September 02, 2025

What holds us together?
What makes us One?
Kindness and compassion come to mind.
Psyche and the ideas we share in common. 
Good faith in/with each other,
and the desire to be soulmates along the way.

"Good faith" for me means the willing/willful intention to be who we say we are.

Integrity, sincerity, authenticity.

Beyond that, the Void. No?

I participated in a Zoom call meeting of retired ministers
several weeks ago. The moderator asked us to open the meeting with a short description of where we worshiped now the we did not have "a church of our own" to oversee. He asked me to start it off and I was happy to say that since my retirement in 2011 I have not darkened the door of anything church building anywhere ever. The rest of us all answered the question differently, and no one inquired about why I have no use for worship services in churches. It would have been an interesting question to explore together, but not appropriate to the occasion.

What do we have in common? Clearly, not theology, me and the other retirees. How can any thinking, rational, reasonable person embrace theology? A God who must be "taken on faith"?
Which, to me, means making something up and saying it is so. Or embracing something someone else has made up and saying it is so.

What is true to our experience and doesn't require believing in to know that it is so--as in, "I believe in God, the Father, Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in HIS only Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, born of the Virgin Mary..." What about our experience would lead us to believe/think this is so? Only somebody else telling us that it is so, and that we are hell-bound if we don't believe it ourselves, because "the Bible says..."

Well, "the Bible that says so" was crafted over 400 years between Jesus' crucifixion and the closure of the canon of scripture that says so. The Bible says so because human beings with a stake in the outcome said so and made sure that the Bible they created in those 400 years also said so.

And, in the words of R.D. Laing, "We are playing the game of not playing a game." Which anyone can see just by looking.
Which leaves us where? Doing what? Well, here, now, wondering what's next.

Throw out theology and where does that leave us? With plenty of Emptiness, Silliness and Silence to sit with, experience, explore, and probe to see what it has to offer. And it has a world filled with interesting, exciting, things to offer--it only takes being quiet to know so. And I am all about being quiet and knowing what I know when I do so. And not having to believe anything, or take anything on faith. Mine is the church of the wide open spaces (the Void, no?) replete with wonders great and small. If you are not coming with me, you are on your own.