The 'Muslim Priest’: An Introduction (Part 1)

Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem

“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. ”

― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

All of life is a pilgrimage. All of life is a seeking of that primordial One-ness. Of God. A yearning towards the One who is our Beginning. Our End. Our All and Everything. And as Blessed Augustine has said in his Confessions, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord.”

Who am I? I am currently a priest in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. A ‘traditional’ priest. Perhaps you can say ‘Traditionalist’, yet that term has some unwelcome connotations and baggage. At the moment, I am on a sort of semi-private leave while the practical arrangements of my move to Islam are made final.

I am also in the middle journey of my life, having reached middle age. Though at one time I would have felt as Dante did — reaching the mid part of my life and finding myself lost in the dark woods, I wouldn’t say this now, as I have found the ‘straight way’. There was no ‘mid-life crisis’ involved. It is simply that we all see things differently at different points in our lives. With different eyes. Looking back, as it were. Hopefully growing in wisdom. Inshallah.

My whole life has been one of intense spiritual searching. Of yearning. Of devotion. Reading the Gospels and Holy Scripture alone in my room hour after hour as a young boy, I took seriously the call of Jesus Christ: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” (Matthew 19:21) It was a radical pursuit of Truth and of God. To find the Truth, and then to LIVE FOR IT — with all one’s heart, with all one’s mind, and with all one’s soul. Come what may, and cost what it will.

Who was this God Whom we seek? How do we find the Unseen? How do we know the Unknowable? How do we define the Uncircumscribable? The nominal American Protestantism of my youth didn’t really seem to have any deep answers. And so I went on a search as a young man. What is Truth? I sought to find it myself.

My ‘agnostic’ search began in my teenage years and extended through college and into my 20s. The Calvinist God that I knew as a child seemed distant, unlovable, uncaring. The theology seemed bookish and dry. Christ, however, was another matter. Where did he fit in in all of this? The Calvinist God of whom I was instructed did not seem to match the Christ I knew in the Gospels. The parable of the Prodigal Son seemed nothing like the doctrine of Double-Predestination taught to us in Sunday school. Can we, by our own will, repent and turn back to God? Or has our fate already been decided by a Totally Sovereign Lord? I found the latter concept totally monstrous over time, and like Ivan Karamazov, I ‘returned my ticket’ and rejected such a cosmically cruel God, whether or not he truly existed. Even if it should mean that I be damned to hell. I would go out of protest of such a cosmic injustice.

Through all of my searching, I may have been many things, but I was never an atheist. I knew there was a God. Or an ‘Ultimate Truth’. Perhaps a ‘Force’. But it — or He — was there. Waiting to be discovered. The Tao, perhaps, was as close as I could understand It. “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” I carried a small copy of the Tao Te Ching with me in my pocket for years starting at the age of fifteen.

I was never satisfied, however. There was always something missing. I studied Buddhism. I sat in Zazen meditation. Waiting. Waiting for what? I wasn’t sure. Enlightenment? The dissolution of my ego? Mindfulness? Much of Buddhism in America didn’t seem terribly serious. Something like Zen Buddhism is intimately and deeply tied to the Japanese psyche and culture. It doesn’t seem like a tradition which could simply be lifted up wholesale and set right down in the middle of 21st century America without doing some damage to its integrity. In the Zazen meditation hall, there were no Japanese. Just angry ex-Baptists in Japanese robes sipping green tea, chanting phonetically ancient Buddhist chants and (then) complaining about George Bush and Fox News. I don’t doubt that they were sincere, but it simply didn’t seem to ‘work’.

It was one day in the summer of 2003 that I chanced upon an American Buddhist magazine in a Barnes and Noble in which there was an article complaining about the eclectic inauthenticity of American Buddhism. “Many American Buddhists are really into reading Rumi, for example,” the article lamented.

Rumi? I had never heard of Rumi. So naturally, I immediately abandoned the magazine and bought a book of Rumi’s poetry. It was the popular Coleman Barks translation. And amazingly, this was a major milestone in my life. Here, in the poetry of Rumi, did I find a new way to connect to God. To know Him. God was no longer the stern, distant Judge, nor the arbitrary Calvinist ‘monster,’ nor the abstract ‘Ultimate Reality’. Here was my Beloved — face to face with me. He was a God Whom I LOVED. And who loved me. I felt absorbed into the ocean that was the Love of God. I have never felt or experienced anything like it. “There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you?” asked Rumi. And yes, I did feel it. I yearned for this New Love.

Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side. Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now. You are covered with thick cloud. Slide out the side. Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you have died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now.

This was my discovery of the deep ocean of Sufism. Sufism — not simply the ‘mystical side of Islam’ as it is often described, but this depth of spiritual tradition which is truly central to Islam in its totality. (This truth I would only discover much later.)

My discovery of Sufism was not my first encounter with Islam, however. Aside from reading about the central tenets and pillars of Islam as a teen, 9/11 was my first real encounter — as it was for many Americans… and American converts to Islam. After the terrorists attacks, in October of 2001, the local Islamic Center held an open house which I attended. I ate with the Muslim men there. I prayed with them. Listened to them. Attended lectures and speeches about what it is to be Muslim. My interest piqued. I signed up for courses on Islam in college. In a course on Islamic Civilization, I listened to the Quran beautifully recited for the very first time. I was deeply moved. I was inexplicably drawn to it. But my interest, then, was still mostly political and academic in a post-9/11 America.

Rumi, however, was the gateway. He provided the missing key. By 2003, I yearned to become Muslim. I saw the beauty of it. The depth. The truth of it. I spoke with the Imam about conversion. I hung out at the local Islamic Center. I made Muslim friends. It was a beautiful and joyful moment.

But I didn’t convert. At the time, I was too fearful of such a conversion.

How would I be perceived if I ‘rejected Christ,’ as I saw such a conversion entailing? How could I do such a thing? My parents and family would disown me. Society would see me as a ‘terrorist’. I backed away at that point, I am ashamed to say. And for reasons which, looking back, were really mostly cultural, I chose to seek out such depth in theology and mysticism as I saw in Sufism and in Islam within a Christian context. Not far from me was an Antiochian Orthodox church. The Divine Liturgy was sung in Arabic at times. It was not the Quran in all its unparalleled and Divine Beauty… but it would suffice. In my study of the depth of the Christian tradition, the Orthodox East was the only place where there was something comparable to the beauty and depth which I saw in Islam. Not simply the beauty and the depth, but the firmness in upholding tradition, morality, family, society, etc.

Orthodoxy was my compromise.

Yet Orthodoxy was a complete system. A whole civilization. A depth in theology. A world of monasticism. A thing of transcendent beauty. It was something into which one could immerse oneself and throw oneself completely. Which is what I did.

Islam was something that I still respected. Yet if I was to take on the Orthodox faith, I would do so totally and unreservedly. So different was this ancient and apostolic beauty from the dry and fractured Protestantism of my youth. I sought God with my whole heart and my whole mind and my whole sole, and if Islam was not a path open to me at the time, then I could find Him certainly in Orthodoxy.

Perhaps in Orthodoxy I could find the One-ness and Wholeness of God which I sought.

(To be continued in Part II.)

Just a note: This is a *very* brief and incomplete account of my full spiritual progression. More will be fleshed out later. I provide this now in order to give a very basic outline and overview.