The Gym and The Faith

It turns out the whole donut-shop-next-to-Jenny-Craig may be a global conspiracy. 

I joined a few weeks back, looks like a normal gym, named after a normal guy, in a pretty normal place conveniently five minutes walking from my flat, conveniently next to a sweet shop. 

People says God bless you a lot there, people asked where (not if) I go to church. Somebody on staff at BSM remembers them coming to his college to rip telephone books and ride motorbikes over each other's abs in Jesus' name. 

Here's what's great:

The gym has womens' only workout times, free aerobics classes and personal trainer people helping out everybody. The facilities are simple, clean and people without huge muscles are welcome there. It's a friendly place, and many of the people who are working there didn't have other opportunities (for education, for careers). They make a point of being a welcoming space, and encouraging reasonable fitness goals, and helping people meet them.

Here's what's weird:

As I first met the director and staff, a little buzz went off in my brain, it's the thing that picks up on (and shuts down) when I hear a certain kind of language that I associate with certain ways of viewing the world. I thought it was an American thing, a problematic western Christian fanatical, smiling, but smiling in your face kind of talk. Another global conspiracy. 

Next day on the phone with my mom I said, hey mom, I'm going to tell you what these people said, and you have to guess what church they belong to. 

My mom: well, it sounds like Assemblies of God

That is crazy! The nuance of language within one particular religious group (when they're speaking English) is so consistent across continents, between classes and hugely different histories. The church is only 100 years old in the USA, so these churches, this movement is relatively young. But Christianity has deep roots in South India. 

313 AD Constantine converts himself and the Roman Empire to Christianity

52 AD  St. Thomas arrives in India and founds the first churches in South India 

Europe is still pagan, the Americas are still a sea monster and wavy ocean on a map of the flat earth, and the Syrian Christian church in South India is home to Judeo- Christians, and  a rich tradition of Indo-Judaic Christian practice and belief. 

source: wikimedia of course

I wonder about the ubiquitous ways of speaking about, and therefore thinking about, God and Christian faith. What does it mean for all Christians if we all use the same language? 

God has many names. There are plenty of holy scriptures, but people of all faiths continue to write prayers, songs, poetry, cheezy email forwards. We use new words and ideas to name God and recount the experience of faith. 

These prayers we pray individually are indispensable as the ones we recite in common. The common prayers are our liturgy, the songs we all can sing, the old and new stories we have all heard. The universal and the particular; the incarnation: God and a person. Love is the rational principle of the universe, love is the thing that holds each of us together, and to each other. 

 Christianity is the convergence of the universal and the particular. I believe that the universal reveals itself through the peculiarities of time and place. 

I struggle to have faith, and so this Lent, I am taking some time to think (and hopefully write) about God in the particular. This is a commitment to be on the lookout, to be open to seeing things in new ways, and to let myself be surprised and humbled, and to have my faith renewed.