On Having a Baha'i-like Belief System: The Light of Christ comes to people through many channels

Anna-Maria sees all people as praying to the same God. -gw

...[E]ven though religion occupies a large percentage of my brain, I have shied away from joining a particular group.

Some religions I have looked at fail to engage me on their own merits. And no, I won’t cite specific examples because if you are of that religion, and you had a different experience, I don’t want to insult your thinking and your choices. Moreover, I am profoundly aware that one person’s vehicle to access their best self may not work at all for someone else. Monastic life could make one person bitter at the deprivation even as it allows another to strip away everything that’s unimportant and see God clearly, just to give one general example.

However, what it often comes down to, regardless of the particular religion, is that I can’t see limiting myself to one perspective for life. The support of my LDS friends after my Dad died was considerable. In the long run, it wasn’t the best fit for me, but it was right, then. I have drifted toward and away from various meditative practices several times, and the longest and strongest was the Zen Buddhism that I studied relatively seriously until shortly before I gave birth to Eliza. It started as a way to strengthen my concentration during karate but became something I did for its own sake.

Paradoxically, the simple beauty of the practice allowed me to step out of a fairly anti-Christian, specifically anti-Catholic, phase in my life, and to recognize that there are some really beautiful things at the heart of that belief system, too. I started describing myself as a Catholic Buddhist, although even that, ultimately, was too narrow a definition.

In some ways, I suppose that I have a Baha’i-like belief system in that I think we are all praying to the same God* and that religions build on each other chronologically as societies progress.

All of this is, I guess, a VERY long way of saying that I agree with Bon that I think that what she calls the Light of Christ is something that comes to people through many channels.

Anna-Maria, "Answer: Light," Elizasmom.com
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{Re-posted with permission}