What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet... -William Shakespeare
We are born, given a name, and our human story begins. Once we started toddling around, our adult people loved to point out things and name them for us. I remember with my son, over and over and over again, I would point to a ball and repeat “ball” and then ask him “Can you say ball?”
I have a really funny side story about that. He was little, maybe 18 months or so, and I was changing. He was standing there, paci hanging out of one side of his mouth, watching me change because that’s what all kids and most pets do. He pointed to me and said “ball ball”? He was pointing right to my lady parts. I laughed and said, “No mommy doesn’t have balls”. Then I proceeded to have a full conversation with him that, actually, sometimes mommy does have the balls and I giggled and then I looked down and, on my underwear, there were a bunch of big circles. "Oh", I said, "Yes Liam those are balls." Lol, apparently, he was a quick study and quite literal.
Anywho, naming objects is important. It is fundamental to our ability to communicate with others. It helps our brains assess situations quickly, process our environment and respond as needed. It would not be very efficient, and possibly quite dangerous if we were driving a car, staring at a red octagonal sign, wondering what it is and what its purpose might be. Instead, our brain sees the sign, registers it’s a stop sign, and sends a signal to our foot to hit the brakes.
Unfortunately, there’s a small glitch in our system. Sometimes, we start to attach emotion and judgment to these words. For instance, for years, I could only use the phrase “the J word“. I had serious beef with Jesus because I was under the impression that he preached judgment, self-righteousness, condemnation, and fear. I could not understand how or why God would put some people on Earth to fix or condemn others. And it really didn’t sit well that God and/or Jesus would promote shame, war, death, and discrimination as a reasonable approach.
Let me use an analogy to help clarify my current understanding of all things religious. Let’s imagine for a minute that you and I knew each other better, and I think you’re pretty amazing so I decide to write a book about you. Then, because you are pretty wonderful, your family member, a colleague, an old childhood friend, and the neighbor down the street also decide to write a book about you.
Each of these books written would be very different, right? They would have different characters, settings, plots, and twists. Depending on what point of your life we chose to write about, you may look like a very different person, but it is all still about you. One book is no more “right” than the other. And even if 10,000 books, poems, and short stories were written about you, they still would not capture all of your essence. There would always be more books that could be written.
I wonder if this is how we have so many different religions and religious books. Everybody has a different experience with their higher power. They have different characters, plots, settings, and experiences describing their relationship with Spirit/Source/God/Nature or whatever name resonates most with you.
In this world, we speak many different languages. In fact, there are a recorded 7139 known languages spoken. Just as we have different spoken languages, we too, speak different spiritual languages. Some of us use God, some of us use Source, Allah, Spirit, Krishna, Nature, etc. Somehow with spiritual languages, we have determined some are right and some are wrong. Some are superior, some are barbaric. Even worse, some of us have learned that it’s OK to ridicule, shame, or even kill another human being because of their spiritual language.
I wonder what would happen if we simply translated? Just like we do with spoken language if somebody says something in French to me, I translate it, as best I can, into English. With spiritual languages, we have woven judgment and self-righteousness into our interpretation and I wonder what it would look like if we could let that go. This could be an opportunity to practice that playful curiosity we chatted about in blog 4- Wrongology.
For whatever reason, God language never resonated with me. I resisted the idea that there was an old white man in the sky wearing white flowy robes. It always conjured up a scene from Tom and Jerry. Freshman year of college, at UC Santa Cruz, I took a world religion course. In this course, we studied and read books like the Bahadgavita, the Koran, the old testament of the Bible, The Tao the Ching, etc. As I read each of these different books, I found different nuggets of wisdom in each of them that resonated with me. I started wondering how I became a Christian. Why was I not Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, etc.? What if I was actually Jewish, Buddhist, or Muslim but because of my family/city/country of origin, I got stamped Christian? Almost like a letter getting mis-stamped at the post office.
It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I was able to explore who Jesus was in a safe and non-assumptive environment called WAYfinding. I learned he was actually a pretty cool dude. He was an activist that stood up for marginalized populations of people. His whole thing was "the meek shall inherit the earth" NOT the wealthy, privileged, entitled people with power. A few years back, Jesus and I had a pretty amazing reconciliation but that will be a story for another day. I realized my beef was not with Jesus, it was with the human ego that twisted and manipulated Jesus’s words to create a platform for their rightness. I came to realize that people could be deeply religious and not at all spiritual and vice versa.
Recently, I have given myself permission to reimagine my connection to Source and let go of any names and practices that do not align with my core belief that we are here in human skin to foster healing and grow love. As I became more curious, started trusting my connection with Source, and stopped white-knuckling the steering wheel of life, that is when a continuous series of “Woo Bombs” began to light up my path.
Question: Do you have a spiritual language? What is it? Are there any parts of your spiritual practices that no longer serve you? What makes you feel more connected to your higher power or with your true self?
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