The Freaks Outside, the Freaks Inside

"It's not even the U.S.A., its the soul of Western man that is in the very act of flying apart HERE and NOW."

(Love in the Ruins)

"Ima tell you something and it's just gonna be between you and me. I think folks carry on about heaven too much, like it's some kind of all you can eat buffet up in the clouds and folks just do as they told so they can eat what they want behind some pearly gates. There's sinning in my heart, there's evil in the world but when I got no one, I talk to God. I ask for strength, I ask for forgiveness, not peace at the end of my days when I got no more life to live or no more good to do but today, right now... What's your heaven?"

(Black Snake Moan)


These are two quotes that reached out and hit me between the eyes this week, and I think that--somehow--they're connected. The first is the statement of a psychiatrist in Walker Percy's apocalyptic (in every sense of the word) Love in the Ruins, describing a machine that (he claims) can cure what ails the modern human--the terrors, the digestive problems, the impotence--and restore peace of mind and heart. Of course, the idea is mad; it is a wild reach into nothing, a real leap into the chasm of blind and unthinking faith. But his diagnosis! It speaks to us no less today than it did when the novel was first published in 1971; it dramatizes the disconnect we all feel (admit it or not). The soul is falling apart; the center cannot hold; around our proud monuments stretch miles of mocking desert, so that we (the West, the modern world) are obliged to look upon our own works and despair.

The death of Michael Jackson this week, it seems to me, speaks to this disconnect. I have not been around long enough to chart with my own eyes the Charles Foster Kane-like rise and fall of the King of Pop. For as long as I can remember, he has always been the "freak"--the reclusive ghostly figure that everyone was convinced was a child rapist--the man with the terrifying face and falsetto speaking voice--the man the tabloids cruelly named "Wacko Jacko." His death has sparked a barrage of retrospectives focusing on his groundbreaking career and any number of cruel jokes have been revived about his face, about his lifestyle, and about his appetites. Some have publicly rejoiced that such a monster has been taken to a place (presumably a very hot place) where he cannot hurt any more children.

Make no mistake--the harm Jackson did (or may have done) in the lives of those young people is incalculable. But news of Jackson's death this week put me in a curious, mournful, and contemplative frame of mind. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates, I cannot find it in me to rejoice at Jackson's death. Nor can I join anymore in the easy mockery that crops up in places like "Scary Movie 3." Michael Jackson's tragedy is too familiar. It occurred to me that, if we are all Humbert Humbert, there is a sense in which we are all Michael Jackson as well. We, as much as he, feel the disconnect between what we want or need and what we get--the tension between who we are, who we want to be, and who (or what) others say we are.

The temptation, when confronted with a Michael Jackson or a Humbert Humbert (or a Dick Cheney!) is to recoil in horror and disgust, to vociferously thank God that we are not like these sinners, that we (at least!) have a conscience. And so we call them freaks or monsters or crazy in order to push them away, to insist that they are not of the same blood as you or me.* Now, I'm not saying that Jackson was in any way normal in his declined years (whatever that means)--nor am I suggesting that there was any excuse for anything he might have done to those children. What I am suggesting (as Bob Dylan suggested about JFK's shooter) is that I can feel a little of what Jackson must have felt--not because our histories or predilections are in any way similar, but because we both partake of the same divided, fallen human nature. And so my duty is not to push him away, to call him a freak or marvel at his insane tastes and habits, but to affirm that he, too, was an image-bearer for God--with all his surgeries and affectations--that he, too, was in some important sense a child of God and therefore my brother.

Of course, it's easy to do this exercise when its object is many miles away and recently deceased. It's hard when he or she is in my town, my church, my neighborhood, and very much alive. It ain't easy. There's sin in my heart, says the preacher in the quote above, and part of that sin is the compulsive need to reduce people to their behavior or appearance (when we should have gotten over this by the end of Middle School)--and so we must choose. We want Heaven to be an exclusive country club in the sky, with an all-you-can-eat buffet and endless parades of Jeeves-angels to minister to our Bertie Wooster souls. But perhaps--just perhaps--part of this business of bearing witness is throwing open Heaven's door to everyone. To those in the highways and the hedges. To tax collector and sinners. To freaks. Even to coreligionists. And perhaps a willingness to listen and suspend judgment (though not prudence) for a moment is the first step.

