God has always felt big to me. Even as a child, I had a sense that I could spend my entire life getting to know God and never exhaust the possibilities. There would always be something more to discover, something more to experience, and something more to understand. One of my life scriptures has been Philippians 3:10–12, particularly Paul's longing, "that I may know him," referring to Jesus. That desire to know Christ, to encounter the Sacred, and to deepen my spiritual understanding has remained with me throughout my life.
I've never imagined arriving at some point where I could confidently declare that I had learned everything there was to know about God. The Sacred has always been inexhaustible to me. Yet, while that conviction has remained, my understanding of Christianity, my relationships with other religious traditions, and my own spiritual experiences have continued to expand.
I've come to recognize that there are different ways our spiritual worlds become bigger. Sometimes we discover that the Sacred is larger than we previously believed. Something challenges our theology, our assumptions, or the boundaries we've inherited about where and how God can be encountered. At other times, we've always believed more was possible, but we begin experiencing something we had never personally encountered before. Our understanding expands, our experience expands, and sometimes both happen simultaneously.
There is also another dimension to this expansion. Sometimes our spiritual world grows because our understanding of ourselves changes. We discover or embrace something about our identity, humanity, desires, or relationship with the world that invites us to reconsider what we've been taught about the Sacred.
These experiences raise important questions. What happens when our spiritual lives stretch beyond the categories we've inherited? What do we hold on to? What needs to be reconsidered? What can we release? And how do we discern what is unfolding when we don't yet have the language to understand it?
The Theology We Inherit and the Theology We Choose
Whether we recognize it or not, all of us inherit ways of understanding the world. We absorb beliefs, assumptions, practices, and interpretations through our families, communities, cultures, and religious traditions. These inherited frameworks shape how we understand ourselves, others, and the Sacred.
In theological education, we sometimes distinguish between embedded theology and deliberative theology. Embedded theology refers to the theological understandings we absorb through our experiences and communities, often before we've had an opportunity to examine them critically. Deliberative theology emerges when we intentionally reflect on those beliefs, considering them in light of our experiences, study, relationships, and spiritual discernment.
There is nothing inherently wrong with inheriting theology. We all begin somewhere. Some of what we've inherited is beautiful and life-giving. Some of it has sustained generations through unimaginable circumstances. Some traditions have provided language, rituals, and practices that continue to nourish our spiritual lives. But not everything we inherit deserves to remain unquestioned.
Sometimes our lived experiences bring us into direct confrontation with what we've been taught.
I grew up in churches where gay people were condemned. For years, I served in religious environments while wrestling with my own sexuality. Even after recognizing that I wasn't straight, I knew that some of the communities in which I served would not accept that reality. I have journals from earlier periods of my life in which I asked God to deliver me from being bisexual. That was the language I used at the time, reflecting the theological assumptions I had inherited.
Yet, even during those years, my spiritual experiences complicated those assumptions. As a teenager, I had an experience in which I understood Jesus to be calling me his apostle and telling me that my sexuality would be used for glory. There was a profound tension between what I believed I had encountered spiritually and what the religious environments around me were teaching.
Eventually, my understanding of deliverance changed. I wasn't delivered from my sexuality. I was delivered from heteronormativity into queerness.
My understanding and experience of my sexuality have continued to develop over time, but that shift fundamentally changed how I understood the relationship between my identity, my spiritual life, and my calling. I had to reconsider teachings I once accepted and make room for an understanding of myself that did not require denying something true about my being.
What I experienced wasn't simply the rejection of Christianity. It was a transformation in how I understood and related to the tradition that had shaped me.
This distinction matters because we sometimes assume that questioning inherited beliefs necessarily means rejecting everything associated with them. But spiritual expansion does not automatically require spiritual rejection. We can retain what continues to nourish us, reinterpret what needs reconsideration, and release what no longer serves our becoming.
We don't always have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Sometimes Expansion Happens Within Our Traditions
As a spiritual director, I have the privilege of accompanying people as they explore their relationships with the Sacred. I've witnessed people experience significant theological and spiritual shifts without necessarily leaving the religious traditions that formed them.
Sometimes these shifts emerge through a growing awareness or acceptance of identity. A person may recognize dimensions of their sexuality or gender identity that they previously struggled to acknowledge. As their understanding of themselves changes, inherited theological assumptions about holiness, embodiment, belonging, and divine love may also require reconsideration.
