All that hath life and breath!

"Prophesy to the breath! Prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, 'Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live!'"
-Ezekiel, chapter 37, verse 9

I spend a good amount of my day thinking about and working with the breath - far more, I'd venture to say, than the average person. I have been a singer my entire life - I was doing vocal exercises before I could speak - and breath is absolutely vital to singing. Similarly, breath is extremely important in Voice and Speech work, which is one of my great loves as far as theatre goes. I have asthma, and know what it feels like to be unable to take in the air that I need to survive. I hail from Bon Air United Methodist Church, the church of the "good air", which likes to use breath symbolism.

If you don't know the process of breathing, it's quite a fascinating one. When you breathe in, the breath comes in through your nose and mouth and moves down to fill up the lungs. The lungs need room to expand, so this really fabulous muscle called the diaphragm, which cuts across the torso horizontally, contracts down to push your organs out of the way (causing the belly to expand out). The ribs also swing out to allow the lungs to expand. (Whether the rib swing is a part of the natural breathing process is debated - some people maintain that "belly-breathing" is the only natural way to breathe. I find the rib swing to be a very valuable part of the process.) Then as the ribs and diaphragm return to relaxed positions, the air is pushed out - the exhale.

Sounds easy enough, right? And everyone's body knows how to do it and we do it every moment of every day, right?

Wrong. Most of us have actually forgotten how to breathe.

See, natural breath engages this muscle called the "transverse", which wraps around your belly like a cumber bund. There are other muscles covering the transverse - the rectus abdominus ("the six pack muscles") and the obliques. The transverse is only muscle that needs to be used - but most of us actually engage the other muscles as well. As I said earlier, the belly will expand out when you breathe, making you just a tad bit fatter for a second, and that is not something that is encouraged by our society. So what we do is engage these other muscles to hold our stomachs in - that means that the diaphragm can't contract like it should and therefore we don't take in as much air. Often, you'll see people's upper chests heaving up and down - since they can't get the expansion they need in their abdomen, they breathe into the chest, which creates shallow breathing instead of a full breath.

Some of us have the opposite problem. Singing teachers all look for people breathing in their chest and try to get them to breath "from their diaphragm". I remember many days of holding each other's shoulders down in choir, or lying on the floor breathing with a hymnal on my belly, trying to make it move up and down. What this can do, though, is make us overcorrect and distend our bellies outward, pushing out on the transverse, which then (because of how muscles are knitted together), makes it impossible for the ribs to expand, and therefore difficult for us to get a full breath. This is my main problem.

Tension is something we all live with every day. Despite going to theatre school where we work on relaxing the body all the time, my neck and shoulders are so tense that you can't even find knots - it's like trying to massage concrete. We all know about tensions we get from physical actions, like the way we walk or the bags we carry, but there's another kind of tension that creeps into the body, and that is tension created from emotion. Tensions of doubt and insecurity. Tensions of fear and shame. Tensions of loneliness and despair. The time you had a "wrong answer" or "stupid question" and people laughed at you. The time you laughed when no one else did. The time you said, "I love you," and felt like a fool. The little embarrassing or hurtful moments that we can still remember perfectly years later - those store up and create habits of tension, literally in your body, that affect your breathing. These tensions are very, very difficult to reverse.

There are many scriptural references to breath that I have only begun to study. Today's old testament reading was from Ezekiel, and included the verse I quoted earlier. It's the "Valley of Dry Bones" section, where God takes Ezekiel to a valley filled with dry bones and asks him if they can live again. Ezekiel, being smart, says, "You know if they can." God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to these bones that flesh will come upon them, and breath will come upon them, and they shall live. As Ezekiel does so, flesh does come upon them again, but they do not live, because breath had not entered them. God commands Ezekiel again to prophesy to the breath - and when he does, breath enters them and they live again.

The "breath of life" is not a new concept. It is around as early as Genesis 2:7, when "the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being." Life comes with breath. This was made quite clear in the CPR class I took last week - without breath, the heart doesn't get the oxygen it needs to keep pumping. When you breathe in, you are replenishing your heart.

The interesting thing about breath in Ezekiel is that breath is commanded. He tells the bones that flesh will come upon them and breath will enter them - and flesh comes upon them immediately. But he has to separately call upon the breath to enter.

One of the most fascinating things about breath is that it is the one process that is both voluntary and involuntary. We can chose to control our breath, but it still happens if we don't. One of my teachers once said, "Breath is the bridge between what keeps you alive and your will." In this way, the passage in Ezekiel shows true resurrection - both the automatic processes of the body represented in the flesh, and the spirit of life and will, represented in the breath.

