Touched by the presence of the Lord

While I was at the library the other day, I was interrupted from whatever internet browsing I was doing by a kindly seeming, middle-aged, Korean woman. She told me she'd felt called to come talk to me, like I was somehow open to what she had to say.

In a way, she had been right. I was open, I listened to her with my whole heart, which is probably why the experience ended up being so intense.

She started by telling me about an email her pastor sent her and some of the scripture he quoted, particularly a verse from Isaiah 60 about light in the darkness.

As we explored parts of the Gospels together, she had me understand how the Word of God, of Yahweh, was Jesus Christ and that He was the light in the darkness. And so on and so forth, Jesus died for our sins and so only through Him can I truly be forgiven and accepted into the arms of the Lord.

She told me about her 11 year-old son and reading scripture with him. Several times she interrupted herself to pull out a small, circular sponge like you would find in a makeup kit to use to wipe her nose of her allergies. And she cried. She cried for me, at the power of what she was saying, so strong was her belief.

While I truly did try to listen with an open heart, and even read aloud some of the scripture she passed in front of me, (John 6:44, Psalm 139), I cannot fully accept this sacrifice. God sent His only son, Jesus Christ, to absolve us of our sins so that His blood may show us the way to the throne of heaven. The part I cannot understand or perhaps cannot accept is why? And this is a very specific why in that I'm not questioning the motivation of why must He do this, but rather why must it only be this way?

To paraphrase Derrida, only I can be responsible for my life, and conversely, for my death.   But examining the divine sacrifice within this discourse, we come across an intersection of the responsibility that is uniquely of man and the grace of that which we call God.

As an immortal being, God is exempt from the kind of responsibilities faced by man. He is beyond being good, being understood, morality. Who does He answer to for His actions but Himself? So for Christ to die for us, to offer to take responsibility for us and for our sins, creates a symbol wherein God accepts responsibility for His own actions.

To me at least, it says, I made this what it is. It's my fault and so I must be the one to fix it. Your failings in my eyes are because of Me, so your salvation must also come through Me, through Jesus Christ.

This is why I am not Christian. My faith is not put in Jesus Christ. I do not trust Him explicitly and wholly. The way I view it, I answer to a higher power than that, creation, that eternal force of life that moves us forward. In less secular terms, I suppose many would call this God, but that is one thing I deliberately choose not to do. How can one fathom to name and so attempt to define that which is, was and will be? Only man.

"All other sins, stealing, killing, etc, are secondary." To what? To the greatest sin which is to fail to honor your responsibility to your creator. For according to Psalm 139:13-16, we were each formed even before our birth, seen and witnessed before life itself. I cannot refer to this as God though. It's not disrespect because to me, every act of creation, which is indeed every action, is or should be a celebration and honoring of the original creation.

At the end of our conversation -- a term I use rather loosely considering I said maybe a total of 10 words of my own in the course of something like 45 minutes -- this woman prayed for me. She prayed for the Lord to bless me in all I do and to give me strength, but also to give me strength in Him. Perhaps I need that strength, but not right now, not until I'm ready to accept it.

And I admit, I felt it, what she would have called the presence of God. It was a pressure in my head given to the intensity of the moment. Something I felt physically and made me tremble. But is that God? I struggle to name and describe it, so I'm not going to rationalize with some attempt at a scientific explanation, but is it God? And if so, which god? Which faith and belief has that kind of power except that which we give it?

If I were Pastafarian, I would say in that moment I was being touched by His Noodly Appendage (RAmen). I'm not mocking faith in questioning this, I'm searching for my own.

There was one other thing she said that really struck me. Religion is dead, she said, to believe in Christ is to believe in the living spirit. This as she urged me to find a church in my area, a Foursquare where I could find Christ.

It struck me as particularly serendipitous that I should draw the attention of this woman, because I still remember rather distinctly the conversation I had about a month ago when a man stopped me in Red Square up at Western.

"I could tell the Lord had opened you to hear my message."

Perhaps I am touched by the presence of the Lord. Touched so that I may stay open to these experiences and listen and experience the diversities of Faith across our world. Religion is dead, yes, but the spirit is very much alive. 

Talking to Strangers

Stop me if you've heard this one before. So I was walking home to shower on Monday after a fairly raucous evening at a friend's when I happened upon a man and his daughter sitting at the stairs by Red Square on campus.

I thought nothing of it at first until he called me over asking what my shirt meant.

