Choosing a spiritual way of life isn’t always easy. It can be messy and full of all kinds of questions. However, for people like Esther Maloney, it’s the questioning and the journey that make it more interesting.

Maloney, 33, and current Torontonian, was born and raised in a Bahá’í family in Montreal, Que. Growing up, she didn’t feel pressure to convert, or to seek out one religion to answer life’s questions.

The Bahá’í Community of Canada website reports that the religion was founded in Iran in 1844. Today it is still considered one of the world’s youngest religions. Unlike some religious systems that automatically count you as a member upon birth, the foundation of the Bahá’í way of life is discovery.

“I did learn about Judaism and Christianity through school friends and extended family,” Maloney says. “Later on I explored some aspects of Buddhism and Native spirituality. These explorations always served to strengthen and deepen my understanding of the Bahá’í writings.”

She explains that, as a Bahá’í person, there is not much competition for one belief. Her faith journey was open from the very beginning.

“Bahá’ís believe in ‘progressive revelation’,” she explains. “Which is the idea that God has unravelled what is one unified message through different messengers such as Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha over the course of history, like chapters of a book that build on each other.”

“Bahá’ís believe in ‘progressive revelation’,” she explains. “Which is the idea that God has unravelled what is one unified message through different messengers such as Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha over the course of history, like chapters of a book that build on each other.”

Where Maloney’s experience existed within a broad spiritual landscape, Justin Tse, 30, had his own unique journey within the world of Christianity.

“My parents took us to a Taiwanese church, but my dad was the Cantonese pastor there,” he says via Skype from Northwestern University, Chicago. “Then he was ordained at a black church, because the Taiwanese church wouldn’t ordain him.”

He chuckles at the memory.

When he was six years old, Tse’s family moved from Vancouver to the San Francisco Bay area. There, he had experiences that would influence his future religious choices.

“For me growing up, faith was apolitical. I was an evangelical. Faith and social justice [were separate],” he says. “But I attended Catholic school and the Catholic high school that I went to was not your average, run-of-the mill Catholic high school. It was like liberation, feminist, womanist theology kind of Catholic school.”

“We read the Color Purple along with Genesis,” he says. “Our canon was Toni Morrison.”

Although he went to a Catholic school, Tse would spend his early years as an evangelical Christian. Some often distinguish evangelicals from Catholic Christians as being the more easy-going of the bunch.

When he was 18, his family moved back to Canada, and his father was ordained as an Anglican priest. Soon his whole family was confirmed as Anglican.

"I attended Catholic school and the Catholic high school that I went to was not your average, run-of-the mill Catholic high school. It was like liberation, feminist, womanist theology kind of Catholic school.”
- Justin Tse

It was when he was attending a protest outside of the Chinese consulate that he learned of something else - an experience of Christianity that he had wanted.

“I met a Byzantine Jesuit priest while protesting…in solidarity with the Hong Kong Umbrella movement in 2014,” Tse explains. “He told me that was he was Catholic, but he was not Roman…I was like, is that even possible? He was like, well, there’s me.”

“So, through this social justice effort,” he continues, “I got sucked into the Eastern Catholic Church and that’s where I ended up.”

On why this distinction in his spiritual journey is important, he has a lot to say.

“There’s a lot of me and God stuff that goes on when you’re a Protestant,” he says, “very sort of direct relationship with God.”

“I don’t think I had it in me to be an individual before God,” he says. “I kind of need a church. I need a sense of what we Catholics and Orthodox call the communion of saints. The sense that I’m not in this alone, that I’m part of something larger, mystically, is important to me.”

Savanna Ali, 19, lives in Toronto and she is an evangelical Christian. She very much enjoys what Tse refers to as being an individual before God.

“I have a personal relationship with Jesus,” she says.

For Ali, the major catalyst in her spiritual journey was the divorce of her parents.

“When I was 14 years old, my parents separated,” she shares. “Basically everything I knew was…shook.”

Ali experienced depression for a period of time. Later, she felt “God’s love” draw her back to exploring the faith of her childhood and now it is part of her daily life.

For Ali, Tse and Maloney, the daily connections seem to be what enhances their spiritual lives.

“The idea that being Baha’i is something I work at every day,” Maloney says, “within my own heart, in my family and in my community is a process-oriented view and that feels really whole and realistic to me.”

Natasha Collishaw, 30, is also Baha’i and lives in Toronto.

When asked for advice to fellow young people who are having their own spiritual journey, Collishaw is firm.

“Be patient,” she says. “There’s a lot out there so it’s important to take that time to reflect and meditate.”

Originally appeared in TANDEM, a multi-faith magazine for Canadian millennials.

Spiritual Evolution: Toronto Bahá’í’s experience and the tale of an evangelical turned Eastern Catholic professor