Be unwritten yet inspired

I think my most favorite song in the world is Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield. Part of the chorus goes like this:

“No one else, no one else / Can speak the words on your lips / Drench yourself in words unspoken / Live your life with arms wide open / Today is where your book begins / The rest is still unwritten.”

This week is the week of Pentecost, the birthday of the Christian church according to the story in the second chapter of the book of Acts in the Bible. It was the day that tradition and story dictates the Holy Spirit brought down breath upon those who had gathered, allowing them the ability to be universal translators, so to speak, and share the news of Jesus with everyone.

πνεῦμα (pneuma) was the word that was used in that passage. It’s a Greek word that means breath or wind, but is often used in religious context when one is talking about the Spirit. It also appears as the root in words dealing with the respiratory system, like pneumonia, pneumology, etc.

Consequentially, the word inspire also comes from a word meaning breath. In Latin, the word is spirare, and is the root for words like inspire (“to fill with the urge or ability to do or feel something”) and the word conspire (“to act or work together toward the same result or goal”), amongst others.

If you’re a word geek like me, you can go look up other words with both of those roots…… I’ve spent many hours going down such rabbit holes.

Any who.

There’s a point to this, I promise.

This week also starts the month of Pride. And if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’d know that I consider myself an ally of the LGBTQIA+ community, even if I am not fully up on all of the lingo and make a few missteps along the way. I belong to a church that recently adopted to be Open and Affirming.

Some would question this decision. Some would say we are conspiring to be a part of the world and not “godly”. Some would say this lacks inspiration. And those people would be correct, as far as their viewpoints allow them to be. After all, there are weapons within the words we all chose to follow. There is some truth to what they say, as far as they know.

But here’s the thing. We cannot speak the words that aren’t on our own lips. We should not live our lives with arms that are closed off. Because that very same Spirit that gave breath to the first church in the Book of Acts long ago also gives each of us the inspiration to be universal translators of those that are lost, however that may be. And with that inspiration comes instructions to love one another, welcome the foreigner, help the poor, support the marginalized, love mercy and be the hands and feet of the church.

But humans tend to focus only on a few words and not the entire inspiration. And then they conspire together to exclude those who are part of the whole just to make themselves better.

Another line of Unwritten goes like this:

“I break tradition / Sometimes my tries are outside the lines / We’ve been conditioned to not make mistakes / but I can’t live that way, oh, no.”

Don’t get me wrong, traditions can be great.

But they can also be terrible injustices. Slavery was once traditional. Denying votes to women was once traditional. Excluding people from places because of their ethnicities was once traditional. And in those cases, it took someone breaking from the tradition to make it not so traditional.

But even those things that we deem as “traditional” really aren’t traditional for everyone. Take for instance, the Lord’s Prayer or the Doxology. I don’t think I have been in two churches in my lifetime that use the same words for those, yet any time anyone tries to change the form used in a singular church, there are people who hem and haw about how the current version is the “traditional one.”

Breaking traditions also can mean progress.  If Johannes Gutenberg didn’t break tradition in 1440 and create the printing press, perhaps you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

As for making mistakes…. Well, everyone, including the church, makes those. But if we don’t  question traditions, make mistakes, and speak the words on our lips… Are we even being inspired by the breath that is the Spirit in the first place?

Here’s a video of Unwritten if you wanted to listen to the song.

So magical friends…. Live your life with arms wide open. Be inspired. Break traditions.

Be unwritten, but write your own story.

Happy Pentecost.

Stay magical.

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