The Congregational Project begins again with a charge from the organizers to the participants and then a brief overview of the sacred text for discussion. The organizers then turn us loose, without prejudice, to jump into the deep end of the pool of knowing.

How do they do that?

We turn our chairs toward our group. The round table of ten where volunteers from congregations referred to as Christian and Jewish sit prepared to take this journey. Some are old friends from the Genesis group. Others are new faces. A few are strangers we have waited long to see.

We read the sacred text together. This one is from your tradition. It seems so foreign to me. I listen for you to explain it for me. I hear new sounds of my own believing resonating within me. I watch you wrestle with the text. I know this. I don't understand it. I recognize it.

We turn our chairs toward the larger group. The twenty round tables of ten are in a large second-floor room of a Methodist church. The organizers ask us, what did you hear? They step back to the edge of the room, leaving us in the deep water.

How do they do that?

People report clearly hearing things I clearly did not. Their words are resonating through me. My consciousness is awak-ened to another place. I say yes, I am hearing.

We return to our group. We read the sacred text together. This one is from my tradition. It seems so familiar to me. I explain it to you. Your questions and your answers awaken something new in me. I hear the sounds of my own believing resonating within me. I did not know this. I understand it. I did not recognize it.

We reassemble our chairs to rejoin the large group. The twenty round tables of ten. The organizers ask us, what did you hear? They step back to the edge of the room, leaving us in the deep water.

How do they do that?

I report clearly hearing things people clearly did not. Their words are resonating through me. My consciousness is awak-ened to yet another place. I say yes, I am hearing.

We are moving out of the room now, down the steps, across the parking lot into our cars. I am driving myself home, my radio in the off position. I am listening to my thoughts wan-dering through the sacred texts, the sacred texts wandering through my thoughts. What do these texts say? What do they mean? What do they reveal about the divine? Maybe these sacred texts are ancient machines constructed during the front end of time to create disturbances in the field of our comfortable reality, sacred apparatus that gently awakens us. Maybe what I hear in the texts is where I am, what I think, what I believe, a revelation of myself in that moment. Each time I read a familiar verse or a new verse, I find something new because I am forever new. I open the pages from a new place, another experience. In these readings and discussions and questions and answers, I hear where I am. My spirit is revealed to myself.

Arriving home, I park my car and step out into what appears to be night. My breath is moving from deep inside me, going out, coming in, offering genuine thanksgiving to him from whom all blessings flow.

My soul is oriented.

Victor Bonaparte is a member of The City Temple of Balti-more Baptist Church.