Responses by now, while highly supportive of my efforts, began to question the possibility of defining God, and from my own reading of the Tao Te Ching I was aware that "The tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Each statement that I made left out something that was important to one or more of my readers, and I was reminded that definitions are inevitably limiting, and that limiting the unlimited is a fruitless task. So be it. The ensuing communication was stimulating, and I found it important to say in my covering letter for Musings IV that I had no thought of trying to persuade others to my way of thinking, that I considered my respondents to be secure enough to find my ideas non-threatening, and that these efforts were a necessary part of my own journey.

* * * * *
Is theology finally and inevitably a series of unanswerable questions? Including this one?

Probably so, at least in the sense that the total subject matter of theology is defined as beyond the cognitive grasp of any human being (though Jesus came close, as did Lao Tzu, Buddha, and certain others). But it could also be said that physics is beyond the grasp of human intellect (though great insights have been expressed by Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and others), and anthropology, and psychology, and economics, and so on. There is mystery, and room in it for more discovery.

And, as in other disciplines, most theological scholars don't claim final truth, they hypothesize. They state their best guesses, based on the information available to them, and work with those as their guides until they find a basis for a better statement. Thus knowledge expands, falsity is corrected, and incomplete theories are fleshed out. In all disciplines, established knowledge is considered incomplete and the search for additional truth and understanding continues. Is it any different for theology?

Yes it is, in the sense that God is defined as being beyond the power of the human mind to comprehend, while that cannot be said of the subject matter of any other scholarly field. In other disciplines, one assumes that there is always more to discover and know, but never does one accept the premise that a point will be reached where there is more to know but it cannot be known. Only in theology is that assumption made.

Nevertheless, there are theologians who publish definitions of God. And there are those amateur theologians, like me, who are willing, publicly or privately, to try the same thing -- to say "this makes sense to me, and this doesn't." And, just as other scholars do, I invite the kinds of responses from colleagues that will challenge the hypotheses, question the assumptions, correct faulty thinking, or simply disagree.

As I said earlier, my quest is to get my heart and my mind in sync with respect to what I can affirm about the spiritual journey. I was endowed with a good mind, and for most of my life it has dominated my personality and behavior; more recently I have discovered feelings and have moved closer to accepting them. I perceive that neither the mind nor the emotions should be developed to the exclusion of the other in a healthy being, but that the integration of the two is essential for wholeness. So far, my theologizing -- my mind-work -- would place me somewhere on the Humanistic side of Methodism, but the returns are not yet in, and the part of me that most needs development is the emotional, not the rational -- or rather, the need is to get the emotional and the rational both well-developed and in some degree of harmony. The "Methodist quadrilateral" would have us ascertain the rightness of our ideas by referring to scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. In that combination, there is the promise of the development of the integrity (integration) that I seek. If I were a Biblical or doctrinal literalist, I would find it impossible to square my thinking and feeling with scripture and tradition, but I interpret scripture metaphorically and understand tradition, particularly the Methodist tradition, to be dynamic, growing and tolerant of a variety of theological formulations. So, I still belong, with my tinge of humanism, in the Methodist family.

I have these questions (and some tentative answers):

1. Did Jesus have greater access to God than you and I can have? Was Jesus a child of God in a way that you and I are not children of God? Did God choose Jesus (and, I would say, the other great founders of the world's religions) to be God's emissaries, to reveal Godself to humankind in its various cultures? Was Jesus, by God's act, special in a way that other human beings are not?

Or was Jesus a human person, like you and me, who, without any special divine intervention, became more open than anyone else to the spiritual forces of his world, and thus was able to exemplify and to teach us one of the paths to spirituality? Were his human qualities simply more fully developed than those of anyone else? Was he, as a human being, more in touch with how the universe works?

If, as the foregoing question suggests, Jesus was a product of his culture, could he have broken through the cultural pattern of his upbringing and presented us with such a new interpretation -- unconditional love replacing law, universality of grace, God as spirit, etc.?

Why not? Judaism was not a static, legalistic faith, but an evolving pattern of beliefs. There is some evidence, or at least an hypothesis, based on the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the Essene community library included much of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in its literature a full hundred years before Jesus' birth. There is the suggestion that Jesus had studied in that community or had at least been familiar with it in the years of his life for which we have no scriptural record.

And, of course, when we look at other fields of knowledge and culture we discover that there have been dramatic breakthroughs without, as far as we know, some special divine revelation. There are many who would be considered products of their traditions -- Galileo, Copernicus, Freud, Jung, Darwin, Newton, Einstein -- whose contributions were dramatic in their departure from those traditions. Jesus was, perhaps, no more tradition-bound than they.

