In Conclusion
A Reflection on my Interfaith Essays
This essay is the concluding one in a series where I look at various faiths and explore where they have inspired me and where I have issues. Although I am a Christian, I believe that God wants us to explore and learn from other traditions as part of our spiritual journey. This is my journey, no one else’s, and the articles merely record how I see things. They are not intended to offend or convert, nor do I expect you to agree with me. I do, however, appreciate feedback, friendship and further learning.
Other essays in the series:
Why I Am A Sikh… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Sufi… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Catholic… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am An Orthodox Christian… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Pagan… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Hindu… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Buddhist… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Jew… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am an Atheist… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am an Anglican… and Why I’m Not
And, thus, it was accomplished.
The set of essays that I planned to write exploring my interfaith journey was complete. Ten in all, covering my own church, other churches, other faiths and none, were all written and, like God after six days of creation, I could rest from my labours.
Except that I couldn’t. I am not God and, somehow, my labours were not complete. For whilst each essay told a story, put together, I realised that they also spoke a different, deeper, and wider narrative. Hence, this essay. The one essay to bind them all, the conclusion to the process.
Initially conceived as simply an essay on Sikhism, the project soon widened because what I had to say about that faith was matched by things I needed to get out about lots of other traditions. Sufism was the natural next progression since I’d just returned from Pakistan where I’d made pilgrimages to numerous Sufi shrines, then Catholicism. By this stage I had mapped out the entire set and they got written in the order they were published. It was a rewarding process. It is good to examine yourself from time to time. We think we know what we think, but we don’t always fully realise it without reflection. And then there is the question of why? Why do I feel this way? Why do others feel differently to me? Those are the really deep questions that beg answers.
And whilst the process was rewarding, it was also frustrating. Each essay was intended to be a short, snappy 1,000 to 1,500 words exposition of my attitude towards a faith tradition. But I found that impossible. I had so much to say so the 1,000 words became 2,000, then 3,000. Even then I could not get it all out — I had so much to explore; a book could be written on each were I to truly do every path justice. But there has to be a cut-off point. After all, these were essays on my personal explorations of each faith, not an outline of the history and traditions of the faith itself. So, I concentrated on the personal but by doing that I missed so much out. Take for example my essay on Paganism. I casually mention Gerald Gardner, the founder of the Wicca tradition yet I don’t explain or explore Wicca itself. That is a failing yet, I believe, an unavoidable one.
But moving one, what has undertaking this process taught me about myself? Well, several key lessons in fact and so I shall outline them here, starting with the first:
#1: I find God in place, not Scripture
Throughout all my explorations, it becomes clear that I prefer to go to a holy place rather than pick up a holy book. I find experiencing, being, totally different to reading about. I write these words now from an Orthodox monastery where, over the past few days I have learnt more about Orthodoxy than I’ve garnered from a dozen books. No matter how many books one reads about the Camino, they are no substitute for even a day’s walking, one chance encounter with a fellow pilgrim on the path. That is not to say that I don’t read books. I do, vociferously and continually, but they compliment and give context. If I want to really meet God, I travel to His holy house, not read about Him.
But why is that? Christianity is a Scripture-based religion so, surely, I should not be that way. I believe that it stems from my childhood. My early memories of walking through fields and along ancient lanes. I used to have conversations with God then. They were natural conversations, not forced or contrived. Not bound by liturgy or doctrine, undertaken at certain times within a certain formula. Yes, I knew the stories from the Bible well, through my school and reading my children’s Bible at home, but these stories rarely impacted my chats with God who was always more of a mate than a figure of authority.
And central to my childhood wanderings was St. Margaret’s, the parish church in our village. From my earliest days I have been fascinated by history, those links with the past, the ancestors. And in Draycott, that meant the church. The oldest building for miles around, the repository of the parish’s history, a hotbed of legend and mystery. That was where my religious vision of the world formed, nowhere else. I may adore the Holy City and visit it regularly, but my Jerusalem will always be a simple sandstone church on a hillock in England’s green and pleasant land. It is a return to the womb, a link with the ancestors, a communication with the essence of humanity.
