The Problem of God

An interesting aspect of the college experience that often isn't highlighted is the ridiculous intersection of classes and experiences you get to have while you're there. That International Relations class you're taking gives you a reading that you talked about the week before in Ancient Greek. The conversation you had at rehearsal last night with the set designer comes up discussing seventeenth-century opera in your seminar the next day. By living at school, never being away from your studies, has the amazing ability to bring the most wide-ranging aspects of your academic life together with your regular life. A few days ago, as we all spilled out of our Intro Theology course, I heard my professor mention that the biggest problem humans have when engaging with the divine is language. We are incapable of describing in words our experience. That thought kept twirling in head until Concert Choir rehearsal, when an idea (the confluence of two entirely unrelated classes), popped into my head:

Music brings us closer to the divine because it transcends language and human understanding in a way quite similar to the divine. It transcends linguistic boundaries and touches an inner part of ourselves that we cannot reach with words alone.