New Wine From Sour Grapes - Installment One

Over the years I've thought a lot about the relations between money, art, and success. I've thought about these things so much because 1) I am a musician/songwriter with almost 30 years experience and who might aptly be described as competent but "unsuccessful"; 2) I am an idealist with a strong, but markedly sub-articulate, 'art for art sake' impulse; and 3) I am a husband and father whose job it is to provide shelter, heat, running water, Captain Crunch, school backpacks, and plastic light sabers.

Again, I'm a competent picker. I come from a family of musicians, and one of my relatives is a financially successful, nationally known banjo player and a member of the Georgia Country Music Hall of Fame. I started playing banjo myself when I was eleven years old, guitar when I was twelve, and mandolin a few years ago. My singing is passable, and perhaps even pretty good if "bipolar hillbilly" happens to be your cup of tea. Furthermore, friends and family tell me that my songwriting is okay. So far, so good. But then one turns to the business end of the whole affair.

I have played bars, coffeehouses, outdoor festivals, and private parties a lot over the years and have made a little money here and there doing it. Nevertheless, my failures and defeats in the "getting gigs" and "getting paid" departments far outweigh my successes. It is this fact and its attendant temptations that I want to investigate just a bit. (I might also add, for the sake of those suffering from similar afflictions, that this all applies to my life as a writer of poems, novels, and essays as well, only more so.)

The first thing that has to be admitted is that I am not an extroverted, go-getter kind of guy. This fact rooted in a native lack of industry coupled with a strong dose of trans-generational family dysfunction. So let's go ahead and be clear on this - I admit to having had a life-long lazy streak, and I acknowledge that it is partially responsible for my lack of success in the music business. However, I honestly do not believe that my lack of ambition is altogether attributable to laziness. It is also partly due to the fact that I'm just tempermentally unsuited to shove and elbow my way around in the dog-eat-dog world.

In this respect, I'm sort of like a guy in a tiny, dinged up Corolla (word to my brother, Geoff) manuevering down a highway swarming with Hummers. I putter along too slowly in the fast lane, and everybody honks and shakes their fist (or else they laugh and point) as they speed past me. This makes me nervous, so I just pull over. Perhaps I sit in the grass and write a song about how I prefer the backroads of life to the interstates. Unfortunately, nobody hears the song. For one thing, they have their CD players up too loud. For another, they're all still honking, only now it's because they're annoyed that some flake is parked on the shoulder playing a mandolin.

Let me shed the cute metaphor for a second and be candid about what I really mean. Truth be told, I have many times been passed over in favor of musicians with a quarter of my talent. Often these guys had more stage presence. Most every time they knew how to "shuck and jive" better than I do. Usually they had cooler hair cuts. Invariably they were perfectly comfortable shoving themselves into the limelight armed with only a few power chords and a just-shy-of-mastered moveable pentatonic scale.

Now perhaps this all sounds like sour grapes. Matter of fact, it is sour grapes. That's why I bring it up.

Somehow as an artist I have to transcend, not so much capitalism or the general contempt for art so endemic to our culture, but my own faithlessness and second guessing as to both 1) my calling as an artist and 2) God's integrity in providing for those who follow their heart. I need to clarify the motives behind my criticism of contemporary American culture, particularly of its superficiality and the way in which it co-opts and makes merchandise of everything: I need to ask honestly whether I am motivated by the desire to see Truth, Beauty, and Goodness prevail, or by my own desire for a piece of the pie and the attendant self-righteous lust for seeing others castigated as sell outs. As long as it is the latter, I will find the way of transcendence - in other words, the way of the Kingdom - undiscoverable and inaccessible.

* * *

I used to daydream about never, ever receiving money for playing music just on principle. But then I had a wife and three kids and needed balogna, and music was a good way to supplement my income. All I had to do was become a jukebox, play Margaritaville, and voila! I could buy Juicy Juice and diapers that week. Pretty compelling argument. Pretty cowardly way to live, though, I am (almost) convinced.

