The Gospel according to George Bailey: Musings on “It’s a Wonderful Life”

As with most years, my wife and I sat in front of the fireplace and watched “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Perhaps it is because my Scots-Irish heritage goes back to the Bailey clan that I connect with George’s bildungsroman so well. I have to admit that I am a bit of a weeper when it comes to such things, and after years of watching the film (pretty much every Christmas since high school), it’s the same story and the same result: George Bailey, the everyman of America’s early 20th century – survivor rather than thriver of the American dream – feels his life is worthless and decides to kill himself. Given the chance to see what life would be like for everyone else if he had never been born, he finds that life is indeed the greatest gift of all. In its now iconic ending that Frank Capra sets up so well, all the townsfolk show up at George’s house to bring gifts of money (akin to suburban Magi), but the most important gift they bring is something George has had in spades all along: friendship that has endured for decades. George’s now-famous brother, Harry – a war hero and all-star football player – comes center stage and raises a glass in toast to “my big brother George, the richest man in town.” Everyone joins in the chorus of “Angels we have heard on high” and the bells of all christendom chime to announce not only that Clarence, the angel second class, has now got his wings – but that the world is not forgotten if we remember it and each other.

Needless to say – I love this stuff and it only gets better as the years press forward. Every stage of life draws a different emphasis in the film – I longed for a relationship like George and Mary’s courtship in my late 20’s, I saw the pain of George struggling with his dreams in relation to his occupation – a job he never wanted but was destined to fulfill. In my 40’s I watch George the family man – the guy who for all the good he is doing in the world comes home and creates chaos for his wife and kids. Here is a guy I can relate to all-too-well – the darkness of anxiety and fear that you bring home with you and find leaks out into your relationships with those most dear to you. The looks on his children’s faces when he explodes in the living room should be required viewing for every father – it doesn’t get more real than this guys…

That said, as I face Christmas Eve with my children this season – I will be raising a glass to George Bailey amidst the darkness of the day as well as the light. Here is to taking another step into the world with faith rather than fear…here is to not having all the answers…here is to the courage to say “I am so sorry” when we explode like monsters in the presence of our kids and wife and see our dark humanity all-too-well… and here is to friends and the community of saints that surround us that remind us that despite all this we can live another day to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.

Here’s lookin at you, George Bailey… Merry Christmas…

(view the ending at YouTube.com here… but have some Kleenex with you…)

Top recordings of 2009 – the final four downloads

well… last week I started my top 9 list for 2009 spelling out the first five downloads and streamings for the year.   This week will round off the final four for 2009.  So… without further adieu…

4. Mark Knopfler, Get Lucky – As I have said in other postings, I have had the privilege of attending schools with great music alumni – Garfield High School (Jimi Hendrix, Quincy Jones) and University of Glasgow in Scotland (Eric Clapton went to the Glasgow School of Art for a spell).  Glasgow is a city of great musical heritage – whether being the port from which Johnny Cash’s grandparents set sail from for America or the emo arthouse stylings of Belle and Sebastian it is a rich place to be from.  Mark Knopfler is certainly no exception.  Born in Glasgow and later to be the lead singer/songwriter for Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler is simply one of THE great rock guitarists out there.    With the release of Get Lucky this year, Knopfler has now released equal amounts of music as a solo artist as well as the lead for Dire Straits which makes this release an important shift.  Many reviewers are luckwarm to brazenly thumbs down about the album, but I frankly find Knopfler’s storytelling only growing more grounded with every release.  From the opening strains of pennywhistle, brushes rapid fire on the snare and rabid fiddle playing wrapping around the opening line “Southern bound from Glasgow town, she’s shining in the sun/My Scotstoun lassie, on a border run…” on the lead track “Border Reiver” you know this is a supreme Celtic shout out through and through.  The album rounds off with “So far from the Clyde” and “Piper to the End” in the event that you didn’t pick up the post code of this release and is a strong CD all the way through.  As always, Knopfler’s guitar technique is front and center on a number of tracks, but it is the sage-like musings of the seasoned storyteller that takes you back in this CD. The lost soldiers on “Remembrance Day” recalls the bitterness of loss amidst war that “Brothers in Arms” did in the Reagan era, the track “Before Gas and TV” opens wide the storyline of “Money for Nothing” without the irony – a working class outside the stream of change and not included in the vision of upward mobility that continues to frame a consumer culture.  It is unfortunate that the reviewers didn’t catch the Glasgow vibe – many simply wishing for another “Sultans of Swing” or “Money for Nothing”.  But standing against the artists out there, Knopfler is a giant and the waters of the Clyde flow through words and finger picking…

