Hold the pieces you think are broken to the light, and you will see that they were always touched with grace.

Every Sunday, before the seven o’clock bells finished their summons, my grandmother would tug me into the parish. By the time we slid into the long benches—atrophied by generations of guilt-ridden knees—my arms were already aching.

Above us, stained glass windows held the saints. Their gazes were angled downward with what I interpreted as expectation. Even then, I knew that I would eventually disappoint them.

When sunlight plummeted through the colored panes, the church detonated into a riot of colors. In my childhood theology, I understood this light as an instrument of discernment. It designated colors based on one’s holiness. It anointed the saints in streaks of heavenly gold, and stained the rest of us in guilty shades of crimson.

Some mornings, it presided over the altar, igniting the priest’s vestments in gilded glory. Other weeks, it comforted the bowed heads of lamenters with a consoling blue. Rarely did it touch me. Left in the shadows, I would wonder what sin I had secretly committed to be so completely overlooked by the light.

I hadn’t yet learned the vocabulary of sin, but I knew discomfort intimately. Men snickered when my wrist moved in arcs instead of angles. Women frowned when my voice rose into a melody with femininity that surpassed theirs. What they didn’t know is that children, in the cruelty of awareness, learn tone before they understand language.

The priest ratified and rendered those tones official.

By the time he spoke about the sin of homosexuality, I had already rehearsed what to do. He never met my eyes when he expounded how it was a disorder of desire, but the congregation nodded along like they had all seen the devil in our midst. His voice slithered through the church like freshly burned incense, thick enough that I couldn’t tell whether I was breathing or choking.

With those weekly reminders of what sin was said to resemble, I began worrying about the light again. I imagined Him looking out at the congregation, counting belief by consensus, and taking their word over mine.

What terrified me most was the idea that the light would keep slipping past me, the same way it always seemed to. I dreaded that the light developed preferences, choosing instead the people whose bodies never made anyone uncomfortable.

By the time I was twelve, I had learned the safest place in church was the farthest pew from the priest—sa pinaka likod. It was close enough to listen yet near enough to leave. I told my grandmother I preferred the view there, but honestly, I was preparing to leave. I skipped one Sunday, then another. Eventually, I stopped inventing excuses. It was easier to say nothing than to explain the unfixable way my body felt in those hallowed halls.

It’s strange how stepping outside the church taught me more about faith than a decade of kneeling inside it ever had. Distance asks questions that doctrine cannot answer, but contemplation can. When you’re no longer performing for people who are measuring your faith, you get a chance to hear yourself again. You get a room to breathe, away from the curling incense—to separate what is fear and what truly is faith.

It wasn’t until I wandered in the peripheries, the neglected edges of the world and of myself, that I began to understand how faith collects itself in the places we least expect. Among these shards of experiences, the divine light finds its way to you, even if you have convinced yourself that you’ve wandered too far for mercy.

God waits in the panes of glass we’ve never stood close enough to let the light through. 

I was fifteen when an earthquake ravaged our town. In the days that followed, I volunteered to help in a school outreach because doing nothing felt like another kind of sin. I was assigned to a relief station, and it didn’t take long to realize that no amount of effort would ever meet the need before me. There was no beauty in their suffering, none of the parochial martyrdom I’d been taught to glorify.

I remember a mother standing over a dented pot, sweat gluing her hair to her face, trembling as she ladled lukewarm lugaw into mismatched cups. A line of children—none of them hers—kept inching forward. With every scoop, the pot grew barer, until what remained was no longer hers to consume. Everything she had became everything she gave.

It would have made sense for her to stop—to guard what little was left. When someone more vulnerable than her met her eyes, she did not turn away. It was the first time I saw the gilded light beyond the church, perhaps illuminating humanity to offer her vestigial strength and shoulder the part she can bear.

It is in the peripheries that I also learned the theology of reinvention. 

At nineteen, I found myself in a cramped bar, reeking of hairspray and glitter, watching my first drag show. When the queens conquered the stage, and sequins blossomed like newborn stars, a part of me I’d forgotten resurrected. These performers took what the world had thrown at them, the same things I’ve experienced in the parish, and refracted it into light. Bearing witness to these queens, who constructed a self out of fragments and exhibited it as a masterpiece, was an act of defiant faith.

The divine light looked different this time. It disintegrated, no longer into orderly colors but into innumerable hues, dancing alongside the queens. I began to suspect that perhaps the God I was looking for was in the innovation of expression, demanding every life be seen, like a stained glass, in its full spectrum. Seeing someone live exactly as they are is a form of faith, one that permits the entire bar to exist as vividly.

Recently, my faith found its way into the streets. I joined a massive walkout against corruption in our university, hundreds of us pouring out of classrooms with customized cardboard signs. 

This time, the divine light seemed familiar. It gleamed red, but with a different intensity that did not resemble the same one that stained the sinners. It was raging and unforgiving, a red that leapt from one frustrated student to the next. 

Everyone in the streets basked in the seething red light, wrought by the bravery to look suffering in the face, to name it without religious euphemism, and to demand that Filipinos not be expected to endure what they have for generations. 

I knew that God was there, for he won’t allow suffering to be our divine destiny. There is a God who drags us into the streets and proclaims that resistance, one way or another, has always been ours to claim.

I used to think faith was a mirror held up to remind me what I was failing to be. Somewhere along the line, it became more of a stained glass, mustered from pieces that were never meant to match. Experiences that don’t logically fit together nonetheless solder themselves into something of unexpected coherence and incandescence.

When I finally shone a light on those experiences, something I used to beg the stained glass to do for me as a child, I saw, to my surprise, that grace had been there all along.

Looking at my life now, faith has become the stained glass brazed from the shards of myself that I was taught to discard. The fragments of myself that I once hated for the way they caught the light are now what make me recognizable to myself, and to the God I have found.