"Don't wait for the hearse to take you to church" is what the placard had been reading in front of the Baptist church across the way from my driveway for the past few weeks. Some fellow, and honestly, it wasn't me, decided to have a little scrambling fun and change it to "Cha Cha Your Heart Out." Not only did this scramble-wise lettersmith change the message, they changed the message.

This revision is timely; the winter is at it's grayest and most seemingly desperate to exact a tax of frost and bitterness from we who trudge awkwardly through it. The sun gains a minute a day, yet this is hard to notice when thick and thin ice intermittently become that which holds your body up. "Cha Cha" is definitely in order, should a hearse barrel down the highway we should be dancing after it, a gaggle of salsaleros in it's dark wake, generating light and color of our own amid the monochrome cold.

If anything, this message is timely also for the church. Not the actual building itself, but indeed the whole worldwide family of faith that has struggled to serve a hopeful message in a world deluded with the usual suspects; war, famine, apathy and over-consumption. Have religious communities, even the most progressive and advanced, shed the trappings of power and the brokering of such? Has policy replaced individual faith as a tenet more meaningful in the global dia/monologue? Is there transparency in our doctrinal umbrellas, or are the shields becoming thicker and making more partisans in the global search for meaning?

Well, it's a gray area, just like the slumbering mountainsides. We see signs of openness, such as the unprecedented amount of interfaith dialogue, and at the same time, Israel for one is being decimated by all sides in an effort to secure their faith in a position of power. Has the spiritual state of the world nudged one hyper-generalized iota toward our present understandings of the cosmos? I think to the latter, the answer is a meek yes, riddled with stage fright and wobbly knees. But it's being pushed forward, and has no choice but to be confident, cracking voice and all. It's growing up, it has to, because we are.

Daily, we're undoing what we used to know about reality. The science sections of our mass and messed media broadcasts are becoming more like a stroll through alchemical tomes and long held shamanic visions of the 'real reality.' We're stopping and bending light, inventing whole new forms and rules of matter, going beyond matter to view that void that permeates everything. What we know is dust on a chalkboard and the eraser hasn't seen any rest. I'd like to think that evolution is continuing not only with our organism but with the organisms we've created to interpret the mysteries we're embedded in. Religion, in the capital R sense of the word, has make remarkable changes in the past hundred years, but on the whole these changes are cosmetic and fashionable. But where is the "Cha Cha" in the quest to connect, to discern and do good work? It's in you.

The concept of religion, these different teams all scampering about trying to achieve the same thing, is moving from a 'corporate' model to an 'incorporate' model, with you as the gatherer and the stitcher of the ideas into one warm quilt. We're making religion into spirituality; moving from a system where we're born into 'the Company' and thus brought up in it's ways, to making choices and discovering what's useful to us, what guides us on the way and gives us structure. So many people have a discovered, via the wild current of information flowing with more of a gush than ever before, cross-cultural wisdom. Westerners can see themselves in the Tao, and can just as easily slip on their Saturday best and see the same ideas in the synagogue. Or the side of a mountain. Or in a historical novel. Or in art. We're in a bind because we will continue to need Popes and Lamas, Gurus, Shamans and Houngans to dispense the knowledge we crave, but we're assimilating it in ways that handedly dispel borders, rivalries and dogmas. In our cosmopolitan mixing and matching, we're discovering that so many themes of universality, the ubiquitous nuances of human experience, to be more useful than the one channel network of wisdom that served our ancestors. But even if we discount the most archaic and anachronistic of these, we lose the context of our own personal metamorphoses. We need them, and we need them to get along.

So, westerners desiring knowledge from specific paths only to blend these into an amalgam... is that alright? Yes, as long as we acknowledge and respect our sources. In our curiosity, we can create a deeper context for understanding the global, by respecting these ancient rivers of faith which course through our new cities. We shan't muddy them up, but we will party on the docks. For the joy in seeing that, despite the symbols and customs, we're all yearning for the same thing, we can connect in ways never before permitted, making for richer lives with more and more nodes and hubs of meaning. There is rapture in knowing our souls are all designed to speak the same language.

I am fully cognizant that this is a rosy picture painted with a brush made of horsehair generalizations. It's impossible ever to lump all spiritual experience into some easily configurable theory. I write this as a bumpkin on a rock watching little bits of stuff float down an icy stream. But, from these little bits, there are clues. And even if the clues don't match up, it's worth it to put the idea out there, to press for change, to advocate a feeling, that hopefully it may catch. The idea itself has been around for a long time, and it will continue to circulate and percolate. While it's winding through, it's hard to notice the effects. But a little time changes that perspective, quick. In the next hundred years, backing up to examine the state of our faith, ho-hum or Cha Cha, it'll be extremely hard to say that things wouldn't have changed. It may be downright evolutionary/revolutionary. The First Church of Fermionic Condensate, anyone?

So, to that prophetic rearranger of messages, cheers, and thank you. While church elders are likely to be steamed at your apparent jest, I know you mean well. You're slipping us a more positive note, an invitation rather than an admonishment. From the Hopis to those on the Hajj, from the Baptists to the Buddhists, from the seagulls to Sirius, we'll take you up on your offer, though I can only speak for me, and of those just mentioned that reside in me. Let's have a Conga line through communion and dance the Merengue toward the expansion of meaningfulness in our brief but glittery lives. Let's crack a smile as we sashay through the goodness and wisdom that has been left for us, and weave it into our own style, wearing a legacy whereever we go.

I'm not going to wait for the hearse to take me to church when I can Cha Cha my heart out right now. That's my church: being in the dance, on a crowded dancefloor full of seekers moving in the light, moving in their own way, interpreting the music with their unique bodies, and putting all the motions together into something totally original, new, and something that works and feels good for them. Under it all, is a drumbeat older than any of the ideas we hold dear or let flutter by us. May each step in the dance honor that, and guide us in the Cha Cha.

Revision: in the third paragraph, there was an odd mix-up: I had family instead of famine. Trust me, being a Joslin ain't all that bad.