Over the last week I’ve come to experience another form of God.  Mt. St. Helens has awakened again and has periodically sent steam, ash, and rocks into the air.  Having lived in the Portland area for over a year, this is a very new experience for me.  Seeing the earth in a completely new light, I understand how the land, air, and water change all the time.  The earth is alive as evidenced by its mutation and growth.  As I see the ash and steam billow into the air, sometimes thousands of feet into the air, I am reminded that we are all a part of this mutating God.  As the earth around the mountain drastically changes and reforms and new hot earth in the form of magma makes its way to the surface I see the aging and rebirth that is requisite in all of our lives.  As the earth spits its ashes and heat forth, so do we as we change our selves, our minds, and our spirit.

The change within the crater is an excellent analogy for what became a new stage of spiritual awakening for me.  I’ve elaborated a small amount about how music became a pure expression of spirituality; a spiritual conduit, if you will.  I could see such violent change in the music of Neurosis, but then at the same time I could sense the beauty of rebirth and a greater grasp of what life is and what it means.  While I walked a spiritual path, I’d been unable to define how I felt in expression, much less in words.  This was the case until the early part of this new millenium.

I took a simple questionnaire available at BeliefNet.  Basically, the questionnaire presents the questioned with an idea of where they stand spiritually after answering a series of broad questions.  BeliefNet told me I was a Unitarian.  I’d never heard of Unitarians…I just figured they were some small group of agnostics that liked to meditate.  I wasn’t too far off, but the Unitarian church, a couple years after taking this questionnaire, gave to me a home in which I felt perfectly at ease to practice a spirituality without deciding if I were Christian, Pagan, or nothing at all.  1st Unitarian Church of Portland is truly an amazing spiritual home.  It fostered my curiosity into the spiritual and it assisted me in fleshing out in more depth than previously attainable: a theology.  The ways in which Unitarians (specifically 1st Unitarian Church of Portland) welcomed anyone who searched for a gathering place to satisfy their spiritual curiosity is unsurpassed.  Every Sunday I felt as though I had grown a bit more spiritually mature and was all the better for it.

Mid-way through the church year, I was having a conversation with a fellow Unitarian during the post-service coffee hour.  She remarked about how I looked like Jesus (which was true at the time, I guess) and that I could play Jesus in any re-enactment of Christian parable.  Interesting.  I chuckled.  But as soon as she mentioned Jesus, she became apologetic and asked me to excuse her for bringing up Jesus but she felt that he’d done great things.  Of course, I believed this, too, but didn’t understand at all why she felt the need to apologize for bringing up Jesus and Christianity.  I thought about this quite a bit.  After a few weeks, I came to the realization that, although liberal interpretation of Christianity was part of the basis for Unitarian belief, Christianity was a bit taboo since many of us (including myself) were defectors from more conservative sects of Christianity such as Southern Baptists or Catholicism.  This is all fine, because Unitarianism stresses the idea that God is all encompassing and that the varied degrees of understanding and interpretation of God are essential in understanding the impossible.  God is a being of unity; of oneness.  The common, but rarely spoken, apologetic attitudes toward Christianity turned me off a little bit, but not completely.  I understood many Unitarians to be like alcoholics: people who could never come close to a glass of beer for fear of taking a sip once again.  I didn’t feel this way because I knew there had to be a sect of Christianity that allowed for the belief that questioning the idea of God was natural in the process of self-discovery and spiritual growth.  In addition, I’d come to understand that my spirituality seemed to beckon for a more contemplative, a more meditative church that examined religion in a nuanced manner as opposed to an outright liberal, progressive, and free-thinking manner.  I wasn’t looking for conservativism.  I was looking for an inlet into Christianity that would unlock my own gates into interpreting one of the most important, divisive, and fragile concepts of our time: Jesus, God, and the Christian church.

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