Heading East
Continuing my ongoing thoughts as a priest-monk becoming Muslim.
It’s been about a month and a half since I started my trek on the road east from California, yet it already feels like something of a lifetime. After decades of feeling drawn to Islam in varying degrees, I had finally decided to take the plunge. For this to happen, however, a physical move was necessary and in order, as I was living in a Catholic monastery. One simply can’t be a priest and monk publicly, and a Muslim privately. For the better part of a year, this had been the situation — at least increasingly so in my private thoughts. Now, I had to step out into the unknown. No safety nets. Just trust in God.
In order to begin my new life as a Muslim, I felt it important to head back east — to go home — to the place where my journey into Islam began some twenty years ago at a little Islamic center in a university town in the rust belt of Appalachia.
I recalled the words of T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets:
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
And so I was coming Home.
