Mid-Summer Review

What have I been up to this Summer?

Thanks. I’m glad you asked. Summer is roughly half over for me. I’m trying to avoid the panic of feeling like time is slipping through my fingers by considering all the good thus far. Would it be an overstatement if I were to say that if all I had done in May and June is get my hands on three CD, that half the summer has been worth it? I guess that is more for me to qualify. Its up to you to decide if it is silly or not. What you might initially find silly is that I spent some $150 on used CDs at my favorite record store, Zulu Records, while I was at Regent studying in May. I don’t usually have time to listen to music. I haven’t been keeping up with some of my favorite aritsts/bands. My livelihood is music, and so I thought I needed a good shot in the arm of musical inspiration. Some times you’ve got to wade through a bunch of music to find what you are looking for. I also just bought a used 30 GB ipod from a student for $75 and have more convenience to listen in the car or while flying. So far this has been a summer saturated by great music.

I’ll add that after all the money and time I’ve spent, I still come back to my friend David Stith’s music and find it to still be fresh and interesting. A plug: he is finishing recording his first major release with Asthmatic Kitty as I write this. He is working with Rafter, a label mate, in San Diego. It will have contributions from the Osso, Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond as well as Sufjan Stevens (AK is his label for those of you who don’t know). David has removed most of his demos from his website, but you can still download a few tracks for free at www.dmstith.com







Here are three discs that rise to the top of my new pile:

Boards of Canada The Campfire Headphase
Again, I’m prone to overstatement when it comes to music, so here goes: I’ve been waiting my whole life for Boards of Canada and I didn’t know it. Not only does they have the name of a country I deeply love, they create emotional movements that suit me well. It’s not fair to judge music based on its capacity to fit one’s emotions. That makes the music all about me and that makes me seem selfish. I turn again to the way that I describe my affection for Radiohead and other types of music that incorporate strangeness and noise. BOC manages to form emotional landscapes with various beats and noises that aspire to make sense of our noisy, digital, industrial world. They helps us remember beauty in the midst of what seems so painful in our highly artificial, pre-fabricated existence. I was first drawn to BOC by a re-mix they did of Beck’s “Broken Drum” on Guerolito. That song is my favorite of the re-mixes. It compares to Four Tet’s remix of Bloc Party’s “So Here We Are.” I’m a sucker to good beat overlaid with ambient synths and noise artifacts. I thought Album Leaf was a master at this, but Album Leaf has been usurped.

Wolf Parade At Mount Zoomer
I picked up a used copy of their previous disc, Apologies to the Queen Mary, at Zulu Records when we were in Vancouver. I’m pretty sure I bought that record mostly because of its drum sounds and secondly because it sounded like a rough and raw rougher version of Modest Mouse—if you can actually get any more rough and raw. It was mostly the sound of the WP record that was interesting, but once I got it on my ipod and listened to it, I realized it was not going to be an easy listen. Hopefully its intensity will grow on me in time, but when Steve down at Full Circle records here in Holland said this new WP record is more chill, I knew it would be interesting even before I read any reviews or listened to any snippets on the itunes store. This is one monstrous record. It gets low marks by Pitchfork because the reviewer didn’t think the album holds together. I guess there are two different song writers who contribute songs independently from each other. In my opinion these different writing personalities do not work against each other, instead they form a record that will get lots of listening time out of me because I can’t imagine it wearing thin any time soon. Oh, and it was recorded at Arcade Fire’s church studio and the drum sounds are as interesting on this record as they were on Apologies to the Queen Mary. And Steve was partly right. This record is a chill version of WP, but I’d add that it is a much more creative effort in terms of thoughtful arrangement. Not only does the whole disc have a lot to explore, but so does each song. Lots of great guitars moving all over the place and did I mention the drums are amazing. The vocals keep swelling in at just the perfect places too—not over sung, pushy vocals—easy and modest.

Sigur Ros Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
I can’t really talk about this record yet except to say, Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thanks to the kind, gentle Icelandic souls who make this music. Oh, and there is a track that is recorded live with a full orchestra and choir. Thank you!


Other than rabidly listening to music I have been working on a few courses to finish my Masters degree, helping Susanna with some landscaping projects, traveling to Montana to participate in a faculty workshop on Senior Seminars, going out of my mind with two puppies that can’t seem to avoid chewing on pens and pooping indoors, and studying the trajectory of Barack Obama. Vancouver with Sam and Andy was a highlight for sure. Susanna joined us for our last week there and we ate gelato almost every night.

My trip to Montana was also significant (photos here). I did some fly-fishing with author David James Duncan. I’m not a very good fly fisherman because it requires the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree to practice with all that you need to know about bugs and weather and fish. David gave me some pointers and I actually caught some fish—in the pond that is stocked on the ranch, not in the river while wearing my fancy waders and standing in the water. It was kinda like the bunny slope of fishing. In David’s words, it was so easy to catch fish in the ponds that it was “stupid.” I watched him spot a 24-inch, four-pound trout, sling out his fly line and hook that fish like he was shooting it with a bow and arrow. This is now my best fishing tale. To fish with a favorite author is one thing. To share a moment like this, the kind that he has written about so well, makes me ridiculously fortunate. Later that night I was working on my cast as the sun was disappearing. David walked down to the pond in order to get away after having hosted a reading and discussion. He generously offered me his time and we had an important conversation. I’m going to send him a copy of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet because I think it explores some of the same themes and utilizes some of the same style as the novel he described to me he is presently working on. Susanna made sure we ordered a used copy off the internet, so I doubt that it won’t show up for another month. Ack! It is good to have a thrifty wife.

Susanna is in Austin for the week to catch up with friends and attend a wedding. Sam and Andy have been over to the house several times to study. It is an incredible help to work with others. I can stay on task better. It’s like there is better energy in the room if that doesn’t sound too New Agey-ish. We’ve been reading the New Testament together starting with our time at Regent. Last night we worked through Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon. I wish I spent more time reading the Scriptures out loud like this with others. Honestly it is hard to enjoy the summer because I need the structure of the workweek to get my butt in gear and so I wallow in frustration with my poor work ethic. Reading the NT aloud with Andy and Sam ranks right up there as the best parts of my summer.

I’ve actually been working quite a bit. I’m just not working on what I’m supposed to be doing. I’ve been distracted by a manuscript on arts ministry. It is the fleshing out of my notes from the seminar I did with David Taylor at the Arts Symposium in Austin back in April. My working title is While in This House We Groan: Nurturing the Arts in the Local Church. Let me know what you think. It is a reference to a passage in 2 Corinthians.

