Vocabulary. It's an odd feeling when in a conversation I am on the same page emotionally with someone else and yet words and distinct concepts are difficult. I have already stated in an earlier blog how me and my girlfriend Emily come from different religious backgrounds. I am Christian and she is Jewish. Since I take several religiously focused classes, lead a bible study, and am otherwise thinking about religious issues often the topic is approached between the two of us from time to time. In my presentation and in other entries I have discussed how religion becomes both an emotion and a knowledge based system and my frustrations with reconciling the two under set definitions or identities. I find that in this interreligious dialogue I am forced to focus more on the emotional experience and pass by much of the terminology because it is not shared. We both have different vocabularies of addressing the topic. At times this can be frustrating, other times it can be liberating. On the one hand, it makes the conversation difficult, on the other, it forces me to look outside of any preconcieved notions I have, look outside of myself essentially, and form a new common vocabulary based on the experience itself. I could no longer explain myself, my faith, in the ways I had always been taught growing up and instead form my own vocabulary, our own vocabulary, to address something we both feel but express in different ways. Here I also must be careful not to oversimplify the situation and say that our feelings or our spirituality are the same because there are differences that have to be accepted. However, it is a dialogue of acceptance and growth in both understanding and our relationsip.