He was not divine.

The Christian claim that he was divine was the central theological error that Islam had been sent to correct.

This was not a minor doctrinal dispute.

It was the hinge on which the entire comparison between the two faiths turned.

I had held this position with the confidence of someone who had received it from trusted sources and had never had reason to examine its foundations because the foundations had never been challenged by anything that came from outside the framework.

The video was outside the framework.

I called my sister Nora on Thursday evening 5 days after the church.

We were close in the specific way of older sister and middle brother.

She the one who had always been more settled, more certain, more at home inside the structures that our family and community offered.

She was a nurse now, living in Ittook with her husband and their 2-year-old daughter.

And she had maintained the faith with the consistency I had always respected even when I did not match it.

I did not tell her about the church directly.

I said I had been thinking about some things and wanted to talk.

She said, “Come for dinner on Saturday.

” I went for dinner on Saturday and I told her the story, the party, the church, the video, the light that had no source and no explanation.

Norah listened in the way she listened to patients in distress fully without the agenda of a prepared response, just receiving the thing being said.

When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, “Show me the video.

” I showed her, but she watched it twice.

She said, “I don’t know what that is.

” I said, “That’s what everyone says.

” She said, “What are you going to do about it?” I said, “I don’t know yet.

I’m reading.

” She said, “What are you reading?” I said, “About what Christians believe.

” Not the argument version, the actual version.

She said, “Why?” I said, “Because I said things in that room that I’m ashamed of, and the light was there the whole time, and I want to know what the light was.

” She said, “The light might not tell you anything.

Sometimes things happen and we can’t explain them.

The important question is what you’re going to do about what you’re already feeling.

” I said, “What am I already feeling?” She said, “You know what you’re already feeling.

You wouldn’t have called me otherwise.

” She was right.

I knew what I was already feeling.

I had been feeling it since the moment I watched the video back at 2:00 in the morning and saw the light in the upper left corner and felt the specific sensation of being watched doing something I was ashamed of.

I was feeling the beginning of a question I had been avoiding for years.

The question about whether the faith I had grown up in and thinned out and carried as cultural identity rather than living practice was the whole truth about God or whether it was a part of the truth or whether the full truth was available somewhere I had not looked yet.

The video had not created this question.

The video had made it impossible to keep in the drawer where I had been keeping it.

I found the church again on a Monday afternoon, not at 1:00 in the morning this time.

In the cold February daylight, the kind of pale Toronto winter light that came sideways and did not warm anything, but at least was present.

I stood on the sidewalk outside and looked at the building, red brick and old, a wooden sign above the entrance with the church name and service times.

The side door through which we had entered at 1:00 in the morning was closed now.

The front doors were closed, too.

I stood there for about 4 minutes, which is longer than it sounds when you are standing on a cold sidewalk trying to decide whether to go in.

I went to the front door and tried it.

It was open.

Inside, the light from the February afternoon came through the stained glass in the subdued colors of midday, and the sanctuary was empty and quiet, and the altar was at the front with the white cloth and the candlestands, and the kiboreium in its place in the center.

I walked up the center aisle slowly and stood at the front and looked at the upper left corner of the wall near the ceiling.

Nothing there but a stone and a shadow and the edge of a stained glass panel.

Whatever had been visible in the video on Saturday night at 1:00 in the morning was not visible here on a Monday afternoon.

Of course, it was not.

I had not expected it to be.

But I had needed to stand in the space and look.

I sat in the front pew.

The church was completely empty.

No footsteps, no voices, the muffled sound of blur street traffic through the thick walls.

I sat there and I looked at the altar and I looked at the upper left corner and I looked at the cross mounted above the altar on the far wall and I said quietly because the quiet of the church seemed to require quiet.

I don’t know if you were there that night or if you’re here now.

I don’t know what I believe about you yet, but I made a mess in your house and I’m sorry for that.

I came back because I needed to say that to your face.

I sat there for another 20 minutes without saying anything else.

When I left, I felt slightly lighter than when I came in.

The specific lightness of someone who has said the thing they needed to say and whose body has registered the saying of it, even when the mind is still processing everything else.

I walked out into the February Toronto to cold and pulled my coat tighter and thought about the light in the upper left corner of the video and about what Norah had said that the important question was what I was going to do about what I was already feeling.

And I felt standing on the sidewalk outside an Anglican church in the annex neighborhood of Toronto that what I was already feeling was not going to get smaller by being ignored.

It had been getting larger since a Saturday night at 1:00 in the morning, and the trajectory was clear.

I needed to understand who was in that room.

The director of the church was a woman named Reverend Patricia, which was not what I had expected and which said something about my own unexamined assumptions that I stored away to think about later.

I found out her name from the church website that evening and emailed her that night.

a short message explaining that I had been in the church over the weekend and had a question about something I had experienced.