“The Discipline of Healthy Discourse: A Possible Gift of the Presidential Races”

June 26, 2008

Within the last few months I’ve had a slow steady stream of classmates from high school pop up with “friend requests” on my Facebook page. This is all rather surreal. On the newsfeed section I can see the Facebook activities of students from Hope College, students from Casady School in Oklahoma where I taught middle division, students from OCS where I first taught high school, friends from grad school who now live in the UK, Colorado, California and some who remain in Canada, friends from church back at Bridgeway in OKC...all these people lumped together with people who sat next to me in Speech class and Algebra, competed with me in PE, football and basketball and played in band and sang in Chorus. It is not that I don’t want to connect with these long-lost friends, it is that in trying to come to terms with who they are now almost fifteen years later, I find myself pondering who I am now fifteen years later. If anything, these people pop up in our lives in a way that brings continuity to our stories. They help us bracket ourselves, to step outside ourselves and see ourselves better as if from their perspective. Isn’t this why so many of us are afraid of school reunions? In some way the gathering of people from long ago acts as a kind of milestone or bench mark and we find ourselves wondering if our stories are getting more interesting and heading in a bright and shiny direction or if we are digressing and falling into a slump.

They were good people, for the most part. I don’t want to sound bitter about high school. It is not so much who those classmates were that I’m concerned about. It is who I thought they were, how I interpreted them in light of who I was at that point in my own growth, and how that reflects back on me. “Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” (Hamlet). And we can follow this reasoning with, “to the pure in heart everything seems pure,” (The Apostle Paul). If that is true, then the antithesis must be true as well: to the dark in heart everything seems dark or to the shy and insecure everything seems intimidating. The lens through which we view the world often says more about us than it does about the world.

Memories of these classmates invoke memories of the 14-18 year old version of myself. I am now three or four stages removed from that young idealistic, teenaged Joshua Banner. I am sure that he would be both encouraged and discouraged by who I am today. I don’t want to be too hard on myself though. Memories are strange. We have very little control of them. We unconsciously edit our memory and we tend to hang on to the best and the worst. The ordinary humdrum of our past fades away; thus memory is mostly an exaggeration. If history is written by kings, perhaps we might say that the extremes of our past—the best and the worst—are our own personal tyrants.

There is one main capacity that I hope I’ve grown in: love, of course. Specifically, my hope is to have grown in an ability to love others in healthy dialogue. One of these high school friends has been sparring with me on the 2008 elections. He began with a question about my support for Senator Barack Obama. “What are you thinking?” he asked me in a wall post on my facebook page. And thus we were off to the races. I confess a bit of a hesitation about some of the strong language I used in confronting his frustration with my preferred candidate. In the course of a couple exchanges, it seems that very little of our ideas and convictions translated. At this point in our dialogue I feel a bit lost and confused in our own little gridlock.

So here we have two people, estranged from each other by close to fifteen years who are also further estranged from each other by their own political biases. I guess it is too much to expect that we might actually have a healthy dialogue. There is too much water still left to go under the bridge.

As I continue to ponder this failing exchange with an old high school friend, I continue to experience a deep sense of bewilderment and I continue to wonder why? Why am I surprised at my bewilderment? What is at stake here? I didn’t make it to my last high school reunion. I’m not sure if I’ll make my next one either. Will I ever see this guy again? Does it matter? Something seems to matter to me here, but what?

During the last presidential race I wrote and e-published an essay I titled, “Teaching Sixth Graders in a Time of War.” Something I heard on my way to school one morning on NPR set me off into the swill of despair. I wanted to do something tangible. I wanted to talk with others. I wanted participate in our democracy prior to the voting booths. I wanted healthy dialogue. So, during my prep periods I wrote out my thoughts on why my vote for John Kerry was a protest vote against the handling of the war in Iraq. I felt so strongly about the use of my time that I showed it to my boss at the end of the day.

The reaction to my essay from others: one friend told me I was “full of shit;” another questioned my faith. I ended up writing three more essays in response to these and other responses. That whole experience was bewildering too, but it was good for me. I learned more about my own positions. I was able to listen to others. Our exchanges got heated at times, but overall the discussions leant themselves to more trust and more understanding. Democracy worked.

I found myself rehearsing the words of the prayer attributed to St. Francis after the election—especially in light of the election’s results:

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

I worked this notion of giving and receiving into my graduate studies. I worked it into my curriculum with the sixth graders. It changed the way I think about the creative process especially when writing music or recording; It has come to affect my understanding of prayer, friendship and sex, how to be a neighbor and a citizen. Dialogue is a deep practice of listening that forces one to surrender her agenda, to allow for awkwardness in a conversation rather than rushing in with the next, most insightful adage. We give up the fight for the last word. We defer; we consider others better than ourselves; we serve by listening. If we all joined together with the intent to give rather than to receive, there would always be abundance. No one would be needy. This all fits nicely with the Sermon on the Mount. It gives us a better grasp of what Jesus meant by “meekness.”

However, there are many times when the Apostle Paul and even Jesus himself do not come off as wilting lilies. “You brood of vipers!” (Jesus) and “I will not spare one of you!” (Paul).  Jesus rarely defended his authority, and when he did, his defense was cloaked in difficult allusions to the Father. Much of what he presented about his authority was difficult to understand. Paul, on the other hand, was traipsing around Asia Minor visiting churches, getting himself imprisoned and writing numerous letters working to maintain his authority. He lost many of his key leaders during his ministry. It all must have been exhausting and the result is some stern language in his epistles that reveals his frustration. Yet, Jesus was still very firm. He was unflinchingly firm in the face of Pontius Pilate’s interrogation and in the face of angry mobs trying to trick him into blaspheming. These two men are at the core of the New Testament writings and they continually tell their followers to obey the first command, to love your neighbor, and yet that love is not passive or weak. It is the definition of a more true kind of masculinity, a kind of strength that our chauvinist society can’t understand. So, how does that kind of strength play itself out through the practice of healthy dialogue? How do we love by listening well and do this with strong convictions?

In the context of our post 9/11 public discourse, “fundamentalist” seems to be synonymous with “terrorist.” We are quick to disregard any religious fervor if it smacks of dogmatism or rigid idealism. This is a label that progressive Evangelicals are trying to shake like the plague. At one recent faculty meeting I heard a professor rant, “Fundamentalism is wrong!” Later he admitted that by making such blanket statements he is susceptible to his own brand of fundamentalism, but nevertheless his call was for us to stop being too nice and for us to speak out our convictions--what we believe to be right and wrong.

So, we find ourselves in the same kind of gridlock I’m now in with my old friend from high school. How can any of us believe an idea and offer it in dialogue in a way that does not alienate the others who disagree? In short, we seem to have cornered ourselves into believing that any conviction equals fundamentalism. This is definitely the reason why there is such a push to remove religion from public policy and discourse, but isn’t such a sweeping elimination of religious language and thought its own kind of secular fundamentalism then?

Dialogue can only be nurtured in the context of love. Love is the only way that we can avoid the gridlock of our respective ideologies. Love is the difference between the tyrant and the prophet. Love shows us how to lower our guard and to look past our fears of each other. Love restrains us from bombast. Love is heuristic. Without it we will be left with strife, jealousy, backbiting, gossip, slander, dissention, hate…all those things that keep a democracy from working.