It ain't easy. But (as the preacher suggests) we do have one source of help. At one point in Black Snake Moan, Samuel Jackson's character exclaims, "I ain't gonn' be moved on this. [...] Like Jesus Christ said, 'Imma suffa' you. IMMA SUFFA' YOU!'" The grace he offers to Christina Ricci's character is strange, violent, and should not be emulated. But the strength of his conviction--the firm resolve that, with God's help, he will not be moved, but will bear with her until the very end--this is the dark and weird heart of the Gospel, and it is only by holding onto that mysterious place that we can find the strength to open our heart to our fellow freaks.

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*I'm tempted to suggest, though it's been a while since I've read any of the stories, that the real horror of an Edgar Allen Poe story arises from exactly this tension; we do not want to claim these insane and murderous creatures as part of us, even though we see that the tension in them is that same we see in the mirror every day.

The Future in 1971

Random Association of Words and Music

The old Republican Party has become the Knothead party, so named during the last Republican convention in Montgomery when a change of name was proposed, the first suggestion being the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party, and campaign buttons were even printed with the letters CCCP before an Eastern-liberal commentator noted the similarity to the initials printed on the back of the Soviet cosmonauts and called it the most knotheaded political bungle of the century--which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading "Knotheads for America" and banners proclaiming "No Man Can Be Too Knotheaded in the Service of His Country."

The old Democrats gave way to the new Left Party. They too were stuck with a nickname not of their own devising and the nickname stuck: in this case a derisive acronym that the Right made up and the Left accepted, accepted in the same curious American tradition by which we allow our enemies to name us, give currency to their curses, perhaps from the need to concede the headstart they want and still beat them, perhaps also from the secret inkling that our enemies know the worst of us best and it's best for them to say it. LEFT usually it is, often LEFTPAPA, sometimes LEFTPAPASAN (with a little Jap bow), hardly ever the original LEFTPAPASANE, which stood for what, according to the Right, the Left believed in: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Athiesm, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia.

--Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

Worship and Communal Location

The danger--the great, galloping temptation--of personal located-ness is that it will devolve into individualism, into a roomful of people talking to themselves about themselves in a kind of bizarre imitation of the Speech of God. These stories mean nothing unless they are shared among individuals. I tell my story to you, you tell your own to me, and we recognize that we are on the same road, marchin' to the city.

But there is a larger story (and the point seems so obvious that I am almost ashamed to bring it up)--the story of God's work in this world. More specifically, I believe worship occurs as a community of faith reflects together on where it's been and where it is going. The dead past (not-dead, not-past) rears up in our souls and we stand together with the dead saints of the past and the unborn saints of the future; time, for a moment, is negated. The Church, visible and invisible, lifts itself up to the Divine and partakes of His life. And in this coming-together, we worship.

The problem with so much of what we call worship today seems to be that it is unhistorical, or a-historical; the songs we sing are barely older than our children, if that old, and the prayers we pray are made-up on the spot. The sounds we strive for are modern, "with it,"--good beats and trumpets and repetitive lyrics. It's like singing cotton candy--sweet, melting in the mouth and then gone.

I'm not arguing against new music or extemporaneous prayer. But somewhere along the way we forget that it is not just this generation worshiping God; the entire Church is present in our worship, and we pray and sing in solidarity with them. Old hymns (or old gospel songs or old anthems) tie us to the past, keep us from floating free in the ocean of the "now"--they free us from linear time, the time we are otherwise bound by in our daily life, and enable us to connect on a deep soul-level with our fellow believers.

In an odd paradox, we are most free when we are most rooted; the rootlessness of the modern worship chorus binds us to the wheel of minute-by-minute time. We cannot reach the past or the future because we are stuck in the now. But by digging deep into historic Christianity--by rediscovering the past--we are located in the larger story of the Church and of God's work in history. We are united (or re-united) with the communion of saints.

I've got a few more thoughts on worship that should trickle out over the next couple of posts, so stay tuned.

Worship Music and Personal Location

More than (or as much as) expressing the pain at the core of human experience, worship [should] involve recognition of a definite location or located-ness of the church-in-time. I'm afraid that a lot of the music I tacitly criticized in my last post does not do this. Indeed, it seeks to transcend our located-ness, to move us beyond where we are to where He is (or something like that).

But if pain or separation is as central to worship as I'm suggesting, we cannot so easily neglect the fact that we--we ourselves--in this time and at this place--are singing; our worship is not the effusions of a disembodied mind out tripping the universe, sailing into the mystic--it is the grounded confession of a people in the historical here-and-now. This rooted-ness can take two (general) forms--the personal and the communal.

