The Divine I Know

A soul declaration by Christine Liwa Cutamora

I was never here for salvation.
I never sought the Divine to be rescued.
I didn’t kneel in desperation.
I knelt in reverence—
not outward, but inward.
Where silence meets stillness,
and I could feel it,
not above me, not beside me—
but within.

You force me to eat the body of Christ every Sunday,
but I don’t need to.
Because the Divine does not live in the bread.
It lives in me.
Not literally, but deeply.
Undeniably.
Not in the ritual I swallow,
but in the truth I embody.

I don’t pray to survive.
I don’t sing to be forgiven.
I don’t perform to be seen as holy.

I seek because I can’t look away
from what is real.
From what pulses through my ribs
when I’m still enough to hear it.

When others say,
“I met Him when I needed Him the most,”
I nod.
But I don’t relate.

Because I didn’t meet God
in the moment of drowning.
I met the Divine
while I was already searching—
not for comfort, but for truth.
Not to be saved,
but to be shown.

Let them keep their God in churches,
in thrones,
in gendered pronouns
and stained glass names.
Let them kneel because they were broken.
Let them chant the names they were taught.

But I…
I will not name

Who am I to name the Infinite?
How can we be so certain
about something that moves beyond language?

The God I know
has no face,
no voice,
no rules—
but speaks so clearly through my becoming.

This is not unbelief.
This is holy restraint.
This is deep reverence.
This is refusing to reduce the Divine
to symbols I did not choose.

And still—
I kneel.

Not in fear.
Not in guilt.
But in sacred recognition.
I kneel where He dwells—
not out there,
but inside me.

In the marrow.
In the silence.
In my refusal to forget.

I am not rebelling against faith.
I am returning to it—
the kind that was never written,
but always known.

So no—I don’t believe I commit sin when I sit with a quack doctor, when I listen to ancestral wisdom, or when I seek healing outside the walls of a church. Because the Divine I know does not punish me for seeking truth. It does not shrink when I ask questions. It does not abandon me when I look beyond what tradition allows.

And no—I am not a hypocrite when I step into a church either. Because I can walk through sacred spaces without losing myself to them. I know how to enter with reverence, and I know how to leave behind what is performance.

The difference is, I don’t go to church to be seen by God—I go to feel what is sacred and leave what is not.

My loyalty is not to ritual; it’s to truth.

I will honor what holds depth and strip away what is hollow. And that’s not hypocrisy—that’s discernment.

That’s alignment.

That’s what it means to be in relationship with something greater but not controlling, vast but not vain, sacred but not demanding. The Divine I know is not afraid of complexity—it welcomes it. Because the core of it all is not obedience. The core is honor.

This isn’t just a modern, convenient rebrand of faith.

This isn’t me saying, “I still believe in God, just not in organized religion” like it’s a trending disclaimer.

What I walk with is not a softer version of what I left—it is an entirely different relationship with the sacred.

This isn’t about rejecting bad teaching. This is about releasing diluted frameworks altogether—those that were shaped by fear, control, and performance.

The Divine I know isn’t something I tried to make fit inside a better church. I didn’t try to fix the doctrine.

I left the paradigm. I outgrew the idea that holiness requires hierarchy.

I moved beyond the need for middlemen between me and what is eternal. What I walk with now isn’t reactionary—it’s foundational. It wasn’t born from rebellion. It was born from remembrance.

What I carry is not borrowed belief—it is soul-deep knowing.

The visualization I carry within me is not a thought—it’s a visceral, overwhelming knowing. It’s so vivid, so raw, that if I let myself fully feel it, I could break down in tears—not from sadness, but from the intensity of sacred recognition.

I can see it clearly, even as others doubt what can’t be seen. But I don’t need permission to believe what I feel without question. When people lift their hands in worship, I don’t relate.

The instinct inside me is not to raise my arms toward the sky—it’s to kneel inward, curled like a fetus, folded deep within myself, where the Divine pulses. Not above. Not beside. Inside.

And it’s not heavy—it’s light. So light, it feels like a veil. A shroud that wraps me, not to bind me, but to expand me. A presence that is so vast it stretches to the edges of the universe, and yet so intimate I feel it flicker through my own skin. In that space, I don’t feel human—I feel glowing. Flickering. For a moment, I almost disappear… yet I remain intact.

That’s how real it is. And that is why I refuse to call it God.

Because what I see, what I feel, is not diluted with rituals, punishments, or performance. The word “God” has been caged—confined by rules and "rightness." But what lives inside me is undiluted.

Formless.

Honest.

Clean.

The Divine I know doesn't demand, doesn't instruct, doesn't punish.

It simply is.

And I’m not here to please it. I’m here to walk with it.