The Wholeness of My Faith

My religious orientation has always been multidimensional and engaged in various forms. In the modern world, my religious identity can now be seen and labeled as being authentically interfaith, yet that distinction is still quite new and was not used, let alone known until recently, and is deeply connected not only to my multi-religious cultural practices, but also through my bi-racial ethnic identity; and more importantly, how my embodiment, that is, my journey of learning how to claim my wholeness and integrate the parts that uniquely makeup who I am, where I’ve come from, and all I’ve encountered in my experience have shaped my theories of a healthy life, which is my personal theology.

My Father, the first child of four, from my Sicilian immigrant grandfather from Licata, Sicily, and grandmother taught me what it means to know the power of the trinity, that which distinguished us as Christians, and more ethnically as Catholics. My mother, the baby of a teen Jewish mother who was excommunicated from her own family and her faith for her young pregnancies with her Hispanic boyfriend, inspired in me the necessity to cultivate a healthy and aligned life and community of your heart choosing inside and outside organized religious identity to find a true autonomous self, devoid of designation.

Above all else, it is my faith in Jesus that is the best quality that defines and guides me in my life. Growing up as a Catholic, I became enamored with participating in many churches and religious rituals & the unique role it can play within families, culture, and every aspect of human life. As a child, I requested to attend Catholic mass with my Sicilian grandparents in my home parish in Antioch, California. By middle and high school, I started to attend non-denominational Christian and Mormon churches with my friends and their families, also within the same culturally and religiously diverse community in which I was raised in the San Francisco East Bay Area. I attended public school, but in college, it was imperative for me to attend religious institutions because of my interest in spiritual learning and social justice activism, which I sought out on Christian campuses, and then later in life in the diverse, spiritual, and vegan communities of alignment.

I spent the first two years of undergrad starting my Master of Nursing degree. During that time, my religious life was purely maintained through social justice service trips, where I visited Native American priestess in Arizona, and impoverished Christian communities in Ecuador, and then lived with Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist monastery, Deer Park in Escondido, California, and learned the true value of presence and the power of the breath. Between my sophomore and junior years of undergrad, my sister died tragically in a car accident and as a result, my whole relationship with my faith strengthened, surprisingly, through an entire life of complex grief. I believe it was my Christianity through this tragedy that saved me.

It was my religious identity that always gave me hope for salvation and reminded me of the power of life, death, and transformation. In essence, the cycle of life gave me a sense of peace and something to trust in more powerful than my pain. As an adult, I began attending black gospel churches, mostly AME and Baptist communities and groups for music, and worship, which has been another salvation for me in my darkest days. Worship and music, in particular, was the through line of my faith both in and out of the church, and continues to braid all of my religious, cultural, and ethnic identities together in a tapestry that is felt, known, and understood more somatically. My distinct theology of wholeness, health, and holiness that is the trinity, is the triune communion of worship, of the body, mind, and the spirit.