Years ago, I sat in the balcony of a church and noticed a woman in the procession wearing the same kind of vestments as the pastor. I was serving as an intern in a conservative church at the time, and I had fairly settled ideas about what Scripture permitted women to do in ministry. I said that if she started preaching, I was leaving.

She did not preach, but the moment did not disappear.

Someone later challenged me about my reaction, and I took the question back to the pastor with whom I was serving. He was not a progressive pastor trying to convince me to abandon conservative Christianity. He was a conservative pastor I trusted. That made what followed much harder to believe and, strangely, much easier to receive.

He sat down with me and took me back into the biblical texts.

I had known what those texts said. At least I thought I had. I knew the passages, the arguments, and the conclusions. I had teachers and churches behind me. My position was not a tentative interpretation waiting for better evidence. I was certain.

Then a person I trusted showed me that the texts were not nearly as simple as I had believed.

I eventually changed my position on women in ministry, but that was not the most consequential thing that happened. The deeper disruption was discovering that I could possess Scripture, reasons, teachers, tradition, and certainty and still be wrong.

That question has followed me ever since: How do I know what I know?

Much of my early Christian formation taught me answers. It also taught me, mostly without ever naming it, what kinds of knowing were legitimate. Scripture occupied a privileged place. Doctrine explained how Scripture fit together. Pastors and teachers helped interpret doctrine. Experience could confirm what I believed, but experience that contradicted the framework was more likely to be distrusted than allowed to question the framework itself.

The same structure shaped how I encountered other religions. For a time, learning about another tradition meant learning enough to explain why Christianity was true and the other tradition was not. Later I became more inclusive. I could recognize truth elsewhere, but Christianity still served as the measure by which that truth was validated. My thinking had broadened without yet changing the deeper structure by which I decided what counted as true.

People complicated that structure before Daoism became a serious part of my formation. Encounters with Muslims did not fit what I had been taught about Islam. Christians whose theology differed sharply from mine could still exhibit faithfulness, wisdom, and integrity. I gradually discovered that some things I had learned about other traditions were not merely incomplete. They were wrong.

Direct encounter forced me to distinguish what I had received from what was actually in front of me.

Seminary gave me language for what had already begun happening. I entered theological education partly because my beliefs had changed and I wanted to find a firmer foundation beneath them. Instead, I encountered biblical scholars, theologians, traditions, methods, and communities that demonstrated how complicated the ground itself was.

Biblical study made it impossible for me to continue pretending that Scripture arrives without interpretation. Texts have histories. They emerge from communities. They contain memories, theological judgments, cultural assumptions, literary decisions, competing voices, and unresolved tensions. Even before a reader opens the Bible, generations of human beings have already participated in producing, preserving, selecting, translating, and interpreting what the reader receives.

Then another human being reads it.

I still find Scripture profoundly important, but I do not believe the words become something other than human words because they are Scripture. We are encountering people who saw something about God, themselves, their communities, and the world, and who gave language to what they believed they had encountered. We see through their eyes and interpretation, and then we interpret what they have left us through our own.

That realization eventually extended far beyond biblical interpretation. I studied theologians who began in very different human locations and therefore noticed different things. People experiencing oppression asked questions that comfortable communities could overlook. Women exposed assumptions embedded in theological systems constructed largely by men. Different communities approached Christ, sin, salvation, revelation, authority, and Church with different histories pressing upon their questions.

I had gone to seminary hoping to discover the foundation beneath my changing beliefs. I eventually wrote that there was no foundation simply waiting for me to uncover it. We each build our own.

I still believe that, although I understand it more carefully now.

Building a theological framework does not mean inventing reality. It means accepting responsibility for the framework through which I perceive reality. I inherit language, beliefs, assumptions, practices, communities, and questions. I test them. Some become more trustworthy. Some need revision. Some collapse. New experiences reveal things I did not know enough to ask about. Scholarship corrects assumptions. Relationships expose blind spots. Practices change what I am capable of noticing.

Even the questions I ask have a history.

Experience therefore matters greatly to me, but experience may be one of the easiest places to confuse encounter with interpretation.

Experience is a teacher. The difficult part is discerning the lesson.

During seminary I explored contemplative practices from a variety of traditions. Some brought physical sensations. Some stirred emotions. Some surfaced images or associations I had not consciously summoned. Some simply changed the quality of my attention. At times I interpreted those experiences quickly. A sensation of warmth or energy could become an explanation about Divine energy. A powerful moment could begin carrying theological meaning almost immediately.

I am more cautious now.

If I feel warmth during a spiritual practice, I can responsibly say that I experienced warmth. What caused the sensation is another question. If something feels deeply meaningful, I can say that I am experiencing it as meaningful. That does not establish that the meaning I have assigned exists independently of my interpretation.

Meaning can be real without becoming proof.

I am a meaning-maker. I have known that about myself for years. Something happens and my mind begins connecting it to memories, beliefs, symbols, stories, patterns, and possibilities. This can produce insight. It can also produce a very convincing explanation that turns out to be wrong.

