Every Buddhist practitioner's journey is as different as each flower under the sun. Just as no two flowers are identical, no Buddhist journey is the same.

I cannot speak for anyone else’s experience, but I can tell you about mine.

In 2010, I wrote a book called, The Practical Buddhist. In it, I wrote the following:

I was raised in a home that adopted Christianity as their spiritual tradition. We lived in the Deep South for many years but moved to California when I was 12. My family’s religious roots were aligned with the Southern Baptist denomination.

This very conservative tradition believes in the infallibility of the Bible and that all biblical teachings are relevant to any time period. I grew up in Pasadena, Texas, and I lived there most of my middle childhood years.

While we lived there, we attended a Southern Baptist church. We went to church frequently, sometimes three times a week, and it heavily influenced my personal definition of normal when it came to religion and/or spiritual practice. I grew up believing that attending a two-week vacation Bible school (VBS) in the summers and later holding a leadership role in VBS as a youth was normal.

As a young adult, I helped lead services and toured with a musical evangelism group, playing guitar and singing. I also grew up with skepticism toward Catholicism, Judaism, and any other faith that was different from mine.

This wasn’t something directly taught by my parents, but a by-product of the church-based teachings that placed our flavor of Christianity and religion above all others.

In my young adult years, I embraced Christianity with everything I had inside of me. I had nothing else going for me, no career or real life direction. At 21 my first serious girlfriend broke up with me and I was devastated by it. Sensing I needed to reorder my life and get away from all that was familiar with, I moved from Southern California to rejoin my parents who had moved to San Jose in the San Francisco Bay Area the previous year.

It was at that time that I decided to study medicine, and I enrolled in college again. I’d previously dropped out of two consecutive academic years and had written off furthering my education. Reeling from my relationship woes, I decided to try again. I again became heavily involved in the church my parents attended and soon became an ardent evangelical Christian. It was in church that I met and married my first wife.

I won’t say that the relationship was a rebound, but in retrospect, we both might have been spared much pain had I not been so empty and hurt when we met. Her faith was as devout as mine, and we quickly became engaged and married.

When we divorced seven years later, it was my doing. Part of the reason was the deterioration of my faith. I’d kept it secret fearing she wouldn't understand. My faith was dying, and I knew our path together wasn’t for me.

I felt like I’d lived that portion of my life and needed to move on. She was steadfast in her desire to work through our issues. She arranged, and I grudgingly attended Christian counseling, both of us thinking that I needed to be fixed in some way.

She told me once that a friend said I was suffering from a chemical imbalance and that was the reason I felt the need to leave our life together. She desperately tried to hang onto our marriage, but it wasn’t within me to stay. As time passed, it became very clear we were on two previously diverged paths.

I felt as though I had been hopping back and forth between two lives. There came a point when I had to be true to myself. I don’t blame her for any specific event or issue that led to our divorce. She did what she felt was right. And I was doing the same.

Ultimately, we had different life goals and preferences and whether it happened sooner or later, our divorce was inevitable. I could’ve done many things differently. I could have caused, and suffered, less pain. But it was done. We divorced and went our separate ways only to continue raising our two children with as much cooperation as we could.

I lost many friends from my church life in the process. It hurt deeply to have people I respected turn their backs on me citing their Christianity as a reason. I eventually concluded that they were as much a victim of their belief systems as I was and their behavior toward me was only a symptom of a more serious problem they had no interest in resolving.

Ironically, and to cite the Biblical advice of Jesus when he sent his disciples into the surrounding regions to teach and to share what they had learned from him, I “shook the dust from my feet,” and moved on without these former friends. As a divorced father, I missed my children so much that for years it was like a gaping wound that wouldn’t heal.

I was walking and breathing but I felt dead inside except for those six days a month when I was able to have them with me. My ex-wife once told me that my son Benjamin slept in his crib with a picture of me and would say goodnight to me before he went to sleep.

It broke my heart to hear that knowing that I could have prevented it by acquiescing to the pressure exerted by so many to rejoin my former wife.

My love for and dedication to my children never wavered. It was difficult and sometimes very painful attending their many activities (dance recitals, church events, Little League baseball games, high school sporting events, etc.) only to leave without them. The gaping wound was always with me.

It was harder still when my ex-wife’s new husband unilaterally decided I shouldn’t see them because I couldn’t pay my full child support payment. Feeling she needed to be a submissive wife, she supported his decision. If I’d had an open wound before, their decision to keep me from seeing my children was like having salt poured in it.

During this time I was struggling financially. I was under-employed and heavily in debt and it made life very difficult. Still, my ex-wife’s husband decided I needed to be taught a lesson. It killed me to be apart from my children. It felt like the gaping wound had become infected and was eating away at my soul.

I hated him for a long time; he knew I was poor and couldn't afford an attorney and he took advantage of the situation. I later realized it was anger and not hate that I was dealing with. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I’ve concluded that he was probably trying to do what he thought was right, however wrong, and deluded his approach and how much he hurt my children and me.

I tried to enlist the help of their Pastor (he was also my former Pastor and someone with whom I’d attended college) to engage an independent but trusted third party to mediate.

I told the Pastor I wanted to see my children. I explained the situation and asked him to intercede and talk to my ex-wife and her husband. I asked him for help setting up a dialogue between me, my ex-wife, and her husband, but it became apparent that his allegiance was to his own.

He was entirely resistant for helping in any way unless, as he put it, I “started behaving like a Christian.” I looked at him like he was a monster with three heads. I couldn’t imagine the audacity with which he offered his remark.

“What did you say?” I asked, sitting in his plush office.

“Barry, you must start acting like a Christian and set the right example for your children.”

That was his advice: change your behavior to suit me, and maybe I, a so-called man of God, will help. I needed to behave in a certain way so that he would correct a wrong.

With that misguided and judgmental statement, devoid of compassio, he forever changed my view of the Christian church. His behavior and self-righteous stance weren’t based on anything close to anything I’d read in the New Testament.

He was only too happy to prolong my suffering, and that of my children, until as he said, I “started behaving like a Christian.”

Not long after our meeting, I sent him this note in the mail:

Dear Bill,

Did you read the account of when Jesus told the blind man that he’d heal him if he behaved in a certain way? Neither did I.

Barry

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