A Reasonable Faith

Nietzsche: God is dead.
Freud: God is dad.

What is our view about God? It's been a few years since Sunday School, and our views on spiritual matters have - what? - morphed, drifted, transformed? Would our younger selves even recognize us today?

We take a moment to assess our spiritual journeys. How on earth did we end up here?

There are questions, a few answers, and more questions.

Thanks for listening. Share with your friends. Find this and more at cheynemusic.com/podcast.

Transcript

MAKING OUR WAY - A McMahon/Cheyne Podcast

A Reasonable Faith (Season 1; Episode 13) - 2/7/24 

Hosts:
  Jan McMahon
  Rob McMahon
  Deanna Cheyne
  Jim Cheyne

JIM (voice-over): When I was eight years old or so, our Sunday school teacher told us the story of the Garden of Eden. How brave of her. It all sounded wonderful. There was this couple. They seemed happy. They had all they needed. Then things went downhill and fast. A snake, an apple, something about fig leaves, and then they get kicked out. Then an angel with a flaming sword was placed at the east entrance so no one could get back in. And I remember thinking, if the angel was guarding the east entrance, can’t we just get in from the west? Thus was born my career as a skeptic.

My beliefs about religion, or more specifically about the texts that inform those beliefs, have changed over the years. Jan, Rob, and Deanna have each made their way from childhood to today and have brought some things with them and left other things behind. So I sat down with them and asked them some questions.

JAN: When we are talking about making our way, I think there are all these different aspects that we look at. The things that shape us and form us. And so for all of us here at this table, a very important aspect of our lives is our spiritual lives. How we started and where we are today and where we’re headed. I was thinking of aspects of that that might be a good conversation for us.

JIM: I’d suggested this scripture verse: One Corinthians [laughter] 13:11. And Paul says, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.“ And I’m thinking, well, that’s kind of what I’m after, but I don’t like the implied pejorative of that word “childish.“ Maybe the word “childlike“ would work. I’m going to do a Tom Jones here. It must have been that old Salvation Army colonel, Billy Joel, [laughter] who said, “Son, can you play me a memory?“ I like that. He didn’t say melody like every other songwriter, but he’s Billy Joel, so he’s not going to say that. “Son, can you play me a memory? I’m not really sure how it goes, but it’s sad and it’s sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man’s clothes.“ It’s that younger man’s clothes.

For me, the way I used to think about the Bible was legitimate for where I was then. And the way I think about the Bible has changed, and it’s legitimate for where we are. We’re growing up, and at every point we’re at the full maturity of where we are at that age. It’s not who we’re going to end up being, but it’s who we are then. I think the word I want to use is: the Bible scales to the person who’s reading it. For someone who is of a certain type of view of the world, the Bible is a certain way. Others can have a very sophisticated view of the world, and the Bible is available there, too. It’s not just one type of reader. It seems to scale.

Last night we were at Don Giovanni, the opera, and who did I see at intermission? I ran into Ron Busroe, and of course, since it’s a Mozart opera, naturally we’re talking about hermeneutics, and we were talking about this topic, and he says, “You know, I look at my sermons, and there’s a passage that I used when I was 20, and I use now, and I look at the way I use it, and I use it differently.“ That has to do with, he has changed, but also it’s a changed circumstance. And that’s where I think the idea of the Bible is scaling to accommodate where we are. So when, if I say putting away childish things, it’s just a matter of it’s time to grow some more. Earlier in 1 Corinthians, Paul is saying how he’s having to provide just spiritual milk to these folks that should have been beyond it. They should have had meat by now. They should have had a heavier diet, but he’s having to give it to them by their ability to consume at a certain spiritual age.

JAN: I was thinking about how a passage of Scripture that’s changed for me is in John. It’s the story of Thomas. It’s after the resurrection, and the disciples have met together, and Jesus appears to them. And they’re all there except Thomas, and he appears, he shows them his wounds. They believe that he has risen. Later, when they’re talking to Thomas, they tell him the story, but he does not believe them. Or what he actually says is, “Until I see it for myself, I won’t believe you.“ That’s obviously the Jan McMahon paraphrase.

ROB: That’s a good one.

JAN: So Jesus reappears a week later to them, and in that, Thomas comes to believe. Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe.“ Well, there was a time when that was presented as if there was something wrong with Thomas for being a doubter.