Much of what is postured as rhetoric and wit in our society mostly amounts to scoffing. It doesn’t even amount to good, healthy satire. Satire at its best enables the foolish to see themselves as they are. At its best, satire intends to see the righting of what is wrong. Scoffing, instead, is a cutting off--a death wish. G.K. Chesterton was an expert at this. “How can angels fly?” He asked. “Because they don’t take themselves too seriously.” We all need to laugh at ourselves from time to time, but we Americans have trouble with this. God bless John Stewart and Stephen Colbert and even perhaps Al Franken (maybe Al Franken).

In his book God Laughs and Plays, David James Duncan defines fundamentalism as a closed conversation. Fundamentalism is white knuckled and it can’t get outside of itself. It doesn’t look into mirrors; it doesn’t engage in the revision process. It is not that we revise the Scriptures or our creedal confessions; it is that we revise our understandings of them. All of us hold fundamental beliefs even if we aren’t fundamentalists. We live and breathe and exist because each of us holds to certain fundamental presuppositions about the universe. With out these fundamental beliefs we would not be able to wake up in the morning and attend to our work nor would we be able to sleep at the end of the day. We assume that the sun will rise and that it will provide us with sufficient warmth, that gravity will never fail, that we will always have access to water and that people will understand us when we use language. All of these are faith assumptions that neither of us can completely explain, but we still function according to their truths. These assumptions help us get on with our lives and work.

When we white knuckle our convictions, we close ourselves off and we become fundamentalists. We reduce ourselves to the mentally absurd by white knuckling ideas that we can neither explain or control. We confuse faith for empirical certainty. We then unnecessarily distance ourselves from our neighbors. We become suspicious. We expect the worst of others. We police their beliefs; we are quick to publicly censor and condemn. There is then no need for dialogue—only lecture or monologue. The Christian faith has survived two millennia because it is deeply rooted in its convictions yet is still able to endure scrutiny. Wherever it thrives, it does so by its dynamism not by its pogroms, inquisitions and witch hunts. Christianity is not static, dead doctrine. Ours is a living, breathing, life giving faith community that seems to flourish best not when it is linked to political powers but when it is instead suffering under persecution. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

If the lens that we see the world through can say more about ourselves than the world, then the same applies to the way we hold onto our convictions whether they are agnostic or Christian. In a dialogue the first order of business is how we hold our convictions and not just those convictions themselves. Dr. James Dobson is a case in point with his recent comments about Barack Obama. At one point in our not so distant past, such public fencing by a leader in the Moral Majority might have led to disaster for a democratic candidate. My optimistic hope is that most evangelicals can see Dobson’s comments for the caricature that they are. I’m not even concerned that evangelicals vote for Obama. Most won’t and Obama won’t need many of them in order to win the election either. I’m concerned about our public discourse; I’m concerned with healthy dialogue.

What disturbs me so much about my exchange with my friend from high school? I’m disturbed by the same thing that disturbs me about Dobson’s reduction of Obama’s faith: a lack of understanding, an inability to listen, a stand off, zero exchange, zero democracy. Dobson accuses Obama of distorting the bible in order to serve his own purposes and adds, “What [Obama is] trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.” Obama is not trying to make an argument from Scripture at all. That is the difference. He is saying that if we are to legislate policy informed by our faith, it needs to be translated into a context that the various constituents of our country can share. At the same time Obama adamantly defends the need to retain religious vocabulary in our public discourse. “If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.” Obama is not reducing Christianity to universal appeal. He is calling Christians to fully be Christians and to carry their faith into the public discourse in way that extends itself to our neighbors. This is a very different public posture than Dobson's. Obama is calling us to open ourselves to dialogue and understanding. Dobson, instead, would rather strong arm government and have it surrender public discourse to his version of Judeo-Christian faith. One is charitable and open; the other is fundamentalist, closed and white knuckled. Fortunately, it seems that the latter is losing traction.

I’m not naive about the work ahead of Obama once he is elected—and I am pretty confident he will be. My Dad is pessimistic about Obama’s ability to affect the change that everyone is so enthusiastic about. I can understand this. In the wake of his “Yes We Can” campaign, I’m not optimistic about quick fixes to our economy, health care, social security, education or our dealings in Iraq and Iran for that matter (or North Korea or China….). Obama represents a shift in politics that I hope will be a watershed for public discourse and the political process. His speech in reaction to the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright demonstrates that he has a sophisticated and generous ability to enter into the complexities of our society. In such a bifurcated nation as ours with its many culture wars and with such poor international relations, we need this kind of leadership and mediation. We can’t function much longer without it. In Obama’s self-written speech that has been compared to both King and Lincoln, he put himself in the shoes of Rev. Wright and saw issues of racism from the Reverend’s generation. He put himself in the shoes of others who don’t understand Rev. Wright’s world. He explained for us the subtle nuances that make up the confusion about the Reverend’s words and he accurately described the limitations of our media coverage. These nuances can’t be appreciated or considered through the medium of sound bytes and the squabbles of talking heads paid to conjecture in a way that keeps television ratings high. We need more than 15 second blips and bleeps about what he said and what she said. We need healthy dialogue. We need political leaders who do not underestimate the American people, who respect our ability to listen and think well.

It is this kind of generous dialogue that I was hoping to engage with my high school friend. It’s the kind of dialogue I hope you and I are able to engage between now and November. Perhaps this is one of the great gifts that these awkward and agonizing presidential races offer us every four years: a chance to relearn the discipline of healthy dialogue that we can then carry into every other area of our lives after January 2009.

Prime the Pump

There is much that I could say now at the end of this school year 2008. There is too much to say and if you know me, I’d really like to sit down to write it out and say it all in one blog entry. However, that would be asking too much from you my readers and I honestly don’t have the capacity to come to terms with all that is swirling around inside and around me. So, I’ll try to be brief and just prime the pump for some more blogging in the near future and throughout the summer. I haven’t had very much time to really be my full self this past school year—meaning, that I haven’t been very reflective. I confess that I haven’t protected my time for contemplation and I’m now reaping the consequences. The consequences are a lack of focus and a kind of numbness, an anxious unsettledness and an exaggerated state of scatter-brained-ed-ness. I’ve been living and working beyond my own internal means. Writing is an extremely helpful way for me to come to terms with all that has happened this year.

That is not to say that I’m rotting on the vine. There are times when we are pushed beyond ourselves and the fruit of our lives becomes a result of not what we might have in the present moment to give, but a result of who we have become in the broad scheme of our lives. This hasn’t been a time for manufacturing new ideas, art and teachings. This has been a time to trust the Spirit that led me here and to allow the Spirit to inspire and sustain what I’ve already got. I’ve been calling it a season of convergence. And maybe there is something true about the reason why Jesus was in his early thirties when his ministry became strikingly public.

