Frank, thank you for the thumbnail sketch of your spiritual experience and your nice comments. Some time if it is of interest I would find it equally interesting to learn what led you to the extremely negative comments you've made from time to time, which you took responsibility for so articulately upthread. This particular thread, I think, is running its course and will wind to an end soon, so I will not look for that here (if indeed you would want to go into it at all). But I will be on the lookout for your posts in a new way as a result of our exchanges on this thread, and I have enjoyed thinking with you.

Thanks also for the reference to E'palians and thinking-- yes, reason is what we think of as the third leg of the stool our faith rests upon. Also it is often said that to embrace the best Anglicanism has to offer, one must be willing to live with/in/around/through ambiguity. I like to extend that by adding that it's best to also have a deep curiosity, and the ability to keep one's eyes wide open at all times and not look away from the difficult and the complex.

But yeah, the E'palians I know are pretty into that thinking thing. :~) Yet some of my best friends, who I think of as temporarily confused, have been fundies whose usual mode of thinking is pretty rigid. They're amazingly vulnerable, one on one, to a playful, inquiring spirit. :~)

~Susan