It’s time I bow my heart, and tell the readers something vulnerable. This is the story of my spiritual path, and most of this I’ve kept locked away until now. It’s a story of depression, the search for God, and the culmination of the path.

My story starts when I was but 7 or 8 years old. My father was a lovely man. He cared so much for others. My father was a Christian pastor of a small pentecostal church. The church was so small it couldn’t offer a salary, but this was nothing new for my father. For most of his life he was happy to be poor and helpful, rather than rich and detached. By the time I was 7, however, he took a side job as a painter, which paid the bills and allowed us to live a regular lifestyle. Nothing extravagant, but certainly not as poor as he lived most of his life.

At 7 or 8, I remember my father taking me to nursing homes where he would sit and pray with the dying. One incident changed my life forever. We walked in to a room with one patient. She was in her 90’s and had a very strange look on her face. She had the face of pure terror. It was clear that she was afraid to die. She couldn’t speak. Her hands gripped the metal bars on the sides of her hospital bed with white knuckles.

My father moved closer and asked if she wanted him to pray and she mouthed something as she grasped his wrist. He sat beside her and began to pray. I walked away from them and looked around her room. There was no sign of any family. No cards. No pictures. It was simply empty. She felt like a forgotten elderly woman. I walked over to this wide window in her room and looked out the view. We were possibly 8 floors up and looking out over the city, I saw the smog, the plumes of smoke from industry, and all of it colored in hues of grey through the mylar tint of the glass.

It was at that moment that a thought, or feeling, crept into me: “Is this all there is?” That moment I was hit with a deep sadness. Today I would call it a depression. As a child I became fearful of death. Even though my parents believed in Heaven, I felt this fear of what was beyond.

Depression ruled most of my childhood, and after a near death experience I had an experience of Divine Love: As I slipped away into darkness, I became aware of the darkness. Like a living veil. I panicked and in my fear, I felt the most love I had ever experienced. I felt as though I was at the bottom of the ocean and the waters around me the pure love of an Ultimate Source. A love from the Divine Source itself. I woke from my near death experience, to face a new day and began the search for truth.

As an adult I searched for truth in Buddhism, Hinduism, Esoteric Christianity, Gnosticism, and a variety of modern religions and spiritual groups. It was in 2019, seeking truth on my own, that I had a moment of clarity and felt I really had connected to something deep within me. While this was a bridge to God, I was still missing the mark.

Something was lacking. I was missing the heart, the love of the path. Thinking back to my youth, I recalled that one of the first mystical books I ever read was a work by Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan. Now 30 years later (towards the end of 2023), I was looking his name up online and came across a group of Sufi’s who followed and was led through his lineage. Through the work they discussed, I felt my heart begin to open and I embraced the path of mystical Islam.

The Chishti path of Sufism doesn’t require one to be a Muslim. But in listening to members who were Muslim, I felt the draw towards the Quran. In a state of spiritual reverie, I felt that God was telling me something: “You will become a pillar that no more goes out.” It was a reference to an obscure passage in the Bible. For me, in that moment, it meant that after all my wondering I had arrived at a path that I would remain in (no more wondering). The Quran, like the Bible, can be read literally, or through the filter of the spiritual heart. When the latter, the book unveils the compassion and love of all things. As in the prayer by the Prophet Muhammad (Prayer of Light), it reads, “Thy [God’s] Light is in all forms, Thy Love is in all beings…” The Light of God is in all forms. Like the opening of the Tao te Ching, there is One Source and from it radiates the myriad of things that create the world we live in. One Source manifesting in all faiths.

That’s how I’ve come, to where I’m at. I’m not sure what I would call myself. Certainly Sufi, but mystic over all. “Your dutiful heart will prepare the way,” the words seemed to fill my mind while in meditation, and so I know now that regular duty to God is the way to peaceful surrender (the mystical spirit of Islam).