by Quirin

Created on: September 03, 2008   Last Updated: September 06, 2008

Many people whom I get to know, who are not necessarily practicing New Age thought in their lives, wonder why it is that I chose New Age spirituality. It certainly seemed to confuse if not outright concern many of the people who knew me in my younger adult years. I had been an avid member of the Assemblies of God church since I was a small child, participating in youth group, choir, junior ambassadors, and taking my Bible study very seriously. I talked the talk, and I walked the walk. I was not what I considered to be a "fanatic" about it. I wasn't trying to save the entire world around me, but I was serious about my faith and my dedication to God.

Two things happened when I became an older teenager and then young adult that caused this shift in my spiritual perception. First, I found out Christian boys are just like non-Christian boys, in that they tend to want the same thing from girls sometimes. I also discovered that what the adults were whispering about during the Wednesday night service was the fact that the minister had had an affair and misused church funds. This rather shattered my pristine concepts that Christians were of some greater moral fiber than the rest of Humanity. This caused me to actually realize that we are all basically the same, with the same feelings and thoughts, and the same power or lack thereof to make the right choices. I'd come to believe that we Christians were separate, that we were somehow "better" than non-Christians, and these events made me turn around to take a look at the "rest" of Humanity and start questioning just WHAT it was that they believed. Maybe they weren't so "bad" as I had always thought, and I should give them the chance to be understood.

Through this experience and my awakening to awareness of ALL people, I consequently began to study in some small part about other religions and spiritual traditions. I would never call myself an expert on these subjects, but I have studied enough to see some amazing parallels and hints of parallels between all the major traditions of the world, old and new. There are common threads that weave throughout the world's various spiritual understandings that tie them all together, if we were to move beyond our own individual doctrines and dogmas. I came to understand that God had many faces - many facets - and that all the peoples of the world were talking about the SAME Creator, just from different perspectives, different experiences and teachings which had been spawned by them.

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