If I sound like I’m beating around the bush thus far, it’s because there is too much for me to get into. It is easier to paint in broad strokes. Let’s just say that I’ve always been a restless soul. My twenties were hard. I experimented with a lot of things: teaching high school and middle school, graduate school, preaching, song writing, recording, worship leading, some graphic design. Oh, and lets not forget the good jobs: lawn care, outdoor sporting good retail salesperson, insurance agent office administrator…et al. Susanna and I are almost done with our third year together. We’ve moved to a new place and begun a home together for two of those years now. We both are employed in places that value our gifts and allow us to dream and be creative. We are forming deep friendships—sigh—finally. And right now as I sit here the Spring in Holland Michigan is more than delightful. Oh, and our two puppies are pretty much the best things we have ever spent money on. Check this.

All of my last few drops of emotional awareness were spent at our last Gathering service a week ago. The music was led by all nine of our graduating seniors. I think “electric” is the best word to describe the evening and I use that not to refer to the sound of our music but to allude to the energy in the room. It was electric thankfulness and it was intoxicating. When we sang the Doxology at the end of the evening, I spent my last tears. This evening I’m smiling and still thankful, but it will take me a few weeks, the summer perhaps, to be able to come to terms with what has really happened this year. Convergence is the best word for now.

I’ll conclude by observing the things I am looking forward to:

On Friday the 9th of May, I will be flying to Seattle with Sam Pedigo and Andy Kadzban, recent graduates who will be sticking around next year to be my interns. We will spend a night or two in Seattle and then head up to Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. to take New Testament Foundations together. I have only three more classes left to finish in my Masters of Christian Studies degree program. I hope to be done this time next year. Sam and Andy are taking the class as an exploration of Regent as a school they might want to transfer to after their time with me. Susanna is teaching a creative writing class at Earlham College in Indiana starting next Monday the 12th. She will join us in Vancouver on the 24th.

We will then return to Holland on the 31st of May. On June 2 I’ll head out with a group of professors and students to spend a week in Montana on a rustic ranch participating in a workshop developing Senior Seminar curriculum. One of my favorite authors, David James Duncan, will be joining us for a couple days.

I then return to Holland on June 8. The rest of the summer will be spent studying, writing, gardening, going to the beach, walking my dogs and working on music both for next school year in chapel and my own music. I hope to finish the Ordinary Neighbors record that Susanna and I have been working on now for over two years.

We have a couple groups of friends who have been threatening to make the trip up to see us this summer. If that is you, let’s stinkin’ get it on the sinkin’ calendar. If it is not you, please please feel free to come visit. If you are a Hope College student around here this summer, you are welcome too anytime! Seriously, people need to come hang out with us.

Here is to a great SUMMER!!!!

Why I'm Not a Fan of Most Christian Music, Our Anemic "Idiot" Culture

In a recent post I made disparaging remarks about the artistic merit of today’s contemporary worship, and in my class last week I actually said something to the effect that I wanted to pray for the souls of anyone who listens to contemporary Christian music. Yes, it is true. I have some pretty strong ideas. These are times for penetrating and active thought so that we can clarify our ideas and better inform our practices, but I also want to make sure that I don’t hurt or overly confuse with the way I present my ideas. I am especially thinking about the freshmen in my class. It is very easy to be cynical. It is even fashionable. If I want to promote anything, it is a posture of assent and belief and trust rather than skepticism. The relationship between belief and doubt is dynamic and delicate. There is much to be said about this, but for now, I’d like to offer some thoughts to explain my discomfort with most contemporary Christian music and its accompanying culture.

I remember my first semester at Wheaton when a Junior approached me and a friend and commented on how “on fire” the Freshmen were for Jesus. His disparaging comment was "well, wait till you a junior." This cynicism among upperclassmen became pretty familiar to me by the time I was a senior. Even though I saw many of my classmates wrestle with different forms of bitterness, I managed to finish college without any resentment toward the church. However, it was when I started seminary that I too began to develop feelings of suffocation and angst. Nothing in the Scriptures suggests that Christians should spend all of their time with each other. In seminary I wasn’t just surrounded by Christians; it was pastors in training that were everywhere. I lasted only a semester at that school and it took me four more years before I would gain the courage to give theological training another shot and I decided to go to school in Canada as well.

So yes, I have wrestled and I’ve let myself drown in cynicism, but I’ve also repented of this sin and have committed myself to loving the church in all of her beauties and blemishes. There was even a period of time when I tried to ditch my faith altogether. I let my heart grow numb. I stopped going to church and I stopped praying. Fortunately, faith is not my invention nor is it my possession. It is not something that I can switch on or off, and it is not something that I can discard. I am not my own. I am his and he is mine.

Fredrick Beuchner’s well known sermon, “The Magnificent Defeat,” gets at the truth of our latter journey in faith. Each of us takes our turn at being Jacob and the working out of our faith in fear and trembling is a tussling with the Angel of the Lord. The result is a broken leg, and when that heals, eventually a limp. Henri Nouwen describes us so well as “wounded healers.” It is not a matter of if we will get confused and hurt and frustrated. It is a matter of when and of how we will react with forgiveness. Forgiveness is the most unique attribute that we as Christians have access to. It is completely counter-cultural and works against all that we might consider rational. There is no sense to it. Yet, forgiveness begets forgiveness.

I would even go so far as to say that it is hard for me to trust a person who doesn’t have a limp. We spend so much of our energy building a façade trying to convince our neighbors of our stability and confidence. This is a great threat to the deepening of our faith. Repentance requires us to have truth in the innermost being. We have to be honest with ourselves, with others and with God. We must embrace the poverty of our spirits and let Christ’s righteousness reign in our bodies and minds. What troubles me about much of contemporary worship is that it reflects an insincere triumphalism that resembles something more like the warm fuzzies of a blockbuster feel good flick than honest to goodness confessional worship.

I heard Li Young Lee, a favorite poet of mine, do a reading a few years ago in Oklahoma City. He introduced a selection of newer poems with the disclaimer that they might not actually be poetry at all. Instead he hoped that his readings represented what he called, “authentic speech.” They were bits and pieces of phrases he had taken from conversations he had either had or had overheard. His thought was that there is something completely sincere about words that are formed spontaneously, and privately, without any pretense of being published.

Oh that we could attain such naiveté! If we had access to authentic speech, then we might have access to authentic worship. This must be what we appreciate about children: their lack of guile and transparency. Yet as we grow older we find that language and rationality instead make it much more possible for us to deceive ourselves. At best we discover the complexities of the world and of ideas and the words we use to represent our ideas and the world only become opaque layers. We hide behind words. We become confused and resign ourselves to this confusion and that resignation itself is an unfortunate deception. That, my dear freshmen, is the burden of adulthood. But you are right, we needn’t complicate simple things. Worship is worship. We should cut to the chase and get on with it.

