Even though I lived as a conservative fundamentalist for the first twenty years of my life, I never made a good one. I guess I love mystery and ambiguity too much. Black and white distinctions have always bored me. I'm endlessly fascinated instead by a God who is infinitely beyond all things, yet who dwells intimately within the core of the human self. A cosmos where every creature is the echo of a love-word of the Divine, a word that never had a chance to be spoken, yet whose echoes appear anyway. A world in which every being mirrors every other being, where there exist an endless number of creatures appearing as mirror-images, but no originals. A philosophy in which absolutely EVERY spiritual path and theological position - including our own - has both its positive and negative elements. A life where seeming opposites - masculine and feminine, spiritual and worldly, transcendent and immanent, to give just a few examples - are continually shapeshifting into one another. How amazing and mysterious this world is! How could one ever be satisfied with a belief system containing answers that are black and white and unchanging? Such a world view feels like spiritual suicide to me! I like to explore and discover new things. Indeed, each of us is meant to be a sort of Lewis-and-Clark of the spirit. For mystery is our true nourishment.
Photo: Limber Pine snag and spires above Emerald Lake on a blustery day; Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; October 27, 2012
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