The breath is called upon to give new life.

Today is Pentecost, which is a huge dramatic (in the best sense of the word) event in which the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles. Fire descended upon them and they spoke God's word in tongues. Pentecost is called the birth of the church. Pentecost means that the Holy Spirit, part of the trinity, can work within us and through us, using our bodies and voices to transform the world.

Pentecost starts with breath. It starts with a sound coming from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind that filled the place where the apostles were gathered. This is actually what I think it must be like to be sitting in the lungs when a breath comes in. Montreat has the blessing of flimsy doors. The doors from the lobby to the auditorium are thin and don't shut well. During the service today, as the pastor commanded us to prophesy, the mountain wind blew in, causing the doors to swing open and shut loudly. I saw people from Facilities Crew and lay leaders start, looking towards the doors, wondering if they should go lock them - "No!" I thought. "What is the wind but God's breath?! Let it rush in, filling all of us in this place to be alive to speak his Word, and sing praises!"

Unfortunately, it is not that easy. Because of my asthma, I've had my lung capacity tested - and unless it's allergy season or I've been running, my lung capacity is well OVER 100%. I was frustrated with Voice and Speech classes for most of my life because most of these classes I took before college focused exclusively on breathing, and while breathing is important, knowing what to do with your breath is just as important. I tend to take in a lot of air and not use it. My voice used to tend towards a "breathy" quality, meaning air was escaping instead of vibrating through my vocal cords. I cannot tell you how often Voice and Speech teachers have worked to get me "on my breath". I had the air - but I didn't know how to use it.

"Breath is inspiration," a teacher of mine told me once. "Your passion and interest in this work is deep and clear, and I think it's making so much go on in here," pointing to her head, "and it's making your voice breathy because breath is inspiration." But inspiration, I have learned, is not communication. Inspiration is the pinch that causes you to say ouch (to put it in acting terms), inspiration is the reason you care to say anything, inspiration is the spark that starts the fire. But the spark has to hit something to truly ignite.

Wait, wait, wait. We've been working with this breath-as-life metaphor for quite some time. If breath is only the beginning, then does that mean that life is only the beginning? What fire does the spark of life start?

When the fire ignited, the apostles started speaking. They started speaking in languages that were not their own, they started speaking and everyone could understand, everyone heard the message in their native tongues. The Holy Spirit worked, and all language boundaries were defunct - all because of breath and voice.

Voice. Perhaps even more mysterious than breath, voice is a miracle that happens when breath vibrates. As the breath is released from the body, it passes through the vocal folds, which vibrate, creating sound, and travels up through the mouth or nose where it's shaped by different articulators (such as the lips and the tongue) to form words. It hits on resonators in the body which amplify it naturally. The voice is a primary tool we use to connect to each other. A baby's desperate cry for food, a pealing, ringing laugh - these are naturally uncontrollable impulses. The natural impulse towards voice, combined with the brain's craving for a language system, create spoken language that is our primary mode of communication.

We have learned to stifle our laughs and swallow our cries. Those inescapable tensions that constrict our breath prevent our true voice from ringing out. We control our pitches and tones. We disconnect from our voices because to connect with them would mean not only being vulnerably exposed without our armour of tension - but marching into the world that vulnerable.

But without doing that, how are we able to truly sing God's praises with all of our beings? How could we dance with the joy of the spirit if we leave a foot behind? Furthermore, the Holy Spirit working through the apostles' voices created communication that was universal. Nothing was getting lost in translation - meaning there was complete understanding, which means unity and community among all the people.

The story of Pentecost is the story of wind and fire is the story of breath and voice. We are ALIVE, and we are TOGETHER! The birth of the church is the beginning of an understand between people, understanding that surpasses all boundaries.

It is hard and scary to live this way. Our tensions protect us from ourselves and each other, and the more of ourselves we put out there, the more is available to hurt. Our tensions are so ingrained in us they seem impossible to change. A part of me finds voice work to be the most frustrating thing in the world because you never reach a point of, "Okay, my voice is good now!" It's about constantly striving to be open and relaxed and available so that whatever happens can happen, unobstructed.

But, like Ezekiel, we can call upon the breath of life. We, who are an exhausted, delirious people, gasping for air, can prophesy to the breath, and be filled with life. And being filled with life, we can transcend with voice into the One Body, destroying all barriers, so that the Kingdom of God may come upon the earth.