When my father died, I stopped believing in God. I was 15 years old, and it was 2009. He passed away from a heart attack on the front porch of our home. My family tried to comfort me with sayings like "the Lord has called him home," but these words offered me no solace. I couldn't understand God's plan as I grappled with how empty I felt. I missed him so much. I'd call his cellphone just to hear him on voicemail.

But I instinctively knew that if I wanted to mend from my father's death, I would need to connect with something. At first, I simply started exploring my history as a black person. I found a foundation for this exploration at Everyone's Place , a black-owned Baltimore bookstore that has been in the community for 31 years. The two-story shop often smells of frankincense and myrrh and maintains a steady flow of patrons purchasing everything from imported cowrie necklaces to books by Queen Afua .

One of the reasons Christianity ceased to feel like something I could claim for my own, especially when I was in the depths of grief over my father, was its history of racial oppression coupled with my personal experiences with racism. It became increasingly difficult for me, a young black woman, to seek salvation in a religion that had largely perpetuated the lie of a pale and blue-eyed Jesus. Later, I learned about Christianity's early history in the Middle East and Northern Africa and connected with many of Christ's universal lessons. However, when I was mourning, the religion just didn't feel like it could lift me out of my grief.

For more than five years, praying was hard for me. I wondered why I should talk to a God who had caused me so much pain. But after years of grieving, I found my way back to God through an ancient African religion. The Yoruba faith has given me the answers I could not find on my own, brought me closer to powers greater than myself, and helped me overcome the pain of losing the first man I ever loved.

Before my dad transitioned, I was a part of the vast majority of African Americans in this country who belong to the Christian religion. My dad grew up in Hampton, Virginia, and was a Christian man. Our house was built around the church—Bible quotes were plastered on the walls and my dad would play gospel music by artists like Marvin Sapp on Sunday mornings. Unfortunately, his death left me with so many questions that I felt Christianity wasn't able to answer. How could I believe in the Father after losing mine?

My father was always adamant about education, so by taking a proactive approach to study[ing] the history of black people, I felt like I was doing the work he would have wanted me to do. Everyone's Place is where I began to immerse myself in the ideas of thinkers like El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, and Assata Shakur. I read these authors to remember myself. Their ideas and thoughts were a part of a unique healing process—one that tore down my self-hatred, built up a sense of black collectivism, and gave me more concrete ideas on how to navigate the world as a strong black woman without the protection and supervision of my father. I missed my dad deeply and still woke up early on Sunday mornings hoping to hear the sound of his gospel music. But as these rituals faded, new rituals would soon come to fill their space.

By the time I came across the University of Baltimore's Cuba Study Abroad program, I was truly ready to heed the call of my ancestors and connect with something greater than myself. I quickly learned that the Yoruba religion is a spiritual system that had covertly survived the violence, rape, and subjugation of the Mid-Atlantic slave trade. The Yoruba people were one of the largest ethnic groups brought against their will to the Western world. They hailed from West Africa in what would be considered the Benin Republic, Togo, and southwestern Nigeria today. Although these people saw the devil in the form of the slave trade, they brought their God across the sea with them—the Ifa religion, which is generally referred to as the "Yoruba religion" today.