Emotional Response

This is a little embarrassing (and Elizabeth makes fun of me for it), but on three different occassions, as I was driving my motorcycle to school in the morning, I started to cry.

The first time, in fact, I almost had to pull over and stop driving. Just before I pulled over, though, I imagined the sight of a white man sitting on a motorcyle in the middle of a busy farmer's market in Bangalore crying... and that made me laugh... so I was able to keep going. What is interesting is that I have no way to explain what emotion I was having. I was not sad. I was not hurt. I was not happy. There isn't a word to describe the emotion. At the time, I was listening to the Democracy Now podcast on my iPod and they were playing a speech by Martin Luther King the night before he was killed (the famous and prophetic "I may not get there with you" speech). I became overwhelmed with a strange mixture of emotions... sadness, to be sure; awe; inspiration; urgency; frustration; anger; and even some joy, just to mention a few. My point is that language is simply inadequate to describe such emotions.

The second time, I was actually listening to a Norah Jones interview on the
NPR Shuffle podcast. She started telling the story of her time in the recording studio with Ray Charles when she was just 20 years old or something. For some reason, I started to cry again. What is interesting is that I was at exactly the same farmer's market as the last time (this was about a week later). Once again, I have no word to describe the emotion.

The third time, once again I was listening to an NPR podcast and driving through exactly the same farmer's market. This time it was a story about Barbaro, the racehorse who had just been euthanized. Again, I started to cry. The mixture of emotions this time certainly included sadness, but also frustration and many other emotions, which I may explore in another blog later. But my point here is that we, as human people, have so many countless emotions, and no real way to express those emotions in words. There is an ineffability to life; a mystery that we can never understand about what makes us who we are; what makes us vulnerable; what makes us, well, human.

So, for anyone out there who might read this blog, family or stranger, I invite you to respond (anonymously if you prefer), with descriptions of emotions that you might have experienced that we have no word to describe. In my last sermon in New Jersey, I shared a phrase by Rudolph Otto that happens to be my favorite and, I think, is fitting here. It is the Mysterium Tremendum... the Mystery of Experience which is at once tremendous and trembling... Terrible and Terrific. It is this mystery, I think, that makes us who we are.