And so elsewhere. When I travel, I love to meet God in the landscape. I am close to Him whilst walking along lanes which is probably why I loved the Camino so much. I adore connecting with stories of local saints, how He changed the world on a local level through normal, everyday people. Glastonbury, Walsingham, and Ilam, or abroad, Demir Baba, the Sufi shrines of Pakistan and India, Santuaria della Verna, Sihla Monastery deep in the forest. These are my places, but not the cathedrals or grand mosques. Those I find architecturally and historically interesting but not holy. They are too worldly. I don’t trust money and temporal power. Instead, rustic simplicity speaks to me.
Simplicity, yes, but not the whitewashed voids of the Presbyterians or Salafis. To me these spaces are merely empty, places designed to keep God out. For they are the religion of the word, the power of the book. Images are not needed; indeed, they are declared evil and banished. But a world without beauty is a sad place indeed. Give me a frescoed mountain chapel any time! We need to have a connection with our place on this earth and the whitewashed voids are merely generic and identikit. But take a man out of his own soil and, like a flower, he withers and dies. I see it with immigrants. It is in the angst of the Irish folk song longing for the emerald isle they’ve left behind. When taken out of your own soil, the weeds of materialism and power-seeking multiply, trying to fill that gap. I see it too in converts, who always seem to be trying to be something they are not, desperate to make the foreign cloak fit their body and getting angry when it is either too tight or too loose. I understand why, but surely it is not the answer. To be truly happy one must also know and accept thyself first.
Through writing the essays I have noticed something. The written word religions tend to spring and flourish in more urban settings. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but, generally, the more law-bound a faith, the more urban it is. The Jewish community has always thrived in towns and cities; in Europe almost all the Muslims are urban, and they veer towards the more rule-orientated manifestations of their faith, whilst our cities are full of Baptist and Evangelical churches. Yet I have never felt comfortable in cities, particularly the larger ones. A visit is fine, but after that I need to leave. I long continually for the fields and trees.
Yet even here, I am confused. In this extolling of rusticism, I am also not entirely in tune with myself. For, the natural world does not interest me as the human does. I can tell my Baroque from my Romanesque but not a chaffinch from a sparrow. Within nature I am happy simply to be, but when it comes to human culture, I yearn to explore, examine, and understand. History has been my passion since my earliest days, and I am fascinated by man’s story on this planet. Why is this? I do not know but it is and that is all I can say on the matter.
#2: I don’t do exclusive
This point follows on from the last in some ways, but I wanted to make it again since it is both the former and something else besides. So, I have written ten essays, in order these being why I am a Sikh, a Sufi, a Catholic, an Orthodox Christian, a Pagan, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Jew, an Atheist and an Anglican… and why I’m not. And that is telling. It is telling because, aside from the Atheist and the Anglican, which I’d long planned but always intended to keep until the end, they were the faiths that I most wanted to write about, the faiths that had most impacted me. Sikhism I had to write, it was what inspired the entire series, whilst Judaism, for example, I wasn’t originally intending to compose an essay on. I have had a long and deep relationship with Jews and the Jewish world but, on my personal spiritual life, the impact has been far less. Indeed, it was only at the urging of a friend that I completed that one.
And even though the series is now complete, there are noticeable gaps, religions that I have not and do not intend to write about. There are numerous, such as Coptic Christianity or Jainism where I simply haven’t had enough contact with to be able to justify an essay. But there are also gaps for other reasons too. More than all others, two significant gaps remain: Protestant Christianity and Islam.
Ok, so not precisely. I wrote about Anglicanism and the Church of England is, technically, a Protestant church. But it is not all that Protestant. It is often seen as the Via Media between the Catholic and Protestant traditions, Protestant (or Catholic!) lite. And that is important.
Similarly, I have not written about Islam, but I have written about Sufism, a part of Islam although one which, like Anglicanism vis-à-vis Protestantism, is seen as a bit more liberal, open-minded and, well, out there.
So, why these gaps? What do they mean?
In short, I did not write about these faiths because they have never really said as much to me. I’m not saying that they don’t have anything to offer — for many people they clearly do — but for me, so far, with the experiences and interactions that I have thus far had, they have not inspired me like the other traditions that this essay series explores.
Over the past twenty years or so, I have looked into almost all of the world’s faith traditions and some spoke to me more than the others. The ones that spoke the most are the ones that I have written about. In the spiritual salad bar, they are the ones that I have returned to for more than an initial taster.