One of the big hang ups for me when it comes to being a faith-full musician, is that it is hard to shake the idea that God looks at art and music the same way that our culture does. At my best moments I might think, "Hey, God wants me to be independent of the empire; He wants me act prophetically and live out the Sermon on the Mount in a bold, tangible way; and when I do, He will supply the balogna and diapers, even if I don't get paid." That way, when I don't require money from the folks I play for, they have no leverage when they want to treat me like a jukebox. I don't have to play that dumb song that the redneck wants to hear, because he isn't paying me, doesn't own me - instead, I can play this dumb song that the redneck needs to hear.

But when it comes to actually living that way - taking the less travelled road and all that - there's not only the old reliable "need to buy balogna" fear; there's also the other, more insidious fear that God is really on the side of the redneck, the car salesman, the bureaucrat, and most evangelicals of every trade, in that he views music as a trivial thing, a silly diversion, and not as something to seriously challenge and change the world with. So I play the Jimmy Buffet song and get my chump change at the end of the night.

Paul says that the laborer is worthy of his hire. He says this in order to explain how it would be appropriate and legitmate in every sense for him to receive money for all of his apostle-ing. But then he did not in fact receive money for it. I reckon this is because he knew that, whatever fairness might dictate in a perfect world, in this world (the one people for some reason insist on calling the real world), money always comes with strings attached. I imagine he further knew that one of the main strings is this: tell us something comforting and cute, and for Heaven's sake, something that doesn't challenge or offend us.

* * *

Okay, I've been tinkering around with this one long enough. It doesn't look like it's going to come to a tidy conclusion any time soon. So hold that thought. More on all this later.

Can Any Good Thing Come From Alabama?

I just had an interesting conversation with a fellow Christian. He was surprised to hear that I believe that God has some special plan for an ethnic, national Israel, and that it involves actual land. Among reformed types (I know some of them), it is customary to dismiss this idea as dispensational pre-millenialism of the Tim LaHaye/Hal Lindsay variety. Don't we post-millenialists (okay, amillenialists too) know that the promises of the Old Testament have been universalized to include all ethnic groups? Don't we know that the New Earth is going to include the whole planet, not just Israel? Don't we know that he is a Jew who is one inwardly and not outwardly (and, if we're honest about what we really think, that this really applies slightly more to gentile Christians than to real, ethnic, bloodline sons of Abraham)?

I recognize that this notion of God loving an actual place could throw a kink in a fellow's systematics. But when I read the Bible - the Psalter, the Prophets, Paul - I can't ignore God's passionate insistence on how much he loves that little strip of land over there on the eastern Mediterranean.

Is all that "curse those who curse you" and "bless those who bless you" business really just rhetorical?

How about when God says to Israel, "Can a woman forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." Is this just "symbolic"? Something that has to be interpreted "spiritually" by twenty-first century evangelicals (who are undoubtedly the most spiritually enlightened group of people ever to exist)? Is this something God was really adressing to the New Testament church but allowed the Jews to believe applied to them for a time? Because whatever you and I may say about it, the Jews were certainly convinced that these things applied to them. Otherwise, why was Jeremiah so hurt and confused that he blurted out, "Ah, Lord God, surely thou hast greatly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, Ye shall have peace; whereas the sword reaches unto the soul." Oh, Jeremiah, you silly thing - none of that ever really applied to Israel any way. God was talking about us, not you. So see? No reason to get all huffy.

An even more disconcerting interpretation is that God really did feel that way about Israel back then, but now that the Old Testament is "obsolete" he's just kind of moved on, just kind of forgotten all those declarations of love he made to Israel once upon a time.

No, guys. This is one of those times where rigorous sytematics has to be tempered (as logical and philosophical constructs must ever be) by the overall ethos of scripture. Simply put, we must not allow our love for systematization to render us up a God who writes love poetry that he doesn't really mean. That would be the foolishness of Aaron: I ran these verses through the machine, and out came this god.

