Walking with God: Romani faith and everyday miracles
When you don't light candles and your church is inside your heart.
Days before our daughter was due to be born, Martina woke up with a paralyzing headache. Her blood pressure was rocket high and kept climbing. Pepi called doctors and emergency lines and was told we must go to the emergency room.
Martina ended up staying 10 days in the hospital for observation and to make sure her blood pressure was stable, waiting for the baby to pick her moment to arrive. Thankfully, our daughter was born healthy and without complications.
But in that moment, on our way to the emergency room, when we quickly gathered documents and essentials, threw jackets on, and rushed out, in that scary limbo when Martina was stepping out into the unknown, in pain, and worried sick about her baby, Pepi said six magical words as he was pressing the handle to open the door.
“God in front us, we follow.”
Martina had heard Pepi say “God in front, I follow” countless times. He says this almost every time he ventures out. The stakes can be tiny or life-changing. It doesn’t matter. What matters is his unshakable belief that God is with him at every step.
For Martina, whose faith and spirituality still ebb and flow in search of a strong roof in her heart, these words always sounded beautiful and a little bit enchanting. But when she heard them on her way to the hospital, they - unexpectedly to her - brought her comfort and courage. And for the first time, they sounded true.
What makes faith unshakable?
Pepi, a person who has had a very difficult life since he was abandoned in an orphanage as a 6-month-old baby, a person who has faced violence, brutality, and poverty, who has seen tragedies most of us cannot imagine, has never - not once - doubted the existence of God.
The same goes for his entire Roma tribe. Their faith in God is unshakable even though their lives are much harder than everyone else around them, even though the class divide is prominent in everyday life, even though their life is marked by daily struggles.
What does this faith look like?
The Romani don’t light candles in front of icons. They don’t follow prayers where the words are already laid out for them in advance. They don’t go to church in the traditional sense. Our Roma relatives have their own church, in the ghetto, in a building like any other. But they don’t need to go to this church in order to establish a connection with God.
God, to them, is not a concept. God is not something foreign, something to be explained, something to be translated. They don’t acknowledge intermediaries to God.
To them, God is always present. God is always here, listening, and ready to respond. God is always participating.
It doesn’t matter if you are illiterate and you can’t read the Bible. It doesn’t matter how virtuous you have been according to this or that standard. It doesn’t matter how you enter a conversation with God. None of this matters, because it is all human-made, a structure upheld by traditions, customs, and cultures that ultimately have no place and no power in the unbreakable link between one human soul and God.
All this sounds no different from any and every religious or spiritual teaching. We have all heard it and read it a thousand times.
The difference becomes noticeable in how the Romani weave it into the reality of life.
In August 2017, several houses from the Roma mahala (which translates to “neighborhood” but is most widely used as “ghetto”) were demolished by the municipality under the supervision of the mayor, dozens of police officers, and several reporters.
The mahala, in existence for over a century, became gradually surrounded by middle-class white-skinned neighbors who felt the Romani were encroaching on “their otherwise beautiful” neighborhood. So, in a tale as old as time, steps were taken to chase away the Romani.
A second wave of demolition happened in 2019, and one of the razed houses belonged to Pepi, his then-partner Nora, and their children. The families were placed in a “temporary housing center” and have, ever since, been hounded with bureaucratic curve balls and threats of eviction and child protection services. In the demolitions, many things were lost. Documents, birth certificates, diplomas, childhood pictures.
“They came at 5:00 am,” Pepi remembers, “and chased us out. You barely have time to wake up the children and leave, let alone figure out what clothes to put on, or remember which important items to take.”
How would most of us react if our home is razed to the ground and we’re now left at the mercy of an institutional system that despises us? How would we respond to standing in front of a pile of rubble with nothing but the clothes on our backs?
We can show you how Pepi’s niece, Vela reacted when her house was razed in August 2017.
You can see her, visibly pregnant, walking straight ahead together with her husband and kids, not even looking back, with a journalist barely able to keep up, at the very beginning of this news report. Vela’s responses to him are flippant, sarcastic, defiant, and, even though she’s the one who’s had her life turned upside down, he’s the one repeatedly caught off-guard.
“Where are you going to take the wife and kids?” the reporter asks her husband, Nicky.
“To the sea, we’re going on vacation,” Vela answers.
“But you’re pregnant,” the reporter says after a quick look at her.
“I’m not pregnant.”
“What do you mean, look how big your belly is!”
“Don’t you worry about me.”
“Where are you going to live now?”
“Where am I going to live? Around the world and back.”
You can see the anger but, try as you might, you cannot see despair. The Roma spirit does not break. It has not broken even after a thousand years of violence. Tragedy doesn’t subdue the Romani. It makes them laugh, it angers and energizes them, and they continue walking forward, straight ahead, just like Vela in this video.
What is their secret?
Faith. In themselves and in God. But not a God who stands far away in the sky. Not a God that needs to be appeased and who you have to beg to.
The God who works with you
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