I call myself a “Skeptical panentheist liberal Christian Unitarian Universalist with humanist and Earth-centered sympathies.”

A panentheist believes that the divine is present everywhere and in everything. This differs from pantheism (everything IS the divine) and omnipresence (ALL of the divine is simultaneously present everywhere).

My 3rd grade Methodist Sunday School teacher told us that “There is no spot where God is not” and that early part of my theological education has stuck with me!

The skeptic within began to bloom when I was in seminary. My theological education proved to be an intense laboratory in which to scrutinize beliefs that I had long held dear.

Methodists taught me to fight my skepticism and even to hide it as a sign of weak faith. Unitarian Universalists welcomed and even celebrated my uncertainty and my questions as healthy parts of a dynamic faith journey.

For me this means that I continue to perceive the divine presence all around me . . . most of the time, and when I’m not sure . . . well, that’s ok, too. A faith of contradictions is still faith.

I can live with that!

In wisdom and grace,

Rev. Ruth