wedding song from the throats of proud brothers and sisters, or the heartbeat of a child that was later born from a deeply loving mother will ring through the air of some new world that we will never see or hear in this life, but where we will be seen and heard. These peoples will know us and they will know our love and they will know our hatred and they will know our humanity and they will remember us in the same manner as we have remembered ourselves. This is our immortality.

I think of this, and I think of humanity’s obsession with existing, or rather, our inability to fathom us not being here. Every depiction we have of our future, whether it be utopia or eternal war, has always been of humanity’s survival, no matter the circumstances. Even as we are incessantly portrayed destroying ourselves and our home, we say that we will “by then” be able to preserve ourselves in the hollow crevices of spacecraft before our world decides that it is too late for us. Every prophecy of the future is a reassurance to ourselves: we will still be here. We will be alive - you and I will still know what it is to be alive. Even after death, we’ve told ourselves that we will still think and breathe, only on another plane of existence, and if we are good and play nice and behave ourselves, we’ll get to go to a peaceful place in the sky made of our wildest dreams. We are creatures of curiosity. We cannot comprehend a world where there is nothing left to explore. Even now, as I write this, I struggle to write the possibility of there simply being nothing after us but gas and rock. It is painful and it feels so incredibly unfeasible to me, even if I know if it is not. We are, by our very nature, desperate optimists. This is how we have survived; we have told ourselves that we will always be exploring, that our world is limitless even beyond the world we’re in now. We have convinced ourselves that we are and must be eternal.

This is not saying to be pessimistic or nihilistic, this is not dismissing or slandering religion, and this is not saying that we should ever stop exploring if we are not prevented from doing so. This is, in fact, a celebration rather than a criticism of humanity. We are determined to remain present, regardless of methodology or circumstance. We promise to each other that we will help one another thrive and keep one another alive. This simple, magnificent record aboard a space probe is the embodiment of my current belief system as well as how it was formed - that we are our own salvation. We will save ourselves from ourselves and we will keep ourselves breathing, no matter how. It is our way of existence.

Only a half-year after my nightstand crucifix, the holy water from my Auntie Susu, and King James Bible with bookmarks now removed were all shoved into a junk drawer of my desk, I found myself lying in a light turquoise bedroom with and modern abstract paintings and framed drawings of purple mermaids surrounding me. It was supposedly mine, but that was only visible (and only barely) from the few medals and trophies placed atop my bureau and the few posters on the wall I was allowed to hang. There were still hints of the modest ruffles of my wedding-attending dresses in my curtains and the same gentle cool hues of an aunt’s living room were tossed onto my wall. It felt as if I were a permanent tenant of a bedroom of an estranged sibling - the someone I (and everyone else) was planning that I’d be. The aspect of the room with the most amount of changes (of my own volition) would be myself. As it turns out, being given 3 months’ time with nothing to do (summer) but think about your own mortality and moral compass helps you to develop a great deal as a person.

I began to contradict and confuse myself; even though I allegedly knew that feelings of excitement and passion were useless unless utilized for productivity or social stature, yet I found myself indulging in them nonetheless when I didn’t catch myself. I began to ask, why did I have to catch myself? Why wasn’t I letting myself enjoy just about anything? What was the harm in doing things that didn’t benefit me practically? Why was I prioritizing my future over my current self, who would determine my future just as much as my preparations would?

The more I asked questions of this same vein, the more often my answer became “I actually have no idea,” and so it became a spiral of discovery.

I am not anti-religion by any means. Religion comforts and brings together far more people than one could possibly imagine, and if it brings you joy, keep practicing. But for me personally, organized or “specific” religion is somewhat null. There is no way of knowing whether there is one or are five or are five-thousand deities above us who created us, nor for what purpose, nor what they want from us. I don’t see it fit to manipulate our current life for any reason that is not based on what we undoubtedly know for sure. There’s more than enough reason present around us to bring about the essential practices of love and respect and appreciation. Why would we look to the stars when God - not a being, necessarily, but simply the idea of our creator and our salvation - is here, with us, in us? We are our own saviors. We are the ones saving one another and keeping ourselves alive. We should acknowledge and celebrate this feat. Rejoice, if only because we are here, because we have kept ourselves here.

God is the tight grip of two young bodies in an embrace of comfort or excitement, nesting our heads and arms into the crevices of one another's bodies, pressing against one another saying “I am here and my feelings are yours,” and God is the fuzz you feel in your chest accompanied by the afterthought of the embrace even whole seconds after letting go. God is the ‘click’ when a mind thirsting for knowledge finally understands it fully, and the discovery lights them up in an instant and swells and flows throughout them warmly. God is not who the mass of echoing amateuristic human voices sing to in rows of pews in a chapel, but the voices themselves, putting familial trust in one another - that those next to them will sing along with them and that the day is glorious enough for singing. God is the voices that accompany yours and mine.
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"Welcome home. It is a pleasure to receive you." - Greeting on the Golden Record, originally in Punjabi (translated) "Greetings from a computer programmer in the little university town of Ithaca on the planet Earth." - Greeting on the Golden Record, originally in Swedish (translated) "Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time." - Greeting on the Golden Record, originally in Amoy (Min Dialect) (translated)