3. mewithoutyou, it’s all crazy! it’s all false! it’s all a dream! it’s alright - I mentioned this in an earlier posting on my facebook page, but I once again will admit to being very, very late to this party.  I had the privilege of working with a student on her honors project this past term and through her reflections she introduced me to mewithoutyou. Yes, there is a debt Aaron Weiss (singer, chief wordsmith and religious vagabond for the band) must pay to Sufjan Stevens, The Polyphonic Spree and the Handsome Family for kicking open the door for this “hey, let’s play crazy music with whatever we find laying around but make it so compelling that people will listen deeply rather than run away” genre.  But what separates mewithoutyou from the fray of Sufjan Stevens wannabes is the depth and integrity with which Aaron Weiss had been willing to go in his creativity and seeking after the muse regardless of what religious camp they may find themselves.  Having signed with Tooth and Nail a few years back, the band flew a distinctive alternative Christian band flag with the proper noun in their band title – mewithoutYOU.  These days, Weiss considers himself to be a theological freegan polyglot finding hybridized meaning in his readings equally of a Greek morality play rendered by a Sri Lankan teacher named M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen from a children’s book (click on this hyperlink to see the video to the song “The Fox, The Crow and the Cookie” which bears a striking resemblance to Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” aesthetic), Christian traditions as seen in the revisioning of King David in “The angel of death came to David’s room” to the turning to Sufism with his anthem that anchors the CD entitled “Allah, Allah, Allah”.  In this move toward seeking wisdom from such seemingly polarizing sources has left many scratching their heads – some calling Weiss a “backslider” and betrayer of the Christian faith to those who denounce this theological journey as merely a play for a wider audience.  It takes courage to journey into such waters and for fans of a certain stripe it will take more than courage… it will take faith.  And perhaps that is what mewithoutyou is offering their audience after all is said and done.

2. Bob Dylan, Christmas in the Heart – of all the releases this year, this has probably been met with more befuddlement mixed with rage and disappointment than any other.  This is of course due to His Royal Bobness ‘(HRB) rabid fan base  coupled with Dylan being the closest thing to a living legend that American popular music has still recording that existentially stems from the folk revolution of the late 1950s.  As a bearer of a legacy, Dylan’s every move is watched and turned over and over.  On a recent Kindlings Muse podcast we tackled the question of Dylan and his legacy through such artists as Fleet Foxes and Sufjan Stevens.  During the Q and A portion of the show, one of the audience members asked bottom line question – “So, where is Bob Dylan going?” It seems that he has gone right to the heart of American chestnuts – the Christmas song – and played it straight up.  Some reviewers think that this project is nothing more than a joke – basically an ironic mockery of the Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, et. al.  industry of tree-trimming carols that assault shoppers in malls and become the stuff of disdain for children as their parents remember their past.  These are people – IMHO – who still think that irony and sarcasm are the twinned voices of the generation.  No, I listen to these gems and hear nothing by honor and a tapping into something so much deeper than irony.  To his credit, I think the home and hearth that HRB is crowing on about in these standards is a home that the man who sang “Like a Rolling Stone” would like to come to rest in.  Like George Bailey in the finale of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, I think HRB is tired of singing alone and would love a singalong.  Mark my words all you naysayers… this is a recording that will be with us… and we will be better for it.  And of the nine downloads I have listened, this is as guilt free as it gets – all proceeds from the sales of the CD will provide 500,000 meals to school children in the developing world through the World Food Programme, 15,000 meals to homeless people in the United Kingdom through Crisis and more than 4 million meals to 1.4 million families in America through Feeding America.  Take that you cynics…

1. U2, No Line on the Horizon - Sure, they are the biggest band in the world and may be the biggest band in the short history of rock and roll (the jury is out) – so why can’t they have the biggest and best release of the year?  Yes, perhaps there is no surprise here for those who follow Theology Kung Fu (which one friend called a “U2 lovesite”), but when I heard the first single “Get On Your Boots” I honestly thought “so, this is it, isn’t it?  U2 are trying to re-capture some energy but this feels all wrong.”  But then the album was released and the digging into the album began and as I have written in many venues (my theological reflections on No Line on the Horizon were published as an article here)  this is yet another masterpiece of production, songcraft, and zeitgeist ready-at-handness hitting hard on questions of faith, war, poverty, racial discord, and what it means to be human.  The current 360 tour only seals it for me – this is U2’s year yet again and it is… wait for it… “magnificent” (click here to watch the boys perform “magnificent” during their weeklong stint on David Letterman… to see is to believe).

