The Norm - Theology on Tap

So the Center has been running smoothly as of late, not much to talk about. I feel as though I come in, take phone calls, work on One Warm Coat, Homeless Court, organize information, help the guys with immediate needs, etc. Sometimes as I walk to work I wonder what I am walking to, what I am doing. Where is all this stuff going to lead to and get done? I guess I am not sure, but I think that the answer will come with time. And if it doesn't, then I suppose I will to live in the questions as someone famous said we have to do. Just keep coming in, keep coming back. This place is a good thing.
We went to Theology on Tap again Tuesday night. It was a great speech about religious existentialism by a Jesuit, Daniel Hendrickson (I hope the spelling is right). Basically that means talking about how we find and relate to God in our everyday life activities. It's a wonderful subject to think about. Existentialism focuses on our experiences, how we think about them, what we learn from them, how we react to them and how we use all of that in our lives afterwards. When we throw God into the mix everything just gets a little bit better. Instead of focusing on just ourselves and then our relations to others, we fodus on ourselves and our relation to the ultimate Other, God. This is great stuff. Bernard Lonergan, a former Jesuit professor at Boston College, wrote about how we know the world and how that can lead us to God. He was thought of (and rightly so) as an epistemologist, someone who deals with how humans know. But in another sense this is very existential. When we dive into our knowing, we must look at all our experiences, joys, sorrow, sufferings, learnings, understandings, conversations, everything. Through the process of knowing, by reflecting on and judging these things, Lonergan argued that we can connect to God. It is sort of like an existential leap into God. One we make by using our experiences and learnings to thrust ourselves into existence and God through our subsequent actions.
I am not sure, actually, how this is done. I feel comfortable in the learning and acting process, I think the existential part comes fairly naturally. I also feel pretty adequate on the faith part, relating with God and such. But making the two connect, that is the tricky part (at least I think so, Lonergan said it should be obvious). I have talked to some people who seem to think that Love can be the big connection, somehow if we see love in our intellectual pursuits and love in God, we can use that to unite our experiences. Something to work towards. This shouldn't come as a surprise, we are always working towards something, that is the very nature of how we know. We continually experience, question, learn, judge and hopefully act by making choice about the whole process. I suppose bringing God into the picture should not change that at all.