The Prophet Bilal Moreno

A Facebook update by a friend from college got me thinking about my own religious journey and how we both ended up where we never expected to.

Photo by Anuja Tilj.

It was another dreary morning spent scrolling for connection when a man and woman with two children in their arms showed up in my Facebook feed. In the photo, they are smiling in front of a rose-pink wall and dressed in formal clothes, like at a wedding or some other formal event where you can get a family photo for free. 

The man is the color of wheat toast. His light beard is closely trimmed to merge evenly into his low fade, like a typical clean-cut Hispanic dude from back home. “Bill Sanchez has updated his cover photo,” Facebook told me. Who? I looked hard, but I couldn’t place where I knew Bill from, or what exit I’d taken in my life that placed me in the same zip code as him since I first got on Facebook in 2007.

In the photo, he sort of looks like me—minus the beard, which I can’t grow, and the wife, who is darker-skinned than mine and has curly black hair. He has a daughter, maybe four or five years old. His son, who he holds in the crook of his left arm, wears a tiny patterned dress shirt and vest like Enzo did at Brittany’s wedding in November, the day Argentina beat Mexico to stay in the World Cup. 

I clicked on the link to Bill’s profile: five mutual friends from my college days at William Paterson, all of whom I haven’t seen in over a decade. Their faces are familiar, though I wasn’t close with any of them; I didn’t make many friends while at Willy P. After living in campus housing the first year, I moved back to Bayonne and commuted so that I could spend more time with my girlfriend, play soccer at 16th Street, and help lead the church youth group. When I wasn’t in class, I hung out in professors’ offices or the atrium reading books about soccer history and playing on Facebook.

Because I work in front of screens and then return to a screen to write at night or early morning, I’m often bored: maladaptive daydreaming, like in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” comes easy. So seeing Bill’s photo got me all turned around, remembering who I thought I’d be at 22 and how far away from that person I am now. 

It was early June when I found his Facebook profile. I had booked flights for New Jersey to see my parents and grandparents for five days, so I was more nostalgic than usual.

I clicked on Bill’s photos and started swiping, looking for a resemblance to the person I knew all those years ago. I scrolled past pictures of him playing with his kids, on vacation with his wife, and standing at a dinner table with his brothers. Then I saw a picture of him in the desert in a white tee shirt with prayer beads around his neck.

Click.

This was not Bill Sanchez. This was Bilal Moreno¹, the kid from Passaic I met at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship during my freshman year of college. We weren’t friends in the real world because Bilal—which is what he went by then—annoyed the hell out of me. The first time we met at one of Pastor Ken’s Bible studies, I got trapped in a conversation about the Holy Spirit. He was charismatic and believed the end of the world was coming in our lifetime—he also thought Barack Obama was Illuminati and that God was preparing him to Christianize North Africa.