Well friends, that is the list.  Let the dogs of war loose – what did I miss?  where did I hit the nail on the head?  Where would you put these?

Top recordings of 2009 – 9 downloads to consider before the New Year

Like most people I both love and detest “best of” lists – I often gawk at what people choose (I mean, do the Oscars EVER get it right?) but at the same time can’t keep myself from pouring over them.  With that, I culled through my downloads and streaming for the year and akin to past Theology Kung Fu lists, have let the year set the number.  So here are my nine recordings to consider for download and streaming (you will see why I make this designation as you look at the list) before singing Auld Lang Syne at your New Years party:

9. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse with David Lynch, Dark Night of the Soul

One of the marks of this decade was the move of artists to (in the words of the Flobots) ‘fight with tools’ such as Garage Band, Facebook and MySpace to subvert the industrial strangehold on music distribution to varying degrees of success.  In the vain of Radiohead releasing ‘In Rainbows’ for ‘donation only’ via the web, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse teamed up with a bevy of artists to record an amazing album true to its Carmelite title -  a homage to St. John of the Cross’ passive purgation into the ‘dark night of the soul.’  Filmmaker and auteur David Lynch (he of Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead fame) joined in to create filmic versions of the project as well as producing a photo journal.  The entire project was slated to be released with EMI this Fall but the project was pulled.  But if the move to the ‘computing cloud’ has taught us anything it is that no power on heaven or earth can stop the world wide web.  The album can be heard in its entirety via NPR’s First Listen site here.

My favorite track: Suzanne Vega on “The Man who would play God” and Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals on “Just War”

8. Fanfarlo, Reservoir

Lovers of Hey Marseilles, Arcade Fire, Beirut will find a home with Fanfarlo’s bookishly twee graduate student  aesthetics.  Similar to the Decemberist’s Victorian revisionism, the London sextet took their name from, of all places, from a book by the 19th century French critic Charles Baudelaire. As lead singer Simon Balthazar said in an interview on NPR “I was reading French symbolists at the time, and I sort of just reached out on the table and there was this book [by Baudelaire].”  Keeping with Baudelaire’s romantic sensibilities, Fanfarlo blend cello, violin, trumpet and mandolin into literate reflective flow that feels both at home at the circus and the critical theory post grad seminar.

7. The Flaming Lips/Stardust – “Borderline” off the Covered: A Revolution in Sound compilation

It probably isn’t fair to put just one song… let alone a cover song… let alone a cover of a Madonna hit from the 1980’s… in a list of “best of” releases at the end of the 21st century, but what can I say?  Wayne Cody, frontman for The Flaming Lips teamed up with Stardeath and White Dwarfs (which is fronted by his nephew Dennis Cody) to record this freaking AMAZING revisioning of this Madonna chestnut of yore. Like Madonna – while the songs made for great fun on the dance floor, it was the visuals with the dawn of MTV that grafted music to image for all time and this isn’t missed by the Lips.  As with all things Flaming Lips, there is the tinge of spaceman irony in their aesthetic – to hear them is to see them as it were with the big bunny suits and huge plastic beachballs. As the Lips toured this year they threw this cover into the mix to roaring acclaim and you can see why in the video of the song.  As the song builds, watch Wayne Cody in the background with his Emo puffy coat banging the large gong while his nephew in the argyle vest throws his hair around like Kurt Cobain at prep school and think “I bet Thanksgiving is a riot at their place…”

(btw – the Covered compilation that has this track also has a cover of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” by… wait for it… Adam Sandler. Yes… THAT Adam Sandler.  He sings it straight up and it isnt that bad…)