The personal form locates the worship in the individual's own experience. Casimir Pulaski Day shows us a person grappling (much true worship is grappling or wrestling with God) with the mysteries of the Almighty One who takes and takes and takes. Psalm 28 is David's cry from a concrete place of darkness. (Now, note this: "Casimir Pulaski Day" is a fictional narrative; however, like theme songs, just because it's fiction don't mean it ain't true).

Too often, the "personal" is vilified (at least, in certain circles of which I'm aware)--and it's true that radical individualism is a problem in a community of believers who ostensibly have all things in common. But we, as humans, need narrative "hooks" to actually pull us into the meditative space required for worship. We can't do it cold. The sharing of personal stories (of distress, of pain--and, yes, of joy) enables us to find concrete locations for feelings and emotions Godward that might otherwise remain amorphous or unexpressed. And that--even if the pain bites no more in Heaven--will (I am fairly certain) continue forever.

The other place of located-ness is the communal, and I'll turn to that in my next post.

Worship Music and the Love Song

This is in some ways a sequel to my post on Nick Cave and love songs. I was in church today, listening to yet another anthem along the lines of "God I'm at your throne and worshiping etc etc etc" and wondering why it seemed so vapid and empty, when it hit me that it lacked two central elements of good worship music: pain and location. It got me thinking, and I jotted down a few thoughts.

Is it possible that our idea of worship has grown so debased that we think cookie-cutter sentiments and bald reportage ("I'm at You throne and I'm ready to worship") can actually cut to the heart of the worship-experience--that the tears they produce are real and not simply automatic responses to canned sentiment--that the trumpets we play to evoke majesty are actually the trumps of God? That our efficient clicking-through of points (awe--humility--majesty--and be sure to get a "Hallelujah" in there somewhere) does any sort of justice to the story in which we find ourselves?

I think we have forgotten that all true worship (Isaiah's vision of the Lord and, yes, the Preacher's vision of the world) springs, not from euphoria or fuzzy feelings, but from deep existential dread and pain--that David wrote best when he was in sin, or recovering from sin, or facing the consequences of his sin--that only in fear and uncertainty can true worship be found, because it is only in the face of that fear and uncertainty that we can throw ourselves at last upon the Rock.

For what is a worship song but a love song? And if Nick Cave is correct, a core factor of the love song is pain. And then, I started thinking about (what I would consider) good worship music. Here's a list I came up with:

I Saw the Light
Casimir Pulaski Day
(compare to the hamfisted evocation of the same text in Blessed be Your Name--a song that seems to forget that it's about a supremely depressing text).

Because He Lives
Old Rugged Cross

I could go on; my point is that every one of these songs looks, without flinching or sugar-coating (even when they are ultimately optimistic), into the pain at the core of human experience and at the root of the Christian religion. And each does more--each locates worship inside a narrative--be it personal or the communal one of the Christian faith. More on this later.

Obama Speaks at Notre Dame

President Obama gives the commencement speech at Notre Dame. A lot of it we've heard before--he repeats a story from The Audacity of Hope about an encounter with a pro-life doctor who objected to his (Obama's) rhetoric about the right wing. A good story, to be sure, and relevant considering the controversy about the president's visit to Notre Dame, but not anything new.

There are a couple of good bits, though. There's this:

Unfortunately, finding [...]common ground - recognizing that our fates are tied up, as Dr. King said, in a "single garment of destiny" - is not easy. Part of the problem, of course, lies in the imperfections of man - our selfishness, our pride, our stubbornness, our acquisitiveness, our insecurities, our egos; all the cruelties large and small that those of us in the Christian tradition understand to be rooted in original sin.

Emphasis mine. I think it's an interesting section because we find Obama--a self-confessed Liberal--speaking of Original Sin, something I recall being assured that Liberals don't believe in. Now, doubtless Obama doesn't mean the kind of original sin that makes every thought of a human's heart evil continually, the deep grimy perversity that Calvinists are so fond of pointing out. He means "imperfections" (exactly what he says)--problems that can be overcome if only we set our minds to it. Right? Right? Except that the "imperfections" are rooted in something deeper, and this underlying thing is Original Sin.

I'm not interested in parsing Obama's theology. There is no exercise so useless as trying to see which public figures embrace "right" doctrine; in fact (and this is going to show up in my looking-back post) there is no exercise so useless as trying to define "right" doctrine. But I think Obama's heading in the right direction by bringing Original Sin into the mix when he starts talking about trying to live civilly in a diverse society. It's not just a matter of everyone just getting along; we must all struggle, and we must all struggle with ourselves in order to live well with others.

