Spiritual Journeying

I must admit I have a healthy, perhaps unhealthy, appreciation and identification with this piece from iMonk. I have been forcing myself outside the page, to experience, to widen myself. To think and find that there is more than where I’ve been.

On one level I’m stuck, but on pace. Doing my due diligence in the historical work necessary to get to the next level. You can’t do theology without a foundational base, can you? And in the Christian tradition that base is found in biblical studies. I feel that I’m a good ways along now, having a good foundation to understand the gospels, though apocalyptic is still a struggle. Paul is next on the list. Having done that, I would fee comfortable and able working up to a proper Theology.

One of the things I never realized, that to do this all correctly, takes years. But of course life and living it cannot wait for that. There is so much more.

On the lowest level religious experiences happen, have happened to me, and create the foundation for religion and spirituality. Add community experiences with symbols and praxis and you have it all. But listening to Stephen Prothero’s Noble Lectures this year game me more incentive to do what I felt I had been doing (to a small extent). Be a wanderer. Wander to and from the community, in and out of the praxis, in and out of the experiences. Find their boundaries, and what they mean.

I am still a skeptic (not a cynic in either the real or pejorative meaning) on some level. Not that I don’t trust others, perhaps I don’t trust the meaning others find in what they experience. I’m a pretty unique person in the way I think, believe, and act. For historical studies I now have a pretty set method for understanding things – most people I talk with do not have any method whatsoever. For life experiences, well those are wide open, and I hope to have many more of those.