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| Destruction of "Idols" by Protestants (1524) |
First, a good friend persuaded me to look at a particular window at St Mary’s Cathedral (Sydney) for the aesthetics. It showed Mary on a crescent moon with a halo of stars. It was beautiful and as I looked at it I had a strange sense of a medieval and mystical version of Christianity, and a thought “what a shame this type of Christianity no longer exists”.
Second, my approach to religion subtly shifted over a period of many months until I arrived at a position where I was starting to think maybe God exists in some great cosmic sense, and that the Gohonzon (the sacred mandala of Nichiren Buddhism, which I have been venerating for a number of years) is a portrait of God, and that (at least some of) the benevolent Gods might be God’s helpers.
Third, I listened to a podcast on Martin Luther and had a thunderstruck moment when I realised that the religion I had so thoughtfully rejected a long time ago was perhaps not Christianity but something rather more specific – Protestant Christianity. In my mind Protestantism was Christianity and vice versa, simply because I didn’t know any other type. The Christianity I knew was rather uninteresting and uninspiring so it never occurred to me to explore any variations of it. More than 400+ years of Protestant ancestry had taught me to look somewhat askance at Catholicism, thus I tended to avoid it. My very limited encounters with Orthodox Christianity suggested it was a religion inextricably tied up with ethnic and cultural identities that had nothing to do with me, so I never thought about it, other than to admire the aesthetic. I did not even know there was a church further to the east than Lebanon until a few months ago, such was my general disinterest in Christianity.
The notions I had thought were synonymous with Christianity but are actually features of Protestantism (mostly inspired by Martin Luther and then John Calvin) include: