I am often amused by the thought that I may me going to church more than my friends who call themselves believers. In a foreign country, it is to me a ritual and in the past year or so, I must have been to mass around once a month on average.

DRCongo being a fervently catholic country, I was really looking forward to attending Sunday mass in Goma and was not disappointed the least. The chants were pure peace distilled, with a rhythm of joy brought by drums that fill your soul with optimism for the rest of the day. There are four services on Sunday at the church near by my hotel. Four. But there is still not enough space for everyone and dozens of people must stand outside to listen to the priest.

I didn't have a picture of the church, so I've decided to show you the leopard rug at the hotel. This is what life after death is my friends. I was told it's worth $400. Considered buying it.

I don’t really caution assiduous practice of any religion. A convinced atheist myself, I find it difficult to get my head around the idea that millions of people let their life dictated by rigid rulings written by a handful of old men. Nothing ever rang so true to me than Voltaire’s “Prière à Dieu”, and I don’t even believe in some kind of “force” or “energy” that would mysteriously decide good and evil and make the world go ‘round. To me there is only humanity. Us. Facing ourselves. Our conscious beings, distinguished from animals by our capacity to reason. Make Cartesian choices.

But maybe there is this one thing too. Love, this thing we can’t really explain. So many religions have define, explain what God is to them, but Love, not one has done so. If you try to be succinct you have to use the word love itself. I you try to really, really define it, you end up ranting for hours and still cannot encompass all its form. Our capacity to love influences our choices too, reasonably sometimes, madly often. And that puzzles me, because, well yes I do not have an explanation for it. I just KNOW it has nothing to do with God, or a force, or an energy. It just has to do with being human, with humanity.

Humanity would be my religion then and I go on my little quest. My very personal, spiritual quest for my very own truth. And I look for it e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e. Today it is at church in Goma.

Goma-Love-Spiritual quest. There lies the quintessential reason I made it into journalism. Forget about “telling the story”, “adventure”, “passion for the truth”. It is looking deep into human nature that interests me. Understanding the light and dark places within us. If we are all capable of Cartesian reasoning and love; how, oh how, is it possible for people to hate so much, kill so much, as it has been possible in places like Eastern DRC?

I will probably never know, and will certainly lose myself in this quest. I can sense a very Coelho’s Alchemist’s ending to it. Nevermind, I am standing today at church in Goma, shaking hands and offering la paix du Christ to my neighbours, staring at the half-chopped ear of the choirboy and relishing in the choral’s prowess.