this god thing

So not unlike that time I signed up to do NaBloPoMo, I have recently signed up to blog on a regular basis for the last half of my semester. This is for a class called "Spiritual Practices for Healing and Wholeness"and the thing is kicking my butt. I am learning a lot academically, but damn, it is beating up my heart quite a bit as well. I get triggered now and then in class, and when we meet each week we start with an hour of yoga. Now, the body stores all kinds of things in muscles and joints, including trauma and abuse, so after an hour of bending and stretching and loosening up all kinds of memories buried who knows where, it gets rough when we start talking in class about some stuff. The prof is really cool in that she has made adjustments for me so that I can still participate without getting triggered so much, but still. It's hard work.

So here I am, up earlier than I want to be, writing about god. Again. I know that anyone who started reading here all those years ago never expected this to be a theological blog, but hey, here i am. I write what I am doing, and right now, that's theology. Maybe I'll get back to writing about sex or politics or cooking or building things in a while. for now, I need to work out whatever it is that's jamming me up. I appreciate your patience.

I've been thinking about what it means to have faith in a god that is not described in terms of a person or personality. Most of what I have read in school this far describes god as wanting this, loving that, hating this other thing, feeling joy and sadness, rooting for the Red Sox and otherwise being a ... guy.

And that's where I get stuck. That just smacks of us hanging human identifiers on the divine, and that does not make sense to me. We are limited in our expression by our language and our inability to think or imagine beyond our own experiences. Thus, we think of the most fantastic outer limit version of what we know and decide that this thing we call god is maybe an inch or two beyond that. I can't believe that. It does not ring true for me, and it's beyond what I can take on faith. For me to believe in something that I cannot see or experience physically, it needs to make sense to my intellect. I can't believe a creator god gave me a smart brain and then wants me not to use it. So, some stuff has got to pass my internal "well that makes sense, I guess" test or it won't fly.

Is this bad? I don't know. Is it wrong to need to understand something that is inherently incomprehensible? Or am I splitting hairs with this, demanding to know what I think I can and should know and conveniently accepting the things that do not challenge me as much that might be impossible for me to know and thus knock down my house of cards? Hard telling. The good thing here is that I am in a process of discovery and discernment. There is value in the process of learning and clarifying and distilling what it is that I know about god, and it is not a process that can -- or should -- be rushed. Here I am, learning, questioning, exploring, seeking. I trust that an honest effort at seeking will reveal things to me that I seek, and probably some I did not seek. But that's OK. It's the seeking that's important, not whatever answer I find at the end.

More tomorrow.