I said I was from a Muslim background and was not a church member and hoped my inquiry was not inappropriate.

She replied the next morning and said I was welcome to come in on Wednesday afternoon.

Reverend Patricia was 52 years old from a Barbadian family in Toronto and had been director of this church for 7 years.

She had a quality that I would come to understand was the product of decades of pastoral work with people in various states of distress and transition.

The quality of being completely present without being crowded, of giving you the full weight of her attention without making it feel like a pressure.

She did not look surprised when I told her what I was there for.

She looked interested.

I told her the full story, the party, the open door, the recording, what we had said and done.

I showed her the video on my phone.

She watched it carefully, leaning slightly forward, going back to watch the upper left corner specifically.

When I pointed it out when she handed the phone back, she was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, “What did you feel when you saw it?” I said, “Like I had been watched doing something I should not have been doing.

” She said, “By what?” I said, “I don’t know.

That’s what I’m here for.

” She said, “That’s a good reason to come.

” She did not use the word miracle.

I noticed this.

She did not perform the response of a person who had been handed a conversion story and was going to convert it into a whim for her institution.

She talked about the light the way you talk about something interesting that has been given to you for your consideration.

She said unusual things happened in the spaces where people gathered for prayer over long periods of time and that she did not fully understand the mechanisms.

But she did not think the mechanisms were the point.

She said the point was what the experience had asked me.

What question was I now holding that I had not been holding before.

I told her the question was about the space between the God I had been taught and the God who might actually be present.

She said, “Can you say more about that?” I said, “I grew up believing God was real, but experiencing him mostly as distant.

The faith was real, but I could not tell you if the practice was pointing at something actual or just add the tradition itself.

” Now, there is this thing I cannot explain sitting in a video on my phone, and I do not know what to do with it except that I cannot ignore it.

” She nodded slowly.

She said, “What you’re describing is the gap between faith as inheritance and faith as encounter.

A lot of people live their whole lives in that gap and never notice it.

Something made you notice it.

” I said, “A light in the corner of a video at 1 in the morning.

” She said, “God has used worse material.

” She gave me a Bible, not the full Bible at first, a small New Testament with Psalms, the kind that fit in a jacket pocket.

She said, “Start with John and come back if you had questions.

” She said she had a small group that met on Tuesday evenings to discuss the faith from a beginning reader perspective and that I was welcome any Tuesday I wanted to come.

She said there was no expectation or agenda or destination I needed to commit to.

She said this is a conversation.

Come as long as it’s useful and stop when it isn’t.

I went home with the New Testament in my jacket pocket and I started reading that night.

I had read portions of the Bible before in academic contexts for coursework, for research, for the purpose of analysis rather than the purpose of understanding.

Reading it as something that might be true was a different experience with the same text.

The way listening to music in a language you are learning changes when you begin to understand the words.

The words were the same.

what I was doing with them was different.

The Gospel of John did the thing that everyone who had recommended it to me seemed to expect it to do, which was make the central claim of Christianity unavoidable.

This Jesus in these pages was not the prophet of the Islamic tradition, corrected and limited and human all the way through.

He was something else.

Something that the text itself was insisting upon through every story and every conversation and every I am a statement that would have been immediately understood by everyone who heard it as a claim to the divine name.

I had known this intellectually from apologetics training uh from the comparative religion framing where the trinity was presented at the Christian error.

But reading it directly in his own words as the text recorded them.

The intellectual knowledge became a different kind of problem than I had been managing.

The problem was not the logic.

The logic of the trinity had always seemed to me like the weakest part of the Christian position.

Philosophically unstable, requiring too much definition work to sustain.

But the person in these pages was not making a philosophical argument.

He was doing things and saying things and the response of everyone around him was the response of people is in the presence of something they did not have a category for which was exactly the situation I was in with the light in the upper left corner of my video.

My category for
Jesus was well organized and had been constructed without reading him directly.

Reading him directly was not fitting the category.

I went to the Tuesday evening group 3 weeks after my first meeting with Reverend Patricia.

There were seven people in the room, various ages and backgrounds, some longtime church members, and some people at various points of approach to the faith, sitting in a circle of chairs, in a room off the main sanctuary with tea on a table and a whiteboard on the wall and the specific atmosphere of people
gathered around something they take seriously without taking themselves too seriously.

I told them when it was my turn to introduce myself that I was from a Muslim background and was asking questions.

The room received this without drama which I appreciated.

A man in his 60s named Harold who had been coming to the group for 3 years after spending most of his adult life away from any faith said questions are what this room is for.

a young woman named Amara who was Ghanaian Canadian and had grown up in a Christian household and was now working through her own more sophisticated questions about what she actually believed smiled at me and said, “You picked the right Tuesday.

” The discussion that evening was about the resurrection, specifically about what the Christian claim actually was and what the evidence for it was and how a person in the modern world was supposed to think about it.

