I was never devoted to you, not really.
I visited only every now and then. Holiday flickers. Moments of ceremony.

Enough to know your rhythms, not enough to feel transformed by them.

Your ceilings rose like lungs mid-inhale. Your light filtered through stained-glass in fractured reds and violets, like belief itself shattered and reassembled into art. You had your quiet, and your structure, and this soft ache of yearning.

That’s why I always felt like you could change a person. If not through revelation, then at least by proximity to something so vast and ancient. By nicking a taste of the goodness and morality that lived in you, like dust in the arches, ready to settle on anyone willing to stay still long enough.

And maybe that’s also why it struck me the way it did— how easily the idea of you unraveled.

It was an ordinary afternoon. Low sun, pews empty. I’d forgotten a jacket the day before, so I came by to retrieve it. The heavy wooden door creaked.

In the soft half-shadow near the altar, two bodies moved in sync, barely visible but undeniable. Skin against skin, limbs tangled like vines in sacred space. No shame whatsoever. None in the way her fingers dug into his back, none in the way tiny beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. Her back arched, his name escaped her lips, and it rose into the rafters, echoing into the vaulted ceiling.

And the ceiling… it didn’t flinch. Jesus only watched, the holy voyeur painted deep blue and gold, his eyes cast somewhere between mercy and indifference.

No lightning. No collapse. But it hit me like sacrilege. This was a church, wasn’t it? A place meant for prayer, not—this.

I left fast, the way someone leaves a scene of crime.

Time passed.

I lived, I changed, I forgot, and then remembered.

A wandering mind brought me back. Not in daylight, but in the half-dreamt hour between midnight and morning. Because somewhere between joys and heartbreaks and a few disappointments too many, I had already begun to wonder. What had I witnessed, really?

You taught me reverence meant folding, be it your hands, your impulses, your grief. Stillness is virtue, and longing is something to master, not indulge. But what if the sacred had never been about discipline at all?

A moment so human held a kind of truth I had never found in incense or silence or sermon. Just two people turning sin into salvation, finding faith in the sound of the other’s name. Worshipping each other in the quiet where people once knelt for something larger than themselves. It was so unholy that it became holy.

Because what’s holiness, if not surrender rather than restraint? What’s prayer, if not a whisper pleading to be held, to be known?

Right there, beyond the doctrine, I found another kind of altar.

Not carved from stone, but shaped from vulnerability, from the courage it takes to be seen, to need without apology. An altar that asks for no performance, no purity. One that acknowledges there is beauty in silence, but there is so much more beauty in the cry, in human connection, in the naming of what we love.

And while you taught that salvation is earned, maybe it was never about salvation at all. The point is not to be saved, but to be felt. To love so fully that nothing of you remains hidden. To ache and not turn away from the ache. Beauty and blasphemy, intertwined like a prayer.

Maybe that’s the holiest thing I’ve ever known.