Thinking about...

Today, I was skimming through the internet when my eyes met one of my favourite quotations:

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean ; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1869 - 1948

I grew up in a Christan family, where I was baptized, where I celebrated two communions and a faith confirmation: everything was purely traditional for my family, and as I was young, I did not have the opportunity to choose if I wanted to live these events or not. Living in such an environment, I never really thought about my own faith: everything appeared obvious to me. Until the age of thirteen, when time had come to celebrate the latest event: the confirmation.

There you are suppose to "confirm" the blessing you received during your baptism - the symbol of the Christian's new life - as it happens at an early age in various cases (for more details: *). I remember how I wasn't convinced by the idea: I thought it was too important to be just a "matter of principles", and since I began to have doubts about Catholicism and religion in general, I disagreed. But I was young and I eventually didn't have the choice.

©Anke Merzbach, http://www.bsw-art.com

After that, I quickly stopped believing. It wasn't a case of thoughtful rejection: it was only because everything I learned had lost its meaning. The child I was was sure; the teenager I was becoming distrusted. So I just gave up thinking about religion for a few years: I didn't feel concerned at all. From time to time I tried to remember how I felt previously, but I finally considered that it didn't come from me: as I told you, my family follows most of the Catholic traditions and when I was a little girl, it only seemed normal to me to do so. 

This refusal lasted several years.
But there I slowly left adolescence to enter adulthood. It made me become more conscious about our world and, thank heavens, less and less focused on myself. Opening the eyes wasn't as great as expected: no need to give more explanation, just read the newspaper, watch television news, stay open to the world you live in and sure you will understand! And for the first time, I felt like wanting to believe. Not by principles anymore, but by true faith: I wanted to find the strength to believe in something else / someone else, because more I was discovering (I especially had a real shock in 2009 which drives me on the way I am currently talking about), more I refused to see human being as the greatest strength existing. How could it be, considering how evil it can be?

And someday I read this quote, the one written at the beginning of the article. It lightened my day, and I am still able to see myself distinctly smiling, suddenly full of real happiness, smiling and saying aloud: "That is the answer I needed!". After all, "Every cloud has a silver lining", and I realized that there was no need to have the blues for once: nobody said that life was easy, and we all know that it is far from perfect.  But beside this fact, while beautiful things like friendship, laughter, hope and great minds exist, I deeply believe that it is worth living here. Great people exist, and they will ever exist, with their courage, their battles and very often their discretion.

I still do not know if I am a believer or not, but nevermind: I realized that there were tons of reasons on earth to smile and to fight for. It seems maybe obvious, but it has been an important step of my reconstruction. Coming across this quote today reminded me a lot of memories, that's why I decided to devote a space on this blog.

Good evening, Guten Abend, Bonne soirée, ערב טוב! :)