However, the challenge is that the older we get, the more stale our words become. For those of us with a limp, we have trouble trusting our own words just as much as we struggle to trust ourselves. It is those who don’t struggle with words that I am suspicious of. We are surrounded by so much language. Words are everywhere bombarding our eyes and our ears from every direction, an infinity of signage and a haze of syllables. This is the status quo of our eon of advertising. As my father used to say about my adolescent mouth, for all the talk, how much is actually being said? What can feed our hungry hearts? Where is bread? How is it possible that we are not completely exhausted by all of this vanity?

One author has called ours the “Idiot Culture,” and I tend to agree that the use of language in our popular culture is limited. This is mostly due to the fact that most of our language is used for the sake of selling products. Language therefore is reduced to the task of a simple tool that is used to manipulate buying behaviors, and as language deteriorates so does our vision of the world. Anemic language results in an anemic imagination, and how then can we have eyes and ears to scratch the surface of an infinitely beautiful and loving, transcendent God?

What I fear most is that many of us have been so immersed in the idiocy of our culture that we are both ignorant of what more abundance there could be as well as we are afraid of it. It is as if we would rather have cool whip rather than fresh whipped cream or Velveeta instead of a nice smoked gouda, frozen TV dinners instead of finely prepared meal. We live in a processed, manufactured and boxed existence rather than a life of discovery and abundance.

One fortunate discovery for every of today’s Christians is the well-spring of language that has already been established for us through the Scriptures and the witness of the church throughout history. We do not need to starve for good heart warming and mind expanding texts. What we have access to in the book of Psalms alone could keep any of us occupied for a lifetime. This goes without even mentioning our rich tradition of hymnody, what even some scholars outside of the Christian church agree is most likely the greatest collection of cultural artifacts that the Western Civilization has to offer. Jerry Sitster’s newest book is aptly titled Water from A Deep Well. In his introduction he argues that if we are really hungry for God, then we cannot possibly keep ourselves from the richness of what the Fathers of the Church have to teach us.

I do wish that I could simply cut to the chase and stop quibbling about language and all these ideas. I do wish it was that simple, but I’m afraid that to make it that simple would be to believe that all that is present and all that is new is sufficient to feed my hungry soul. I’ve worshiped long enough to know how myopic and limited my own personal Christian experience has been. We should desire deep roots to weather the heavier storms of life so we can remain faithful. To establish those roots, we should learn from people who actually have weathered storms, people who have grey hair or who are even dead. I want an old faith, a faith with deep, ancient roots and that is so alive that it continues to bear fruit even for today and tomorrow.

Interestingly, what I believe my classmates at Wheaton were growing weary of was not so much a disdain for Jesus and his teachings. Instead I observed that all of us who were raised in evangelical churches going to youth group slowly begin to realize that the culture we had come from is thin in comparison to the ideas, people and events that a liberal arts education introduced us to. We began to have difficulty taking our American experience seriously. We began to question our roots, but for most of us this was a far cry from surrendering our faith completely. It was simply a natural progression of understanding our faith and finding out what faith is.

A child looks up to mom and dad as if they hung the moon; the adolescent begins to separate himself from his parents and begins to feel distant and misunderstood by them; later he begins to question his parents, their lifestyle, their beliefs, habits and even personality; full maturity develops when the child is able to forgive mom and dad for not being perfect, is able to sympathize with his parents’ weaknesses, accepts his similarities to them, and finally is able to appreciate all that his parents have taught and provided for him.

What concerns me most is our transition between adolescence and adulthood. It is as if our society is caught in a perpetual state of adolescence and is incapable of appreciating the past in order to move ahead toward the future. It is a wasteland of non-commitment, or at least what Wendell Berry calls, “contractual commitment.” Berry is the farmer and agrarian essayist who scathingly explains that we treat our land the way we treat our women. We attach ourselves only to what conveniently serves our immediate needs. However, once the contract no longer serves our needs, we break the contract. Long-term commitment then, is rare and counter-cultural—not counter-cultural in a trendy manner, not an obsession with being different for the sake of being different, but counter-cultural in the most rare and true sense of committing oneself to both the strengths and weaknesses of another person, or even an institution like a church for example. As Christians we might spend all our energy conceiving the perfect church that we make ourselves incapable of actually attending and participating in any real church in any real place and time with real people with real strengths and weaknesses.

Relationships, church participation, practicing an ancient faith, working to learn more about the great cloud of witnesses on whose shoulders we stand…these become disciplines that help us make a counter-cultural commitment to a community of faith that has gone before us and will continue long after we are gone. The question each person must ask him or herself is, where does identity come from? Can I truly be formed out of the vacuum of myself? There is no such thing as a self made man. We are each a product of someone’s nurturing and teaching. Human beings rely on each other whether they are capable of appreciating that fact or not. The tremendous benefit of being a Christian is that I have access to a great historical community of faith.

With all this being said, I return to bring these thoughts back to my initial comments about contemporary Christian music. Most of this music and much of our American church today is ahistorical and blind to its rich tradition. For this reason, it is a poor culture. I am not interested in tradition for traditions sake at all however. I’ll close with Jarslov Pelikan’s well known adage: “Traditionalism is the dead faith of those who are living. Tradition is the living faith of those who are dead.” There is no small coincidence between the degeneration of our culture into what has been called an "idiot culture" and our historical blindness. It is no wonder that popular culture continues to become more and more absurd. We have forgotten so much that humanity has already learned so well. I hope and pray that the church might some day be a vessel for preserving culture in a way that it has at various points throughout history, rather than acquiescing to cultural trends.

"An Open Letter to Will Lightfoot"

Below is a letter I sent out to a good friend when he was looking at grad schools back in 2003. I thought publishing this here on the blog might offer some better insight into my previous post about this season of convergence here in Holland Michigan at Hope College. I also thought about it because my friend Tyler has asked about it and I know several other students and recent graduates who are considering Regent College.

I want to make a note about my use of rhetoric here: sometimes being caustic helps a writer get his or her point across. I fear that some of my exaggerated expression in this "Open Letter" might lead some people to have skewed ideas about Regent. If anything, it reveals how I was fighting to make sense of my life at that time and exposes more about me than Regent. So, for the record I decided to complete a full Master's degree, their MCS in Independent Studies. You can definitely find some rigorous academics at Regent, but there are many students there from many walks of life who are interested in many things other than getting straight A's--which is refreshing. Oh, and it is very difficult to take Old and New Testament surveys on your own via audio lectures. So, beware!



"An Open Letter to Will Lightfoot" 1/18/03

I heard a rumor that you are still considering Regent as an option for your postgraduate studies. I was out for a walk today by the water and was feeling all sorts of joy about my being here, and I thought of you and thought of what I would say to you about Regent after completing a semester and a few summer courses. I think what I am about to say is more for my benefit though. I am trying to nail my thoughts down and take a position on this season of my life and publishing these thoughts to you will make it official: Jesus has been generous to me by bringing me here.