6. Neko Case, Middle Cyclone

When Fox Confessor Brings the Flood came out, the days of Neko Case being the secret crush of KEXP and NPR listeners was over.  With that CD, the sometime-singer in The New Pornographers whose pure voice channeling Patsy Cline, swirling lyricism of a bookworm, and non-sequitur arrangements forged by someone who spent too much time on craigslist (she bought up 100 pianos on craigslist and stored them in her barn… go figure) came to roost.  While the 2009 release of Middle Cyclone wasn’t quite the level of genius that was Fox Confessor, it still stood head and shoulders over many of the releases this past year.  Her cover of “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Nature” stands in the middle of the playlist as a tent pole for the eco-centric themes running throughout – whether it is the fact that Killer Whales get their name for a reason in “People Got a Lot of Nerve”  to the 30 minute plus (yes… 30 minute plus) ending track “Marais la nuit” which is just the sounds of her backyard at twilight (I wonder how many people just download that single…) it is really a tour d’force.

5. The Mountain Goats, The Life of the World to Come

I first came across the Mountain Goats (the band fronted by John Darnielle) with their release “The Sunset Trees” a few years back and especially the single “This Year” which is a rousing singalong that I usually play every year now on my birthday and love the “maybe this year in Jerusalem!”

There is a level of irony that so-called Christian bands will try to reach their audience by making their songs as abstracted and removed from biblical references as possible with not so much as a fish symbol on their CD cover art, yet a deeply ‘secular’ band like the Mountain Goats will release an album of songs whose titles are all direct biblical citations.  To read the linear notes and track listing in “The Life of the World to Come” is to get more engagement with the Bible than a year of Sundays in half the rock band churches popping up in warehouses everywhere.

Yet rather than either dismiss the project as the work of a cynic or disregard the songs as having no hermeneutic relation to the texts cited in the title, take a moment and just listen to the stories that Darnielle spins forth in each track with a Bible in your lap.

“Matthew 25:21” takes the parable of the Sheep and the Goats into the room of Darnielle’s mother-in-law as she is dying of cancer.  When you think of his chosen text as a rendering of promise for the “good and faithful servant to go into the joy of the Lord” it puts irony out in the hallway.   For U2 fans, Psalm 40 is considered almost untouchable since the definitive version anchored their “War” LP in 1983.  That said, the Mountain Goats take in “Psalms 40:2” is a kicker with a pulsing bass line fronted with Darnielle’s charistmatically frantic voice proclaiming “He has fixed his sign in the sky / He has raised me from the pit and set me high” that he is seeming to dare God to save him.  In “Genesis 30:3,” Darnielle sits at an old beaten piano singing about a kind of love few songwriters have the courage to reflect on let alone sing aloud.  Here Rachel, the beloved of Jacob, offers her maidservant Bilhah to her husband so that they can bear a child: “I will do what you ask me to do / Because of how I feel about you” sings Darnielle with a weight to his voice that speaks of love, understanding and pain in ways that much of what is called CCM could learn from.

I will upload my top 4 downloads tomorrow… any guesses what will make the number 1 spot?

The ‘oughts’: a decade embracing the ‘cloud’, the ‘Long tail’ and the end of the CD era

With the end of a decade comes the flood of lists – best movies, best CDs, biggest changes of the decade, man and women of the decade. etc.  Pundits are racing to label this first decade of the 21st century – depending on whether you are a glass half empty person or glass half full, you could say that this has been the decade (00) of the ‘naughts’ or the ‘oughts’ (as in ‘ought 5′, ‘ought 6′).   While those who have read my musings both here and elsewhere would say that I lean toward the cynic repose, I will say that the past 10 years deserve to be seen as the decade of the ‘ought’: whether framed by the stunning political upheavals in the Presidential race with the election of Barak Obama – a relative unknown at the beginning of the new century who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as Commander and Chief today, or the economic upheavals of the end of this decade where people are scrambling to make sense of a consumer culture without the means to sustain consumerism resulting in not only a loss of jobs, homes, and lifestyle – but a serious crisis of identity as well (“if I can’t spend… who am I?”).   One of the greatest shifts of this decade has been the full-on embrace of what has been termed as “The Long Tail” phenomena.   The term was framed in the middle of the decade by Chris Anderson, an editor at Wired magazine, who essentially argued that where much of consumer choice was framed by access to goods found in traditional ‘brick and mortar’ shops which were limited to inventory and therefore shops were driven only to stock items that were deemed the most popular and generally appealing – the ‘oughts’ have fully realized the shift to online retailers such as Amazon and iTunes and as such have essentially endless ’shelf space’ (a phrase that will quaint to my children in the years to come).  Anderson puts it this way in his 2004 Wired article cited above:

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There’s the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to ’80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don’t have the distribution clout to get into Tower [Records] at all.

