How the last chapter of my book made me return to the Catholic faith

Hello dear wanderer,

I'm happy to write you a letter, as promised in one of my last posts. And if you didn't come from there, no problem. This letter was written before the post, anyway. You might notice similarities between them.

In writing about longing, the ache for belonging and the search for home, I discovered I had not yet found mine. This led me to face questions I could no longer pretend I didn't have. And to tell you about this, I have to take you back into my story.

As I finished going through my beta-readers' comments and feedback, everything seemed so positive and very much at the final stages of editing. I've been working on this project for more than a year, and it's a tiny chapbook... Could I have finished it in three months? Probably. Finishing things quickly is my way of guaranteeing I won't abandon my work. I remember this painting I spent three whole days on, barely eating or sleeping. My only goal was to see that thing through, and I did it. Later, I destroyed it — which is what I'm unlearning at this very moment: to not destroy my work, either by deleting it, burning it or abandoning it. To let it breathe. And to give it time, and be patient, and not give up when I feel like an impostor. I am not very good at being an artist, I guess. Generating ideas is something, but that doesn't mean I can give birth to them.

With a history of leaving five universities before one degree in literature (phew!), paintings left half-done and then lost, or ruined, and a studio set up and broken apart (and set up again)... I'm quite used to moving on. It's a good way of dealing with grief: detach and depart. So I start with both hands, then something interrupts, and I let go. Too often, everything feels like too much to bear, and going away is a coward's move, in my opinion, but it could also be my only option at times. A jinx I can't shake.

I learned the things I love tend not to survive my own touch, and interruptions would come at any time — death was never far either. Always watching just around the corner. I made temporary homes in flats, in people, in ideas; always running, never staying long enough for anyone's eyes to rest on me. I did not like being looked at for too long. If someone saw me clearly, they could put me in a cage, and I would never fly again. Yes, flying away was all I wanted: the running stopped being a wound and became a craving. Move enough as a child, and you grow rootless — and rootless becomes the only place you can breathe. If I stayed still too long, I felt claustrophobic in my own skin. So I left, again and again. I became a dog, then a rat, then smoke, and disappeared.

Then I came back. It was a too-close-to-death type of experience. Coming back into a body is very weird. It can feel so heavy. Also, hospitals stink. And I don't mean this only metaphorically speaking: having Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome diagnosed around my 30s contributed a lot to understanding how I experienced life in this flesh. Now I had an explanation why my very joints have been feeling out of place my whole life — an invisible, persistent, annoying reality of pain, fragility, weakness. The cage I feared other people would build for me was already here. It was made of my own bones. So I put all those complaints and tears in a bag, and put the bag in a drawer with old plans, dreams and sketches, and moved on.

The concept of redemptive suffering came knocking on the door of my life around that time, but I was wrestling with so many other things. I had come from Catholicism, so of course I assumed I already knew what their perspective was. Most people do. And obviously, it had not worked for me in the past, so I assumed it was their fault (not mine, clearly! I know everything!). Long story short: I became an atheist, with a deep hate for Christianity, then a pagan, practising occultism and all sorts of spirituality I could find. At my darkest point, going through experiences I can barely explain, God found me, alone, in my bedroom, and that is an amazing tale for another time.

From that day on, I discovered that if nothing else survived my touch, God would. I could not win against Him. That was always my biggest consolation and joy.

But these experiences coincided with having a strong evangelical influence around me at the time, and there were people and genuine hearts I will always be grateful for. Being a person with a few strange gifts, I did not stop to ask whether there might be more — because everything made sense now, and all the experiences were more real than reality itself! May He never let me forget that He works everywhere, always, gracious and merciful, even in the years I was leaning mostly on myself, with a wrong posture, heart and knowledge. Oh, well, who can blame this child...? At the time, I thought I was doing everything right and avoided facing this growing feeling that something was missing.

Then I moved again, to another continent. Now I was a Latin American in England, and for the first time, I understood that the foreignness I had felt my entire life had not, until then, been literally true. Everyone received me with open arms — but the accent does not lie, and humour references are the bane of my existence. I had struggled to read people in my own country; here, I was hypervigilant and could read the room even less. Everything was so heightened. At last, I was officially an outsider, and in some ways, it was actually comforting. Their culture gave me room for things I never got to do in my own native environment.