"My life is my message. That's an awfully powerful statement to have on a shirt, where's it from?"

Having explained that it was a Gandhi quote, he then asked me what my message was. And so we talked. And I found myself spilling to this stranger the kinds of spiritual beliefs I carry with me and rarely talk about.

He asked me which, if any, religious affiliations I made for myself. He asked what I was doing here at Western, but unlike most people, followed it up by asking why.

He in turn shared with me that he was Josh, a Heretic and reverend and that the small, blonde, blue-eyed angel splashing her way through the puddles was Virtue.


Our conversation was short, 15 minutes at most and often interrupted by a sopping Virtue who came to share her dripping love.

He'd been in the army but had been kicked out for "entrepreneurial enterprises." Josh told me that some time after this, he became a Christian and learned Scripture well enough to be a reverend, but because of some of his more radical views, has had trouble staying with any particular church.

Silly little girls in silly little puddles

Now, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole religious experience; there's so much hypocrisy and hate within the history of the Christian church and I don't feel I'm educated enough in other doctrines to truly be able to accept them for myself, but I cannot shake the feeling that this conversation was a message to me from whatever higher power I'm serving.

"The better you can explain who you serve, the more of a purpose you will have in life."

Last night at Jack's I lost a part of one of my necklaces, a small clear marble that I got at the end of my volunteering with Power of Hope last summer. At the end of each camp session we hold a closing ceremony wherein everyone leaves something behind and takes something with them symbolically in the form of pebbles or the like and shiny stones or marbles.

At the end of this particular camp I was looking for direction. I was looking for purpose. So when I picked that clear marble, I called it my heart compass and imbued it with the power to serve as a reminder to trust myself, to trust that I know intuitively where I'm going. Later that same summer, I looked up wire wrapping online and turned the marble into a necklace most of you have probably seen me wearing.

I carry a lot of sentimental value in that little necklace, so it's loss only served to compound the quiet emotional struggle I'd been facing since early this morning or I suppose late last night depending on which side of sleep you look at it from.

In that sense, I was feeling down when I ran into this man. I was mentally heavy and weighed upon by a myriad of things and this short conversation was enough for me to decide I want to reevaluate.

There is power in the connections we make. If you imagine scale being a reflection of magnitudes, then the bonds we make as people are like the atomic links that form molecules a thousand fold stronger, and even short connections that can be counted in minutes have the power to change lives.

Like I said, I want to reevaluate. I want to take Josh's advice and figure out who or what I'm serving with my life, which admittedly has been a process I've been going through for some time now, just maybe not in those words.

Musicality

Music is namaste manifest, despite traditional and originary meanings, it has become accepted to represent a sentiment akin to the light in my heart recognizing and respecting the light in your heart.

Sing the song of your soul. March to the beat of your own drum. To exist and, more importantly, to create in this world is to let that musicality express itself.

Music culture is a reflection of soul culture. If a song resonates with you, you feel it. You dig it, and so feel it beneath the surface. Music is the sound that is noise with purpose with an added layer of rhythm.

And the beauty of it is that it has an organic quality. Good music flows, it comes naturally to us and good music that doesn't flow does so that it interrupts this process in such a way that that makes it natural to the process.

If we take noises to be the basic building blocks, the random nucleotides in this aural (and in many ways sub-aural) experience, then sounds are the individual genes that make the sequence and order of these noises relevant. Music then is the string of DNA that separates the sounds into the coherence necessary to make something complete and whole.

Music as the expression of the soul is not just song, but all creative acts. Emotions are the verses, chorus and refrain that make up the arias of the inner experience. To convey emotion through the arts -- whether it is contained in our traditional models of what is considered art or not -- is to unleash not only this light from within but also the self-same darkness embodied by and necessitated by that light.

But where does this light come from? What is the source of this music within us that compels us to dance and sing and write and paint and perform and sex?

In that we refer to these kind of cathartic releases as communion with God and that they were once used in the kind of ancient rites that connected us with the Earth, with the Forces of Life that we depended on for survival in a way not seen in the industrialized world of today, this light cannot be from the Self.

The Self is too preoccupied with the here, the now, the past, the future, the physicality of that eternal argument between mind and body. To react so instantly and so strongly requires the freedom of that which is unburdened by this kind of responsibility created by life.

In The Gift of Death, Derrida says that everyone "must assume their own death, that is to say, the one thing in the world that no one else can either giver or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility." Where a few pages earlier he stated that "It is from the perspective of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be responsible."

