I was born in England to Sikh immigrants. A good (whatever that means) English Christian schoolboy during the day, reverting to a ‘good’ (whatever that means) Sikh son of an honest immigrant farmer every evening.
For reasons I will never quite understand, this hard switch back and forth between my Eastern roots and Western breeding, from day time obedient Christian and to evening and weekend Sikh warrior was far more of a torment to me than either of my brothers or any of my 'second generation immigrant' friends.
To make matters more colourful most our teachers were Welsh immigrants who despised the English and taught us how those "anglo-saxon immigrants" had taken over their "celtic homeland" and "weakened" their bloodline!
To relieve my silent confusion I would bunk off from school, use my lunch money to take the central line to Holborn Station and escape in the wonder of the Reading Rooms at the British Museum. There I dug through the brittle skin of what I was being told it meant to be a “Sikh” at home and what it meant to be a “Christian” at school and excavated my own darkness.
My private ordeal eventually turned from an elevation, to an elation and eventually a rev-elation. Both faiths, indeed all faiths are connected by a stream that runs deep beneath, in an undercurrent of latent truth that connects all humanity with or without our feeble permission. We should never trust what we see on the surface we are not that shallow. Our true task is to (if we are blessed or we are blessed if we) slow down long enough to drink from the sacred pool of truth rooted deep within us.
Baba Nanak Faqir followed the Rumi saints at the same time as he cleared the hindu cobwebs off the Vedic scriptures to reveal that "there is no moslem, there is no hindu". Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji was equivocal about this, he taught us that if we have the courage to step beyond our social identity the shackles of our shallow social despair disappear, if we slow down long enough to allow the pool of our frantic mind to be still, then we will see that we are all uniquely one.
"How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
Thou know'st we work by wit,
and not by witchcraft;
And wit depends on dilatory time."
Othello. Act II; Scene iii
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