For others, expansion involves a changing understanding of how God relates to human life. Someone who inherited an understanding of God as directing or controlling every aspect of their path may begin experiencing their relationship with God as more collaborative. Instead of understanding life as the discovery of a predetermined divine script, they may begin to imagine themselves as participating with God in the co-creation of their lives.
Such a shift can transform how someone approaches prayer, responsibility, discernment, freedom, and uncertainty.
These transformations also remind us that religious traditions are rarely as uniform as we sometimes imagine. Christianity, for example, has never been a single, unchanging theological expression. Across its history, Christians have wrestled with questions about scripture, divine authority, human freedom, embodiment, justice, and the nature of God.
Progressive Christianities, liberation theologies, womanist and queer theological traditions, and contemplative and mystical expressions of Christianity offer different ways of engaging these questions. Encountering such perspectives can enlarge our spiritual understanding without requiring us to abandon Christianity itself.
Someone raised to believe that questioning religious authority is rebellion may encounter a community where thoughtful questioning is understood as an expression of faith. Someone taught that faith requires certainty may encounter contemplative traditions that make room for mystery, silence, and not knowing. Someone taught that aspects of their identity are incompatible with holiness may encounter theological frameworks that recognize liberation and embodiment as integral to spiritual flourishing.
Each of these encounters can expand someone's spiritual world.
Spiritual expansion is not a competition to see who can move the farthest from their beginnings. Remaining within a tradition does not necessarily indicate stagnation, just as leaving a tradition does not automatically indicate maturity. What matters is our willingness to engage honestly with what we are learning, experiencing, questioning, and discerning.
Encountering the Sacred Across Traditions
My own spiritual expansion has also involved learning about and engaging traditions beyond Christianity. This was not accidental. When choosing where to pursue my theological education, I intentionally selected an interreligious seminary. I wanted to study in an environment where Christianity was not the only religious tradition represented, where I could encounter other ways of understanding spiritual life and relating to the Sacred.
Over time, my curiosity has continued to grow. I've become increasingly interested in Black American religious and spiritual traditions, including Hoodoo, as well as African and African diasporic religious traditions. I've also continued exploring mysticism, contemplative spirituality, dreams, visions, and ancestral relationships.
These traditions and practices are not interchangeable. Hoodoo emerges from particular Black American histories, experiences, and spiritual practices. African religious traditions such as Ifá and African diasporic traditions such as Lucumí have their own histories, ritual practices, systems of knowledge, and understandings of spiritual life. Although traditions may share historical relationships or cultural connections, those relationships do not erase their distinctiveness.
Mysticism adds another dimension to this landscape. Rather than belonging exclusively to one religion, mystical practices and experiences appear within many spiritual traditions. Dreams, visions, contemplative encounters, and other forms of spiritual knowing invite us to consider ways human beings have experienced realities beyond ordinary perception and understanding.
I find this diversity fascinating. I do not need every religious tradition to teach the same thing in order to recognize that I might have something to learn from it.
More recently, I've been drawn toward African religious traditions, including Ifá. I've spent time reading and learning from Black scholars and practitioners about these traditions, and I've had personal experiences with Ifá divination. I'm also developing a connection with a Lucumí house, a relationship that is still unfolding.
I approach these encounters as someone who is learning. Curiosity does not make me an expert, and meaningful spiritual experiences do not eliminate the need for humility, relationship, and respect.
One of the things that has fascinated me is how some of my experiences with Ifá have resembled experiences I've had within apostolic and prophetic expressions of Christianity.
In some Christian traditions, there is an understanding that Spirit communicates through people to other people, offering affirmation, instruction, direction, confrontation, warning, or revelation. I've experienced that kind of spiritual communication within Christian prophetic settings.
Through my experiences with Ifá divination, I've encountered communication understood within the religious framework of Orisha rather than the Christian language of the Holy Spirit. Although these traditions have distinct theological understandings and practices, I have noticed similarities in my experiences of receiving spiritual communication.
In both settings, I've received messages that affirmed something I was already sensing. I've encountered instruction and challenge. I've received warnings and messages concerning future events that, in my experience, later came to pass.
These encounters have felt meaningful and aligned with my spirit and being.
I'm not suggesting that Christianity and Ifá are the same, nor am I interested in collapsing their distinct understandings of revelation or spiritual authority into one system. Rather, I'm reflecting on the similarities I've encountered through my own lived experiences and the questions those encounters continue to raise.