ROB: Right.

JAN: And that’s what I grew up to understand that story to be. But the truth is that I see myself in Thomas. I’m that person who doesn’t believe without the evidence in so many things. I have to see how you got to your conclusion before I’m going to accept your conclusion. And to be honest, I think that’s a reasonable position. The truth is that the other disciples saw, and that’s why they believed. And so Thomas’s position really is the same as the other disciples. They saw, they believed, he saw, he believed. And so I’ve come to see that as accepting of doubt, and how Jesus actually addresses that doubt and gives him the evidence that he seeks. And so that’s comforting to me as a doubter, because if somebody was going to appear to me and say, “I have risen from the dead,“ or tell me a story of somebody who had risen from the dead, I will just tell you I would not believe that story, because it’s not within my frame of reference, my understanding of how the world works. So I’d have to see it to believe it. And that is truthfully now how I approach things of faith.

JIM: The Gospel of John is written to a community that’s at least a generation and a half or two generations after Jesus, right? In the ’90s or so, so it’s 60 years past the event. So there are droves of people who never saw Jesus, who could not be there for that evidence. And so Thomas is kind of a vicarious witness.

DEE: The thing is with Thomas, he was the one who was absent when Jesus first appeared to them, so the others didn’t have the opportunity to say, “I won’t believe until I see it for myself,“ because…

JAN: They were there.

DEE: …they saw it. So poor Thomas is the only one who was out. How do we know how the other disciples would have reacted?

JIM: Well, in Mark, everyone just runs away in fear. And I’m very glad that the Gospel writer included this story of putting Thomas there. “In case you’re worried about you weren’t there to see it, Thomas is your guy.“ So I like that.

JAN: Yeah, that’s kind of…

DEE: What I was going to say is - and I don’t know if this goes across cultures, but I know growing up, and I think in our environment, you’re kind of taught you don’t really question things. You’re taught, “Well, this is the Bible, and this is what you should believe,“ and somebody who comes back with, “Well, I just have enough faith,“ they’re afraid to question. They’re afraid to say, “Well, why is it that way?“ Or, “What if it is something different than I’ve been told to believe all of my life?“ And questioning it somehow because it’s been ingrained in their brain is somehow not having faith. For me, I think having faith means you’re not afraid to question because you believe you’re growing in your beliefs. And if God is real, faith is real, then He’s not going to let go of you, right? So if you’re afraid to question, then how strong is your faith?

JIM: Now, when you say you were taught not to question things, was that an explicit sort of thing you can remember someone saying? Or is it more like you’re all in a certain group and questioning things just wasn’t on the table?

DEE: Right. Well, it’s a combination of that and also being told, “Well, it’s God’s word. It’s inerrant.“ And I remember one time…

JIM: Was that word actually used?

DEE: Yes.

JIM: Really?

DEE: Yes.

JIM: Okay.

DEE: Actually, more by my peers than by an adult. But, I mean, you know, you hear that in settings that you’re in. But I remember one time in the car with my mom, and I can’t even remember what the topic was. It was something about God, and I questioned it. And I said, “Well, why would God do something like that? I mean, that doesn’t make sense.“ And my mom, I think she actually pulled the car over. “Don’t you ever” [laughter] “do that again or say that again.“ And I’m like, “Why? I’m just asking. Like, I’m questioning. I need answers.“ And, you know, I think God wants us to question because, you know, the Bible says, you know, “Seek and ye shall find.“ And…

JIM: There’s a strong parental instinct to kind of keep the brood close. And when you have ideas that are kind of like that, that can be kind of like, “Uh-oh. Uh-oh. She’s growing up. She’s getting out of reach.“

DEE: My mom takes time to warm up to new ideas.

ROB: I think you’re right, though, Jim. The homogeneous culture that we all grew up in, I mean, we trusted the adults around us. Our Sunday school teachers, our bandleaders, and our, you know, the Corps Sergeant Major, the officers, our parents. There wasn’t any need for most of us to question things. Everybody around us, “we thought,“ (air quotes), was thinking the same way or believed the same things.

