Theology of Words

I don't have the words right yet to deal with what is tumbling around inside me. I am in this class with a magnificent professor - brilliant and pedigreed - and of course I find myself debating with him in class. It is sport and my own unique way of learning (if I can dialog with him the words and concepts have a better shot of sticking in with the cobwebs inside my cranium). And then it happens: this brilliant man says something that leads me to think that what he calls theology - a legacy of concepts from Niebuhr to Tillich to Stackhouse - a sound and well honed discourse, is in fact light years away from my personal theology. My beliefs are borne of those and other readings but then lightly tossed in a big bowl with a lot of vinegar, or more like dust and blood and events and dark nights alone in prayer. And as a result my "theology" if it can be called that, is not only personally defined but quite different.

Belief - that is the operative word - is something that I have because there can be no evidence for what I name god. (Sorry but I use that word/name for convenience because Voldemort stole "He who cannot be named"). Anyway faith and belief is what appears in the void not what happens when some Sunday School Teacher says "cuz the Bible tells me so." I believe in and follow what Joshua (aka Jesus the Nazarene) preached - a somewhat radical and reverse logic that in order to be filled one must be empty, in order to save your life you have to lose it, that the rich are poor and the poor have abundance. He told us that what we think is good is what is in the way and that when we embrace what is bad (our faults and defects) we are made whole and filled with compassion for others. This practical but counterintuitive logic seems to be quite different from the teachings of my church and certainly this classically educated professor.

Now I am not a suck for a grade, and I can go to the mat with the best of them, but I do feel this dilemma. How am I to explain and justify that which is only my journey? Each of us has a personal spiritual journey and most likely none of those will fit within the structure of any classic theology. It can't. Textbook theology is perhaps what we are supposed to think and espouse, but the experience of spiritual contact cannot be defined, or bottled up or very often spoken. Then what am I to do? Argue my points from a textbook definition which no longer lives for me? Or struggle to place my experience in some conceptual framework knowing that it may never make "real" sense to anyone but me?