There is perhaps no greater example of this revolution in economics and seismic lifestyle shift during the ‘oughts’ than the rise of the iPod and iPhone driven by iTunes.  Akin to the Facebook explosion where people began reconnecting with people they barely spoke to in high school and now share status update quips with on a daily basis, now with the advent of the digital music player, the ubiquity of laptops and now netbooks, and the move away from server mentality to ‘cloud computing‘,  the flow of music and video is no longer restricted by shelf space at the corner Tower Records (R.I.P) or big box Walmart.  While iTunes still operates on a purchase model – you buy the 99 cent download and therefore ‘own’ the song on your music device –  services like Zune and Rhapsody have a pure ‘cloud’ model where you merely pay a subscription to their library and while you never ‘own’ the music you are listening to, you can listen to it as long as you wish and trade it out when Lady GaGa (who I have to admit frames the mantra of the ‘oughts’ – “I want your everything as long as its free” –  in her zeitgeisty song/video “Bad Romance” which will stick in your head for days… so just be warned before listening/viewing gets irritating or simply embarrassing to have on your playlist.

What this essentially signals is the end of the CD era as we turn the page on this decade in a matter of weeks and rush face first into 2010.  Having lived thus far through rise and fall (and rising again) of various media delivery modes – whether it be vinyl, 8 track, cassette, CD and now digital download and streaming – what is apparent as we enter the next decade is that while we will continue to listen to music, it will be with our head in the proverbial and yet very real ‘cloud’ as much as with our feet on the dance floor.

Stay tuned – Theology Kung Fu will be posting our ‘oughts’ wrap up posting in a couple days…

As the year ended in 2008, I posted my top 8 CDs for the year here on Theology Kung Fu – a list not so much of ‘new music’ but music that was certainly new to me or at least renewed to me via the growing use of digital media.  This is what , predicted in his theory called ‘The Long Tail’

Freedom of the Self – finishing editing on the book

The work on my book – Freedom of the Self: Cultural Identity and the Mission of God at the Crossroads – is wrapping up this month and will be sent off to the publisher in early January 2010. More to come!

Advent 1: Silence in Luke 1 before song

This past Monday The Kindlings Muse had their annual Christmas show at Hale’s Pub in Fremont.  Always an eclectic gathering (read: island of misfit toys) of passionate artists, writers, singer/songwriters, and book worms reflecting on this season.  For my part, I read a portion of an unpublished book I have had sitting on my hard drive for the past three years entitled ‘Fear Not! – Reflections on the Sounds of Christmas‘.  Basically,  as the title points to, I trace the ‘fear not’ refrain from Isaiah 41 through the various uses in the New Testament.  One of the chapters of the book looks at Luke 1 where Zecharias the husband of Elizabeth (Mary’s cousin and soon-to-be mother of John the Baptist) is praying in the temple when he is visited by the angel Gabriel who announces that his wife, advanced in age, will give birth to a son.  In many churches, Advent is about the ‘popular’ stories of the season – the shepherds in the fields, Joesph and Mary travelling to Bethlehem for the census, Mary’s Magnificant where she declares that her ’soul magnifies the Lord’ (we can all hear Handel’s musical score at this point).  But before everyone starts breaking into a version of ‘High School Musical’ in bathrobes under the Palestinian moonlight, there is silence.  Zechariah upon hearing that there is no reason to fear turns his well-heeled overly educated mind to Gabriel’s announcement and questions how such a thing could even be possible?  Certainly a valid question for many of us – how indeed.  How can the Divine break into our lives without so much as an Outlook calendar invite?  How can an angelic visitor come into a very busy schedule of pious prayer, interrupt, and expect anything but serious questioning?  To say that Zecharias reminds me of many of my clergy friends during this time of year is a vast understatement.  To put a sharper point on it – I think we skip preaching on this passage of Luke because it simply hits too close to home.  But there it is: the religious professional doing everything ‘right’ as the guild expects of him, yet misses the forest for the proverbial trees.  The result of this theophany? Silence.  Zecharias loses his ability to agree or disagree with the message before him and has to just “be” in the midst of the gathering glory – no longer able to either validate or invalidate what is taking place.  Probably the most painful place for a religious leader in many ways – to just “be” in the midst of the swirling events.   Elizabeth can now be heard – given voice in the narrative along with Mary with some of the most important insights into what the coming of Christ will mean and how we are to prepare a place in both our hearts and the world for this Emmanuel moment (something certain churches that denounce women’s leadership should take note of as well lest an angel shut their mouths as well …)

