A Confession of Faith

I thought it would be a good thing to make a confession of faith, so anyone reading this will know what the label on my bottle is, so they will know if my wine is something they would wish to drink.

I was raised in a secular family, all my siblings are atheists, my parents were both born in Christian families but as adults they were not Christians, we lived distant  to my grand parents who we almost never saw and we never attended church nor were we baptised. Although in my case, I was named by a friend of my father’s who shared a love of opera singers with him, an Irish Roman Catholic Priest, but I have no recollection of him. We did have cousins who were Christians, who we saw very occasionally and I once attended midnight mass with them, but all I experienced was being very tired from staying up so late. I encountered no Christians who inspired me, the occasional Jehovah’s Witnesses did come to our door but they did not call to my soul. 

I wasn’t much of a reader, the only novels I read were for school but I did like Asterix & Tintin books.

Listening to the music of Yes "Close to the Edge" at age 11, did inspire me, I remember lying on the floor following the lyrics 'a seasoned witch to call you from the depths of your disgrace", there was a magic there. At 14 I read the Hobbit followed immediately after by the Lord of the Rings, I had never had an experience like that before, it opened something up inside me, I may love those books now more than I did then. They were a revelation, I didn't know Tolkien was a Christian, I did not think much about him, I do remember looking at a picture of him sitting under a tree and feeling an intense love for the man. Looking back I'd say reading those books was a taste of religion, a discovery of a region of the soul.

In my 20s I read quite a lot, books both good and bad: Dostoievsky, Kafka, Vonnegut, A E van vogt, Philip k Dick. I read some Kerouac who professed an interest in Buddhism and I started to read some spiritual literature: Buddhist texts, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads I didn't entirely ignore Christianity as i read the Gospel of St John, I even quite liked it, these texts did feel like works from another age I found them fascinating but there was an alienation between my mind and the mind they represented, I did not think I knew God or experienced divine love.

Colin Wilson’s work did play an important part for me, here was an author who was still alive, with a modern sensibility who was willing to explore byways of experience, ghosts, phantoms, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition etc and I read Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom which while I don't know I understood I started to get the sense of the primacy of consciousness over matter.  At some point in my alienation I felt depression and confusion and felt compelled to pray with a passion. I think God answered that prayer, I was brought to God in the depths of my disgrace and it makes me admire atheists, or at least wonder at them. How can they go through life without love of God? How do they manage with no source for meaning? At about age 30 I read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, this book had a conscious spiritual impact on me, here was someone who was familiar with God, who made me realise God could be close and present. I started to walk inside a spiritual tradition, and a few years some years back I was initiated into Kriya Yoga (in the lineage of Yogananada).

Yogananada had a love of Christ and it seems to me I too would never had loved Christ but for the awakening through Hindu tradition. The Christian tradition now has a life for me.

I am culturally Western and so learning to know and love the Western Christian tradition was important, culture should live and there is no culture without spirituality. I have attended the local nearly empty churches a few times in recent years and maybe I’ll attend more often. I like the experience of love of God in fellowship.

Christianity seems to be in retreat in the West, there needs to be some sort of religious spiritual rebirth, for the good of our culture, for the good of us all, I can't see what that would be, it would be interesting to imagine different possibilities.