What I value most in myself and hoped to pass on to and through my children is that I have learned by experience to try always to not limit either my faith by my fallible human understanding or my understanding by my limited faith. There is a tension often between my personal development in both faith and knowledge, just as there is between any culture’s or religion’s developmental level in both.

I believe this is healthy, though often uncomfortable. When I allow my religious belief system to be challenged by life experience, new or “foreign” ideas, or even my own “twin” to doubting Apostle Thomas, I experience turmoil and insecurity. In fact, as a believer, unless some basic faith has become “bedrock” for me, I probably will not have the courage to face the challenge of growth. And on the other side, unless I have faced the humbling limits of human understanding, I will never make that first leap of faith.

When we begin to think that we have finally “gotten it” in either faith or understanding, we better beware! That may have been Adam and Eve’s downfall, wanting to think they knew it all….no longer having to live vulnerably incomplete and dependent on God.

An unquestioned faith is not faith, but superstition. But understanding that is not open to the risk of a faith that explores beyond understanding is not intelligence, but arrogance.

Often, it seems to me that different personalities tend to lean toward one or the other, so perhaps allowing faith and understanding to live in an ongoing dialogue is one of the most basic challenges of life.

Commitment to this challenge of an ongoing inner dialogue will hopefully give us the freedom to dialogue and learn from each other.