JIM: Things changed for me a lot when I stopped thinking about the Bible as a book and started thinking about it as a library. And not just a collection of so many books, but even the books, a collection of so many traditions and so many stories and so many points of view. This runs right into the thing about “there’s a single author through the whole thing,“ because when I thought about it, well, if there’s one Bible and God wrote it, and you have just some secretaries taking dictation, what’s the deal with the different books? Just next chapter, next chapter. Then you think, well, maybe there are some people that are involved in the authorship of this. And then it starts to open up, “well, wait a minute, maybe these people have a point of view.” That becomes very threatening to the idea of the Bible as the Word of God, because then it’s like, “oh, wait a minute, you can’t have conflicting points of view inside the covers of a Bible and call it the Word of God.” I say, yeah, yeah, yes, you can. And the way I think about it now - it was not the way I would have thought in Miss Hanton’s Corps Cadet class. The way I think about it now is, the Word of God happens, not in this printed page right here, but the Word of God happens in the listener as it is recited. And remember, the Bible, for almost everybody, would have been received by hearing it. And it’s in hearing it that something is happening to the listeners. And in that way, I’m not really so bothered that this seems to happen here, and here’s the story told again, and it seems a little bit different. I can understand that they would have differences.

And I’ll go right to the heart of it and say, Matthew thinks Jesus was born this way. Luke says Jesus was born this way. One is the family lived in Bethlehem. And then they came back and had to flee up, and they found a new home up in Nazareth. The other had to do with some census that is a big historical bugaboo. But I don’t have a problem with there being two different versions, because that’s not where the Word of God is happening to me. It’s happening in something that’s going on while the text is being read. And I’m saying that probably as a musician, because that’s where music happens to me. It happens in time as I’m hearing the piece. I know Don Giovanni very well. But in the actual moment, the time as it’s happening, it’s a different experience. And I know the Bible very well. But still, I’ll go in and - especially if I’m hearing it, you know how people would always say, “If you open your Bibles to so-and-so because we’re going to do the Scripture reading?“ I stopped doing that a long time ago, because it took my imagination away. But if I don’t open it, and I listen to the words as they’re happening, and my imagination is captured, then it’s happening.

DEE: I think from what I’ve been hearing, the Bible is not static. It’s a living and breathing thing, and it’s always challenging us, always making us question, always making us ask questions. Because if it were something that hears what’s said, and that’s the way it is, and that’s the only way to interpret it, it becomes dead. And the fact that you’re saying you started - the way the Bible is written has, for you, made you understand it in different ways…

ROB: Yeah.

DEE: …and what you bring to it. And that’s why, for me, you bring your life experiences to the Scriptures you read. And something that you read a long time ago becomes completely different and seen from another perspective because of what you’ve gone through, because of what you’ve experienced. And then that brings up the questions, and how do you justify this Scripture with another Scripture? And once we stop doing that, we stop growing and stop learning, and realizing God is so much bigger than we realize, and we can’t say, “God is to be understood this way and this way only.” Some people, I guess legalistic people, fail to realize is God created us all different. And we’re going to bring different ideas to the table and different ways of reading that same Scripture. And the way it hits you is going to be completely different from how it hits me, because I bring my background, what I’ve gone through, when I look at it.

Can I get you guys - your thoughts on a Scripture verse? And this is one that I’ve struggled with, John 14 verse 13, and it goes, “And whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.“

JAN: The first question I’d ask is, “Who’s he talking to?“ You know, he’s, he’s…

DEE:  Well, he’s talking to the disciples…

JAN: Right.

DEE: …isn’t he?

JAN: So I’m not sure - I mean, we pull that verse out of that context, and then somehow we think it applies to us. I’m not sure why we think that, because he’s speaking to a specific group of people. So, that is the way I think about it, to speak for me.

DEE: Yup.

JAN: I think one of the things that’s fascinating is, when you learn about other people of faith, whether they’re indigenous people, you know, different faith groups around the world, not our traditional faith, you see that they have similar stories to what we have. Like, there was a flood, or how God created the earth. There are creation stories in every culture that I know of. It’s amazing to me how similar they are, and it’s also of interest to me that some predate the writing of Genesis. So what do we do with that? The first time I was confronted with that, it was totally unnerving to me. How can there be other creation stories? I had never heard of that. I knew one creation story. No, wait a minute. There are these other stories. Now, how do I factor that information into what I - how I read the Scripture now? And it’s very much adjusted my thinking. And I would say that understanding that creation story in Genesis as the Hebrew people trying to understand God and their relationship to Him does not in any way take away from the resurrection. Those are not - You do not have to take that story literally word for word as factional history to accept the resurrection. That’s my opinion for what it’s worth.