They have invited me to consider how spiritual communication is understood across traditions, how we recognize what resonates, and how we discern the meaning of what we experience.
My spiritual world has also expanded through my relationship with the ancestors and through my dream life. I've become increasingly attentive to dreams, symbols, ancestral presence, and spiritual experiences that I'm still learning to understand.
Some experiences are deeply personal. Others emerge through traditions and practices that require ongoing learning. Not everything needs immediate interpretation, and not every spiritual experience requires a public explanation.
Sometimes we can allow an experience to remain an experience before deciding what it means.
There is something valuable about being able to take our experiences seriously without claiming to understand them completely.
Discernment in an Expanding Spiritual World
Of course, spiritual expansion also raises questions about discernment. If we are encountering new theological perspectives, religious traditions, and spiritual experiences, how do we determine what to trust? How do we recognize what is aligned with our spirit and being?
For me, alignment often involves an inner knowing. Sometimes I simply know something before I have the external evidence to substantiate it. There is a sense of recognition or clarity that I've learned to take seriously.
Over time, I've also learned to wait for evidence.
I don't always need to convince others immediately, explain every impression, or force an experience into a settled conclusion. I can observe, listen, and allow time to participate in the process of discernment.
This doesn't mean every intuition is correct, nor does confidence make a belief true. I don't claim infallibility. But my experiences have taught me to trust my discernment with a measure of confidence while remaining open to learning, correction, and further understanding.
There is a difference between trusting what we sense and refusing to examine it.
I think spiritual maturity requires the capacity to do both: to honor our experiences and remain willing to question our interpretations of them.
Just because something is new does not necessarily mean it is good. Likewise, just because something is familiar does not necessarily mean it is trustworthy. We still need to consider what our beliefs and practices produce in our lives, relationships, and communities.
Are they deepening our capacity for compassion, honesty, responsibility, justice, and freedom? Are they helping us become more attentive to ourselves and others? Or are we simply accumulating experiences, practices, and spiritual language without allowing them to transform how we live?
Having a bigger spiritual world isn't necessarily about believing more things or collecting more experiences. Sometimes expansion involves letting go. Sometimes it involves recognizing that the categories we've inherited can no longer adequately hold what we're discovering. Sometimes it requires the humility to acknowledge that we don't yet understand something.
And sometimes it means remaining rooted in what has sustained us while making room for something new.
Remaining Open to the Inexhaustible
I've always understood the Sacred to be inexhaustible. That conviction continues to shape how I approach spiritual life, theological reflection, and my encounters with religious traditions.
Yet the longer I live, the more I recognize that my capacity to learn, experience, question, and become will never be exhausted either.
There will always be more to discover, not because every new idea or experience is equally trustworthy, but because the pursuit of spiritual understanding is not something we complete once and for all.
Our spiritual worlds may expand through theological study, relationships, contemplative practice, identity, dreams, ritual, or encounters with traditions unfamiliar to us. Sometimes these experiences affirm what we've already understood. Sometimes they challenge us. Sometimes they invite us to release something we once believed was necessary. And sometimes they leave us with more questions than answers.
Perhaps part of spiritual maturity is learning to welcome that ongoing discovery without needing to possess or explain everything we encounter.
We can remain curious without abandoning discernment. We can honor our spiritual inheritance without treating it as beyond examination. We can explore unfamiliar traditions without appropriating them or reducing them to what we already know. And we can recognize that our understanding of the Sacred, like our understanding of ourselves, may continue developing throughout our lives.
So I wonder: Where is your spiritual world expanding?
What are you beginning to understand differently? What are you experiencing that you haven't experienced before? What might you need to reconsider, receive, reinterpret, or release?
Perhaps there is something you've inherited that continues to nourish you. Perhaps something you've carried for years no longer resonates with who you are becoming. Or perhaps you're encountering something entirely new that you don't yet have the language to understand.
You don't have to resolve all of it today.
You can remain curious. You can remain discerning. You can allow time and experience to participate in your understanding.
And you can continue discovering what it means to live in a spiritual world that keeps getting bigger.
This essay is adapted from Episode 3, “When Your Spiritual World Gets Bigger,” of The Sacred Resonance Podcast, released October 14, 2026. In the episode, Rev. Larry J. Morris III reflects on spiritual expansion, inherited theology, Black queer spirituality, interreligious encounters, mysticism, and discernment.
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