I will say this: come here not to do academic work but to study. Stay for only a year. Settle for earning a diploma. Work your hardest to get A’s so that they will look good on your transcript if you decide to apply to other schools where academics are the only thing provided. Don’t let career goals in academics rob you of the opportunity to learn real things.

If you chose to stay for only one year, don’t take the two survey courses of the Old Testament and New Testament while here. You can take those classes in the summer over a two-week period, or you can finish them in an audio correspondence format later.

Come here if there is restlessness in your soul about who you are, what the Church is and how you fit into the world. Take classes and read the books and write the papers that will help you answer your most personal questions.

Come here without the expectation of making friends. Come with a willingness to risk on community…or better yet, pursue communion with strangers and be patient. Wait to discover how they are really your brothers and sisters.

Come and sleep in on Sunday mornings and then and hang out at Starbucks even though it is a corporation. They have consistently good coffee, good music and comfortable chairs. Chances are you might want a job at Starbucks someday. I heard they pay $10 an hour and have good benefits. Graduate students need to keep their eyes open for good part time work.

At least visit churches if only to remind yourself how much you love the church.

See if you can shake the false guilt of missing church, then go and make it a discipline.

Hang out with girls—befriend them. Try not to think of everyone of them as a possible wife. Think of each of them as something that your guy friends are not: sweet, beautiful and good listeners. Each one of them will be a blessing.

Read constantly. Read in the morning with coffee. Read in the afternoon with coffee. Read after dinner with coffee, and stop to take naps and play the guitar. Read when you are falling asleep, but find a book that you are not assigned to read like a novel or something on the history of jazz.

Admit to yourself that you probably won’t read like this when you leave. Don’t worry about the reading you won’t do later. Take advantage of the crappy weather and lack of friends. Stay inside and read now. When the weather breaks you can wrap yourself in a blanket and read down by the water.

Read the Bible every morning and don’t worry about it when you don’t. Read it like you are a beginner every time. Read it out loud and know that you might not remember it later in the afternoon.

Pray after you read the Bible. I am not exactly sure what this means. I thought I did this morning, but I already forgot. I think I’ll have to give it another try tomorrow morning.

Make sure you come with lots of good music or at least some extra money to buy new CDs. Music is cheap here and there is a great independent store about ten minutes from Regent. Find people at Regent who are obsessed with music and learn from their taste.

Listen to each song as if it was the best worship song you’ve ever heard in your life. If you can’t do that then don’t listen to that song. Skip it and go on to the next one.

Make sure you have a good number of worship songs memorized that your friends have written. Playing them will help you enter the presence of God, and it will also help you feel like you still live near those friends.

Put pictures of your friends on your computer’s screen saver so that it scrolls through them like a slide show. Leave the monitor on all night while you sleep and maybe you will dream that you are hanging out with them.

Take walks and try to love jogging. Go outside in the rain and in the fog and get wet. Exercise and being outside will be the best anti-depressant.

Come here to study and ask questions and realize that you are studying while you sleep and while you walk or jog, while you listen to music and play your guitar, while you try to commune with other people and with God and nature. Realize that intelligence is often wasted in the classroom because the classroom like the church often keeps you from being honest about what your real questions are. Intelligence without honesty is stupid. I’d rather just be honest. The good classroom will only help push you farther than you might have gone by yourself. Without it most of us will never know what we are capable of.

Do all of this one day at a time leisurely. Think of it as training on how to live one day well. Forget all that carpe diem crap. You can’t enjoy having to cram the “best” into every day. Sucking the marrow out of life can be very wearying. Realize the “best” is only how miserably you will fail at pursuing Jesus everyday. Accept your spiritual weakness. The best you will ever be arises out of how well you know that God doesn’t care that your efforts to pursue him really stink. We will always be beginners.

Oh, and make sure you read works by Colin Gunton, Martin Buber, W.H. Auden, George Steiner, Richard Neihbur, Micheal O’Siadhail, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kathaleen Norris, Annie Dillard, Fredrick Beuchner, Mary Oliver, Alan Jacobs, Roger Lundin, Thomas Merton, Leslie Newbegin, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Jeremy Begbie, Scott Cairns, Lionel Basney, Chiam Potok, Eugene Peterson, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Phillip Yancey, Walker Percy, Jarslov Pelikan, Alexander Schmemann…oh, did I mention Colin Gunton…jeepers what have I been doing without a Trinitarian understanding of God?

If you come here it might not feel very important while you are here. It probably won’t be exciting unless you make it exciting and search your heart for the right questions.
Many people at Regent have been hurt by the church. Don’t be surprised by their questions. Try and find a roommate like mine who visibly loves Jesus, who will eagerly drag his guitar out to play worship songs with you.

Peace to you. I will be praying about your last semester. Let me know if I can be of any help in your decision making process. I don’t know if this was helpful for you, but it sure was for me!

The Goodness of The Lord in the Land of the Living

Convergence is the word I used with Trygve at lunch on Thursday. It has been a long time coming and I recognize that this is a blessed season that could change. When things are good, I confess that I often wait for the shoe to drop and for things to slide back into the ho-hum of the grind, but for now I am confident in saying that I have never known such fullness—such felicity, the life well lived, as the Greeks called it, eudaimonia. When I hit a wall at the age of 27, it was because I had stretched myself too thin. I wanted so much to be a pastor and an artist and to also stay fed and warm at night, and in order to do all that I had to work part time at both the church and as a high school teacher as well. And as I’ve said before, there is no such thing as a part time job at a church or a school. I called into the school twice to request “mental health” days off back in the Spring of 2001, my final semester of teaching high school. For some of the teachers that just meant a day off here and there to catch up at home with family and other things. For me that meant that I literally couldn’t get out of bed. I had a few panic attacks and found myself sitting alone at home on the couch weeping for hours, un-able to move. During that year my average week was something like 65-70 hours of work. I was working in the studio on music and running a house church too with twenty something singles while serving as pastor of music and art and also teaching World History.

I left Oklahoma City and took two summers and a full year of courses at Regent College in Vancouver B.C. The classes were very important for my journey, but the better gift was Vancouver itself. I feel that in many ways I was saved from myself and set down in the most remarkable of places in order to re-discover how to live well. I had spent so much of my energy trying to perfect the balance of everything so that I could be an arts pastor and I had become numb and tired of people. It seemed as if God was using me in spite of me, in spite of the empty shell of my heart. I needed the Spanish Banks, this series of beaches on the south shore of English bay. From the Spanish Banks you can look Eeast to the downtown metro area, North at the foot of the Canadian Rockies and West on a clear day allows you to see Vancouver Island. I actually became a quasi-jogging/exercising type of person not so much because I was interested in being in shape but because I was interested in being outside to take it all in. I ended up in a community house on 7th street with some other grad students, and I could walk to the Banks in less than fifteen minutes.