JIM (voice-over): What follows are my thoughts on Genesis 1, which completely bored everyone at the table. So, to spare you that misery, I’ve edited it down, but left off about 12 minutes, which I can summarize like this: The text of Genesis 1, as we have it now, comes, I believe, from the post-Babylonian period, and the structure of the narrative sounds very much like an idealized temple, as described in 1 Kings 6. I invite you to check that out if you’re interested. Meanwhile, the rest of the discussion begins now.

JIM: Here’s the thing I’ve got about Genesis. The way it doesn’t comport to the scientific idea is this: Light is created before there’s any source of light. Vegetation is created before photosynthesis is even going to be possible. And you’re looking at this and thinking, this does not make sense scientifically. Is it supposed to? Am I supposed to dump science and then just take this because, after all, you just have faith to believe? Is it going to be like that? Then I’m thinking, well, let’s try a different way of looking at it. Some people have thought - a solution was that the days aren’t really 24-hour days, but they clearly are implied to be. There’s evening and morning, the way that the Jewish mark the day, from the sunset to the sunset, rather than from midnight to midnight. So evening and morning are making another day. They’re using that. And I think there’s more going on in here than just that. I think that the Jewish people are coming into their idea of who God is. And I think that, however - whenever the story was first written down, I think this is being done in retrospect to a temple they have lost. And I think this has to do with Babylon, a lot to do with Babylon. And I think that the creation story that they are trying to explain, the way that they’re doing it, they are using some ideas that are around them, all around them, especially in the Babylonian and Enuma Elish epic. And they’re using some of these ideas. And the ideas are kind of extraordinary. So when I look at it, I look at it a different way.

First of all, the number seven is all through this chapter. It’s not just seven days. There are in the first verse seven Hebrew words to set the thing up. The next statements are fourteen Hebrew words. Then we get into six plus one days. And then at the end of that there are twenty-one Hebrew words. And then an invitation to kind of go back and think about that again. So the thing starts with, “Barashit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.“

JAN: Wow.

JIM: I think I got that in between there.

JAN: I just impressed.

JIM: Those are the seven words. Not “in the beginning God created.“ That’s one reading. Another reading is “when God started to create.“ There was this chaos. Chaos. There’s this wind from God that’s brooding over the waters. And the word is very much like a hen over her eggs brooding over the waters. He is going to bring order to things. And he separates light from dark. Day one. Evening morning, that’s day one. Day two, watery chaos is going to be separated by introducing into the middle of it some sort of an airspace. And he creates the second day, the sky separate from the waters. See another division. Taking this chaos, making it order by saying, “No, this goes there. This goes over there.“ So the first day we had light and dark. The second day we have this thing that he calls sky. And there’s water above it, water below it. And later, if you ever have to flood something, just open the windows of heaven - literally - and all that water comes through. This is an ancient explanation for, “why is the sky blue and why is water blue. Oh, that’s water up there.” Okay. That’s not scientifically accurate, but it’s conceptually clear. Then in the third day, the waters have to be separated out from the dry land. Okay? So another act of division. And the dry land also has on it vegetation. So vegetation is viewed as part of the earth. So there’s day one, two, and three. Then the author goes back and he populates those three events. So on the fourth day, what belongs in the light and dark? The sun, the moon, the stars. So the fourth day goes along with the first day. Sun, moon, and stars, they are the things, they are the beings that belong in that room that he’d made for them. Now what’s on the fifth day? Well, he had made the difference between the sky and the waters. So what lives there? You’ve got the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. That’s the fifth day. Then the sixth day, what had he done? He had made the dry land. So he separates out for that all the creatures that belong. And then he creates Adam [pronounced “a-DAHM”] - humans. Then creation is done.

