I Want to Understand

Today I walked into the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens. I have walked past it many times, stopped to look at it and admired it from the outside, but until today I had never felt compelled to cross the threshold.

The cathedral is darker than you expect in the middle of the day. With no service on, the chandeliers are off and most of the candles are unlit, so the only real light comes through tall arched windows set with small round panes of glass. It doesn’t fill the space. It falls in narrow shafts across the marble columns and catches on the gold of the iconostasis, the painted saints on the walls and the deep blue of the domes above, leaving everything else in shadow. I sat down in that half light, found myself crying for my sister, and then I prayed.

We were not related by blood, but she was my sister in every way that counted, and I called her that for years. She was a force, a strong woman who didn’t shrink for anyone, but her energy was bright rather than hard, and she had big eyes that shifted between blue and green depending on the day.

Only later did I realise that today marks forty days since she died, and I still don’t quite know what to do with that coincidence.

Forty days after a death carries particular weight in the Greek Orthodox tradition. It is a point at which the dead are remembered through prayer and ritual, part of an understanding of death that has surrounded me since childhood even though I have never considered myself particularly religious. I am culturally Greek Orthodox in a way that is difficult to separate from simply being Greek. The churches, the candles, the icons, the smell of incense, the crossing of oneself, the memorials and the rituals around death were there long before I had the capacity to decide what I believed.

Some of that is cultural muscle memory. We inherit rituals before we interrogate them, and they lodge themselves somewhere between memory and instinct, occasionally surfacing before the rational mind has had a chance to explain them. I did not wake up this morning thinking that I needed to mark forty days since my sister’s death, and I did not calculate the date and decide to go to church. I didn’t even know it was the fortieth day when I walked through the doors.

Part of me wants to make something of that, and another part immediately starts dismantling it. It could be coincidence, subconscious memory, grief or pattern recognition, or simply the human tendency to impose meaning on events after the fact. That tension is familiar to me because I am autistic.

My mind is extraordinarily practical. I need to understand things, sometimes to an almost unreasonable degree: how something works, what caused it, what the pattern is and what I am supposed to do with the information once I have it. When I am confronted by uncertainty, my instinct is rarely to leave it alone. I examine it.

That instinct serves me well most of the time, but eventually it becomes impractical.

In a largely neurotypical world, most people seem able to live with unanswered questions more easily than I can. I keep asking long after the practical value of the question has disappeared, and at some point the asking becomes something I simply cannot put down.

Grief is proving particularly resistant to this approach. There are facts surrounding my sister’s death that can be understood: sequences of events that can be reconstructed, medical explanations that can be given, practical things that have to be done and cultural rituals that tell us what comes next. None of them answers the question grief keeps asking.

It has also moved through me differently from how I expected. Some parts of it came and went quickly, while others seemed to settle in my body before my mind had caught up. Acceptance came early. I know she is gone. What has not come is understanding, and for a mind like mine, accepting something without understanding it is a far harder place to be.

Sitting in that church today, I caught myself saying it aloud, quietly, over and over: I want to understand. I wasn’t entirely sure who I was talking to. It might have been God, the universe or my sister, or some part of myself that only becomes audible when the practical machinery in my head is finally exhausted.

Most people who know me probably don’t know that I pray, but I do, and sometimes I pray hard. I have done so for years without ever being able to say with confidence who I think is listening.

For a long time I regarded that as an inconsistency I would eventually have to resolve, because surely prayer requires belief, and belief requires some idea of what, or whom, one believes in. I am no longer sure that it does.

I have always thought we need faith: not necessarily religion, and certainly not the same religion for everyone, but something that gives us fuel to continue when what we know is no longer enough. We make enormous commitments to futures we cannot see. We love people knowing that love offers no protection against losing them, build things we may never see completed and trust people we can never fully know. Much of our hope cannot possibly be the product of evidence alone, and much of human life already depends on small leaps beyond what can be demonstrated.

My life in Australia has shaped this understanding as much as the Orthodoxy I inherited in Greece. Living in a multifaith country, among people who find the sacred in many traditions and people who find it in none but still live by profound convictions, has made it hard for me to believe that faith belongs to a single vocabulary. These traditions are not interchangeable, but beneath them I recognise a shared impulse: the desire to locate ourselves within something larger than the limits of an individual life.

That is part of why I find myself increasingly interested in faith rather than certainty. Certainty demands an answer, while faith may allow us to continue without one.

That distinction is difficult for the autistic part of me that wants the world to be legible. I want to understand what happened to my sister and what death actually does to the connection between two people. I want to know where all the love we have for someone goes when they are suddenly no longer here to receive it, whether consciousness simply stops or something remains, and whether she can somehow hear me when I speak to her. I also want to understand why I walked into that particular church today. My rational mind can offer several perfectly plausible explanations, but it cannot tell me which one is true.

Perhaps maturity, for me, will involve learning that understanding has a boundary. That is not an argument against reason. I want evidence where evidence is possible and assumptions challenged wherever they can be, and faith should never become an excuse to stop thinking. But there are questions for which thinking harder does not produce an answer, and death is one of them.

I do not want to romanticise what happened today. Grief makes us hungry for meaning, and I know enough about the human mind to understand that hunger can make coincidence feel like design.

I cannot tell you that my sister somehow brought me into the Metropolitan Cathedral on the fortieth day after her death, or that God did, or even that something buried in my Greek Orthodox cultural memory knew what my conscious mind had forgotten. But I also don’t want to explain it away simply because I cannot explain it, and that may be the greater challenge for me.

Leaving an experience unresolved is deeply uncomfortable for a mind that has spent a lifetime trying to make the world understandable. Yet faith, I think, occupies precisely that space between what we know and what we cannot know, without demanding that we surrender either reason or wonder.

I have always loved Byzantine churches: their domes, their gold, the way they are built to make you look up. I loved them even as a gay child who often felt betrayed by the church that built them. I have never fully resolved that contradiction, and I am not sure I need to. Both the belonging and the distance were with me when I walked in today.

The church I entered belongs to a particular faith, and the forty days I unknowingly marked belong to a particular tradition that is part of me whether or not I subscribe to every element of its theology. I remain tied to that inheritance, complicated as it is, and today it gave my grief somewhere to go. I am grateful, though, that my life has exposed me to the many ways in which human beings reach beyond themselves.

Maybe that is why I no longer feel an urgent need to decide who receives my prayers. What I needed today was simply to pray: to ask why, to ask where my sister has gone, and to say, with all the stubbornness of an autistic mind confronted by a problem it cannot solve, that I want to understand.

No answer came, and I am beginning to think that faith is not the expectation that one will.

Forty days after my sister died, I walked into a church I had never entered, without knowing what day it was, and prayed without knowing exactly who I was praying to.

For now, I am learning to live without understanding why.

First published on Substack, 24 September 2026.