{"id":2641,"date":"2026-09-27T19:06:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T00:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/?p=2641"},"modified":"2026-09-27T19:06:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T00:06:20","slug":"the-evolution-of-my-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/?p=2641","title":{"rendered":"The Evolution of My Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

My religion was something I inherited long before I was old enough to have an opinion about it.<\/p>\n

I was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. My father came from an old Orthodox Syrian Christian family with roots going back many generations. The church at Kallooppara is part of that history; my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather are buried there in prominent locations. Religion was not something I chose. It came with the family I was born into, the traditions around me, and the assumptions of the community in which I grew up.<\/p>\n

But my relationship with Christianity was never as simple as that background might suggest.<\/p>\n

I left India when I was three and spent my childhood in Mombasa, Kenya. There was no Syrian Christian church there in the fifties and sixties, so our family attended an Anglican church whose congregation was largely British expatriates. Later, a priest from the Church of South India came to Mombasa. Because that church had been formed partly out of the Anglican church in India, his services felt much like the ones we were already used to.<\/p>\n

As I remember it, one reason for sending him was the sizeable Hindu community from Kerala living in Mombasa. The hope seemed to be that he might convert some of them. In retrospect, that was a rather ambitious undertaking. I doubt many of the Hindus in Mombasa were sitting around waiting for someone to persuade them to change religions.<\/p>\n

My parents were what I would call nominal Christians, although my mother was more consciously religious than my father. We prayed together as a family from time to time, and we went to church, but religion did not dominate our household.<\/p>\n

My father took a practical view. His attitude, as I remember it, was: if praying or going to church doesn’t hurt anybody, why not? If people wanted to pray for him, he saw no reason to object. He was not particularly devout, but neither was he hostile to religion.<\/p>\n

My mother was different. She had a real Christian faith, but she never seemed to have the absolute, unquestioning certainty I would later encounter among some evangelical Christians. She believed. She prayed. But she didn’t pretend to have an answer for everything. She had a soft spot for Roman Catholicism less because of Catholic doctrine but because her father who she was very close to became a Catholic in his later years.<\/p>\n

When I was sixteen, I left Kenya for England. At first my religious life continued much as before, and I attended Anglican churches in London. Then, when I was about eighteen, something quite different happened.<\/p>\n

I met Dr. Peter Pattisson, who was deeply committed to the born-again Christian movement. He was sincere and completely convinced of his beliefs, and he took a personal interest in me at a time when I was young and, in many ways, quite alone. I remember that he felt called to preach in South Korea, and I understand that he eventually went there.<\/p>\n

Through him, I entered the born-again Christian world. I was young, far from home, and looking for friendship and a sense of belonging, and the people I met there offered both. At eighteen, I was also far more drawn to certainty than I am now. I attended the Keswick Convention, one of the major evangelical gatherings in England, and became more immersed in evangelical Christianity than I had ever been.<\/p>\n

For a while, I took it all very seriously. I carried a small Bible with me and would approach people to ask whether they would like to hear a passage from it. Looking back, I have to smile at the picture of an eighteen-year-old Indian immigrant walking up to English strangers to ask whether they wanted to hear about Christianity. I suspect some of them listened only out of politeness.<\/p>\n

But at the time, I believed in what I was doing.<\/p>\n

Then came the experience that began to change everything: my mother’s illness.<\/p>\n

In 1964, when she was fifty-one, my mother developed cancer. She left Kenya and returned to India for treatment, and I traveled from England to Kerala to be with her.<\/p>\n

During one of her stays at the Medical College Hospital in Trivandrum, something happened that I still smile about. Several women came to visit her, and at one point they began praying over her. One of them started “speaking in tongues.” To most of us in the room, it sounded like complete gibberish.<\/p>\n

I was watching my mother closely. She looked at the woman with a mixture of amazement and utter bewilderment. She wasn’t mocking her; she was truly puzzled. I think she simply had no idea what to make of what she was hearing.<\/p>\n

That moment stayed with me because it captured the difference between my mother’s quiet, conventional faith and the far more demonstrative Christianity I had met through the born-again movement. My mother believed, but she did not feel that faith required a dramatic display of certainty.<\/p>\n

Still, she was open to other expressions of it. When Oral Roberts, the American evangelist and faith healer, was due to visit Kerala, she very much wanted to hear him. He represented a very different kind of Christianity from the one she had grown up with, yet she was curious enough to want to hear him for herself. In the end, she was too weak to go.<\/p>\n

I prayed for her. Other people prayed for her. She prayed for herself. There was no shortage of faith or prayer around her.<\/p>\n

