church, spirituality, and whatnot

the last 24 hours have been more explicitly about spirituality than any other time stretch i’ve experienced since like 2011. this post isn’t a cohesive thought, but some threads that i think are shaping up to be woven together later. 

1. yesterday i had lunch with my neighbor yotam (and eventually his wife, shoshana, joined the lunch party, too). we wanted to get to know each other more intentionally and the frame we told our stories through was basically our spiritual arcs. he started out with his father’s spiritual and religious background and then traced out his own; i did the same.
   
   one thing he said really stuck with me was that religions are living things. and, as a massage therapist, he knows that living things can hurt and sometimes need work. he and i both feel energy to put that work into our respective religions, but maybe not yet…
   
2. at the end of lunch with my friend, marilyn, we ended up landing on the discussion of religion and spirituality and why it’s seemingly so taboo in new england. it really was only the last few minutes of our conversion, but i’m excited to pick up on that thread in the future with her!
   
3. dinner with casper is always a spiritually focused endeavor (he’s at the harvard divinity school and doing all sorts of awesome work). he’s thinking about some next steps centered on what it means to be human and, maybe in the end, that’s all spirituality and religion really is?
4. this actually didn’t happen yesterday, but i’ve been thinking about my friend gibrán a lot lately. we’ve definitely talked explicitly about starting a church in the past and while i’m not actually sure what’s happening with that, i can certainly see that being a valuable endeavor…
5. this also didn’t happen yesterday, but i found this flyer on the bus the other day and thought to myself “this church has a fundamental design problem. this material is made with the wrong audience in mind. this is a solvable problem.”

anyway, the idea of starting a “church” (maybe cosecha style) with a focus on… something other than God is sounding increasingly attractive and also necessary.

this is much more of a public journal entry than a blog post… but whatevs. my blog. i do what i want with it lol.