Do a little thought experiment with me. First, try to forget for a minute that the Old Testament has been made perfectly persipicuous to us. Set aside for a moment the knowledge that contemporary American evangelicals have exhaustively plummed the depths of the Hebrew scriptures and have analyzed away all of their mysterious, eastern, pre-democratic and pre-industrial elements.

Next, try reading the Old Testament as if it were a parchment just delivered to you in the desert by a fiery seraphim after you've eaten nothing but grasshoppers for a month (instead of a textbook with explanatory notes sold to you by a nerdy librarian and that you've done twenty semester hours on in an upper-middle class seminary run by a bunch of white folks). Read it as if it were the thundering oracles of a jealous oriental diety who was known to the surrounding pagans (and feared by them) as a mountain dweller.

Lastly, check out Romans 11. Romans is of course where the bulk of the ammo comes from for the other side of this argument. But isn't it just like God to throw down something in the middle of someone's airtight, proof-texted case just in order to, you know, mess it up? Paul doesn't appear to be taking the everybody-is-spiritually-a-Jew angle in Romans 11, folks (or, as it is otherwise known, the doctrine of Isreal-really-means-the-Church). No, he is very consciously, deliberately, and overtly contrasting Jews and Gentiles in this passage.

Now then, it must be obvious that I am not a master guru scholar of the scriptures. I am not a trained theologian in any sense. I do not know the languages, and I have not taken the classes (although I have the highest regard and deference for anyone who does and has). But I can read English passably well; and insofar as our English translations are reliable vessels of God's Word, I've read it a good bit. And the God that I read about in there loves rivers, and mountains, and valleys - not only that, but he loves particular mountains, rivers, and valleys. The Bible says so, over and over and over. It's not just in there to sound pretty, either. It's true. It's a real part of God's character.

What about you? Is there some place, some locality, some region, some culture, some town, some family home, some neighborhood, some acre of backwoods, some creek, some beach, some stretch of backroad that you love? That you miss? That you draw a great degree of your personal identity from? That you weep for, because it's been sold to strangers, or turned into a development, or flooded by a lake for fat cats on ski-doos, or neglected and allowed to dilapidate? I bet there is. Even if you don't think so right now - maybe you were a military kid, or maybe you just don't get all mushy and sentimental like other folks (or could it be that you cynically regard what is most human about you as sentimentality and mush?) - even so, I bet if you meditate on it honestly for an hour, you will realize there is some place like that for you.

Where does it come from, this mysterious attachment to place? Is it just a freak of human nature with no significance? Is it just something poets and songwriters go on and on about to justify their careers or maladjustment (or both)? Pffffffffft. Come on. You love some place because God loves some place. In fact, the fact that you love someplace is Him loving that place through you. Loving a place is an indicator of human-ness. People with no attachment to place are deficiently human. And that's just another way of saying that their imago Dei is messed up. We are bearers of God's likeness, and everything that is essentially human is his image in us. To love a place is a fundamental element of being a person. Read The Lord of the Rings again if you don't believe me. Or Faulkner. Or Dostoevsky. Or the Old Testament.

Anyway, just so all of you know, in the dispensation of the fullness of times, the eschaton, the millenium, whenever all of that gets straightened out, I plan on receiving the state of Alabama as my especial province. My duty will be to restore her to her Edenic beauty. I love Alabama. It's my home, even though I haven't lived there in some years. It's where I first dwelled among mountains and rivers and fireflies and sycamores. It's where I first heard fiddles and banjos and sawmill blades buzzing on green lumber. It's where as a child I was called in to wash up for dinner.

Chesterton once said something about loving a place - something about an insane asylum, or a slum - something to the effect that even that place would have been beautiful if someone had just loved it. That's precisely why Israel is going to be like the Garden of the Lord someday - because God loves it.