So Silence comes before the Song in our story.  Advent begins with waiting in the quiet…

Let those of us that have ears… be still…

Manhood after Tiger Woods – caught between ‘Wild at Heart’ and ‘Slacker’

In a recent article by Tom Matlack in the Huffington Post entitled “Tiger Woods and the State of Modern Manhood”, Matlack zeros in on this latest account of fallen sports icons as an accounting for what he sees as the demise of manhood in America.  As he surmises in the article:

Guys we are at a crossroads. You can go back into the cave if you want to but it isn’t going to do you, or your family, any good. The guys I know, from investment bankers to Marines, are asking themselves how they can possibly be good fathers, sons, husbands, and workers at the same time. In a way its what women have struggled with for decades but us guys are just facing into as the challenge of a “he-cession” at work and increased expectations at home have us reeling.

Does Matlack have a point worth considering?  Is he just a whiner who needs to ‘man up’, get to work, and stop watching Dr. Phil?  As the author spins his story of overindulgence in the consumer ideals of the so-called American dream that lead to his marriage falling apart and his identity collapsing around him, you do feel a level of sorrow and wonder what is indeed happening to our culture as it concerns men.  The question interests me as well as a teacher who works with young adults in their college years – what developmental theorist Erik Erickson calls the “moratorium from adulthood” and a period of life Cat Stevens mused as being “on the road to find out.”  I work alongside young men in their early 20s who continue to choose essentially two paths:

(1) entwine themselves with charismatic 21st century Robert Bly/Iron John/’Wild at Heart’ types who spin tales of manhood as a thing forged in the Black Forest amidst the terror of hordes of Orcs, framed in the flickering light of epic battles of yore, and promise mentorship in exchange of unswerving allegiance.  In short, many of the neo-Calvinist church plants catering to middle class America who see manhood as certainty of strength through force of will rather than faith, hope and love and as the mark  and virtue of a true man fall into this camp.

(2) The disenfranchised/misunderstood/maligned socially aware social justice artist who sees the role of manhood framed as the critic par excellence.   These young men fall into the hippie cum grunge cum slacker cum ‘have-hoodie-and-iPod-will-travel’ aesthetic that dance on the edge of things often journaling in the coffee shop while the world burns around them.  This is the underachiever who is the overly idealistic and tells all who listen what is wrong and how things should be yet won’t step out to change things beyond the sphere of their shaker snow globe of well-meaning egalitarianism.

Is there another model?  Is there some option beyond these polar extremes?

The Z factor and the end of Church – is it really happening?

There are have been proclamations, rants, even celebrations by some that with the fall in church attendance across the mainline Christian denominations that the days of “going to church” are quickly coming to an end.  By this I mean the days of packing the family up in the car and driving to a Sunday morning worship service, perhaps Sunday school and fellowship hall gatherings over burned coffee and cookies fresh out of a box.  To this bit of Americana I would have to agree – the days of this picture are fading faster than a Polaroid on a bulletin board (note: given that Kodak is discontinuing the Polaroid line, this metaphor is ironically fading out as well).

Is this such a bad thing? Well, a number of post-church (aka ‘emergent’) folks have been banging this drum for most of the late 1990’s and into the current century and have made quite a nice living on book deals and speaking gigs that have stirred the dismay and questioned the notion of “church” as a modernist construct to the point of people gathering around their books and conferences rather than as collectives of the Body of Christ.  Those who attend many of these “we are different” and”embrace Otherness” and  ”not your father’s Christianity” and “meaning as Twitter feed”  gatherings seem to keep coming and the folks who put them on are able to pay their mortgages so something is working, right?   (btw –  many so-called ‘emergent’ folks will ‘hate on’ this alignment of “emergent” = “post-church”… but emergent folks hate on any label… kinda cute actually…)

That said, my worry goes deeper than the business models of the so-called ‘different without a Creed’ gatherings.  My worry is that ultimately ‘the Church is Christ in the world’ (a phrase stated rather boldly by Dietrich Bonhoeffer)  and as such has such a brutally fractured presence in the world that it resembles the torn apart corpse of the Levites concubine in Judges 19-22 (if you are interested in this troubling section of the Hebrew Bible that is never preached on and not found in any lectionary, my colleague Frank Spina provides a great lecture on iTunesU available here)

What is left of the presence of the church other than torn apart, sun-bleached and picked over chunks of flesh and bone fragments as Christians continue to passively participate in ever-shrinking circles of affinity that rarely engage a larger conversation that could mean the end of their perspective and the beginning of some new relationship?

