Maybe that is the invitation of what the text asks of me. Where in my life am I using accruements for the actual experience of God? It takes time to recognize where I’m relating more to a concept of God than to God itself. This journey continues on with the slow relinquishment of what I take God to be as well as what I take myself to be. It requires a great courage and willingness to set aside the concepts what I think and believe and venture into unknown territory. Will I recognize God without the image? Will I recognize myself without the image? 

When I ponder these words they invite me into cultivating a way of being that is always open to new revelations. Now, I recognize that saying “new revelations” sounds a bit far-fetched, but, if I am honest, each day houses many new revelations if I am on the lookout. These revelations are both about myself and about Love. The invitation then is to continue dwelling deeper into the experience of freshness. It comes to mind that I take a fresh breath each moment, in fact it’s a requirement if I want to continue to live. Why then do I not live freshly each moment? I often find myself falling into old patterns of thinking or doing, which are far from fresh. And when I stop to consider how living in this static way actually feels, well, it is very constricted.   

So how am I doing with living freshly in each moment? Needless to say some days are better than others, but I continue to practice presence and remember myself over and over again during the day. There is a delightful story about the Benedicten Monk who was asked what they do in the monastery all day. He replied, “Fall down and get, fall down and get up!” Here’s to another day of falling down and getting up and, perhaps, amidst the scraps and bruises there will be a new revelation along the way. 

Roberts names “historical and cultural outgrowth” as one issue for distortion. Certainly we understand how historical and cultural bias creeps into a message. For instance, when playing the childhood game called Telephone, you pass a word or phrase down a line of people, ending  in distorted hilarity. We also recognize that at this point-in-time the Gospel espoused by many churches would be unrecognizable by Jesus. The result though is not hilarious. Another issue is that the group misinterprets the individual’s revelation. This misinterpretation can include reasons connected with history or culture, but also with the maturity of the ears hearing the revelation. For instance, I can tell a three year-old that the earth circles the sun but the meaning may be lost to them. The distortion becomes magnified within the church when adherence to “doctrine” is elevated to faith and certainty, which results in an intellectual religion.

At the end of the day all of life is joyful practice in order to take no revelation for granted; to honor the diversity in our spiritual experiences knowing the larger context can inform us as we are on The Way.

Using the principle of recapitulation for a thesis.

How is one to understand that in a single life one can summarize, restate, or actually live the “key revelations on which man’s religions were founded?”

From our biology classes we might recall the catch phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."