Writing about God

I thought I was ready for this lenten discipline. I made lists of topics. I had things to say. 

I may have been wrong. Or maybe this stuttering start is what I want to write about. 

For someone who was trained in a seminary to talk about God, I've become increasingly reticent to do so. It's not that I believe less in God, it's that I listen better (I hope) to people who have been hurt by God-talk. 

To be honest, I have experienced some of that hurt, too. However these things are measured (cosmically, I suppose), my hurt did not outweigh the good I found in my faith. And even as I type that, I hesitate to tell specifics. They are experiences that I know other people have not had. This is a puzzlement to me. I don't have an explanation. I know they happened to me within certain contexts, following certain exposures to people and books and . . . put on the cosmic scale, they outweigh the hurt.

So, let me start by saying that I acknowledge the hurt some of you have felt. I would not want to add to that hurt. I know that I have in the past---not even that distant past. I'm lucky to have a friend who told me what I was doing in one case. How many other times do I do it? 

I never mean to. But everyone has a set of contexts, exposure to certain people, maybe books in their lives. I can't always know what I'm doing when I start to speak because I can't always know all that history. I can never know all that history. 

But I say this with as much innocence and good intention as I can muster (can one muster innocence?): I love God. I believe I've met (is that even the right word?) God in what some literature calls mystical experiences. 

Even that much, that little, may have prickly needles in it for someone. 

I guess if I'm going to write about God and adjacent topics, I do so with the knowledge of this possibility and with the stated hope that I might somehow find some salve for the hurt as well. 

This is not everything I think I know about God, but I believe in a God of salve for the hurt.