That was a good and fertile season in my life, but wasn’t convergence. It was formation. Teaching this “Ministry of Theology and Worship” course at Hope College is restoring my passion for teaching. The recording studio is getting better and better and therefore more and more useful. I have several student leaders who are joyfully partnering with me and carrying the weight of leadership beside me. My wife and I are more in love than ever, and I have a delightful ache to sing to God. Honestly, I have wrestled with the artistic merit of much of the contemporary worship that I play at Hope, but the spirit of the worship and the worshippers is what is so compelling. I can sense a genuine desire among the students to be changed into the likeness of Jesus. There is a depth and a fervor that Trygve and I were careful to not name too specifically on Thursday at lunch when we last talked about it. I’m mindful of Annie Dillard’s essay, “Total Eclipse” when she is frustrated with a bystander who too quickly assigns language to the sight of the eclipse as a lifesaver candy, rounded but having a hole in the middle. We have to be careful with how we name things, and we have to be careful to not try to name the un-nameable things. The best word for me here at this point in time is, convergence. I can point to a few tangibles here and there, but I feel awkward and ashamed to try to put any more language to it. If I name it, perhaps I’ll try to claim it for my own and try to control it and then the shoe will definitely drop or perhaps a hammer instead. We often have so many let downs because we place such false expectations on our lives that we can’t help but be disappointed.

I’ll borrow from Biblical language and say the goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living is a bright and shining light, and I am full of joy, gladness and thankfulness.

One more thing I want to discuss is my deep affection for these students here at Hope. I fell in love with the sixth graders I taught in Oklahoma City. They had a way of getting into my heart that surprised me. Every now and then I will get an email from one of them or I’ll find myself wondering how they are faring in high school. To work with college students has required another kind of leadership however that requires even more of my heart than ever before. As a classroom teacher, you have to work hard to draw the line between yourself and the students in order to maintain control. If you become one of them and buddy up, they will eventually find ways of taking advantage of your friendship. Because I love those little kids, I had to maintain control so they could utilize the classroom for the purpose of learning. To pastor college students, I have to become a friend in a very different way. My leadership emerges because they see and know more of me. My home, my marriage, my friends outside of school, my time management, my favorite movies, my favorite books and music, my whole lifestyle, all of it becomes a witness and a model that they sift through, critique, analyze and compare contrast with other adults. And as this kind of ministry becomes more established here, there is a deepening with the students to the point where I now can call them friends.

This is why I ache so much for Susanna to have permanent employment here too. Her one year visiting professorship is up and she isn’t one of the final three candidates for the position in creative writing. With marriage, the truth is that the whole sum is greater than our individual parts. Susanna and I are better together than we are apart from each other. We’ve made for a good partnership during this last year as we get to know each other’s students, spend extra time with them at the coffee shop or have them over to the house. I’m glad that together we are able to create a bridge between the classroom and the chapel. I am the worship pastor who loves to read and teaches a theology class that covers T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” She is the widely published and award winning poet who does not pull any punches in her writing and yet she regularly comes to chapel and sometimes even participates in the teaching or prayers. We want very much to model a commitment to learning, the arts, and our faith that helps Hope students envision a fuller and more dynamic humanity that reflects the witness of Christ, God who became man on the earth. It is not that either of us have it all figured out, but at least we have each other as we work this out in “fear and in trembling.”

Susanna has two prospective jobs at other schools. I’m not worried that she will not find work. I’m just sad for the sake of Hope College. We will miss out on her bright and shining light.

Broken Social Scene: The Half Gospel Groan

This is a post I started writing back in early November but never finished because it got me thinking so much. I've finished it up as a result of my kind friend Tyler's urging.

I just bought Kevin Drew’s first solo release Spirit If….. When I’m downtown Holland and have time, I sometimes stop by Full Circle record store and get myself into trouble. Steve, the owner/manager, sells used CDs too, an unbelievable temptation for me. So despite what I said about him a few posts ago, I bought Elliot Smith’s Either/Or for seven bucks and then couldn’t resist Kevin Drew’s first solo disc either. Kevin is the main creative force behind the Toronto based band/musical collective known as Broken Social Scene. This music is not for the faint of heart. I’m not sure if Kevin suffers from depression or if he is a drug addict (perhaps both), but this record is swirling in the bizarre and beautiful of what sounds to me like drug induced phantasms. I’ve now bought all of Broken Social’s CDs and sometimes wonder how I can reconcile my fascination with this music with my faith.

It is interesting that I now live in Western Michigan, an area predominantly populated by Dutch Reformed Calvinists. For all that could be said in critique of Calvinism as a whole, there is a theological openness to an engagement with culture that is liberating. In 1999 I attended my first Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College that hosted authors like Chaim Potok, Anne Lamot, Rabbi Kushner, and Maya Angelou. At that time the festival also included music (the music has since been separated into a separate festival that run every other year alternating with the Festival of Writing), and it was there that I first heard Pedro the Lion. In the Spring of 2006 I interviewed for my position at Hope College, a sister school to Calvin, while Susanna was presenting her poetry at Calvin’s Festival of Faith and Writing. Six years later the festivals keynote authors were Alice McDermott, Marilyn Robinson, and Salman Rushdie! This is all to say that there resides within the Dutch Reformed tradition some seminal ideology that must not only allow for but also motivate this kind of liberal dialogue with contemporary culture. I confess that despite my own reformed leanings, I am not as well read in these areas as I would like. From what I understand much of the Dutch Reformed tradition owes its substance as much to Abraham Kuyper, yet I did take in a very helpful quote from John Calvin when I was a freshmen beginning Wheaton College. It was in a pamphlet every student read called “The Student’s Calling.”

“All truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it; for it has come from God.”

I want to be very careful with the notion of a “wicked man.” Applying this kind of language to a person is not first and foremost the responsibility of the Church in any final and ultimate sense. None of us is equipped to judge another human being in a final way. Righteousness and damnation is ultimately between God and that person. However, for the sake of minding our own hearts and minds, it is important that we learn to discern our culture carefully. Such discernment is not a matter of condemning another person but rather protecting our own selves—in this case protecting our imaginations, the parts of our being that receive and react to culture. I read John Calvin’s statement in a pamphlet called “The Student’s Calling” when I was a entering Wheaton college.

Nevertheless, this quote has been seminal for me in terms of my engagement with culture. Hyperbole is generally not trust worthy, but this statement is true and no exaggeration: I am sure these words of Calvin were worth the sum total of my undergraduate education. Underneath this statement is a hungry desire to learn and explore all that God has created and to daringly move into a world that is ruled by a dark prince of confusion and enmity in order to find this truth. We could couple Calvin’s words with St. Francis’ teaching that there is not one bit of the created world that does not testify to God’s glory. Our purpose as members of a royal priest hood and holy nation is to go out into the darkness and redeem every inch of creation by drawing out the good within it. We reveal this goodness in just the same way a priest gathers up the bread and the cup and lifts them above his head for the congregation to see and hope in.