But why didn’t mainstream Sunni Islam and the majority of the Protestant traditions appeal to me so much? Well, I can only talk about my interactions which have been heavily (although not exclusively) biased towards the incarnations of both traditions practiced in the UK, but as stated above, what stands out first is that they are book-bound faiths. They are religions of the word conducted, by and large, in white-washed empty rooms. That is also why Judaism only just got in; much of Orthodox Judaism bears many of the same hallmarks or at least, it does where I’ve witnessed it.
But it goes further than that. These traditions can tend towards the literalistic and dogmatic. And, for me, that makes them spiritually dead. That they appeal to others, I can see clearly and if it works for them, great. But they are not me and these reflections are about my personal perceptions. When I’ve encountered them, on the whole, I’ve found them closed off from nature and, crucially, afraid of beauty. Both, at different periods in their history, have found it holy to ban music, dance, fine costumes, figurative art, alcohol and, on occasions, celebrations themselves. Whenever birthdays, that ultimate recognition and celebration of the self as a unique child of God, are frowned upon, then you know you’re on dodgy ground. Fun is out. Indeed, many human emotions are out. But there is always one glaring exception: judgemental anger. Anger is ever-present and seems almost to be celebrated. Heresy, backsliding, secularism, whatever, all can be expressed through anger and judgement. That is telling. These religions have Authority with a capital A. They are backed up by the Word so they cannot be wrong. Seriousness is the order of the day.
Seriousness, but not contemplation, mysticism, and free thought. There is a stress on the exoteric over the esoteric. The rules are clear, and your job is to follow them, not question. There is a right and a wrong, good and evil, halal and haram. They are black and white and not open for debate. Okay, so I might be over-simplifying here, but I maintain that, in general, that is the case.
And because of that, they are exclusive. You are either in or you are out because there is a true path and all the others are, therefore, by definition, false. I had the same problem with the Catholic Church and Orthodoxy, but their exclusivity is tempered by beauty, contemplation, and mysticism.
At its heart, exclusivity is something I cannot sign up to. Try as I might, I cannot comprehend a God that blesses some institutions and not others. Partly because I have witnessed people across all world faiths who have clearly been blessed by God, but more so because, well… what kind of God would think like that? I accept fully that the Orthodox Church, which has preserved the language of Scripture and traditions since the earliest days is probably closer to the original vision of Christ than the Mormons who made up a whole extra Bible and undiscovered civilisation to create their creed. But do I believe that every Mormon is damned because they were either brought up in that tradition or chose to convert to it? No, ridiculous as I might find Mormonism to be, I have no doubt that, if heaven exists, there are more than a few Latter-Day Saints in there.
For me personally you see, anybody who tells me that they have the answer and that only their path is the correct one, I know to be a liar. And I know that because God is too big for any human mind to comprehend and so, if they are making a statement like that, they must be fundamentally misunderstanding an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God.
Conversely though, I also understand that many people need that structure and certainty. Doubt scares them, just as it scared Pope John Paul II when he declared salad bar Christianity to be off the menu. Work I have done around neurodiversity has revealed that people’s brains often function in radically different ways. In prisons I witnessed young men brought up without boundaries and rules, longing for a structure where they did not have to think, just follow, and be saved. That was their spiritual need. But I am not one of them. Exclusivity and dogmatism make me run away.
I need the salad bar.
#3: Faith through fellowship?
During my explorations I’ve discovered that a lot of people are really after fellowship. By fellowship I refer to a religion that is not just about the rituals, rules, rites, and ruminations, but also a way of getting to meet people, being part of a community, sharing in the best sense of the word as evidenced by Christian communion or the Sikh langar. Some people want a place, a group, a family even, where they belong.
Nine out of ten convert stories seem to be along the lines of the person meets someone from another faith that they hitherto knew nothing or little about, that person is nice and kind to them, so they convert to that faith. Tony Blair’s sister-in-law became Muslim after meeting some nice Palestinians and I have friend who almost became a Mormon because a Mormon family was very kind to her. Open up the internet and you can find a thousand and one similar examples.
And this is something that I have never understood. Not at all. Not one bit. And I think that is twofold.
