Huff Post: by Samir Selmanovic Community Engagement Catalyst, Communicator
Life interrupts us. When we can’t fit our life experience into our religion, something has to give, and life can’t give. Like a sturdy surgical tool, life cuts back across our religion to save us from it. Just when we figure everything out, when our belief systems, traditions and practices are beginning to play along nicely like a well-trained and tuned symphony orchestra, we stumble across something — an experience, a fact, a person. And nothing defies our religion so much as finding the sacred in one of “those people.” You meet a Muslim man who resembles the character of Jesus more than anyone you’ve ever met in your church. You find yourself working with a Wiccan woman who is repairing the world better than anyone in your synagogue. You meet an evangelical Christian college student who puts everything on the line to protect the rights of atheists on campus. An atheist wise man or woman comes alongside you and helps you persevere on your path of faith in God. In such encounters, to use the words from Yehuda Amichai’s poem, “The Place Where We Are Right,” the moles and plows of love soften the stomped soil of a hard ground where we are right.
That’s what happened to me.
When I became a Christian, my devastated secular Muslim parents recruited one of Europe’s best psychiatrists and 50 relatives to take their best shot at helping me get over my infatuation with God.
Categories: Belief, CHRISTIANITY, Faith, God, Islam, Religion, Spirituality