I’m a firm believer in leaving yourself open to experiences.

You never know when something you experience will make its way as an integral part of a story you will one day write.

Everything you experience is grist for the mill and it’s important to live your life really engaged in what is happening to and around you.

So recently I was invited to go on an interfaith walk.

It was a stroll through one of Toronto’s diverse neighborhoods to visit a Buddhist temple, a Synagogue, a Catholic Church and an Albanian mosque, all within 2.4 kms of each other.

I am in the midst of a big project.

I wasn’t planning to go.

I received the invitation from the member of parliament who represents the neighborhood and I thought it was just one of those generic type of invitations I could ignore.

But when they called me up a couple of days before and asked if I would come, I felt bad, and decided to do it.

We began at the Buddhist temple. It was very small, about the size of a large house with an open area, and little cushions on the floor and kind of little bench like desks above them.

We had to take our shoes off before going into the main hall where there were statues of some Buddhas in different poses and a monk in a burgundy robe who was explaining the significance of what we were seeing and answering questions.

I found the Synagogue the most interesting. It was The Junction Shul. It was tucked into a little street, one of the oldest Synagogues in the city, built in 1911, again a small building.

I had never been in a Synagogue before. There was a kind of stage in the middle surrounded by a railing made of spindles of wood. Apparently the people who’d built it had worked in the Heintzman piano factory doing the cabinetry. When we went into the basement to see where the micvah was, the basement had a very familiar musty smell that I remembered from all the years I went to the Jami mosque, one of the oldest mosques in Toronto. The micvah was a special sort of bath area for people to do their ritual bathing. It was now where they had the furnace.

What really resonated with me was the immigrant nature of the place. It had been cobbled together much through the resources and labor of the people who’d immigrated to the area. These were mostly Polish Jews fleeing the pogroms.

The Catholic church was next. It was called St. Paul the Apostle church. It was a large kind of semi modern building with stained glass windows and hard wooden pews. The minister had spent fifteen years in Pakistan and was originally from Malta.

Lastly we visited the Albanian mosque, a three story building off a store front area that was first established in 1957.

Back then Canada had a eugenics policy and only allowed white immigrants into the country. Albanian Muslims were some of the first Muslim immigrants.

The prayer hall was simple rows of carpeting.

At the end of the evening all who’d gone on the interfaith walk broke bread at the mosque. There were people from all backgrounds and then some Asian ladies who represented some peace organization got up and sang a couple of songs including Top of the World by the Carpenters.

It was somehow a fitting end to a lovely evening.

It reminded me of why I love this city and this country so very much and the basic goodness of people. We all need reminders of that now and again.