The Task of Theology

(Theology is a Woven Practice, a Mudra, an Archive of Whole Fragments)

The etymology is clear: Theology, from the Old French theologie, is the study of G-d. Theology is a woven practice. Theology is a record-keeping act of the ancestors, youth, and elders that strives to include the transcendent and eternal. The making of Theology is the archiving and collecting of small pieces of the divine into a whole fragment, a woven cloth. Theology is meaning-making, sitting quietly together in the dark, waiting for something to appear to us, and responding/conversing with the images encountered. If Theology is woven, it is also mark-making and map-making.

Theology is a space for an archive of what is seen in the dark, the outlines of G-d, a gathering of the shadows into something coherent. A creative field, evolutionary and living as an ecology. A call-and-response exploration, a conversation of meaning-making. The field of theology is a conversation/study and, at best, an embodied engagement with God and systems of belief and practices that relate to religious and divine experience. Theology is a gestural set of postures, asana, mudra that are refined, recapitulated, and changed in the dance.

Theological imaginations require tools, vocabularies, symbols, and disciplines crafted and re-crafted toward understanding. Skill and imagination are required to develop the receptor sites for the divine, and those skills are forged in the field of Theology.

Theology encompasses epistemology (the intersection between truth and knowledge), phenomenology, metaphysics, and ontology (philosophy that studies human experience individually and collectively) with an interest in making sense and order out of the great mystery and multiplicity of meaning, belief, revelation, and testimony.

The task of Theology is to ask the question: What golden thread weaves the world together?