When your pencil's bigger than your box

I read somewhere that one liberal religious congregation passed around a questionnaire with 20 choices for "How would you describe your theology/philosophy/spirituality?" Twenty choices and yet people were still checking several! Is this a uniquely progressive phenomenon, this liberality of viewpoint, or are liberals the only ones brave or crazy enough to admit it? Could you picture the same questionnaire in a conservative church?

[ ] Fundamentalist
[ ] fundamentalist

My pencil is bigger than any one box. In fact, there are no boxes for my choices, only a large open space for narrative. It's not that my position changes from day to day, rather that when I try to explain it it bleeds across the lines.

Words like God, nature, humanity, wonder, reverence, dignity, contemplation, freedom, responsibility, all fall together in a picture of human being against a backdrop of sheer cosmic immensity. I am in a word religious, a humanist, a mystic, a naturalist, a panentheist, an existentialist. Find a box for that line!I think that rather than pigeonhole our beliefs in someone else's categories we would do best to just list words that are meaningful. One-box people will no doubt protest that words are general and anyone could speak of God meaning whatever they wanted. Yes! That's the glory! If we all write down the words that we value knowing that each of us will mean something slightly to very different by them, we have created a new forum for dialogue.

When your pencil is bigger than your box, switch to crayons.