I’ve always liked the story of young Samuel discovering the Lord. It illustrates the way that many people do…discover the Lord. A phenomenon of some kind presents itself to us, barely noticed perhaps, and probably misidentified at first, or at least not fully identified, and that happens maybe a number of times and maybe for a long time. Often like young Samuel, we need someone more experienced in the ways of the Lord to help us understand what’s happening to us; to help us recognize this event as the Lord speaking to us.

Among life’s many patterns is this one. When we are young, we don’t distinguish between what something is and what it means to us. We assume that what something means to us is what it really is; how we experience it is not just how we experience it, but what it actually, objectively is. Our experience is right.

Take language, for example. Most of us grew up speaking English. When we first heard another language, we probably didn’t know what we were hearing; some kind of gibberish, probably. "These people are speaking, but they aren’t speaking right," we may have thought. Something is wrong with them.

Which is to say, someone who experiences and expresses life differently than I do—through another language, for example—is not just different, but wrong. The right way to talk and experience life is the way I do. Life is the way I experience it; how it means to me is what it is. I think most of us start out that way.

I don’t know when this outlook begins to change, but it inevitably does. After awhile of living in the world, we begin to see things as other people see them; or rather, we realize that there are other ways to look at life and experience it than the ways we learned growing up. Different is no longer automatically wrong; it is simply different.

Take language again. We eventually realize that one language is not right and all the others wrong. Each language is a different way of expressing human experience. Granted some languages may be better for expressing some kinds of things than others, but that is a long way from saying one is right and the others are wrong.

Well, this movement of relativity, let’s call it, happens with other things besides language. And as it happens to us, we may begin to wonder if right and wrong are themselves relative, nothing but accidents of history and the enculturation of preferences. We may wonder about reality itself. Is reality what I take it to be? And is what I take it to be nothing but the way I have learned to see it? Are all things fundamentally relative to my culturally induced and individually chosen viewpoint? And is my viewpoint, my world, merely an arrangement of thought and experience pieced together in my mind for who knows what reason?

Religion is not immune from these questions. As these questions rise into consciousness, I may wonder if the world is ultimately as my religion teaches me that it is. Is it really another way? Or is it any way at all? Maybe the ultimate order of life really comes from my mind. The only meaning life has is the meaning I give to it. It really isn’t out there. Out there is nothing but the "buzzing, blooming confusion," as William James put it, that I happen to order one way or another because that’s how my mind happens to work. How much, if any, of life is like I see it?

Some people look over this edge, see only an abyss and draw back, understandably afraid to go any further. They repress the questions, and try to go about their business as before. Philosophically speaking, they have reached the chasm that separates meaning from being, and are unsure how and if they should proceed. Can life mean something to me and not in fact be that? Are the meanings that guide my life no more than useful fictions, nothing more than a collective imaginative projection that seems for the moment to work, but nevertheless is destined to disappear like a wave on the beach?

Having recognized the distinction between meaning and being, between how we experience the meaning of something and what it might be in itself, and having intuited the far reaching consequences of that distinction, some of us refuse to go on. We try to forget what we almost saw, fearing, as a psychiatrist more than once cautioned me, "down that path lies madness." Well, perhaps, but to draw back is no cake walk, either.

If we go on, the question of meaning and being will eventually show itself to be a theological, and not just a philosophical, question—which, of course, for not a few cynics would prove that that road does in fact lead to madness. Who but mad men believe in what they can’t see or prove? But again, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson one more time, "much madness is [sometimes] divinest sense."

Most theistic traditions, and certainly Christianity, claim that parallel paths of meaning and being in fact converge in the unity and unifying power, in the eternity, that is God. God is the highest conceivable meaning and value—greater than which cannot be thought—and God is, as such, the most being-ful of anything that is, indeed, God’s being is the source and power of all being. The ultimate in meaning and value is the ultimate in being, and this unity of meaning and being is God. God meaning is to be this; God’s being is to mean this.

I realize that may sound a little spacey, but it is simply to say that the questions of life, the questions that emerge as we live life, those that seem to have no answer, push us, lure us toward God. Indeed, this is what these questions are for. They aren’t to be answered so much as lived, and only so, can they be answered.

Although asked in a variety of ways, the recurring question in the gospels is: "Who is Jesus?’ Arguably every episode in these narratives of Jesus’ life opens out to the question, "Who is this?" "Even the winds and waves obey him"; "he tells me everything that I have ever done"; "he makes the blind to see and the deaf to hear." "Who is this?"

Much of Christianity since the late 19^{th century more or less refused to look this question square in the face. Instead they looked at it from the side, the side of meaning. The answer to the question, "Who is Jesus?" was what he means to me. The relation of that meaning to what he really is, was quietly dropped…at least by a good number of thinking Christians. They couldn’t say for sure, and so they didn’t say anything, other than what Jesus means to us, or at least is supposed to mean to us as Christians. And so, Christianity hobbled along with half a divinity: a divinity of meaning without, or at least unsure of the actual being of this meaning.}

But at some point, one realizes that such hobbling is not worth the effort. Then one either learns to live in the diminishing twilight of agnosticism, or one realizes that Christianity is precisely a faith. And then perhaps one makes the leap that heals the limp, the step of faith that the meaning is real, that this meaning is the experience of the true nature of this being, that God is what he means, and he means what Jesus means…to us. We begin to believe that the light we see is not simply the projection of our own imaginations, but the light of another. And that light does not lead to madness, but sanity, to a peace that includes, but passes, understanding.