Aimee Moiso of the Presbyterian Church (USA) is a student at San Francisco Theological Seminary in California. She attended the Bossey Ecumenical Institute's seminar on "Interpreting sacred scriptures in pluralistic contexts" (June 28-July 4 2003), which explored the possibility of shared readings of sacred texts and experiences across ecumenical and interfaith lines.

The Bible has a bothersome habit of leaving unmentioned some of the things I'm most curious about. I'd like to know what went through Moses' mind when he first saw the burning bush. (I imagine something like, "I really need to get out of this heat. I'm starting to see things.") Or how Balaam reacted to being chided by his donkey ("Did you say something?"). Or the first thing Jonah said from the belly of the fish ("Oh, great. Now I'm stuck inside a fish"). Or Mary's first thought when she found an angel of the Lord at her doorstep ("You've got to be kidding me").

Unfortunately for me, scripture doesn't tell us much about how people responded to such unusual encounters with God. As my Hebrew Bible professor would say, the biblical writers were not interested in psychoanalysing the protagonists.

But I am. I'd like to know what these characters thought about God's unconventional message-sending, because I've never seen a burning bush, been inside a fish, heard a talking donkey, or answered the door for the angel of the Lord. These methods of divine communication are foreign to my experience, and they defy my categorizations of how God speaks. So I'd like to sit down with each of these characters, pour a cup of coffee and ask, "What was it like to have God speak to you like that?"

At the Bossey seminar "Interpreting sacred scriptures in pluralist contexts", we spent most of our time doing just that: sitting together over cups of coffee and asking each other how God speaks through our sacred texts and varied traditions.

While no one offered tales of talking farm animals, the richness and diversity of sacred experience were more than enough to challenge our presuppositions and spur lively discussion. We quickly learned that different traditions and cultures use and understand sacred texts in a host of ways. Historically, the Reformed tradition has voiced the authority of scripture (sola scriptura) and the centrality of the biblical witness in theology and worship. But in other traditions, sacred texts are marginal or have been divisive, destructive and rejected. Texts are seen by various groups as the direct revelation of God, divinely inspired, or simply illustrative of God's nature. Some adherents use sacred texts in their daily personal devotions, others reserve sacred texts for scholars and special occasions. Some groups regularly use the texts of more than one tradition; others would find it offensive, abhorrent, or even sacrilegious to seek wisdom from the sacred text of another group. And as we know from our Reformed experience, the role of scriptures can differ widely not just among traditions but within them as well.

Sharing sacred texts was proposed in part as a way to seek commonality across religious traditions, despite their broad variation. In our interconnected world, it has become critical that we encounter, interact with and try to understand other faiths, cultures and traditions in order to alleviate prejudice and seek mutual solutions to global concerns.

I wish I could say that by examining sacred texts the Bossey participants came up with ground-breaking methods to bridge religious chasms and solve the world's problems. But we didn't. The presentations at Bossey, which covered Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and African Traditional Religious perspectives, made me even more aware of the cultural and theological distance between other faith expressions and my own.

I left Bossey with more questions about sacred texts than answers. Does one religious body have the right to examine, interpret or use the text of another? Can a text be spiritually significant to more than one religious body simultaneously, even if the bodies disagree about its meaning? Can God's voice be heard by one religious group through the sacred text of another? If so, should religious groups seek God's word through whatever sacred texts they can, regardless of the traditions from whence they came? Even now, I am unsure as to whether sharing sacred texts is a plausible means by which to find common ground to respond to the world's problems.

But the seminar did remind me that God is infinitely bigger than my personal experience. God speaks to people in ways I could never have imagined. In engagement with others, my concepts of God are enriched and expanded exponentially. No matter how many times I learn that lesson, it is a profound realization.

I may never meet anyone who's heard God speak through a burning bush. And I doubt I'll come across someone who's survived being swallowed by a fish. But even in our everyday encounters we have the opportunity to be reminded of the infinite ways our infinite God speaks and to be enriched by them.

So have a seat. Here's a cup of coffee. Tell me, how does God speak to you?