My Church Gig

It was still my birthday a couple hours ago.  This post has nothing to do with my church gig or audio in general.  Just wanted to share some thoughts as I’ve reflected on my life today.

For whatever reason, the Lost Dogs’ song Breathe Deep the Breath of God has been the underlying movie theme for the motion of the day.

I believe the same thing that offers me a knack for running sound also contributes to what often feels like an oblique perspective on the Christian life:  a personal sense of the connectedness and balance of things.  For me, forty-some-odd years of life has been every inch a bittersweet symphony with soothing melodies against beds of dissonance as well as disturbing motifs juxtaposed to elegant, shimmering glissandos.  I see the whole thing as beautifully and tragically inseparable.

I’m drawn to shows like Six Feet Under in which completely believable characters face turmoil so magnified that we can’t help but see traces of it within ourselves.  I love movies like Magnolia where troubled characters find ironic redemption in a moment of random, unexpected natural phenomenon.  The world is not as you would reason it to be if you were the inventor.  Strange things actually happen – even raining frogs.

I don’t buy the asceticism veiled as good Christian living that’s been peddled to my generation, era, and culture.  Neither do I buy the Gnosticism veiled as righteous efforts to become more spiritually connected to God as if it were an elevated state one must work to maintain.  These attempts to separate a spiritual world of righteousness from a physical world of sin and suffering are as empty as trite childhood songs; one-dimensional melodies manufactured to make us smile and nothing more.  For me, the spiritual and physical worlds are inseparable.  Keep in mind, friend, that when Christ rose from the dead, he did so in his body, no matter how transformed it was.  The scars in his resurrected hands testify to this connectedness – the spirit of Christ now infused with the stuff of this earth working a powerful redemption ever since.

Most of us spend our lives as slaves to a primal urge for safety and comfort, and it poisons our perception of our relationship with and to God.  In fact, we generally envision heaven as the fulfillment of our desires with ideas of mansions and eternal rest.  When we actually achieve safety and comfort on this planet we drown in our entitlement issues and grow tragically weak.  It’s not what one expects; we were meant for adversity, suffering and death every bit as much as we were meant for love, peace and joy.  It’s part of the deal in this thin layer of air between earth and space.

Few people with social skills talk openly about the 3:00AM staring sessions in pitch black and the thoughts that keep them awake.  The unspoken understanding that each of us carry a burden or two is part of maturity.  Trusted confidants are a gift from God.  As Solomon points out, life is mostly full of empty meaning, and it’s even emptier to whine about all that emptiness.  Just get on with it and contribute your piece of the human progression through history.  That’s his final advice.  Rightly so.  Hope that is seen is no hope at all, Paul says.  So we live hoping, never fully seeing.  We live in the absence of fulfillment until death kindly bridges the gap.

Today, for some odd reason, I remember an uneducated, homeless man in Chicago whom I shrugged off.  Turned out he knew more about the Bible than I did.  You find traces of God hidden in unexpected places.  He does that on purpose by the way, using the weak things of the earth (not necessarily weak in heaven’s eye) to confound the earthly wise.  

I also think of people I know who don’t consider Jesus at all, yet in their recovery from addictions they have more spiritual maturity and a deeper connection with God than most Christians I know.  God specifically answers their prayers too.

This spirit of Christ now infused into the soil and air we live on and in is truly powerful, bringing redemption, belonging, freedom, and strength in ways you wouldn’t expect.  But the end goal is not our safety and comfort; it is our nearness to God.  We get some of it now and all the rest later.  In the meantime we would do well to search for God in the unlikely and unexpected.

So here’s to the mundane, the base, and the beautiful for being so:

politicians, morticians, philistines homophobes
skinheads, dead heads, tax evaders, street kids
alcoholics, workaholics, wise guys, dim wits
blue collars, white collars, war mongers, peace nicks

Breathe deep -
breathe deep the breath of God…

-The Lost Dogs

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 12:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.