BOUNDARIES
I am an incorrigibly liberal theologian, constantly testing boundaries: presence of God in other religious systems and in atheism, different layers of religious consciousness, new patterns of community and sexuality. No doubt I frighten my bishop - and sometimes myself.
It is when I fear going over the edge that I am reminded of words to me from Dom Paul Grammont, my abbot during my two-years as a novice Roman Catholic monk in France in the 1980s. Dom Paul was a spiritually bold man, and to date for me the person who has gone furthest into God that I have known.
Dom Paul Grammont
He told me of his twin brother, a French army officer killed in action in 1940. With his unit, he had successfully pierced the enemy lines. So fast and so far that they got cut off from behind, and he was killed.
Dom Paul warned me spiritually not to put myself in this position.
I suspect that Dom Paul did not say publicly all that he intuited of God, all his experience of the mystery. He left us guessing. Encouraging us rather to enter the mystery ourselves in our own ways. Which may be why, for all his evident spiritual mastery, he never had a following.