This is BIG

Finally.

There is something big happening.

This is such an exciting time for me as I am beginning to see where my passions can be and are connected. Several of my classes this term are pointing me toward my love for music (and the arts) as well as my love for knowing and being with people.

My faithful 4 readers, you have heard of the difficulty of the Sexual Disorders class this term. I am so grateful to those of you that have sent encouragement my way during class time! You have no idea how powerful that is for me. On a different note from that class, I was given the opportunity to participate in a unique research project for this class in which I would be helping create a type of training manual for volunteers traveling to underdeveloped countries to work with victims of slavery; their initial focus being on juvenile prostitution-related trauma. The other part of this research is centered around the use of art, specifically music, to help treat these young victims.

So I signed up.

After much deliberation within the group of students participating and also with the folks whom we are doing this research for, I was finally able to settle on a (rough) topic: drum circles as related to the healing power of group therapy for juvenile trauma victims.

For those of you that may not realize the GRAVITY of that topic in my life - it's EARTH SHATTERING. As someone whose life-long dream is to one day be a member of the percussion group, STOMP, this couldn't be more invigorating. I'm writing a research paper on drum circle therapy.

((Excuse me while I do a little jig.))

A quote from A General Theory on Love, a textbook for Human Growth and Development, somehow puts into words what I often feel: that I can't express myself in such a way that is satisfying to me by just using words. You may not realize, but just having a blog is very difficult for me because I often don't feel like I'm saying what I really want to say. This is where music and artistic expression come in for me. This is why I need to play, hear, experience, and exude it.

The verbal rendition of emotional material thus demands a difficult transmutation. And so people must strain to force a strong feeling into the straitjacket of verbal expression. Often as emotionality rises, so do sputtering, gesticulation, and mute frustration. Poetry, a bridge between the neocortical and limbic brains, is simultaneously improbable and powerful. Frost wrote that a poem ‘beings as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with.’

Lewis, et. al, A General Theory of Love, p. 34

In addition to this project, my Theology class has been mind-blowing as well. My professor is a professional musician and has been teaching somewhat of a "musical theology" that has absolutely exploded the way I think about God, my relationship to God, and how God interacts with Godself and creation.

So we're reading Henri Nouwen's Return of the Prodigal Son, in which I am continually reminded of Frost's quote from above - experiencing "a homesickness" that is unexplainable. There aren't words for it, just a guttural, visceral longing.

Then we're learning about Trinitarian Theology in relation to Musical Space - trying to understand the Divine Trinity through music. She plays us parts of a Bach fugue to demonstrate that hearing a chord played on an instrument is a similar experience to the economic existence of the Trinity: how it works. Just because three different notes are played at the same time, doesn't make one not exist anymore. Actually, multiples notes being played together create a fuller, richer sound that fills the room. But just as three notes fill the room, so does a single note...

Stick with me.

...So that, "a different way of thinking about space is possible...a kind of space which is not the space of mutual exclusion but space as relational, a space which allows for overlapping and inter-penetration."

Jeremy Begbie

And also, “Tones relate to one another….Noises, odors, do not related to one another. They are connected only in my consciousness, not among themselves; they simply encounter me. Tones, on the contrary, encounter not only me but one another…in music, we experience space as order.”

Zuckerkandl, Sound & Symbol.

So here, this means that the different beings of the Trinity, like musical notes, actually draw in to one another. Somehow, in their perfection, they create the space for one another that not only allows for distinction and differentiation, but also for uniqueness. So that when their "chord" is played, we hear three distinct notes, but also one resonant sound.

Maybe this makes sense, maybe it doesn't. But essentially, for me, this is helping me understand myself in an entirely new way. A way that feels affirming; that the way I am, the way I operate makes sense. That because I think musically, and I connect differently to these things in a way that other people seem not to, might just be ok. It may actually be of God.

Who would have thought?

Things are moving.