Firstly, there is the fact that it just doesn’t make sense. I meet Fatima and Fatima is Muslim. Fatima is also nice and kind to me and I am grateful to her and recognise the Divine within her. Great. But none of that means that Islam is nice and kind or drenched in the Divine, it just means that Fatima is. To equate a religion with a person seems, to me, a bit, well… dumb. But plenty of people think differently, so why is that?
I think the answer lies in the fact that I have travelled. Over the years I have met wonderful adherents of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, various Christianities, Shinto, Cao Dai, Paganism… you get the picture. Similarly, I have met a load of arseholes who follow those faiths too. People are people. Perhaps the best example is the one I talk about in my essay Settling Into Israel where I was shown great kindness by a Jewish man who opened both his house and his heart up to me. Yet he was also a settler living on illegally-acquired land in the West Bank who had shot Palestinians whilst serving in the IDF. The Light of God shone in him, but all was not light in there. And whatever you think of him or the IDF or Israel or the Settler Movement, none of it should be seen as a reflection on Judaism as a faith.
People are people and whoever they might be, they will be regardless of their creed. So why convert because of them? It might be common, but it is also completely anti-intellectual and irrational.
Perhaps the answer lies in the second factor, my relationship with fellowship. Put simple, my relationship is this: it’s not important.
Yes, that’s right! For me, it’s not something I seek. My faith is, by and large, a solitary affair or, when I do engage with others, it is usually on a one-to-one basis. Indeed, the same can be said of my entire life. I don’t like groups; I don’t fit in. That is probably why I enjoy the Camino so much: you walk alone or, one-to-one with a stranger. The idea of walking a Camino in a prearranged group of say ten or twenty just sounds like hell to me. Because that is who I am. One of my biggest struggles as an Anglican has been fitting in with the church community. Over the years I have tried several but have always been on the margins of the group rather than the centre. Indeed, the one where I have succeeded best has been at St. Margaret’s where I have worshipped on and off for decades. They have accepted me more than any other and, I believe, the reason is because that is my village and so I am seen primarily as a villager with ties to the place since childhood and only secondarily as a member of the church.
Similarly, when I was exploring the priestly vocation in the Church of England, one of my main barriers was that they expected me to tie myself to one church community alone and that I struggled with.
And that is because most people are not like me. More people are like the friend of mine who converted to Islam after a very positive experience working in North Africa, where she later lived. Later, back in the UK, she found the Muslim community to be much more conservative and rather dogmatic and unaccepting of diversity outside of a non-Orthodox lens. Judged and feeling excluded by (segments of) the local community and their doctrines, she at the same time was enjoying a very welcoming experience in the Jewish world and was contemplating converting to Judaism because the Jewish community had embraced her with open arms. She is what I call the Fellowship Type — she has always been seeking a community (albeit semi subconsciously) as much as a creed. Similarly, I believe that most priests are the Fellowship Type too which is why they just didn’t get me when I was exploring the vocation. I’m the Hermit Eccentric Type instead.
The problem is though, we need both the Fellowship Types, and the Hermit Eccentrics like me. Remember, the British Isles were converted to Christianity, not through fellowship and following the rules, but by hermit saints like St. Patrick and St. Columba who synchronised the new religion with the native Druidism. Similarly, it was the Sufis not the Salafis that make much of the Indian Sub-Continent Muslim.
#4: Salad bar spirituality is my path
I’ve mentioned this before in relation to exclusivity, but I wish to return to it and explore it further because it is so very important to me.
The notion expressed by Pope John Paul II through the medium of my friend Brian that one has to accept the whole package or none at all strikes me as ridiculous. Indeed, it is so far from how my mind operates that I struggle to understand how other people can take it seriously. Nonetheless, they do, perhaps the majority of humanity. And so it is worth looking at.
All religious traditions, even the more liberal ones, have some semblance of orthodoxy; a right way to do it and a wrong way. Sometimes that is necessary for a community to function. For example, perhaps the most liberal of creeds, Quakerism, focuses very much on silence. If I were to go into one of their meetings and start booming out classic hymns, then I suspect it wouldn’t go down well. However, that is about cohesion and not dogma. What I am talking about is dogma.