And yet she died.<\/p>\n

I could not reconcile that with the certainty I had been hearing from the evangelical Christians around me. If God answers prayer, why had all those prayers not saved my mother?<\/p>\n

Over the years I noticed a pattern. When someone who has been prayed for recovers, the recovery is credited to God and to the power of prayer. But when the person dies, the explanation changes. It was God’s will. God answered, but the answer was no. She has gone to a better place. God’s ways are not our ways. In some circles, people even suggest that there simply wasn’t enough faith.<\/p>\n

It seemed to me that prayer could never fail under this way of thinking. If the person lived, prayer had worked. If the person died, God had other plans. I understood why people found comfort in those answers, and I didn’t blame them for it. But I could no longer believe in a kind of prayer whose results could only ever be counted in one direction.<\/p>\n

What I remember most is that my mother never lost her own faith. Even while she was ill, she never told me that Christianity had failed her. But she did once tell me that she wished she had greater faith. That remark has stayed with me ever since, because it expressed something I had trouble putting into words myself: you can truly believe and still recognize that your faith is not absolute.<\/p>\n

Her death did not make me stop believing overnight. It was more complicated than that. I continued going to church for a while. Over the years I went through different phases. Some churches suited me better than others, and there were periods when I avoided church altogether. My withdrawal was not really an act of rebellion. I simply could no longer accept some of the things I had once accepted without question.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest changes in my thinking concerned the idea that Christianity is the only path to salvation. If God exists, I find it hard to believe that God would condemn billions of people simply because they were born into another religion, or born centuries before Christianity reached their part of the world.<\/p>\n

The more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I became with the certainty with which different religions claim to possess the one truth. Christianity has its denominations and competing interpretations; Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and other faiths have their own traditions and claims. Even within a single church, people can be absolutely sure that their interpretation is the correct one.<\/p>\n

That certainty began to bother me.<\/p>\n

I also became more skeptical of organized religion as an institution. Churches are run by human beings, and human beings have the same weaknesses whether they are running a church, a business or a government. Institutions can become preoccupied with authority, reputation, money and self-preservation. The history of abuse and cover-ups in the Roman Catholic Church is an obvious example, although the problem is certainly not unique to Catholicism.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean I think religion is bad. It means I have become wary of any institution that claims to speak with absolute authority on behalf of God.<\/p>\n

And yet, despite all this, I have never completely abandoned prayer.<\/p>\n

I still believe there is something valuable in it, although I no longer think of prayer as a transaction in which we ask for something and God is expected to deliver. My mother’s death made that view impossible for me. Perhaps prayer sometimes changes circumstances. Perhaps it changes the person doing the praying. Perhaps it simply gives us a way to face what we cannot change. I don’t know.<\/p>\n

My wife has also, perhaps, shaped my attitude toward religion.<\/p>\n

She was born and raised a Hindu, but she has never been rigid about it. In more than thirty-six years of marriage, I have never heard her say that Hinduism is the one true religion or that other religions are inferior. We have never argued about religion.<\/p>\n

Her father was much the same. My wife once told me about a kurishupadi<\/em>, a small roadside shrine with a cross, on the MC Road between Adoor and Chengannur. Travelers often stop there to light a candle or say a quick prayer before continuing on their way. When the family passed it, her father would sometimes do just that, even though he was a Hindu. In later years, when we traveled that road together, my wife would do the same. I have always wondered whether she inherited that little ritual from him.<\/p>\n

Her attitude showed again when her son from her first marriage, who was raised Hindu like both his parents, chose to become a Roman Catholic in his early forties. He takes his Catholic faith seriously and practices it sincerely, and my wife has been completely at ease with his decision.<\/p>\n

I find that significant. It is one thing to say you are tolerant of other religions. It is another to fully accept a close family member choosing a different faith from the one in which he was raised.<\/p>\n

Perhaps my wife’s example reinforced something I had already begun to believe: that faith does not have to be a competition.<\/p>\n

I have also come to appreciate the difference between religion and spirituality. I can’t define spirituality very well, and I certainly don’t claim to have found some alternative system of belief. But I do think there is something meaningful in the way people care for one another, show compassion, deal with suffering, and sometimes put someone else’s needs ahead of their own.<\/p>\n

Those things don’t prove the existence of God. I don’t think they are meant to. But they matter to me.<\/p>\n

As I have grown older, I have become more comfortable with the possibility that there are questions I will never be able to answer. I no longer feel the need to resolve everything. In fact, I find the insistence that everything must be settled, intellectually or theologically, less convincing than I once did.<\/p>\n

I don’t know whether there is a God. I don’t believe in heaven and hell in the traditional sense, and I don’t believe an afterlife is necessarily waiting for us. My present assumption is that death may simply be the end of our existence. But I am also comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”<\/p>\n

