I was raised in a deeply Catholic home. My parents have lived their religion intensely and have preserved the same ancestral traditions of the Catholic Church—traditions that trace back to the cultural eradication imposed by the Spanish upon arriving in the Americas. I received the same religious education that my parents, and their parents before them, also received. Yet as a child, I could never find any spiritual connection within that education.

As children, we understand that we shouldn’t do to others what we wouldn’t want done to us. Children understand that it feels good to be generous and compassionate because smiles are contagious. They understand that it feels bad to cause harm, because we see sadness reflected in people’s faces. Goodness and wrongdoing are natural human instincts, and from childhood they are shaped by morality, principles, and example. But some children struggle to grasp the idea of a superior and inexplicable force living in temples, rituals, processions, priests, or miraculous images. Children were taught to accept religion as an unquestionable truth—and as the only truth. They were not encouraged to investigate, analyze, explore concepts or history, or develop critical and analytical thinking. They were not taught that many cultures around the world also believe their own religion is the true one. In more extreme cases, children were taught to discriminate against those who did not think like their parents. In short, children were not allowed to ask a simple question: Why?

That kind of authoritarian upbringing led me to distance myself completely from my parents’ religion. Either you are a believer or you are not. And if you are not, society labels you as agnostic or atheist—labels I used for myself during the first half of my life. One day, in the depths of severe depression, I felt God’s light for the first time. I understood that you don’t need any religion to have God in your heart. I realized that religion is one way to connect with God, but not the only one. Some of us don’t need external structures to receive God’s light. That light lives within each of us, waiting to be discovered. Some spend their whole lives searching for it; others, like my parents, find it through their beliefs.

The truth is that today I share the same divine light my parents tried to explain to me, but it was a light only I could find. I am not religious. I do not practice any religion. But God has been in my life from the moment I wake up each morning. Every sunrise and every sunset, every time I see the sun shining on the horizon, reminds me of the day I understood that God is real and that His light shines within each of us. A light we can only feel once we clear away the darkness in our lives.