Welcome to the conversation!

Everywhere today God’s name is invoked. Yet there are so few places to have a genuine conversation about God, a true I-Thou dialogue in which the participants are present to the depth and complexity of the reality we call God, aware of the limitations of their own concepts, assumptions, and perspective, and able to see and hear the others as they are. Conversations that are dialogues are not arguments in which opposing adversaries compete for the one single truth. Nor are they sales pitches for the best product or tradition, or bids for confirmation of one’s position. True conversations are more like this: navigating an ocean with a group of strangers who are unlikely travelling companions, each one boarding the boat in a different place, each one speaking a different language, all working together as a crew along the way to keep the boat afloat and moving forward, each one disembarking at a different place—yet each traveler arriving at a new place, a place different from where she or he began, a place they have not been before, everyone transformed by the journey.

This is the kind of conversation about God I crave. Am I capable of it? I hope so. At least I aim to try, with the wisdom of Samuel Beckett to guide me: “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”

I invite you to board the boat and join me on this spiritual adventure. What I’m interested in is seeking spiritual insights that can revive and refresh spirits weary of arguments and images that were once fresh in their day but have now worn thin. When the ancient Hebrew prophets had a question about what was happening in their community, they would go “inquire of the Lord” for a fresh word to bring to their new experience. We live in the twenty-first century. The Enlightenment has been over for 300 years, and we’re still in a quandary about how to talk about God in a way that makes sense to intelligent people who want to deny neither religion nor science and philosophy. So let’s talk inquiring.  I’ll offer questions, reflections, or suggested readings as catalysts. Let’s start talking and see what kind of journey we create together. As the theologian Nelle Morton says, “The journey is home.” As Rabbi Hayyim teaches, this is how we journey together:

In the month of Elul when the people prepared their souls for the days of judgment, Rabbi Hayyim was in the habit of telling stories to a tune that moved all his listeners to turn to God. Once he told this story: “A man lost his way in a great forest. After a while another man lost his way and chanced on the first man. Without knowing what had happened to him, he asked the man the way out of the woods. ‘I don’t know,” said the first man. ‘But I can point out the ways that lead further into the thicket, and after that let us try to find the way together.’ “So, my congregation,” the rabbi concluded his story, “let us look for the way together.” (Buber, Tales of the Hasidim II:213)