Tyrone Allison

When asked, I usually describe my faith journey as a circuitous, yet intentional path. In my youth, I was a voracious reader, always fascinated by life’s bigger questions. My family included ministers, preachers, and pastors from various Protestant traditions, which honestly confused me from the first time I encountered the word schism. That confusion was probably heightened by the fact that I found myself more naturally drawn toward the historically rooted, liturgical, and sacramental expressions of Christianity I encountered in Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism—even while recognizing many of the Reformation’s criticisms and arguments as valid and reasonable. Even so, denominational identity gradually became less interesting to me than Christ Himself.

By high school, the yogic traditions and sciences seemed to be gaining popularity, so my natural curiosity led me to study them for a while. I also encountered Taoism and some of the other Eastern traditions less familiar to Western ears.

All were interesting, and I intentionally sought to understand their foundational principles well enough to maintain respectful, engaging dialogue with friends or peers who formally practiced or adhered to those traditions. From college until just before COVID, I also seemed to be surrounded by people with New Age, New Thought, Theosophical, and other esoteric or Gnostic-influenced perspectives. So, again, I sought to learn enough to engage.

Maybe a year or two before COVID, I found an online Buddhist sangha that I joined for several years. During that time, I also participated online with ISKCON, which brought me into deeper engagement with the broader Sanātana/Hindu cosmological and devotional world.

Through it all, my own center became increasingly Christological, shaped and deepened by Scripture, contemplative prayer, sacramental traditions, the early Church, and writers ranging from Augustine and Aquinas to Thomas à Kempis, Brother Lawrence, Meister Eckhart, and The Cloud of Unknowing.

In short, even as I personally resist labels and labeling, if pressed, I’d probably describe myself as a non-denominational Christian with a contemplative, Franciscan-leaning spirituality.

I think that journey has also made me reluctant to assume I already know what another person’s beliefs mean to them. Having spent time learning from traditions that were once unfamiliar to me, I’d rather ask, listen, and understand something from somewhere near the inside before evaluating it from the outside. I tend to read traditions almost prismatically—not assuming they all say the same thing, but remaining interested in what each may help me notice.

Service and ordinary relationships have reinforced that too. I feel that people become much harder to reduce to categories when you’re actually sharing work, conversation, joy, suffering, and everyday life with them. So perhaps the value beneath it all is a kind of rooted permeability: I can be increasingly rooted in Christ without needing another person to stand where I stand for me to recognize their dignity, learn from them, or genuinely enjoy meeting them where they are.