That is a very different answer from the one I would have given at eighteen. At eighteen, I wanted certainty. I wanted to know I had found the truth and was on the right path, and I was drawn to people who seemed absolutely sure of what they believed. At eighty, I am much more comfortable with uncertainty.<\/p>\n

I still respect Christianity, because it is part of my history and shaped much of the person I became. I still value prayer. I still find meaning in compassion, kindness, family and the way people respond to suffering. But I no longer feel the need to defend one religious tradition against another, or to claim that I know what happens after death.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that is where my faith has ultimately taken me: not to greater certainty, but to greater tolerance. I can respect the person who is deeply Christian, deeply Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or something else entirely. I can also respect the person who believes there is no God at all.<\/p>\n

And I can remain somewhere in the middle, still asking questions. Perhaps that is the most honest place for me to end.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My religion was something I inherited long before I was old enough to have an opinion about it. I was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. My father came from an old Orthodox Syrian Christian family with roots going back many generations. The church at Kallooppara is part of that history; my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather are buried there in prominent locations. Religion was not something I chose. It came with the family I was born into, the traditions around me, and the assumptions of the community in which I grew up. But my relationship with Christianity was never as simple as that background might suggest. I left India when I was three and spent my childhood in Mombasa, Kenya. There was no Syrian Christian church there in the fifties and sixties, so our family attended an Anglican church whose congregation was largely British expatriates. Later, a priest from the Church of South India came to Mombasa. Because that church had been formed partly out of the Anglican church in India, his services felt much like the ones we were already used to. As I remember it, one reason for sending him was the sizeable Hindu community from Kerala living in Mombasa. The hope seemed to be that he might convert some of them. In retrospect, that was a rather ambitious undertaking. I doubt many of the Hindus in Mombasa were sitting around waiting for someone to persuade them to change religions. My parents were what I would call nominal Christians, although my mother was more consciously religious than my father. We prayed together as a family from time to time, and we went to church, but religion did not dominate our household. My father took a practical view. His attitude, as I remember it, was: if praying or going to church doesn’t hurt anybody, why not? If people wanted to pray for him, he saw no reason to object. He was not particularly devout, but neither was he hostile to religion. My mother was different. She had a real Christian faith, but she never seemed to have the absolute, unquestioning certainty I would later encounter among some evangelical Christians. She believed. She prayed. But she didn’t pretend to have an answer for everything. She had a soft spot for Roman Catholicism less because of Catholic doctrine but because her father who she was very close to became a Catholic in his later years. When I was sixteen, I left Kenya for England. At first my religious life continued much as before, and I attended Anglican churches in London. Then, when I was about eighteen, something quite different happened. I met Dr. Peter Pattisson, who was deeply committed to the born-again Christian movement. He was sincere and completely convinced of his beliefs, and he took a personal interest in me at a time when I was young and, in many ways, quite alone. I remember that he felt called to preach in South Korea, and I understand that he eventually went there. Through him, I entered the born-again Christian world. I was young, far from home, and looking for friendship and a sense of belonging, and the people I met there offered both. At eighteen, I was also far more drawn to certainty than I am now. I attended the Keswick Convention, one of the major evangelical gatherings in England, and became more immersed in evangelical Christianity than I had ever been. For a while, I took it all very seriously. I carried a small Bible with me and would approach people to ask whether they would like to hear a passage from it. Looking back, I have to smile at the picture of an eighteen-year-old Indian immigrant walking up to English strangers to ask whether they wanted to hear about Christianity. I suspect some of them listened only out of politeness. But at the time, I believed in what I was doing. Then came the experience that began to change everything: my mother’s illness. In 1964, when she was fifty-one, my mother developed cancer. She left Kenya and returned to India for treatment, and I traveled from England to Kerala to be with her. During one of her stays at the Medical College Hospital in Trivandrum, something happened that I still smile about. Several women came to visit her, and at one point they began praying over her. One of them started “speaking in tongues.” To most of us in the room, it sounded like complete gibberish. I was watching my mother closely. She looked at the woman with a mixture of amazement and utter bewilderment. She wasn’t mocking her; she was truly puzzled. I think she simply had no idea what to make of what she was hearing. That moment stayed with me because it captured the difference between my mother’s quiet, conventional faith and the far more demonstrative Christianity I had met through the born-again movement. My mother believed, but she did not feel that faith required a dramatic display of certainty. Still, she was open to other expressions of it. When Oral Roberts, the American evangelist and faith healer, was due to visit Kerala, she very much wanted to hear him. He represented a very different kind of Christianity from the one she had grown up with, yet she was curious enough to want to hear him for herself. In the end, she was too weak to go. I prayed for her. Other people prayed for her. She prayed for herself. There was no shortage of faith or prayer around her. And yet