Thursday Thirteen 51: The Nature of My Religion

This week I read this in an article about Bruce Springsteen's music as a means of making sense of the sometimes tangled, often disparate threads of our lives. This is at its foundation, a religious undertaking, a ministry of healing: the very word "religion" after all is from the Latin relgare, which means "to bind together again." It refers to that system of overriding metaphorial and mythological schemes, which binds things together for people--which provides them with a sense of meaning and transcendence.

Rock and roll does that for many of us, Jeffrey B. Symynkyicz writes in "The Healing Ministry of Rock and Roll" in the Autumn 2008 Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Symynkyicz is a Unitarian Universalist minister and author of The Gospel According to Bruce Springsteen. If the book is like the article, it is a worthwhile read.

It left me pondering more about the things that make up my religion than it did about Bruce, though. That would figure with me. Here are some of those things that bind things together for me:

1. My daughter and her wide-eyed, sweet, and honest fascination with life;
2. My family and their older, wiser, always humorous fascination with life;
3. My friends and their not as old, nevertheless wise, and always humorous fascination with life;
4. Our guinea pig, whose basic daily needs remind me that life begins and ends with basic daily needs;
5. The students in my classes who struggle for their basic daily needs and so struggle with life;
6. The people I work with whose hearts as well as their talents go out to these kids;
7. The bloggers who visit Writing in Faith, who take the time to comment, and who offer me wisdom and kindness;
8. The bloggers whom I visit for their warmth and wisdom;
9. My daughter's choir, in which she trains her voice to sing with beauty and wonder of the majesty and mystery of our place in the cosmos and the loving nature of our God;
10. St. John's Parish on the Green, where I can meditate with my Buddhist friends on Monday and receive Communion on Sunday and there is no contradiction;
11. The road outside my door, along which I walk every day to take in the beauty of the day, which I see as life itself;
12. The quiet at the end of the day;
13. The sleep that brings the dreams and the sure knowledge that all things are made new over and over again, every moment of the day, and all we can do is open our eyes and love.

Thursday Thirteen