Last week, I attended the rehearsal dinner for the wedding of some friends of ours. We ended up sitting with our friend’s priest and his wife. At first, my mind was a little conflicted with the prospect of spending a meal talking to a Christian Priest. On the one hand, I had had some bad experiences with Christianity as a child, and it had turned me away from the Chruch and spirituality in general for many years. On the other hand, I’d been doing a lot of spiritual reading of late and was eager to get an enlightened Christian perspective. I set my prejudices aside and greeted the priest with an open mind.

Father Stace turned out to be quite wise and charismatic. We discussed his life as a Priest in training, my dabbling in Buddhism, Hinduism and “New Age” readings, his blog, movies and more. I mentioned that I had attempted to read the Bible a few times and struggled with its immense length. He recommend I start with a few books of the New Testament first, which I plan to do. He could somehow tell that I was interested in the more spiritual side of Christianity and recommended I read, The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality. I wasn’t really enjoying the other book I was reading at the time, so the next day I went out and bought it. I’m quite glad I did.

In some of my other studies I had heard about Christian Mysticism and that it had some similarities with East Asian spiritual paths, but when I researched it online everything was a bit over my head from a theological perspective. The Mountain of Silence was a great change. Written from the perspective of a western academic who had studied other spiritual ideas than Christianity, it was a great change of pace. I won’t try to summarize the book, as I’m sure you can get an idea from Amazon, but here are some ideas that seemed to strike a chord with me:

Through reading The Mountain of Silence, I've gained a new respect for the Jewish/Christian tradition. Although I don’t plan on rushing out to attend church every Sunday, Christianity will no longer be absent from my reading lists.

The wider my breadth of spiritual knowledge and wisdom becomes, the more I realize that all truly enlightened people are all talking about the same things. Terrorism, War and Famine might be all things of the past if people learned from their truly enlightened spiritual guides rather than blindly following interpretations of “Holy” texts that happen to meet their worldly wishes at the moment.