Very important though, he says, and he has created Adam in his image. Now how this differs from the Babylonian thing is: God is not in contest with anybody. This is not the Marduk that is trying to defeat Tiamat. And when he defeats this chaos monster Tiamat, he divides the carcass into two things. And the carcass here becomes the sky, the carcass here becomes the land. That’s not what’s happening here. God is not in conflict. The Hebrew idea of the creator is that he has no beginning - like, the Babylonian story, that gods have beginnings. There’s a mythology there. There’s a story of it. But that’s not happening in the Hebrew one. There is no beginning. And there’s no act of conflict, that he has to overcome and defeat something in order for these other things to take part. It’s quite different. And also in the Enuma elish, people are created to be servants, to go and do things that the gods don’t want to be bothered with. What God has done is, he’s placed himself in this creation: people, the image of God. We are his representatives in this order that he has made out of this chaos.

But this is to me a liturgical set piece at the beginning. And notice also when you go reading through that, the first six days always say, “In the evening and the morning were another day.“ But the Sabbath day is open-ended. The order from chaos, the God who is beyond and not part of the creation. What that does is it removes God from falsification. You can’t disprove God. On the other hand, you can’t prove God.

So when I read that, then I don’t have to worry about walking into a geology class and finding out, “Sorry, I’ve got 6,000 years. You’ve got to fit everything in there. Would you please?“ No, it’s just something as a concept rather than a chronology to me. That’s the way I read it.

DEE: I have a question. Did you come to this conclusion on your own, or did you get this idea from somewhere?

JIM: No, the idea is: if it is a chronology, I’ve got a conflict between the Bible story and what we understand. I also approach this with the idea that God is not a trickster.

DEE: No, yeah.

JIM: He does not put a false test in front of us. “I’m going to scatter around all these bones and all this stuff, and they’re going to be able to do all this isotope testing, and they’re going to come up with the wrong age from the earth, and then I’m going to zap ‘em.” [laughter] That can’t be it. That can’t be it. That could be it. That may be the way it is. Maybe this whole thing is a farce, and we’re just on a losing side of a game someone’s playing, but I don’t think so. And that’s a choice I’m making.

DEE: Right.

JIM: And what I see of the literature is: this is a way of honoring God, not a way of describing how things happened.

JAN: Yeah.

DEE: Rob, what was your Scripture verse that you now read differently?

ROB: I didn’t have a verse in mind. I was thinking broader. I’m going to speak for all of us, and maybe it’s not true for all of us, but I think evangelicalism gave us a foundation, a solid foundation. And then at some point in our latest community that we’re in - the Episcopal Church - they talk about three legs of the stool: Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. And for me, right now where I am, Reason is what I am relying on when I think about Scripture. There are a lot of things that I was taught in my foundation that just don’t make sense to me anymore. It’s not reasonable for me to think that billions of people are going to spend an eternity in hell. I’m sorry. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not reasonable that because of where you’re born, that you’re condemned to this life or that life. It’s not reasonable with what we know about the world and about science and about this universe that we live in, that the earth was created in seven days. It could have been, but to me it doesn’t seem like that’s reasonable. It’s a good story, and I think we learn things from it, but I don’t think the point is literal.

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: And I think that’s where our sense of reason, our sense of our ability to think and question comes in. And for me, that’s changed a lot of things. It’s changed a lot of the way that I think about Scripture and about the way that I approach religion in general.

What I said before about using reason, those first eleven chapters of Genesis, all that seems to me is: human beings looking at the world around them and trying to explain what they see. I don’t even see why God needs to have any hand in that. It’s just, they’re trying to explain the world as they see it, and how it must have came into being. It’s kind of like early science, you know, and the more we learn, the more we find out, we use our reason, we find out more things: That the earth isn’t the center, that there isn’t a solid dome with stars, you know, there, or doors that can open and let the water that’s on the outside come in, that the earth is actually moving around the sun, although if you were just looking and you know nothing else, sun comes up in the east, it sets in the west, must be going around us, you know. A lot of the other explanations, because we found out later that’s not the way it is and that’s fine. Like I said before, the thing about hell just doesn’t make sense, for a God who is love to sentence eternity in hell. And you know, and I’ve also looked into the etymology of the words that are translated “hell,” and there’s explanation there too, to say it’s not what we’ve created, that this fiery, tormented place of eternal punishment is probably something that was invented by men to keep their congregants in line,and to keep them faithful to whatever they were interested in.

DEE: Disciplined by fear.

