Faith

I've been on a bit of a spiritual journey in the past year. It actually started a bit more than a year ago, when I went through some immensely personal things which led me to question the faith I already had. A few months later, some other things happened which nearly made me lose my faith altogether.

I had a rather unpleasant experience involving someone who was very religious who accused me of basically being a terrible person and having done things I should be ashamed of (I have yet to find out what these things were). My perception at the time was also of having been stabbed in the back by someone who attended the same church as I did at the time, and who I would have thought of as a friend. I also felt really isolated when I did go to church, a few times during the singing (which invariably happened at the start of the services at the Pentecostal church I then attended) I looked around and most of the other people there were standing with their eyes closed, their arms in the air with a look of ecstasy on their faces. I felt like a complete outsider. After a few weeks of feeling like this, I knew I had to find something else, or I would drive myself mad. At that point I wasn't sure if I was still capable of having religious beliefs, or if I had lost the capacity for faith completely.

 

After a few months, I stopped going to that church completely. I had come to find it a very empty experience, and one for me that was devoid of any real meaning. I still had faith, I just knew that I had to express it in a different way. I couldn't relate anymore to a faith that was so based on emotions and dependent on doing things a certain way. I realised that the church I had been attending had encouraged beliefs that were really quite shallow, and what I wanted in life was something much deeper. So I started looking, and was surprised to find that I still wanted to have faith. I read a book on Buddhism and one written by a Greek Orthodox author. I went to a few less dogmatic churches and found that I could actually sit in church and sing hymns and not feel totally isolated from everyone around me. Things began to make more sense to me and I began to find the depth in life and in faith that I had been searching for.

I am glad that I had the experiences I had last year - even though they were quite painful they have taught me a lot and forced me to take action against the shallowness that probably would have destroyed me completely. I wouldn't go back to how things were.

Pictures taken at the Kagyu Samye Ling Buddhist Monastery and Tibetan Centre, Dumfriesshire, Scotland.