The poems about longing started coming through at this time. Prose-poetry was my only way of writing after a hiatus of almost a decade of painful creative struggle. But there I was, suddenly active again on my old socials, experimenting and giving my hand to my teenage self. Probably because I felt like a teenager in many ways, with those big emotions, detached from things I thought I knew very well, with a sharp radar for other people's bs (my favourite trait of any youth!). Searching, in a very abstract way, for something I thought I had already found, holding all the answers and none at the same time. Bitter season, this one.

I am no scholar of literature, although I have a degree in the subject, and enjoy studying it, but I was always a writer. After years of suffocating every creative desire under religious misconceptions about images, and about the dark themes I had always wanted to explore, it felt good to just let go of all of that for a moment and see what would happen. That suffocation is how, when the writing finally came back fully, it came back very gothic. At sixteen, I had written my first gothic novel. Rewrote it at nineteen, and years later, deleted it (as I was always being told about all the things that were too dark for a Christian to create). Now here I was, in England, without my book, pretending I was not itching to write it again. I heard, more than once: "Pray it goes away, rebuke it, this is not from God". But only I knew why that particular theme lived so close to my heart, why the poetics of the gothic spoke, of all things, to my faith.

The struggle with Poetry of Longing was not far from all of those aspects, but mainly it was the fear that my heart would move on — something would die, again — before I could finish. And the book itself seemed fine! The beta readers' feedback was great, as well. But a book about exile, pilgrimage, and home; a book about yearning for a return to heaven, where no cruelty remains, where everything is finally understood, and no stranger's violence can reach you — that book was doomed, because the home chapter did not speak to me at all.

I was writing about a place I hadn't actually reached, and I needed the truth more than I needed the book, so I was ready to give up again. Or maybe, I was taking the whole thing too seriously... Was I a liar or just a bad writer? No one else could see the problem as I could. That chapter felt fake. Yes, I do have impostor syndrome, but it was more than that... Something was not in place. How do you write honestly about a country you have never seen? Hm... That line of thought opened another problem, because other writers managed to do so, and although I would never reach the shores of their amazing work, they clearly experienced something I didn't.

There was something missing.

I think I was led — if you have followed my work, you will know what I mean — to study the Gothic. Looking back at some of my reels and carousels now feels like finding evidence for an investigation on myself. Studying the Gothic walked me, without my quite noticing, back into Catholic churches. Not for the doctrine, at first. For something easier than that. Something familiar... It started with a few interrogations in my head: what is up with these people, anyway? Two thousand years is a long time to hold to a lie.

So one day, I had this persistent thought in my head: Sacred Heart. Sacred Heart... As any normal person would do, I just typed on Google and found a Catholic Church near me with that name. On the same day, I was there, being pulled inside by my belly button like a magnet.

First, I was hit with the smell of the wood. As a child, church was my favourite place to fall asleep; I would nap near my parents, face pressed against the wooden bench, probably one of the safest places I knew. And the frankincense... I wished I could swallow the resin like pills. I wanted to be clean on the inside. I stood there for more than two hours; the silence was speaking to me, and I didn't want to leave. Over and over, I sat in there with my failed poems and stared at the Blessed Sacrament until my tears found new depths, and my heart caught fire. Finally, a place where my head went quiet.

Then came the questions. And then the Eucharist. Yes, lots of research are involved in this whole process, and I'm trying to take it in step by step, but if I had to name a single reason for my change of heart, it would be that one: to become one with my Beloved through the Eucharist. He, the One who loved me first. Why did it take so long for me to see? I was confirmed, but never understood until that moment. My old poems felt like prophecy.

A candle was lit in my head: the home chapter — the fake one — I understood it at last. I had written home as a destination, a heaven I was still waiting to arrive at, and that is why it rang hollow: I was describing a place from outside its walls. But home was never only the end of the road. Still in exile, still aching, I am already closer to home than ever. My own sentence, "every home is a rehearsal for heaven", made sense! My longing was like a tired dove, finally finding a place to land safely. Years of my own stubborn rebellion fell at my feet, and scales left my eyes.

So I open that chapter again, ready to face it. I was closer to heaven than I had ever been, and being seen was not that hard anymore. For now, I see the God who sees me — and makes me fly with Him.

Yours,

Iva