God, groceries and language

I have God and groceries in my pocket. Onions, butter, red bell peppers on one side and on the other, Peter Rollins, saying, "God can no more be contained in experience than in language."

God and groceries equally contained in language, jotted in a pocket notebook, referred back to on a shopping trip or in the throes of back porch contemplation. Of course, neither are actually contained in language. Rollins is right, language is just a finger pointing at the two. And groceries are a lot easier to point to than God is.

Language being imperfect is no reason to abandon it. Maybe to reinvent it. Sonny Rollins (no relation to Peter) in the 1950s was thought of as one of the top saxophone players around. But he stopped playing in clubs and spent three years on the Williamsburg Bridge, reinventing his style. His language. Getting it right.

Martin Heidegger looked at the whole of western philosophy and decided that they'd all missed the damn boat in how they were thinking about "Being," so he went back and tried to start over, better.

I like S. Rollins' commitment to his art and Heidegger's stones to think he could see something that the sweeping history of philosophy was missing. After penning something as dense as "Being and Time," Heidegger throttled off the word count and runed out this:

The world's darkening never reaches
     to the light of Being.

We are too late for the gods and too
     early for Being. Being's poem,
     just begun, is man.

To head toward a star--this only.

To think is to confine yourself to a
     single thought that one day stands
     still like a star in the world's sky.

He peered into one of the early doorways to existentialism, which others would have to walk through later. He trusted groceries more than God, or at least in language's ability to get to the former.

Thought and language. Together they can guide you through the supermarket, contemplate Being, or leave you just shy of God. What is it that gets us beyond? If you asked either Rollins or Heidegger, I think they'd all disagree.

Only one of them can play the sax.

Sketching spiritual stripes

"A free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain." -Red Redding, "Shawshank Redemption."

There isn't much that's important that hasn't been said in "The Shawshank Redemption." In this case, Red could have been summarizing my thoughts on spirituality. We are free men and women setting out on a long journey with a yet to be determined outcome.

My own unfinished trek started out in the Episcopal Church, baptized and confirmed (and later married) at Holy Trinity Church in Oxford, Md., as well as a couple formative years and thoughts at St. James School outside Hagerstown, Md. But as an adult, I didn't come to appreciate Christianity until studying Buddhism, philosophy and Taoism/systems thinking in college. And reading Tom Robbins.

Our own spiritual journeys are winding paths and trailblazing up a mountain. How far we get and what we find is up to us. I tend to agree with Krishnamurti when he says in "Freedom From the Known:"

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality, or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, or priests, philosophers or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself...

That's always been one of my beefs with Catholicism, that your experience of God has to be filtered through another person. Unless your Catholic like Thomas Merton, in which case I'm in your camp. But we'll rap with Merton another time.

I've always considered myself a spiritual nomad, a wanderer, a philosopher in training (cue KRS-ONE and BDP, "I think very deeply"). At the same time, my wife and I wanted our girls to be raised in and exposed to the thoughts, teachings, traditions that we knew growing up.

About 13 years ago, we were invited by friends to the Easton Church of the Brethren. I didn't know anything about the Church of the Brethren (even though my sister's husband grew up in that church), but when we went to church, Pastor Gene Hagenberger was riffing on Kierkegaard and Jesus, and grabbed my attention. And the congregation over the next couple years, from making us feel at home and welcome, and throwing my wife a baby shower when she was pregnant with our first daughter, has always felt like family.

Even still, I struggle. I find God on Sunday morning trail runs, in sunsets on the water, in Sonny Rollins' saxophone, in the horseshoe crab I picked up in Ocean City and showed to the girls and other kids on the beach. If I'm looking for God daily in the world, what is it about church specifically on Sunday mornings?

And that's when family, when community, speaks up. The Brethren stress individual study of the Bible, your own relationship with God. I can dig that. There are our girls, putting their spiritual feelers out into the Universe. And there is the church community, who have been there for us through the births of both our children and through the deaths of family and loved ones.

There is Pastor Kevin Kinsey, in his mid-30s, his wife and two children coming to Easton and looking for the same kind of community that those of us who have grown up on the Eastern Shore have known.

We each have our own spiritual journeys to embark on. For my own, and for the sense of community, I'm going to be questioning, thinking about, exploring my own journey via social media and on Sundays with the Easton Church of the Brethren. Like them on Facebook and follow along. Or come see us on Sundays when you can.

I'm not an evangelist. I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Just a vagabond working my way up the mountain.