This is the question that is driving my book project entitled “The Z factor” which is a meditation on the words of the Minor Prophets and in particular the book of Zechariah.  It is something I have been musing over for a while and feel that it is time to kick start the project again.  I will be posting thoughts on it over the coming weeks and look forward to your contributions and help in musing these questions over…

‘We are born of sound’, or why you need to get Alex Ross’ book NOW

I am a bit late to the game in picking up Alex Ross’ Pulitzer Prize winning “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” and can’t say enough good things about it.  Ross is the chief Music Critic and an Editor for the New Yorker magazine and has pulled together a seminal primer for ‘reading’ the evolution of culture in the 20th century through the music that formed our lives and times.  Ross stakes a claim early in the introduction that “twentieth-century classical composition…sounds like noise to many…yet these sounds are hardly alien.  Atonal chords crop up in jazz, avant-grade sounds appear in Hollywood film scores; minimalism has marked rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward.  Sometimes the music resembles noise because it is noise, or near to it by design.  Sometimes, as with Berg’s Wozzeck, it mixes the familiar and the strange, consonance and dissonance.  Sometimes it is so singularly beautiful that people gasp in wonder when they hear it.”

I love this description and the way Ross is so spirited in his call for us to move from being passive listeners toward an engagement as full participants in the music that fills our iPods and cascades out of the windows and doorways of dorm rooms and bars, concert halls and the church sanctuary.  As I wrote in a recent theological review of U2’s recent album “No Line on the Horizon”, music is something that shapes and ultimately frames not merely marking the memories *of* experiences we partake in, but literally *are* the experiences themselves.  For many of us, music is as vital to what it means to be alive as anything else.  We return to the songs that give us hope, provide companionship in the midst of lament, carve out space for reflection and lay out a map for our journey both in recovering our past and forging into the hope of a redeemed future.  ”We are born of sound” muses Bono in the song “Breathe” off “No Line on the Horizon” and I believe he is absolutely correct.  To read The Rest is Noise to realize just how profound the birth of the twentieth century is and the genius that is found in the music we have been midwifed by into the life we now hold so dear.

exhaustion and imagination – on too much travel and the boundaries of identity

I am have been travelling quite a bit recently – a different city and a different conference for three weekends of the past four.  Venturing from the sublime (U2 academic conference in Durham, NC) to the ridiculous (was in a booth across from a disco dancing Yeti under a mirror ball blaring the Michael Jackson back catalog at the YS National Youth Workers Convention in LA) to the somber and informative (the AYME conference where I gave a paper on racial identity in teens in Louisville, KY), in the immortal words of Jerry Garcia – “oh what a long strange trip it’s been.”

I am pretty beat up after all this travelling and frankly marvel as frequent business travelers who keep up this pace.  It is utterly de-humanizing to be travelling those distances in that period of time.  I was bumped up to first class on one leg of a trip and got a taste of what happens to people who travel that much – people shoving their overhead luggage into you so they can secure a spot, barking at the stewardess for yet another drink, grunting at the elderly as they attempt to get off the plane with limited mobility.  I kept thinking “so THIS is what the boys in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” would have become if they had traveled by plane as opposed to ship…”

Being bone tired makes you realize your limits and on a spiritual level offers a space to consider what it is that makes us human.  Exhaustion is the end of the bell curve and I am beginning to see it as the polar opposite from imagination.  The lack of human intimacy, the frantic blur of locales and yet the utter banality of hotel rooms in drab sameness, the lack of distinctiveness in food all add up to a vacuum that provides no resources nor encouragement to even consider possibilities and a vision larger than just making it through another metal detector and TSA strip search.

Frankly, I am too tired to even know what to do with this… but at least I am home to think about it.