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You say you’ve felt a “fundamental resistance” to the Christian form, you’re “lukewarm” toward its theology, and you sense the teachings of Islam may conform more closely to your sense of the Divine Presence within the natural environment. But it’s unclear to me why you feel this way, and I would prefer to be able to address specific questions, such as they are.
For now, however, the most important thing I can do is remind you—or tell you if it wasn’t clear before—that an esoterist will by definition feel less than fully “comfortable” (your word) with any religion and will not “like” everything about it; all up?yas, even those of the relatively more metaphysical East, are colored in some way, and compared to the white light of the Truth they’re therefore inevitably limited and constraining. The following from a letter of Schuon’s is clearly pertinent:
A true metaphysician cannot unreservedly identify himself with a religious up?ya and take pleasure in it with a kind of nationalism, but obviously he must identify with what is essential, hence both universal and primordial.
I want to give two examples of religious limitation. For Christianity man is a “sinner”; this is the definition of man, and it entails the idea that the entire world is bad and the only alternative is between the “flesh” and the “spirit”; it goes without saying that this perspective has a certain relative justification, but its disadvantage lies in the fact that it presents itself as absolute. For Islam, on the other hand, man is not totally corrupted by the fall—a total corruption would be contrary to the very definition of man—but he is totally a “servant” or “slave”, which is in fact an aspect of his nature but which could never sum up human nature as such; to believe the contrary is to deny the specifically human intelligence and dignity, and it is thus to deny what constitutes the very reason for the existence of homo sapiens.
In both cases theology tends to push the respective dogmatic image to the point of absurdity, and most mystics identify de facto with these pious excesses, something a consistent metaphysician—hence one who is aware of the nature of things—would never do. A true metaphysician could not possibly identify himself with such positions, and therefore he could not commit himself to what I call “religious nationalism”. With good reason Guénon defined the “religious point of view”—the word “religious” having for him the meaning of “exoteric”—as a “sentimental attachment to an idea”. And one should not forget all the secondary excesses, sometimes very troublesome, to which confessional sentimentalism gives rise.
When you say you are a “Muslim” or a “Christian”, you exclude an immense part of humanity; you separate yourself from it and reproach it for not being what you are; you proclaim before the entire world that only you have the truth, unless you speak with tacit Guénonian understandings that no one can presuppose a priori. Nothing of this kind is to be found with the American Indians: “The Great Spirit has given you your way of praying, and He has given us our way of praying”; and that is all.
Each of the two traditions in question—Christianity and Islam—is necessarily limited from a metaphysical standpoint or, if you will, from the standpoint of “the Great Spirit” and primordial Truth; the esoterist will acknowledge this fact from the start—without “sentiment”, and without expecting a religious form to be something other than what it is—and will seek to compensate for these limits by drawing greater spiritual nourishment not from the theology of another Semitic up?ya but from esoterism as such or pure metaphysics.
Of course, I don’t know for sure—do you?—that you are in fact an esoterist, hence that you should, or even can, “feel” this way. Might it be that you’re instead an intelligent and inquisitive bhakta, whose temperament is such that she needs to “fall in love” with a religion before entering into it with total seriousness? I’m not presuming to issue a judgment on this matter; I’ve never met you and have only your one letter to go on. But this is a very important question and one that you need to be prayerfully asking yourself.