How relevant to my life are the teachings and example of Jesus? If he was fully human, as I am human, with no more divine help than is available to me, then he and what he taught are completely relevant for me. But if he had some special relationship with God, if there were some predetermined outcome that is not available to me, then it is difficult for me to accept him as a fully relevant teacher and example. If he showed a way that is more difficult for me to follow than it was for him, then where does that leave me? A follower with no realistic path to follow.

2. This raises that very big question of whether God has the power (or the will) to override natural forces and systems. If God created (is the source of) this universe and the way it works at both material and spiritual levels, then I believe we can assume that reality and truth are part of a single fabric, that the universe will act with a consistency that we can depend upon.

What, then, of miracles? What do we do with the concept of a God who is active in shaping history? What of a God who answers prayer? Is the assumption here that God can and will temporarily suspend the way the natural universe works so that, momentarily at least, the world becomes undependable for the many so that one or a few can have their desires or needs accommodated? Or does God "act" only in accord with natural laws and systems, in which case the concept of a God who listens and acts becomes a beautifully poetic statement of faith about the nature of a universe and its resources for our health and wholeness.

3. Another big and basic question has to do with the path(s) to health and wholeness, i.e., spirituality. Is there a single path which includes giving and receiving unconditional love, finding grace everywhere, accepting oneself, etc.? Is it known by different names, sacred and secular, in different cultures?

Is there an element in the religious paths to wholeness that the secular paths lack, and thus, are some spiritual, others not?

Is there any one path, religious or otherwise, that is better than the others? Or does "better" depend on one's individual characteristics -- childhood patterns of love or abuse, personality types, addiction and recovery patterns, cultural roots, etc.?

4. Is there a "both/and" response to these questions? It is so much easier to ask "either/or" questions than to find third alternatives, and yet I believe that "both/and" is more true to the way the universe works. How can the setting of boundaries be made inclusive (both/and) rather than exclusive (either/or)?

5. What of God as totally other? One of my dear respondents asks, "If there were a Transcendent God Whose Being was beyond all human comprehension and whose ways were beyond/"not our" ways, then when one came to the place of wishing to be able to "understand," "comprehend" or articulate this God, one would be (eventually) entirely frustrated and at a dead-end as to being able to do so. Then one would have two choices..., given the limits of the human mind: reduce "God" to less-than-transcendent dimensions to accommodate one's frustration, or...just "give it up" and quit trying. One could, by definition, only reach penultimate understandings, never even close to ultimate."

My tendency is to respond, "What kind of God would have placed Godself so far out of reach of people who were created to receive God's love?" Or to say, "What is the use of having a mind if it's use is to be limited?" But this is another "both/and" issue, isn't it? Maybe?

6. Yet the "totally other" God suggests another set of questions that feel important. The human mind does have limits, and the work of the very best human mind is still limited to intellectualizing. Thinking is only one way of knowing: I am incomplete when thinking is the only ability that I develop.

There are, I believe, a vast array of resources that we are unable to apprehend by thinking. These are accessible only through letting go, giving it up, ceasing the attempt to control outcomes, being completely open, praying, meditating, trusting intuition, accepting dreams and feelings, letting the right brain teach us what it will. This is not an area that lends itself to logic; it is not irrational, but non-rational. My very limited experience, and the reported experience of others whom I trust, tells me that much of the richness of living, much of the growth toward health and wholeness, is not to be understood or comprehended, but simply accepted.

There is, I affirm, an "energy" (for lack of a better word) within me that moves me toward health and wholeness when I let it. Dreams are a major manifestation of this energy. There are, I affirm, within the way the universe works, forces for health and wholeness that I can tap. I believe that Jesus' teachings (in the spiritual path that I find most congenial) guide us in the process of attaching ourselves to those resources. (We also have the option, I observe, of attaching ourselves to forces of destruction.)

In trying to articulate our experiences with this non- rational spiritual realm, it is little wonder that words of rational discourse fail us and we turn to metaphor, poetry, analogy, allegory and parable in order to express the beauty and strength of the impact upon our lives. It is little wonder that we use anthropomorphic terminology -- that we experience what feels like a miracle and credit a miracle- worker, that we feel thankful and look for "someone" to thank, that we discover a new meaning to our lives and acknowledge that it must have been planned. Perhaps with those most intimate we can share the wonder of these experiences non-verbally, by sharing the person we have become, but we live in a social world that calls us to be, and lets us be, out-loud. We need to find our voice, but the language is of beauty and love, not of logic.

7. THE QUESTION: Can I differentiate "God" from my experience of that which I find to be beyond human rationality? Is "God" an extension of me? Am I an extension of "God?" Who creates Whom? If I posit God as "entity beyond" and not dependent upon humankind, then the answers are clear, but I haven't been able to do that. Maybe this is where "both/and" is truly the answer. I wonder; truly I wonder.