she died. I could not reconcile that with the certainty I had been hearing from the evangelical Christians around me. If God answers prayer, why had all those prayers not saved my mother? Over the years I noticed a pattern. When someone who has been prayed for recovers, the recovery is credited to God and to the power of prayer. But when the person dies, the explanation changes. It was God’s will. God answered, but the answer was no. She has gone to a better place. God’s ways are not our ways. In some circles, people even suggest that there simply wasn’t enough faith. It seemed to me that prayer could never fail under this way of thinking. If the person lived, prayer had worked. If the person died, God had other plans. I understood why people found comfort in those answers, and I didn’t blame them for it. But I could no longer believe in a kind of prayer whose results could only ever be counted in one direction. What I remember most is that my mother never lost her own faith. Even while she was ill, she never told me that Christianity had failed her. But she did once tell me that she wished she had greater faith. That remark has stayed with me ever since, because it expressed something I had trouble putting into words myself: you can truly believe and still recognize that your faith is not absolute. Her death did not make me stop believing overnight. It was more complicated than that. I continued going to church for a while. Over the years I went through different phases. Some churches suited me better than others, and there were periods when I avoided church altogether. My withdrawal was not really an act of rebellion. I simply could no longer accept some of the things I had once accepted without question. One of the biggest changes in my thinking concerned the idea that Christianity is the only path to salvation. If God exists, I find it hard to believe that God would condemn billions of people simply because they were born into another religion, or born centuries before Christianity reached their part of the world. The more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I became with the certainty with which different religions claim to possess the one truth. Christianity has its denominations and competing interpretations; Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and other faiths have their own traditions and claims. Even within a single church, people can be absolutely sure that their interpretation is the correct one. That certainty began to bother me. I also became more skeptical of organized religion as an institution. Churches are run by human beings, and human beings have the same weaknesses whether they are running a church, a business or a government. Institutions can become preoccupied with authority, reputation, money and self-preservation. The history of abuse and cover-ups in the Roman Catholic Church is an obvious example, although the problem is certainly not unique to Catholicism. That doesn’t mean I think religion is bad. It means I have become wary of any institution that claims to speak with absolute authority on behalf of God. And yet, despite all this, I have never completely abandoned prayer. I still believe there is something valuable in it, although I no longer think of prayer as a transaction in which we ask for something and God is expected to deliver. My mother’s death made that view impossible for me. Perhaps prayer sometimes changes circumstances. Perhaps it changes the person doing the praying. Perhaps it simply gives us a way to face what we cannot change. I don’t know. My wife has also, perhaps, shaped my attitude toward religion. She was born and raised a Hindu, but she has never been rigid about it. In more than thirty-six years of marriage, I have never heard her say that Hinduism is the one true religion or that other religions are inferior. We have never argued about religion. Her father was much the same. My wife once told me about a kurishupadi, a small roadside shrine with a cross, on the MC Road between Adoor and Chengannur. Travelers often stop there to light a candle or say a quick prayer before continuing on their way. When the family passed it, her father would sometimes do just that, even though he was a Hindu. In later years, when we traveled that road together, my wife would do the same. I have always wondered whether she inherited that little ritual from him. Her attitude showed again when her son from her first marriage, who was raised Hindu like both his parents, chose to become a Roman Catholic in his early forties. He takes his Catholic faith seriously and practices it sincerely, and my wife has been completely at ease with his decision. I find that significant. It is one thing to say you are tolerant of other religions. It is another to fully accept a close family member choosing a different faith from the one in which he was raised. Perhaps my wife’s example reinforced something I had already begun to believe: that faith does not have to be a competition. I have also come to appreciate the difference between religion and spirituality. I can’t define spirituality very well, and I certainly don’t claim to have found some alternative system of belief. But I do think there is something meaningful in the way people care for one another, show compassion, deal with suffering, and sometimes put someone else’s needs ahead of their own. Those things don’t prove the existence of God. I don’t think they are meant to. But they matter to me. As I have grown older, I have become more comfortable with the possibility that there are questions I will never be able to answer. I no longer feel the need to resolve everything. In fact, I find the insistence that everything must be settled, intellectually or theologically, less convincing than I once did. I don’t know whether there is a God. I don’t believe in heaven and hell in the traditional sense, and I don’t believe an afterlife is necessarily waiting for us. My present assumption is that death may simply be the end of our existence. But I am also comfortable saying, “I don’t know.” That is a very different answer from the one I would have given at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-religion-heritage","category-family-friends-remembrances"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2641"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2644,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641\/revisions\/2644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}