Putting Together the Pieces

I've started this blog as a way of focusing some of my search for Truth that began with Zip-Line Theology and Spirtual Spelunking (http://www.zip-linetheology.blogspot.com/). I want to explore the different ways that we experience the Truth in our lives. I want to talk about how ideas expressed in religion find new life once they have moved outside of the "walls" of their religion. Trying to explain this in the past has been challenging, but I want to try again. So I will use an analogy.

The Truth of God, if "God" is a word that isn't to limiting for you, is like a puzzle, but it's all broken up and the pieces are scattered. The purpose of faith, and maybe even of life, is to gather these pieces and try to make something of the picture. At least that's what I think it is. Regarding this puzzle, religion often makes two mistakes. One, they take a couple of pieces of the Truth and claim that they are the entire Truth (or at least all the Truth that humans can ever attain) and they build their theologies around these Truths. This attitude lead directly to the second mistake, and that is believing that different religions can not hold different pieces of the Truth. This isolates the religious practicioners from one another and limits their abilities to really "see" God.

I thought about writing a play called "The Truth Puzzle" a long time ago. In it several characters would be working on a giant puzzle; each character representing a different faith. The interesting thing was that these characters would discover throughout the course of the play that their pieces fit together. In fact, without fitting their "opposing pieces" together, they could never get a good look at the picture. The play has long since been abandoned, so this blog will stand in it's place.

Here's the trick though, about the Truth Puzzle. You'll never finish the puzzle; you'll probably never get much of a picture together in fact. But finishing the puzzle and seeing the Truth in its entirity was never the point. The point is in the process. The work involved in searching for the pieces and figuring out how they fit, and the faith involved in believing that such an effort is not worthless.

I believe that it is not worthless, and in this blog I hope to throw some of my pieces on the table and let people do what they want with them. And I hope to continue to find new pieces or at least of few lights that lead the way to undisovered Truths.