The Journey: first stop.

The first time I stepped into a Catholic Church I did it in defiance of the beliefs of my family. I had recently married my best friend.  We had leaned on each other to escape our troubled households and eventually, the Cult.  We had no idea of what we were doing, but we felt we could trust each other.  My new husband, was a Mita too, but his musical pursuits had expanded his world, venturing out of the cult to sing and play with a very special group of friends.   These friends were devoted Catholics with a music ministry. They would travel from town to town in Puerto Rico in their mission, sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  They were a jolly crowd, filled with  conviction and enthusiasm.  They would talk about their Jesus in a very casual and personal way.  

 I was mystified to hear them talk. Up to that point, to me, Jesus was one of the characters of the Bible.  I am sorry if I am bursting someone's bubble, but Los Mita will try to convince you that they are Christians. I would assure you that Christ was an outdated concept to me. I was taught that we were living a new dispensation and that Mita en Aaron had come to fulfilled what Jesus Christ, apparently was not able to accomplish in his own time.  That is the core of their teachings, regardless of what they want to portray in public.

Our new Catholic friends introduced me to the name and person of Jesus.  I started to recognize that this Jesus was someone I was already acquainted to, inexplicably, by some sort of innate intuition.  I had battled with the contradictions of the god of my childhood's indoctrination and GOD.  It was a painful and lonely battle, and finally, I had met someone handing me the first matching pieces of my puzzle. I acknowledge the first pieces I kept in a secret place inside my heart, were passed down to me from my grandmother -remember she was  raised a devout catholic-I recall spending time with my grandmother, secretly indulging in conversations about Mother Mary, the saints and the angels from her childhood memories.  These memories gave me strength to do the unthinkable for a Mita believer and visit a Catholic church.  For twenty something years, I had received terrifying admonitions about stepping into another church or entertaining their doctrines.  

Fear had effectively kept me from venturing out of the cult for two decades, but something had change.  At that time I was a student of Social Work at the University of Puerto Rico.  I had started recognizing and identifying dysfunction in my family, I began questioning things in a way that did not escape my family's scrutiny.  They started to label me as delusional, they took me to the Cult's elders and the Prophet, to be prayed for, reprimanded and intimidated.  The exercise of their control and abuse intensified to destructive levels of emotional and even physical abuse, as my mother repeatedly beat me up to expel demons of rebellion and disbelief off of me.  I ended up running away.  The few families that would take me in, in the beginning, denied me support after hearing the story of my mental instability and rebellious spirit.  It was then, when facing my worst fear made me fearless.  

In retrospective, I see that converting to Catholicism was the place for me to rebuild a faulty foundation. You must understand that my belief system was so corrupted that medieval doctrines and rituals where a breath of fresh air. Concepts such as Salvation, Forgiveness and Redemption, where revolutionary and new.  I fell in  love with the Eucharist: Jesus was living bread and I was starving!  The scent of incense was intoxicating, the Creed offered a solid ground for my feet and spirituality was now open for exploration.  I was proud to share my beliefs with ancient mystics and with people all around the world.  My faith was a more universal one, not secretive and mysterious anymore.  

To be continued...