Intuition belongs in much the same category. I pay attention to it because something has surfaced before I can consciously explain why. Perhaps I have recognized a pattern. Perhaps accumulated experience is speaking before analysis catches up. Perhaps something deserves attention that I have been avoiding. Intuition gives me information.

Then I have to discern what to do with it.

This eventually left me with a collection of sources that did not fit into a reliable ladder of authority. Scripture gives me information. Tradition does. Scholarship does. Experience, conscience, community, intuition, and spiritual practice contribute something. Teachers have formed me deeply. None of these arrives untouched by interpretation, including my interpretation of what another person or tradition has said.

I do not have a universal hierarchy that tells me beforehand which one wins.

What I actually do is less elegant.

I evaluate. I test. I try. I see what survives encounter and what does not. I return to questions after living with them. I notice where an explanation keeps illuminating experience and where I have to force experience to protect the explanation. Sometimes something I believed becomes stronger. Sometimes it changes. Sometimes it proves false. Sometimes two things remain before me and I do not know how to reconcile them.

Daoist formation changed this process because my Shifu was not primarily interested in helping me construct a more sophisticated collection of ideas.

He wanted me to do something.

That sounds simple now. It was not simple for me.

I was a good listener. I could sit through his teaching, remember what he said, think about it, connect one idea to another, and accumulate an impressive amount of material in my mind. Often I did not understand what he was teaching nearly as well as I thought I did. Years later, something he had said would become intelligible because practice or experience had given me the capacity to hear what the words had not previously been able to teach me.

He once told us that simply sitting and listening fully while he taught was itself a form of meditation. We thought we were listening to lectures. He was training our capacity to attend.

One of his characteristically snarky sayings was, “I know Nothing.”

I once heard that mainly as paradox. I understand it differently now. Nothing, in his teaching, pointed toward the Great No-thing, the undifferentiated before the distinctions through which we normally perceive reality. His teachings about the mirror, differentiation, and experience opened questions I am still working through and that I do not pretend to have resolved.

Another teaching proved more immediately disruptive.

“How do you get in the flow?”

You do not.

You are the flow.

The better question is how to get out of your own way.

He also taught us not to spend our lives searching for God or Dao, but to look for the obstacles we had placed between ourselves and what was already present, and remove them.

I had spent much of my life accumulating answers. He kept sending me back toward practice.

Sometimes clarity comes not because I have acquired another explanation but because something obstructing perception has been removed: a fear, an inherited certainty, an identity I have mistaken for my whole self, a theological category I refuse to question, or the need to settle a question before life has taught me enough to live inside it.

Still, I was very capable of converting even those teachings into knowledge. I listened. I accumulated. I understood ideas. I could discuss them.

Then my Shifu began dying.

He asked his students to give him time to recover. He was doing everything he could to recover, and those around him wanted to care for him and one another. People began constructing a process for filling in for him and carrying the work forward.

It bothered him.

He kept teaching.

He scolded us because we were beginning to construct something that misunderstood what he had spent years trying to teach. We could not become him. His path was not our path. Those of us who had been ordained were pressed even harder. Go and do what you have been asked to do. “Dao your own Dao.” Align to your true nature and live the path that is actually yours.

He was dying, and we were trying to work out how to replace what would be missing.

He refused to let us replace him with ourselves.

During his final months the teaching became simpler. There was an urgency I had not heard in quite the same way before. All there is is now. What matters is what is in front of you. Be love.

He continued teaching almost to the end.

Three days before he died, he called me.

“Keith, you must take action! Promise me!”

By then I had spent years listening to him. I had accumulated his teachings, reflected on them, practiced some of them, and believed I understood a great deal.

In that final call, something I had heard for years finally reached me.

It is only through action that I truly begin to learn. Until then, so much can remain safely inside the mind. I can understand an idea without discovering whether I have the capacity to live it. I can affirm compassion until someone difficult stands in front of me. I can speak about alignment without confronting the habits that pull me away from it. I can believe I understand a practice until experience reveals what I lack.

Action introduces reality that thinking alone cannot supply.

I encounter resistance. I discover consequences. I find places where my ability is inadequate to my intention. I learn that something I thought was simple requires capacities I have not developed. I act, encounter, reconsider, practice, and sometimes become able to receive more than I could before.

Even then, I do not imagine that I have arrived at the fullness of reality. Greater capacity is still limited capacity. Perception remains perception.

My Shifu died in 2022.

His death was the end of my certainty.

There would be no more going back to him with the next question. I could not ask what he really meant. I could not describe an experience and wait for him to tell me whether I had understood it correctly. There would be no final clarification from the teacher whose words had become so important to me.

I was left with what he had taught, what I had practiced, what I had misunderstood, what I might understand years from now, and the life actually in front of me.

I still believe things, some of them strongly. I evaluate claims. I reject things I believe are false. Refusing certainty does not require me to refuse judgment. But I no longer believe the strength of my confidence gives me possession of reality.

My Shifu can no longer answer the next question for me. Perhaps that was the biggest lesson he taught me.

I have to act.

And then pay attention to what reality teaches me next.