It's All About Relationship

We human beings, in our very flawed and ordinary humanity, have a capacity for relationship with G*d built into us, in the EXACT space of flawed and ordinary humanity.  Complexity, intellectual sophistication, and study are not prerequisites for experiencing that relationship.  The most simple-minded and unsophisticated of us are equally well designed to connect with the love and peace and comfort offered through relationship with G*d, and it is often in our over-complication of theological constructs that we distance ourselves from that relationship.

Overthink any relationship and the relationship suffers; it's not different in relationship with G*d.  The need to to reconcile competing truth claims about the nature of G*d deserves the attention it gets.   I'm just not sure if that's THE central consideration.  For example, while beliefs about love and marriage and partnership are significant, they're not what makes you actually fall in love and want to build a relationship.  They are connected, but they are not the same.  

You can believe all sorts of things about love, like you'll never fall in love or never want to get married, and then you meet someone who changes everything you believed.  Not because you have new information that changes your understanding, but because you have a new experience of love, and that experience is more powerful than a set of ideas.

In exploring the world through ideas, it is invariably the poets that speak truth to me more than the philosophers.  The philosophers offer a lot of information, ideas and approaches, but the poets reveal dimensions of truth and meaning and feeling.  I find that the philosophical approach connects me not to G*d, but to human ideas about G*d, which  is something different entirely. 

Meditative practice isn't about emptying the mind.  It is about refining our thoughts and feelings, and the frequency on which we operate, so that we can be open to receiving G*d's ongoing revelelation in our own lives.  Because it's in the place where ideas and experience meet that human life unfolds in its most meaningful way.