Where does the wind come from? Where does it go?

I have a friend. (Yay, finally, I know you're all so proud of me.) Her name is Lindsay, and she's going to be a 2nd year at PHTS. Lindsay and I once baked cookies in the shape of International Phonetic Alphabet characters. This clearly illustrates that Lindsay and I are awesome. Lindsay has been reading my blog, and I've been reading her blog, and all my spiritual musings made her make her own spiritual musings, which she then blogged about, and they made me think things to blog about back. (Confused yet? Good.)

Lindsay is a life-long Unitarian Universalist, which secretly made me squeal with joy when I found out. Why? Because when I first heard of Unitarian Universalism some time in middle or high school, I became super interested in it, but I didn't know anyone who was UU or know of any UU churches around where I could find out more information. In fact, Lindsay is the first person I've met who's UU (at least, that I'm aware of). Meaning I'm absolutely planning on pouncing on her randomly next year with questions about her faith, because I'm burning with curiosity over how UUs practice their faith.

I find myself drawn to Unitarian Universalism because of its openness. I am not an evangelical, Bible-thumping Christian. I do not believe in exclusivity. I know, John has so much exclusive language ("I am the way and the truth and the light, no one comes to the father but through me," and all that), but I like to believe that it is our readings of the text that make it small, not the actual meaning, and there's so much else that suggests inclusion as opposed to exclusion. I don't believe that people who do not profess Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour are going to hell.

Why? Because I believe that God is too big to be contained, limited, to one religion.

What do I believe God is? I have absolutely no idea. None. It would be terribly pompous of me to say that I could possibly fathom God. There are things beyond our human minds, beyond our comprehension. God, anything close to God, must be the farthest. Christianity works within certain mysteries and paradoxes, and it's easy to think about them as being a "definition" for God, but if you look at them, they make no sense. The idea of the Triune God - three entities inside of one? John 1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." That's super abstract. This Word thing. It was in the beginning. And with God. Who must also have been in the beginning. Except, wait, not only was it with God, it WAS God? Christianity makes very little logical sense, and it's because God is not confined to human logic.

One of the things I'm pretty good at is translating between people. I am usually able to get into people's heads easily and understand what they mean. This means that when one person doesn't understand what another is saying, I can get in there and translate so that things are clearer. (This often happens when people don't realize they're actually talking about the same thing.) From this view I have seen many translations of this mystery I call "God". I've seen it in other dieties in other religions. I've seen people call it "the Universe". I've seen it in science.

I believe religion is a language. Early this past school year, I came up with the following beliefs about.. how we work and why we create language:

1. We experience the world through our senses. (That's as far down as I could distill it. Everything I know is spurred on my some sensory input.)

2. We organize these inputs into our perceptions of the world. How things look, smell, taste, sound, feel to us.

3. We create languages so that we can share our perceptions with others. We've decided that one color is red, another blue. Without these languages, we really have no way to communicate. Without language, we establish no common ground.

Religion is a ground to give us a language where we can talk about something so mysterious that we need another language for it. Thus, I see so much validity in different religions and beliefs because they're simply different languages to talk about the same thing.

The problem that happens is people get so caught up in their language that they forget what they're trying to say. I know atheists who love more than some Christians. There are Christians who use Christianity as an excuse to hate, and I don't care even if you believe fully in every bit of exclusive language in the Bible, you have NO Biblical background to hate. The greatest command of Christianity is to love. That's it. It's loving. And a remarkably embarrassing amount of Christians don't follow that commandment. (Of course we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. But there are many Christians who don't even try to love like we are called to.)

It happens all the time. The language strangles us. I have always said that I'd prefer to spend my time with a spiritual person than a religious person. And the draw of the very liberal UUs is very strong for me. Because it encourages my belief in the validity of every person's personal discovery and language. And it's much harder for it to get caught up in its own language, I think, than Christianity. And it's one of the most spiritual religions that I can think of. And I kid you not, that pretty much everything I've ever hear or read about UU sounds absolutely incredible and in line with my beliefs.

So why am I not UU?

Because the language of my religion helps me. But rather than help me to understand, it helps me to NOT understand.

Wait, what?

One of the things you learn in theatre school is that specificity begets creativity. "Go and make up a dance" is too vague to really get someone going. "Go and make up a leprechaun's belly dance" actually gets some kind of creative juices flowing. I'm all for breaking down walls, but the fact is, without some kind of wall to bounce off of, you're just floating aimlessly in space. (So choose your own walls and where to put them that best fits where you want to bounce.) The language of my religion gives me the walls that help me bounce forward.

The kind of voice work primarily studied in second year at PHTS is called Fitzmaurice work. You know when you're lifting something or leaning on your arm a certain way, with a certain amount of pressure, and your arm starts to shake? What's happening is the muscles are confused. They don't know whether to go one way or the other way, and they start to tremor. Fitzmaurice work uses these tremors to help free the breath. Ever since we started Fitzmaurice work, I've been fascinated with tremors. Doing this work, you are focusing on sending a muscle both up and down - lifting something while keeping muscles relaxed, and between that play of two opposites working on each other, this thing, this tremor is created. The voicing that comes out of that tremor is unpatterned, shimmering, vulnerable, and enormously intimate. My first year, we did a week of Fitzmaurice work, and at one point our teachers tremored for us and after tremoring, went into a Shakespeare monologue. Those monologues, those moments, were absolutely indescribable - they were some of the most powerful, moving things I had ever seen because of the vulnerability and intimacy and pure connection that had been established in that room.

But the fact is, I cannot describe them. There is not language for what comes from that tremor. It can only be described as what happens when these opposites interplay on each other.

I cannot say what God is. I cannot even describe the Christian deity of God. I can say that God is the tremor of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I can say that the Word was and was with God. It is language that leads to not understanding in a way that the spirituality of it is released and comes to the forefront.

I like understanding things. I like thinking. A lot. (If you couldn't tell by this blog.) And I'm totally interested in understanding all I can about the language that I've chosen (and other languages, too, but I figure I should start with mine). It's why I'm so fascinated by theology. But ultimately, I do all this so that I can NOT understand, but instead revel in the mystery.