I often feel like I live between definitions: between what I was born into and what I chose, between faith and critique, between politics and poetry, between prayer and protest. I believe in communism, or at least in its soul, the part that speaks of equality and dignity and refuses to accept that people should suffer because they were born on the wrong side of a line. I believe in shared resources, in standing up for people who have no voice, and in questioning systems that hoard wealth and power. I think the world can be more just if we care about each other as much as we care about ourselves. I’d call myself left-leaning, with a heart that cares more about compassion than slogans. I also believe in God, and I know that sentence alone is enough to make some people roll their eyes. I’ve met people who take pride in mocking others for their faith and wear their disbelief like a medal. To them, any attachment to prayer, ritual, or grace is foolish, weak, or backward.
My grandmother is a deeply spiritual woman. She starts each day by lighting incense, and her evenings are full of soft chants and folded hands. She believes something higher watches over us and listens when we cry silently, and that belief gives her comfort and hope. Even in our own family, some people mock her for it. Some of them call themselves communists. They laugh at her rituals and scoff at her devotion. Every time I see it, I wonder what an ideology that preaches justice is worth if it can’t practice empathy. Communism, as I understand it, means seeing every human being as equal, rejecting hierarchies that put some people above others, listening to the pain of the oppressed, and taking apart the systems that cause that pain. Tearing down one kind of oppression while building another defeats the purpose. If I stand for equality for Muslims, for Dalits, for women, and for workers, I can also stand for my grandmother’s right to fold her hands and whisper a prayer. Faith can be a form of resistance, and for many people, belief is how they survive.
Believing in God leaves my politics and my critical thinking intact. It means I hold on to grace while I fight for what’s right. To people who feel the need to mock the faithful, I want to ask why they would take away someone’s only source of joy, or laugh at the one thing that makes them feel less alone. Cruelty is the real enemy of progress. I want a revolution that leaves people’s souls alone. Tagore wrote, “Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” That’s how I see my grandmother, and how I see myself, singing out of courage and a stubborn hope that justice and kindness can live together, and that belief and reason can walk side by side. I believe in God, I believe in communism, and most of all, I believe in people.
