Thanks for this comment and thanks, especially, for choosing to read through the blog posts as you say you are doing.

I started The Empty Path as a challenge to myself.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been fairly certain inwardly about what I believe. However, I’ve been very wary of “confessing” my faith and practice publicly.

As you have noted, “Insufficient language is such a difficulty.” My wariness (for the most part) has little to do with fear of being perceived as a heretic. It has everything to do with not wanting to be misperceived as believing or advocating something I do not.

The paradox for me in communicating about faith and practice arises precisely because I am quite comfortable using my idiolect of “Christian” in private. After all, I know what I mean. In public, though, every word, term, affirmation, sacred story, etc., is freighted with centuries worth of publicly contended connotations, expectations, etc.

The Empty Path is my experiment at putting the translation from “Christian” into “Michael” (and vice versa) out there for other to read, consider, argue with, etc.

That means that the posts do, as you have intuited, build upon each other.

In fact, I feel as if I am just now “clearing the decks” enough to begin speaking directly from the Silence, rather than continuing to parse every term, concept and metaphor, contrasting “what people assume this means” with “what I mean.”

[The most recent post is a prime example of this newer approach.]

We shall see what happens.

BTW, the Stephen Jay Gould epigram at the top of the sidebar was a very careful selection. Gould was a convinced nontheist who, nonetheless, took religious language and its deepest significances with ultimate seriousness. I’ve always admired his brilliant science and his lucid explication of science for the educated lay reader. He words on metaphor sum up my experiment.

Thanks again, and
Blessèd Be,
Michael