So the Self as the projection of this mortality is responsible. And it is this selfsame mortal nature of the Self that makes its rejection a crucial step into nirvana.

While it is not able to Originate this light, in this capacity the "I" can however, help to shape the release. The creativity of the Self is in its ability to filter this expression of the Other. What the Self does is to translate the noise, give it purpose as sound and so music so it can be more readily recognized by the corresponding Self of Others. It frames it and packages it so it can be received, a different kind of Gift than the value of a Death.

There's something primal, something moving about music that occasionally catches us off guard. It reaches in when we aren't paying attention and pulls us almost into a trance-like state. It awakens us at the same time as it lulls us to sleep with its complete control over us.

Namaste.

And so we react; something internal responds and seeks to return that energy.

It's primal and messy, but powerful and beautiful and so completely natural in ways we cannot realize in our everyday lives. We dance, gyrating bodies caught in a maelstrom of sound, whipping us with all the force of a wind in the trees. We sing along, harmonizing, humming when we don’t' know the words, trapped in this Other that controls us.

This trembling seizes one at the moment of becoming a person, and the person can only become what it is in being paralyzed by the [transie], in its very singularity, by the gaze of God. Then the person sees itself seen by the gaze of another, "the absolute highest being in whose hands we are, not externally, but internally."
...
The secret of the mysterium tremendum takes over from a heterogeneous secrecy and at the same time breaks it. This rupture takes the form of either subordination by incorporation (one secret subjects or silences the other), or repression.

This reaction is the reception of that Gift as it is immutably translated to a form more readily accepted by our subconscious.

In this sense, I'm very much speaking of Music in the kind of terms one might describe more aptly as pure music. Music as the transcendental experience.

But music as we hear it is not always pure.

It is created by this Other, but reproduced and transmitted by the Self. As such, music becomes a matter of power, it becomes a tool in the duality known as power economy, the binary between those who do have authority and those who do not because it naturally comes from a place of significance.

Fate kismet and other facts of life that shape who I am as a spiritual being

A while back, I made a post about a little Buddha statue I found on the side of the road and in it, promised to write about my religious beliefs. Here's a small portion of all that I could write about there:

I don't consider myself a religious person. My faith has yet to become enamored of any single organized religion. Much like in high school, there's far too much drama and social politics involved with any of them.

I cannot call myself a Christian. I believe in the teachings of Christ, but I cannot reconcile those teachings with all the sins against man committed in the name of someone who clearly preached a far more loving ideology. At the same time though, I recognize that that history doesn't necessarily reflect any Christian people I know, because most of the ones I know are truly loving, kind people.

I take umbrage to the institution and the church, and what they've done in the name of the religion, not the religion itself.

So it's kind of a mixed bag.

And with other world religions, I feel uneducated about them and a lot of them have the same kind of deal as well. War and violence and hatred all over what some God nobody knows anything about has said. Like I watched the movie Slumdog Millionaire, and I was practically hyperventilating through parts of it watching these people in India suffering. It's the same thing when I look at history and religions, there's just this ENORMOUS baggage and weight behind it. And I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I can embrace that and accept that it's a pain I will never be able to heal.

At the same time though, I have this unshakeable faith that there's more out there. I just don't know what it is. It's like in the books and stories, you KNOW good will win, even if it takes a while, it's gonna happen.

I believe in Fate, what some call Kismet or the hand of God. I have a hard time believing in coincidences, especially when people are concerned. It shapes my belief that certain life experiences are ordained and meant to happen. Free will shapes the path and the time it takes for you to get there, but it will happen in the end. I take peace from this knowledge.

If you are meant to meet someone, you will be presented with opportunities to meet them until you do, but how you meet them depends on which path you follow.

Religious belief as I see it boils down to the same kinds of principles I believe in love:
Love yourself so you can love others and in doing so treat them with respect.
Work towards making good things happen and good things will happen.
Live what you want to see in the world.
In short, find: optimism, respect, love, acceptance

I think this is a sign I'm supposed to be buddhist.

I was walking home from the grocery store when I came across this little Buddha sitting in the grass on the side of the road.

I'm not really one for portents and omens, but considering I just started a shirt design based on the mantra of compassion (ohm mani padme hum), this is a little too convenient. I mean what are the chances?

Now I think I need to write a post about my religious beliefs. I'll try to get one up in the next few days.

Just suffice it to say for now that I believe in the power of Fate, Kismet and the purpose of coincidence.