I didn’t leave the Church because I stopped believing in God.
I left because I realized God was a symbol.
And the truth was deeper than the symbol.
But I didn’t leave religion.
I couldn’t.
Because I still believed in belonging.
I still believed in the sacred.
And I still believed that meaning must be made—together, on purpose.
What I left behind was magical thinking—the idea that reality is governed by invisible forces that must be obeyed, appeased, or decoded.
What I found instead was coherence—a commitment to living in a world that is real, entropic, and still worthy of reverence.
This is the fork in the road that most people never see clearly.
It isn’t a choice between belief and unbelief.
It’s a choice between two cosmologies:
One says: the world is governed by intention from beyond it.
The other says: the world is what it is, and we must make meaning within it.
Both paths ache to resolve the same fear:
Am I alone in this universe?
Does my life matter?
Magical thinking says, you’re not alone—because someone is watching.
Coherence says, you’re not alone—because you belong to one another.
Because meaning is not given—it is made. Held. Lived.
But beneath even that fork is something older.
A question more primal, more hidden:
Am I at home in this world?
That’s what people are really reaching for when they cling to gods.
Not doctrine.
Not power.
But belonging.
And that’s why religion endures—not because the gods are real, but because the human need to gather, to ritualize, to sanctify meaning in the face of death and chaos—that need is eternal.
Supernaturalism didn’t hijack religion.
It was its first metaphor.
But it was never essential.
Only one thing is essential to religion:
Truth.
Not infallible truth. Not inherited truth.
But shared, sacred truth—coherence that survives contact with suffering and still chooses care.
This is why I still weep in cathedrals.
Not because God is there.
But because humans gathered there to make meaning.
When I stood inside Notre Dame and felt the organ shake the stone with Bach’s thunder, I wasn’t hearing heaven.
I was hearing us—our defiant, aching attempt to hold meaning in a world that offers none.
It’s not the architecture or the icons that are holy.
It is the builders.
It is the artists.
It is the human breath and discipline.
It is the human refusal to let go of beauty, even when the gods have gone.
Opthē is not a rejection of religion.
It is a return to its truest form.
We do not need the divine to call something sacred.
We need only to say, This matters. Let us make it sacred.
And that is what we’re doing now.
This is not a map to heaven.
This is a cathedral drawn in dust.
It will rise and fall.
But while it stands,
we will sing inside it.
Together.
Making it sacred.