Heal but by degrees

I was born in England to Sikh immigrants. Taught to be a A good English Christian schoolboy during the day, reverting to a good  Sikh son of an honest immigrant farmer every evening and weekend.

For reasons I will never understand, the hard switch back and forth between Eastern roots and Western breeding, from obedient Christian by day and Sikh warrior by eve 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 would go out of their way to remind us that these "Anglo-Saxon immigrants" had taken over their Celtic homeland, and how the Normans and Vikings all plundered and watered down the ancient Briton bloodline. Their anger at the immigrants of the past cast the presence of my parents and my own unwashable tan skin into new light.

To relieve the mental anguish and silence the self torment I would bunk off from school, use my lunch money to take the Tube from Ealing Broadway on the Central Line directly to Holborn Station to 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 by what it meant to be a “Sikh” at home and by 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 that if people have the courage to step beyond the shackles of social identity, the shallowness of social despair will give way to the breadth of humanity. I learned that if people slow down long enough, allow the pool of their frantic minds to be still, then they will see that we all uniquely love.

"How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees"
Othello. Act II; Scene iii