I had positions on this from my Islamic training and from my media studies framework.

And I brought both of them into the conversation carefully, not to win an argument, but because they were genuinely what I thought, and the group seemed to want genuine thinking rather than performance.

Harold and Amara and the others engaged my questions directly and without defensiveness, and the conversation went places I had not expected, specifically into the historical scholarship around the empty tomb, which was more substantive and more seriously engaged with by
mainstream historians than I had understood.

I drove home from that Tuesday group with the specific feeling of a person who has just had a meal after not eating enough for a long time and whose body is registering the difference.

The conversation had been real.

The questions had been taken seriously.

The answers where they existed had been offered honestly and where they did not exist.

The uncertainty had been acknowledged honestly which was more than I had received from any religious conversation in years.

I went back the next Tuesday and the Tuesday after that.

Meanwhile, the video continued to sit on my phone.

I had not posted it which was itself information since posting things was what we did with recordings.

It was the reflex, the default, and the fact that I had not posted this one told me something about what I understood the recording to contain.

Edris asked about it twice.

I said I had decided not to post it.

He said, “Why?” I said, “Because I don’t want the first thing I ever recorded in a church to be that.

” He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, “Fair enough.

” The night I watched the video one final time was a Wednesday night in March, 6 weeks after the church.

I sat in my Kensington Market apartment with the heat on and the March rain on the windows and I pressed play and watch with the 45 seconds again from beginning to end.

The light was exactly where it had always been at upper left corner soft and white and perfectly still.

I watched us below it.

three 25 year olds with our clever analysis and our ironic distance and our certainty that we understood the thing we were dismissing.

We looked very small from where the light was.

Not small in a cruel way.

Small in the way that people look small when you see them from a sufficient height, not diminished, but simply in proper proportion to the space around them.

I put the phone down.

I sat in the quiet apartment and I said out loud what I had been building toward for six weeks without being ready to say it directly.

I said, “I want to know you.

” Not the argument about you, not the tradition about you, not the framework about you.

I want to know you the same way you apparently already know me.

Because if you were in that room while I was saying those things and you stayed anyway, that is either the biggest coincidence of my life or it is something I need to take seriously.

And I have run out of reasons to keep treating it as a coincidence.

I sat still.

The rain continued.

The March night sat on the city outside my window the way March nights in Toronto sat heavily with the specific weight of a season not yet finished.

And something in the room changed.

Not dramatically, not with light this time, not visible, not on camera, something in the texture of the air, the quality of the stillness.

The difference between alone and not alone, felt rather than seen.

Arriving without announcement, the way warmth arrives when you have been cold long enough to stop expecting it.

I put my face in my hands and I sat there for a long time and I said nothing else because nothing else was needed.

The presence was enough.

The presence was more than I had had in 25 years of performing the inherited faith without encountering the person at the center of it.

When I finally lifted my head, the apartment was ordinary.

The rain on the window, the heat humming.

There’s the familiar objects of my small life arranged around me in their usual places.

But I was different and I knew it the way you know things that are beyond argument.

Not because you decided but because the thing is simply true and you have encountered it and encounter changes you in ways that deciding never does.

The first thing I did the next morning was call Reverend Patricia.

She answered with the specific unhurried calm of someone who was not surprised by the hour or the caller.

I told her what had happened the night before.

Not the details exactly, just the fact of it, the present that had arrived in the apartment, the certainty that had followed, the person I now knew I had encountered.

She listened and when I finished, she said, “Are you okay?” I said, “I’m better than okay.

I don’t have a better word than that.

” She said, “That’s the right answer.

” She paused.

“Come in whenever you’re ready.

There’s a lot to learn and none of it is urgent except the relationship which you’ve already started.

The learning was real and it was long and it is still going.

I want to be honest about this because conversion narratives sometimes imply a completion that the experience does not have.

There was an encounter and the encounter was real and it changed the direction I was moving in.

But the learning of what I had moved toward, the theology and the practice and the specific understanding of who Jesus was and what his death and resurrection meant, and how a person lived in response to all of that was months of Tuesdays and readings and questions, and
the occasional experience of finding that something I had been certain of was more complicated than my certainty had allowed.

I was baptized on a Sunday in June, four months after the church at 1:00 in the morning in a service at the Anglican church in the annex that was attended by Harold and Amara and the rest of the Tuesday group and Reverend Patricia who poured the water with the specific careful attention.

She brought to everything she did.

Norah came.

She sat in the third row and cried quietly through the baptism with her hands folded in her lap and did not try to hide it which was its own kind of gift.

Idris did not come to the baptism.

He was not ready and I was not going to push him.

But he came to coffee 3 days before and sat across from me at the same blur street table we always used and asked me in the direct way Idris asked things when he actually wanted an answer.

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