In this world of competing claims about what is right and what is true, have confidence in the values with which you've been raised and educated. Be unafraid to speak your mind when those values are at stake. Hold firm to your faith and allow it to guide you on your journey. Stand as a lighthouse.

But remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.

Sounds like he's advocating a question-everything stance (and if you've not read The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, you need to do so at once). So what Obama is advocating seems to be an open-mindedness based on an awareness of our own sin and our own limitations. In the midst of all the controversies, real and contrived, that have been roiling lately, it's good to hear this message again.

[Incidentally, here's Bush's 2001 commencement speech at Notre Dame. It's also good, though not as compulsively readable as Obama's (Obama--and his speechwriters--could put the 'phone book into a speech and it would be readable. I don't know how they do it. Bush hits so many right notes--until he launches into campaigning toward the end--that it makes the last eight years seem like even more of a missed opportunity than they did before.]

Love Songs, the Love Song, and Pain

Eventually, I'm going to get around to producing some sort of retrospective of the past three years--a kind of overview of how my mind has changed during my time at Covenant. My disenchantment with Systematic Theologies and move toward feminism/egalitarianism will certainly factor prominently. It should serve as a nice way to tie up what has been a fairly formative period of my life.

In the meanwhile, why have I never listened to Nick Cave? I mean, I've seen The Proposition and listened to the title track from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!; I was around for all the hoopla over Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus--but for some reason, I just never checked the man's music out. Then, the other day at Mckay's I came across Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, picked it up (having decided to avoid Dylan and Bowie, for once) and have since been entranced.

This Cave guy can write. Orpheus has been on near-constant rotation for the past day or so (alternating, sometimes, with Dylan's new album or David Lynch (!?!) or (currently playing) Wilco (the album)). Of these, only Dylan's (admittedly second-rate) effort has managed to approach the soul-searing beauty of Orpheus. Birds exploding in midair, indeed.

And so, I research. I've read up on Cave here and there, and in the course of that reading I've come across this lecture on love songs. Cave has some interesting things to say:

Though the love song comes in many guises – songs of exultation and praise, songs of rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss – they all address God, for it is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for Love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God. It is the cry of one chained to the earth, to the ordinary and to the mundane, craving flight; a flight into inspiration and imagination and divinity. The love song is the sound of our endeavours to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.

All love songs are songs to God? Really? It reminds me of C.S. Lewis arguing that stories move us because they remind us of THE Story. To which I immediately want to say "Surely not! What about Lolita?" Though, of course (as I point out) the "hopelessly poignant thing" is precisely the message found in The Story--that we're all of us broken, that we all can see ourselves in Humbert Humbert and his desperate attempts to justify the unjustifiable. So perhaps Lewis is right. And, though Cave's recommendation sounds too much like a move in the direction of "God is my Girlfriend" music, perhaps he is right as well.

He certainly has more in mind than peppy songs about how you just love God sooo much. Here's what Cave has to say about most pop love songs:

Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief.

Which is interesting (and I say this as someone who enjoys the occasional painless love song). For Cave, all love songs must contain pain because pain is a central feature of our reach toward God, a central factor in our humanity--the separation that hurts because we long to be united. Sounds like Tillich. Sounds like Buber when he says that all true living is meeting (in I and Thou). Failure to bear witness to the pain that centrally manifests itself in love is a failure to bear witness to true humanity. And I suspect that Cave is more than a little correct in his argument. Everything is broken, and everything groans for the restoration that still seems far off.

All of that in mind, here's one of the soul-harrowing songs from Orpheus that has had my brain spinning right round for the past couple of days. Babe, You Turn Me On.

Stay by me, stay by me
You are the one, my only true love

The butcher bird makes it's noise
And asks you to agree
With it's brutal nesting habits
And it's pointless savagery
Now, the nightingale sings to you
And raises up the ante
I put one hand on your round ripe heart
And the other down your panties

Everything is falling, dear
Everything is wrong
It's just history repeating itself
And babe, you turn me on

Like a light bulb
Like a song

You race naked through the wilderness
You torment the birds and the bees
You leapt into the abyss, but find
It only goes up to your knees
I move stealthily from tree to tree
I shadow you for hours
I make like I'm a little deer
Grazing on the flowers

Everything is collapsing, dear
All moral sense has gone
It's just history repeating itself
And babe, you turn me on

Like an idea
Like an Atom bomb

We stand awed inside a clearing
We do not make a sound
The crimson snow falls all about
Carpeting the ground

Everything is falling, dear
All rhyme and reason gone
It's just history repeating itself
And, babe, you turn me on

Like an idea
Like an Atom bomb

Lyrics here.