Returning to Christ After Many Paths

A contemplative journey through traditions toward the Living Christ

There are many ways people arrive at faith.
Some are formed in it from childhood.
Some discover it through study or tradition.
Some inherit it quietly and never leave.

My path has been more circular.

I was born in Paris, France and baptized Catholic.
In my family, Catholicism was present more as cultural inheritance than lived relationship.
My grandparents, especially my grandmother, carried a faith shaped more by duty and guilt than by interior freedom.
I moved through the usual stages of Catholic initiation, yet I did not feel connection through religion itself.
The teachings did not reach me.
The adults around me did not seem to carry an experience they could articulate or transmit.

And still, something was there.

As a child, I sometimes felt a profound movement in certain places:
inside cathedrals, in quiet nature, standing before a cross.
There was a depth I could not name, but it felt real and alive.
No one explained it.
No one seemed to recognize it.
It remained wordless, yet formative.

Later, my mother began exploring Buddhism while living through her own suffering.
Through her, I encountered Buddhist thought, and as I grew older, I studied Taoism and energetic traditions: meridians, Chinese medicine, chakras.
These worlds opened my perception.
They revealed dimensions of presence, awareness, compassion, and interconnectedness that resonated deeply.

During this period, I also moved away from Christianity into a form of atheism.
After my early experience of Catholicism without living spiritual transmission, disbelief felt more honest than inherited belief.
It created space for questioning and for exploring other traditions without constraint.
Yet even in atheism, the deeper sense of mystery and longing did not disappear.
It remained quietly present beneath experience.

Over time, I studied and practiced across multiple traditions and healing frameworks.
Again and again, I noticed that although the languages differed, they seemed to open toward a shared center.
The doors were different, yet something essential felt common: a movement toward truth, integration, and love.

It was only after many years of crossing these paths that I found myself returning toward what Father Richard Rohr calls the Universal Christ, the living presence of divine love permeating all creation and fully revealed in Jesus.

This return did not begin with belief.
It began with recognition.

When I read or listened to the words attributed to Jesus, I encountered a quality that felt profoundly aligned with what I had glimpsed across traditions:
compassion without exclusion, authority grounded in love rather than power, presence with suffering, and a radical orientation toward the heart of human life.

I also began to read the Bible differently.
I approached it with historical awareness, curiosity, and reverence for its human and collective authorship across centuries.
Rather than a fixed doctrinal text, I experienced it as a sacred field of inquiry into the human condition, consciousness, and relationship with the divine.

Doubt, too, has always remained part of my experience.
Faith, for me, has never been certainty.
There have been periods of questioning, distance, and unknowing.
Yet these movements did not dissolve faith; they refined it.
Doubt repeatedly stripped away inherited forms that no longer held life, allowing a deeper trust to emerge that did not depend on fixed belief.

In that way, my return to Christ did not negate the paths that shaped me.
It gathered them.

Today, I describe my orientation as rooted in contemplative Christianity and interspiritual integration.
This means that Christ has become, in my experience, the clearest personal expression of the love and presence toward which many traditions point, while I continue to honor the wisdom encountered across them.

I also recognize that my Catholic roots remain part of me.
There is a kind of spiritual memory that lives in the body: certain rituals, chants, liturgical gestures, and sacred spaces still evoke something immediate and familiar.
I was born within a particular tradition, and some of its language and symbolism continue to resonate at a deep level.

Yet I do not experience Catholicism, or any tradition, as the exclusive or final way.
The path that feels most true to me is what I call the Living Path: an ongoing encounter with the embodied, living Christ within the unfolding of human experience.

For me, this encounter is not separate from psychological depth, shadow work, or the mystery of transformation.
It includes descent as well as illumination, struggle as well as grace.
It is shaped by what I understand as engaged contemplation: a spirituality lived within life, relationship, and inner work rather than apart from them.

In this sense, my roots remain, but they have widened.
Tradition becomes ground rather than boundary.
And Christ is encountered not only in inherited forms, but in the living movement of healing, integration, and love.

My path continues.
I still learn, question, and integrate.
But I now recognize the axis that was present from the beginning:
that quiet movement I felt as a child in cathedrals, in nature, before the cross.

Sometimes faith does not begin in belonging.
Sometimes it emerges through searching.

And sometimes, after many paths, one recognizes the same living center that was always there.