The sun burnt your once perfumed skin, and your tongue is sticking to the roof of your mouth as a result from excessive thirst. Half-dehydrated and desperate for survival, you hear one of your shipmates has spotted land. At last, freedom is within your grasp. Seeing the shores of a new frontier, you think back to your forgotten home where your children have been imprisoned for their different religious beliefs and for their resistance to follow the social norm. Your wife was hung for being different and her community betrayed her because they thought she was a follower of the devil, a witch. You have nothing but your belief in your faith, your dignity. That belief has united your lost courage and united others like you to seek freedom in a new land.

Liberty --France commemorated a statue for the United States and now she watches over the New York Harbor as a light of hope and freedom, beckoning the world: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."
September 1lth --the same statue that opened up her arms to the rest of the world now represented a nation stunned and helpless. Unity flooded the nation due to the recent tragedy of the Attack on America as our nation fought back, not through military actions, but with a strong wave patriotism. Ordinary civilians bought out from retailers; American flags and an innumerous number of vehicles proudly displayed patriotic bumper stickers --God Bless America, Pray for America --symbolizing the extensive faith our great nation possesses. Our nation will never forget the individual --the father or mother who just missed saying goodbye to their kids who ran off early to school --who will never live to see tomorrow, the person he or she will never become. That feeling of helplessness or sorrow or sympathy that we have, causes us to turn to the one thing that we use to support us in times of dire need --religion. Faith is the core of religion, and religion brings unity. The ancestors of the most powerful country in the world once sought religious freedom. Religion is just a coined term formed by a formalized society, yet religion can encompass an entirety of beliefs. Religion can include a person or a group's custom and way of life. It represents the uniqueness of individuals, making this world colorful in its creed.

Traveling around the world created an inevitable sense of isolation for my family. All my relatives were scattered across the globe, and there was no room for personal interaction. Settling down in a foreign country, the United States --a melting pot of culture --gave us a very little chance to directly identify with people who share our heritage. Everyone else seemed to blend in with ease, despite the fact that they were of mixed heritage. Moving here came with our share of tremendous problems, and for that we turned to our faith, our belief in God and in Catholicism for spiritual help and healing.

Many of our most deeply felt aspirations, our spiritual experiences and moral precepts, come to us through one religion or another. Karl Marx interprets religion as the opium for the masses and I believe that man is addicted to the sense of righteousness. Religion is timeless and has been with us since the creation of man and it has made life more meaningful. Prehistoric man faced the hardships of survival. Man constantly searched for enlightenment, drawing from any sources that brought him relief and prosperity. In the era of early civilization, man searched for justification for the laws and the creed that he enforced to carry out his will. Religion helped reinforce man's need to impose his will and his superiority among nature and even other human beings. An example of this would be the result of the Salem Witch Trials, when women paid a price for their everyday unique actions. If a woman looked differently or was an outcast of the community, people were scared of them. The community used fear to create hate and ostracized unique individuals, often sentencing them to death. The judges who sentenced these women drew upon the Christian Bible and its teachings in order to justify the accused's execution. Religion provided people with rules based on a system of beliefs and rituals that served to bind people together through shared worship, thereby creating a social group. Religion gave a foundation to society's beliefs, establishing a norm that we presently live in. I think that this factor is the key in understanding the integration within society .In the end, immigrant communities find out the ways in which they too can integrate with the rest of society. Today religion continues to play an important part in the lives of people throughout the world. Americans are routinely polled on whether they believe in God. Since the turn of the millennium, the proportion of believers remains over 90 percent (NORC, 1994; Piazza & Glock, 1979).

In the United States and Canada, a large population consists of people who either immigrated themselves or are descended from people who immigrated to the New World or were brought there as slaves. If one traces history back far enough, it appears that everyone living in the Western Hemisphere can trace his or her origins to other continents.

As new waves of immigrants from all over the world have streamed into the United States--Jews fleeing religious intolerance in Russia, Italians and Poles fleeing economic depression in their communities, Central and Latin Americans fleeing dictatorships and poverty, refugees from Asian countries torn by conflict --have all joined other members of their nationality group who had settled in the United States in earlier decades (Kornblum,1998). Immigrants of the yesteryear --French, English, and Anglo-Saxons --have grown to be one of the most successful classes in the United States. The outcome of this is a "new growth" in those communities in new ethnic businesses such as restaurants and grocery stores, and new social institutions such as churches (Kornblum, 1998). As a result, much pride has been expressed for their ethnic identity .

With such a vast variation in culture, how can one actually expect to exist in such diversity? The common thing that exists between the human race is the innate hope that we posses within one of us. Religion is a coined term and it stems from the core of our beliefs. Religion spans the globe, and there is no specified religion for a particular culture. Various cultures can share the same religion --Asians and Europeans can be Christians, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhists, etc. A blending of cultures occur resulting in assimilation. This form of assimilation can result in intermarriage between distinct racial and ethnic groups (Kornblum, 1998). Religion will bring other cultures closer together In terms of family and society, resulting in a blended nation. Settled down in a community and having adjusted to the pressures of a new life, I have realized that religion and our faith come at a price. There will always be opposition to any belief or religion, and it is through trials and tribulations that our country has survived and prevailed. Religion will bring hope to immigrants and every one who value righteousness and it will be the bridge towards the future.

Escape -you have finally reached your destination. Some of the future generations may ask you how and why you survived. You have lived to tell them that it is faith, the willpower to go on. Religion is based on faith, which is not only the reason why people believe in God or how strong our beliefs and morals are. Religion tests our strength and our faith as human beings. It is the spark in every h~ the fire that keeps us burning and living from day to day. Faith is what makes us free. It is what the great poet Dylan Thomas recognized as our ability to fight, survive, and live on --to "rage, rage against the dying of the light."