It is the middle of July, and I am carefully layering sheets of pure gold over the statue of Saraswati that will sit in the centre of my altar. It is a finicky task, and while I’m trying focus my concentration, I suddenly notice a question flashing through my mind: what’s a good Jewish boy doing gilding a Hindu goddess for a Pagan altar?

I was raised as a Jew, and phonetically memorized enough Hebrew to stumble through a Bar Mitzvah. But I was never part of a Jewish community, and as I never understood Hebrew, the times when my parents dragged me to a synagogue were leaden painful hours, an experience to be dutifully endured rather than anything that opened onto a spiritual path. For twenty years I would assert that I wasn’t Jewish, because I didn’t believe in any of the theology, and it wasn’t until I found myself teaching a World Religions course, doing research on what Jews believe, that I realised how much of the ethical framework which I embraced was Jewish. My wife (non-Jewish) would listen tolerantly to my convoluted explanation of why I wasn’t Jewish, and laugh and say, “Oh, Peter, of course you’re Jewish.” Reluctantly, slowly, eventually, I came to admit she was probably right.

But as the Firesign Theatre says, “There’s a seeker born every minute,” and being Jewish left me still seeking a spiritual practice. Of course, being a World Religions teacher was a good vantage point from which to explore. I learned more about different religions and found much of value and many similarities in each of them. But though I read a lot, nothing seemed to change in my life. As Baba Ram Dass says in Be Here Now, “Painted cakes do not satisfy hunger.” Readings aren’t a spiritual practice. I was drawn enough to Taoism and its teachings to visit a Taoist temple, but the practice there was to memorize Chinese syllables and chant them without awareness of their meaning, and if I’d wanted that I’d have stayed in a synagogue.

Then the friend of a friend called me, or the Great Mystery gave me a nudge: at this point I wouldn’t claim to be able to distinguish between the two. But I found myself in a sweat lodge, on a vision quest, and something shifted.

Part of the shift was that the Native American path works through body, and as that was the area of myself I least inhabited, it was the place I was most open to learning. Part was moving to a perspective on religion I would later find best encapsulated in William James’ depiction that religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

By that description a religion is a catalyst, a technique to help me align myself with that unseen power, the implicate truth in the universe. What matters isn’t the Truth, but the efficacy of the religion. The genealogy of the powers I call in for the pipe prayers starts with Great-Grandmother, the Void, Great-Grandfather, the Galaxy of Stars. Do I believe in them as literal conscious entities? No. Do I find them useful to triangulate and orient my personal experience in relationship to the world? Absolutely!

The particular path I follow is called the Twisted Hairs, as it is an inter-tribal tradition, reputed to have been braided together by shamanic teachers from different north, central and south American tribes. Practitioners are encouraged to continue the braiding, finding the truths in different religions, and the images of those truths that work for them.

Last spring I gave a dear friend the statue that had been in the centre of my altar for a number of years, a dancing Nataraj that represents the aspect of Shiva as the Transformer, who changes life into death, and creates new life out of death. Having a space at the centre of my altar, the physical set of symbols that represent earth / air / fire / water or body / mind / spirit / emotion was a powerful emptiness, and I held to it, waiting to see what would come to fill it. As I move into my sixties, Shiva didn’t feel as right for me as he had a decade ago. So I wandered eventually down to Gerrard Street in Toronto’s “Little India”, where a handful of stores focussing on religious iconography nestle between sari merchants, and the wonderful restaurants that had first pulled me there years ago.

I looked at the shelves, grateful for the classes I’d spent teaching about the different gods, or the different faces and aspects of the one God, for Hinduism is a religion of which it is said that it has 330 million gods, and that it has only one god, and both are true statements. And I was grateful to have been gifted with the opportunity to spend time in the temples of India and Nepal, so that the images carried emotion and spirit rather than just being more painted cakes. In the end it was Saraswati who called me. She is the goddess of consciousness, the arts and education, and enlightenment. So as a symbol for my aspirations, I didn’t feel I could do better.

The statue is about three inches tall, and bronze. But there is a tradition in Hindu and Buddhist countries in Asia of covering images that represent aspects of the divine in gold, and the idea of doing that pleased me: it was a way of adding a personal component, of deepening and enriching the symbol. In all primal religons, intent is the key element and so my intent to manifest Saraswati in my life could be incarnated by covering her in clothes of gold.

I don’t believe humans are capable of understanding or knowing the ultimate truths of the universe. But we are not just mind, we are spirit as well, and spirit is like a magnet, which feels the power of the pull of north and aligns itself to it. So I trust the pull of spirit and these steps on this strange syncretic path I have assembled, gifts of birth, of learning, of fate. I can’t make it fit a Procrustean bed of truth or falsity, but for me it has meaning. It helps me to better understand myself and my life, and to find ways that the two might fit together slightly more harmoniously. And if that isn’t a final ultimate answer, it is enough of an answer for me, for now.