ROB: Yeah. And other things that we found about the nature of human beings, that homosexuality is not a choice, it is - there are definite genetic and…

JAN: Physiological?

ROB: …physiological differences in people. And so, I think you have to understand that a lot of what you read in the Bible, you have to think: at the time, what do they know? And it’s what you said too, I believe that it is a living document. I believe that as we learn more, we can look at the Scriptures and it fits in with what we learn as we continue to gain knowledge about people and about events and about things.

I wrote a series of articles for myself that I called “A Reasonable Faith,”  and basically it’s how I look at things now based on where I am now, you know, we’re talking about Making Our Way, and this is the spiritual journey that we’re taking, and it’s sort of where I am at the present time. And I think wherever we are at the present time can be considered “milk,” it can be considered - what’s the verse in Corinthians you just used? That we were like children, okay? Childish things, because there’s always room to go beyond that. So wherever we find ourselves at the moment, for us, you know, we might still be children, and we won’t ever know until we see face to face, if that’s going to happen.

JIM: Rob, I wanted to check on one thing. When you say there’s not a hell for billions of people, I can go with the billions part, but there’s still a list, isn’t there? 

[laughter]

JAN: It’s the naughty list.

JIM: We all have a list.

ROB: That’s Santa Claus, not God.

JIM: Well, I have a few candidates that, if it’s not billions, can you at least consider this case?

ROB: I understand that completely. I’ve said it out loud for Jan. She’s heard me say it more than once. If there was a hell, this guy deserves it. But uh, yeah.

[laughter]

JAN: Just in your human mind.

ROB: Just in my human mind, you know, not to be judgmental or anything. 

JIM: There’s a book over there in my science area that’s by Stephen Jay Gould, and I mentioned it. It was called Rocks of Ages, and he has a concept: non-overlapping magisteria, and that is that science and religion are asking and answering different questions, and that they shouldn’t be found in conflict. Some people don’t like that, but he did it anyway. Let me give a quote from it.“The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise: Science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives.“ That I enjoyed a lot.

DEE: I remember as a kid, I was in the Songsters, and I remember the Sunday night service, and we had one of our congregation members stand up to give a testimony, and his testimony was more of a warning, or a - to the young people that, “when you go to university, they’re going to tell you things, and don’t believe it.” This person was an educator…

ROB: Yeah.

DEE: …and I remember sitting there and going, “Your God is so small.“ If you really think that our ability to think and discern is not able to figure things out. That kind of thinking always bothered me. In my home, I was telling Jim this yesterday, it was very common to sit at our dinner table after the Sunday morning service and hear my dad go on about how he disagreed with the sermon that morning. Also, if there was some sort of Bible study that he was a part of, you know - so, I grew up in a home where the authority, I guess, was questioned regularly, and you don’t just accept it because somebody with red on their shoulders said something.

JIM: I remember as a kid thinking that if a religious idea is true, that it should be able to stand the test of anything. Not rhetorical tricks, not debates where someone’s more clever than someone, not something that’s voted, but if you really get down to it and say, “Now, wait a minute. This, this, this, this. That’s either true or not, which is it?” But if it’s true, it shouldn’t fear other ideas.

ROB: Right.

JIM: In fact, its truth could be revealed through looking at other ideas. And I’ve been looking for this. There’s this quote that’s attributed to St. Augustine. Not that that matters. It’s not his authority for it. It’s what he said. “All truth is God’s truth.“ If it’s true, it’s something that is of God. If zircon isotopes can date rocks - which was part of Mattea’s Master’s work, right? - if that reveals that is the age, if that is a true thing, that can’t be against God. It can’t be. If we can get rid of this idea that God is a trickster, [music starts] and he’s just trying to give us this unfair test to see if we can pass. So if I’m reading the Bible and everything’s fine, it’s just fine, I have no issues with it, there’s no need to dig any further. But if then something comes up and says, “Wait a minute, this is weird.“ Then I think I need to look at that and come up, “What is my explanation that pulls back from that so I can see there’s actually unity in this idea?”

JIM (voice-over): So that’s a brief glimpse on where we’ve come in our spiritual journeys since we were young. Some journeys have been much longer than others. Our spiritual lives, though, are foundational to us and inform our outlooks on most everything else. So there will be more to say. So for now, I will continue Making Our Way. Until next time.

[music ends]