When I was a child and even long after, I felt that my mother exaggerated in the way she prayed. I judged her for everything, but especially for that. I even came to resent her for leading me into a life that felt too narrow, as if her prayers had confined me to a destiny that was not mine. I felt deprived of those multiple paths where one can get lost, grow, explore, and finally choose what truly resembles us.

I resented my parents for this counter-cultural framework to which I submitted reluctantly. I did not want to recite the rosary. I wanted to recite what other children shared in the schoolyard, what students exchanged at university, what colleagues discussed at work, something more modern, more social, more reassuring, more in tune with the times.
Faith, for me, was an identity marker I was afraid to reveal, especially in France, because I saw it as old-fashioned, not inclusive enough, not cool.

But one gesture remained anchored in me, the Sunday walk to church continued to live within me. Even after I left home, this reflex, more faithful than faith itself, remained.
Habit and memory were stronger than rejection. In a secular country like France, I was secular. And yet, on Sundays, without intending to, I carried that heritage like a thread connecting me to my past, a thread stronger than any desire to break away, stronger even than my faith, which had known moments of hesitation and even moments of absence.

Part of me wanted to break free, and another part remained tied to that root. That tension made religion feel like a constraint for a long time.

There comes a moment in life when everything that once frightened us dissolves.
A moment when what once made us ashamed begins to soften.
A moment when our contradictions become our language, our way of surviving, not our weaknesses but our possible escape routes.

Life without God brought me nothing, except the certainty that I needed to believe. Spirituality has always been a structuring axis in my life, even in doubt.
Life with God, distant or impersonal as He might have seemed, had been written in me since my mother’s womb. For a long time, I suffered from not feeling free, as if I were imprisoned by invisible chains. It took detours, clumsy breaks, silent rebellions.

But do we ever truly leave our own story?
Do we abandon what shaped us, even against our will?
Do we walk away from what saved us without our noticing?

Can we really tear ourselves away from God when we have never had any other solid reference point? And in the name of the freedom not to believe, do we truly find the happiness of being free?
Free from what, exactly? Free for what?

It is when we begin to question freedom itself that we discover the truth. The greatest freedom is to recognize our limits. To admit that we can claim freedom without ever experiencing it. That we can run after endless distractions in order to flee, while forging new chains for ourselves. That we can distance ourselves from life thinking we are finding it, just as we can search for life even when it is already there, humble and faithful.

This summer, I experienced something deeply soothing. Religion, which had long been endured, gave way to chosen faith.
And I found again the simplicity of saying, without fear or shame, that hope does not disappoint.
I did not return out of fear or duty, but out of inner peace and understanding. It is a reconciliation, not a surrender.

At this moment of confession, I could say that my childhood was marked by constraint and imitation, my adolescence by irritation and an unacknowledged rupture, and my adulthood opens with a reconciliation with what has shaped me for so long, God.

In this first week of Advent, I live it in joy. Beyond doubt remains faith, and I have chosen to place it in God.

Written Aliane UMUTONIWASE