The question for each servant of Christ then is, which areas of creation he or she should explore, dig into, sift through and redeem. We are sent out from our prayer closets, out from our homes and from our communities to search out each nook and cranny of the created world with the wonder of a child and the craftiness of a serpent to be salt and light, to leaven and purify. Yet here is the tricky question: how far can each of us move into the darkness and still generate the light of Christ? As I referenced earlier in a previous post, some of us might lean over to reach out to the world and fall in. Perhaps there are some parts of the world that are best left alone, parts that might have goodness, but its goodness is so deeply hidden beneath layers of confusion that it is ultimately too much for any one person to engage alone without getting into trouble.

Broken Social Scene is a formidable excursion into the messy, grisly beauty that is their sound. Kevin’s newest record has few songs that rarely miss the opportunity to use the “F” word, such an ugly word. It is fair to say that much of his whole aesthetic is beautifully “F-ed up.” So why would a worship pastor like myself even bother with this? No doubt there are many who might not find it worth their time and energy, and I’d honestly be hesitant to recommend this music to just anybody without a good chat. I’m a lover of music and art in general. Unique music like Kevin Drew’s is very hard for me personally to ignore, and if I am going to listen to it, I need to discuss it in just this kind of manner to find the goodness within it. As people of faith, we cannot participate in society at large and leave it un-examined. I fear that many Christians blindly consume culture like sheep going to slaughter. This apathy will eventually lead us to a neutered Gospel and milk toast discipleship.

The word “broken” as it exists in the band’s moniker is essential to appreciating this music. Most of Kevin’s lyrics are obtuse to say the least, and I’m not sure if it is fair to say there is any traditional way of reading them. He is bound and determined to elude any conclusive interpretation of what his music means. Nevertheless, whether the band literally owns up to the brokenness of the word “broken” in their name, that word describes the functional purposes, the modus apperendi, of the band. In Wilco’s documentary, I am Trying to Break Your Heart, former guitar player, Jay Bennet, explains that their method was to take the conventional structure of the song and “f---k” it up. Well, if that is what Wilco did on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Broken Social Scene bashes each of their songs to pieces.

Here is exactly where the redemption comes in though. In the midst of what sounds like extreme efforts to destroy their music, there is still a brilliance of coherent, melodic beauty akin to the likes of my beloved Elliot Smith on one hand and Radiohead on the other. Broken Social just manages to do this in an especially broken and horrifying way.

For a Christian who is tired of sentimentalism, the excessive addiction within the church to masking the pain of the world with forced happiness, the wonderful chaos of Broken Social Scene is a relief. What I appreciate from this kind of art is its spot on ability to articulate what I call generally the “spirit of the age.” This music is able to hold a mirror up to our post industrial society, to examine and confess its agony and at the same time provide a melodic structure that points to something meaningful. What that meaningful something is, is beside the point. What I share with a Kevin Drew or a Thom Yorke is the belief that in the midst of a broken and messy world there is still something worth singing about. In many ways they are much closer to a biblical profession of faith than our so-called Christian artists that are marketed to the church. Let me explain.

In his book Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairytale, Fredrick Beuchner teaches us that the good news of God is always bad news before it is good news. This allows us to see the value of the tradition of tragic literature. Beuchner’s point is that we cannot fully understand salvation until we understand what we are being saved from.

The Greeks originally believed that their tragic dramas should be woven into popular civic life in order to train the moral compass of each citizen. In their Golden Age they had seasonal drama festivals, tragedies in one season and comedies in another. They believed that the tragedies, above all, revealed the quality of a person’s virtue. When un-just violence is inflicted upon a character, a citizen should feel deep pangs of fright and even anger. If a citizen does not experience this, it is probable that he or she is in fact amoral and even corrupt.

For the Greeks the emphasis was upon each individual’s journey toward the virtuous life. For a Christian a tragedy is instead an admission of our need for salvation. Not only should a believer have an ache for justice in the face of tragedy, she should fall upon her face in repentance to recognize her own capacity to contribute chaos to a tragic plot. “Oh, but for the grace of God go I!”

Broken Social Scene, with it’s broken aesthetic, is a tragicomic musical expression. The fundamental idea of the comic is not just that it is funny but that the outcome of the story is good. Often the comedies portray shocking brutality yet they posses a coherent, positive ending where the troubles are put aside and the main characters enter into joy. This can be understood in the composition of the music. The rhythmic foundation of Broken Social is essentially comic in the regularity of the snare and kick drums on both the quarter and half notes. The steadiness of the beats and the overall expression of the drums are not half-hearted. The drums scoot you right along underneath the maniacal swirls of sounds, the distorted voices and the many layers of ambient noises, trumpets and electric guitars. Pare back all the instrumentation, leave the drums and you might sense a stronger sense of hopefulness. For me, drums are everything and Broken Social never disappoints.

However, the overall sentiment of the music, while containing a strain of beauty pulsing through it, is an emotion of confusion, frustration and lonely despair. This is a condition I am no stranger to, and it is how I assume that most of us feel—especially those of us in the West who are so busy. As one writer said it, “Americans don’t have lives; they have careers.” Some scientists believe that as much as 30% of our population suffers from some degree of depression. In this context I hear Broken Social Scene as a protest against the darkness of what we have made of ourselves here in all our affluence and convenience. Here is how I see this music as in one way more authentic to the Gospel than what is marketed as “Christian” music. After all, a third of the Psalter itself is made up of laments and groans of suffering. It is only our sentimentalized American faith that is in the habit of drawing attention in song only to the more pietistic and jovial of the Psalms. I would never ever want to hinder a brother or sister from engaging the person of God intimately and passionately, however, the breadth of the Psalms do not support this as the main focus of prayer life. The overall gist of the Psalms is: the world is full of wickedness; I and we are complicit in this wickedness; even in the midst of the testimony of creation and God’s historic faithfulness we continue to rebel against him; we don’t know what else there is to do or how to stop our rebellion; finally, we cry out “please help us Oh, God.”

Broken Social Scene’s music is essentially a groaning. It is a “half-Gospel” in its ability to help us confess the wrong that is in the world. I am not suggesting that all of us need to listen to this CD or even make it something we can each appreciate. I’d much rather have a good hymn like “Be Thou My Vision” or “Be Still My Soul” as a theme song of my waking life. I just offer this band as an example of how I go about engaging our popular culture.

One final note about Kevin Drew and Broken Social Scene: we as Christian artists should be challenged by these kinds of musical collectives. When I saw Broken Social in concert a few years ago there were at times as many as eighteen people on stage when they had their full horn section adding to a song. Normally this many musicians on stage would suggest either a train wreck or something like jam rock (the later is something I am not particularly fond of). What does it take to get so many people to play and create together? And further, how is this creativity sustained over a period of years? This is my question as I continue to chip away at my own record. How can I incorporate more and more people into one whole piece of art? It has not been easy.