Over the last few years I’ve grown to accept that spirituality is part of my life.  The struggle I had while resolving this avalanche of ideas lied in the fact that what I knew of spirituality (largely based on a Catholic upbringing) was constricted and rigid.  Within the last decade I’ve been able to free myself from these constraints not only by exploring other religions, although that did play a part, but by realizing that God is a construct of man.

The notion of God as a human expression may seem to be too simple an answer for such a grand question.  It is.  There is no true answer for the eternal conundrum: What is God?  There is no answer, for God is no man sitting in a throne above the clouds.  Science instantly proves this wrong, although at a younger age this was a very real proposition for me as it seems to be for some people today as well, which is sad.  God is nothing that can be explained with research.  God does not fall prey to the scientific method.  Many of us experience certain emotions, feelings, and times of heightened spiritual conception.  Many feel this way when they attend a worship service.  Also, many feel this way when they create art with their senses.  Playing music, painting, sculpting, writing, singing are all vehicles for the human to touch the hand of God and the humanist aspect of these endeavors does not discount the presence of God in our lives.  It may be easy to explain off the elation of playing the drums in concert with your contemporaries as simple human emotion, but the feelings attained can sometimes approach the unknown and unexplainable.  This is how I came to realize spirituality has a firm place in my life.

The path to spirituality that I ended up taking had actually been present for many years.  I simply just did not know that I was traveling down this road.  I play the drums and, more times than not, the experience I have when I create music freely is the closest I can come to meditative trance.  There is no surprise that historically humans have celebrated God to the dance of rhythmic drumming.  It is one of simplest ways of touching the hand of God.  In turn, music grants us all a doorway in which to take to reach a higher self.  Not everyone can recognize or ever find these doors.  However, the paths are many to understanding your higher spirituality and music is only one of these roads.  For me, though, music has always played a significant part in my social, educational, and spiritual life.

Toward the late 1990’s I’d come to a spiritual crossroads.  For a time I realized that my playing drums carved a path for me but I was unable to articulate what this meant.  After a childhood spent in Catholicism, a youth spent in agnosticism, and a young adult life spent in question I was unable to detail if I was, indeed, in search of God and, if so, where I could find God. Not surprisingly I found the beginnings of God in music.  Strangely, I found these pieces in the music of a favored musical group of mine: Neurosis.  If you have never heard or heard of Neurosis, the easiest way to explain their music is that it is loud, heavy, guitar and drum laden, sometimes scary, sometimes beautiful, and always experimental.  Many might question my sanity behind finding God in such an unlikely place.  Don’t be so quick to dismiss the notion of walking a spiritual path cleared by Neurosis.  In their music I find the clash of worlds, a battle of quiet and storm.  I feel fire, drink water, trod on earth, and fly in the wind.  I experience in the totality of my being a heartbeat of God.  In their lyrics I envision the struggle of the fallible and tragic human in the face of all that surrounds us.  They are the picture of human angst against the inevitability of our deaths.  Often I found myself getting lost in their music, falling prey to the trance-like pace of their songs.  Neurosis became the key to my future fleshing out of God because they became an answer to what God is: a human construct to describe indescribable emotions.

In future posts I will examine what drove me to find a home in the Unitarian Church and then finding that my short time in this church was a stepping stone for my re-entry into Christianity.

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