All religious traditions do have some degree of dogma but what is striking to me — and very little talked about by anyone — is how almost all of them, particularly the most exclusivist and anti-salad bar spiritualist, were set up by, well… a salad bar spiritualist, that is to say, one who did not accept the religious norms of his or her day, who challenged things and who borrowed from other traditions.
Look at the Prophet Mohammed. When he went up to his cave to meditate, he wasn’t following the crowd; when he declared one god rather than the plethora of idols in the Kaaba, he wasn’t following the crowd; when he borrowed Pagan pilgrimage rituals and repurposed them for his new faith, he wasn’t following the crowd. Mohammed was a classic, free-thinking salad bar spiritualist.
So too Guru Nanak, a devout Hindu who wandered around the holy sites of all the world faiths, and preaching a new order that expelled caste and gender distinctions.
So too the Buddha who left his palace and went on an odyssey of the faith traditions of his part of the world, sampling various practices before settling on his Middle Path and gaining enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree.
And so too Jesus who was an orthodox Jew, but who debated with the Pharisees and Sadducees, told Romans and Samaritans that they’d be getting into heaven and who overturned the tables in Judaism’s holiest place, the Temple.
Put simply, if it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for me. One can never understand a book by reading but one page.
#5: The Divine Feminine
And now we move towards the end and my final great life lesson: the Divine Feminine. I talked about this most of all in my Catholicism essay, but She permeates through them all and, in short, She is the greatest discovery of my interfaith journey.
Put simply, without woman, man is incomplete and vice versa. Male and Female are forces that permeate through the entirety of life. We have both of them inside all of us, in different measures. That’s why someone who is physically Male can be, in many ways, Female. But for a lot of us, particularly when connected with our religious traditions, the balance is out. That’s why I believe that the religions that are ailing or sickening the most (and by that, I don’t mean that they are losing numbers, sometimes these faiths are growing; no, I mean in the sense of spiritual sickness and distance from God) are the ones where the Female has been banned, driven out or sidelined. You cannot worship one god without embracing the Female. That’s why I would consider most monotheisms to be more semitheisms. They only worship half a god.
The religion of my childhood, despite its many blessings, was a semitheism. Females were not kicked out, but they were sidelined. There were (then) no female priests and, with the dissolution of the monasteries, this was not compensated for by the influence of nuns. Nor too was there a cult of Mary. Instead, she was little more than a character in the school nativity play.
Embracing the Divine Feminine was not easy for me. It did not come naturally, and it is perhaps telling that I first found Her in Mary through the Catholic Church. We need something that we are familiar to build upon. Present me with Radha, Kwan Yin or Kali from the outset and I would probably never have met Her. But challenging though it was, my two-decade-long process of getting to know Her has been rewarding and beautiful. For She is part of He, they complement one another and without the other they are incomplete. That is why I find the name of the Hare Krishna temple in London so beautiful: the Radhakrishna Temple. One word, no space, because they are venerated as one deity.
And that is the Oneness of God. A God that includes all. Radha and Krishna, Mary and Jesus, Kwan Yin and Buddha, Allah and his Allat, Yahweh and his Asherah.
And so, in conclusion…
Aha, this is it! Truly it, the end of this interfaith journey. These essays represent the fruit of twenty years of explorations, a pilgrimage that started perhaps during that course at Edge Hill University.
And yet it is not the end because my explorations haven’t finished yet. I am still travelling. I write this essay from an Orthodox monastery where I have been staying for several days, trying to immerse myself into that life. That was to prepare myself for a future trip to Mt. Athos, but I also intend to return here and stay in monasteries of other traditions too, Western and Eastern. And I will be visiting Varanasi, Patna, Haridwar and Bodhgaya so I may experience Hindu and Buddhist pilgrimage like I have done with that of Sikhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. There is so much more to explore and so who knows what the subject of the next essay with be. The Coptic Church perhaps, or maybe Rastafarianism or Shintō, or perhaps I will fill in those gaps and complete the Protestantism and Islam ones?
The only thing certain is uncertainty, and the only truth about the journey is that the path never ends.
See you on the road!
Mapped out 29/08/2023, Smolyan to Vulkosel, Bulgaria
Written 05/12/2023, the Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, UK
Thanks to Elizabeth Arif-Fear for the editing help
Copyright © 2023, Matthew E. Pointon