When Good Things Happen to Weird People

After church today, we had a congregational meeting and adopted a resolution to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA - the preposition was a point of dispute, and the resolution had to be amended, for it was first proposed that we leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America - big difference). Now we have to complete the process of leaving, which involves a ninety day waiting period (we only want deliberate, well thought out schisms) and possibly a visit from an ELCA bishop who would, I reckon, come down and ask us if we're really, really, 100% completely sure about taking such a drastic step; a step which, all said, doesn't appear as drastic as appointing homosexuals to high places of authority within the church.

I talk like I've got all this down, but you would be amazed at how little I actually know about Lutheran infightings and by-laws and whatnot. In my defense, I've only been Lutheran for about a year, and I'm not positive I'm Lutheran even now. Basically, I just want an organ, some responsive readings, congregational psalmody, creedal recitation, and sacraments every week (four out of five ain't bad - more on that in a second). The rest (including the fine points of soteriology, which the Lutherans, along with the Anglicans, appear to be less hung up on than most) is secondary.

You see, at some point about six years ago, I decided to make the ecclesiological shift from a vague primitivism to a perhaps even vaguer high liturgicalism. This was a radical change for me, and the culmination of a long, circuitous process. I won't go into it here, except to sum up briefly: starting about six years ago (I'm leaving out the whole first 16 years of the story), I abandoned the two or three Baptist churches I was then hopping between; went briefly to two different Presbyterian churches; went to an Episcopal church for about two years; moved to Georgia and found the Episcopal churches here wearisomely liberal; tried a couple of Anglican and Lutheran churches in the area but decided they were either too far away, too snotty, or just plain weird; and finally settled down in the Lutheran church in the next town up from ours, where just this morning my wife and I and the other folk there voted to leave the ELCA.

Now everything is not perfect even here. For instance, the congregation voted several months ago to stick to biweekly, rather than shift to weekly, communion - a bummer for a sacramentalist like myself; but at least folks still manage to raise an eyebrow when the talk turns to gay preachers. The vote was 66 to 9 in favor of bailing. I was pleasantly surprised - emphasis on both 'pleasantly' and 'surprised'.

The Malpractice of Poetry

About a year ago, I discovered Robin Skelton's book 'The Practice of Poetry'. About six months later, I discovered that Skelton was a witch. The first discovery was monumental; the second, catastrophic.

Skelton's book is far and away the best book on writing that I have ever encountered (and I have encountered lots of books on writing). This is a dense, intelligent book without the effeminate, la-te-da kind of prompts one finds in many books on the subject. The author reflects deeply on the psychology of poetry writing, including the interminable hang-ups, insecurities, and other convolutions that confound the aspiring poet, and generously provides sinewy exercises that tap the deep springs of the subconscious and elicit evocative material. The writing that I generated using these exercises is the most virile, teeming, raw material that I have ever produced, either on my own, in a workshop, or with the aid of a book.

So what's the problem, you ask? What's "lamentable" about it? Well, as I said, it turns out Skelton was a witch (he's deceased), and this presents a dilemma for me, because I'm a Christian. Now I'm fully aware of the notion of spoiling the Egyptians (though, frankly, I have some problems with stating it that way - more on that in some future post, perhaps). I know that to the pure all things are pure; that nothing is evil in and of itself; and (to quote another source) that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Nevertheless, all of this has to be squared with the following principle: "He that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith"; or, as alternately expressed: "Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils".

Alas, I have not reached that stage of spiritual maturity where I can infallibly recognize the line between Christian liberty and syncretism. Nor do I know on which side of this line it is more profitable (or less destructive) to err. Pharisaism and promiscuous indiscretion are equally offensive to Christ, and equally toxic to his disciples. In the panic to discern the difference, I frequently jam my weapon (most often an ink pen) and lose significant battles in the war for spiritual clarity.

I desperately need to write poetry. I feel reasonably sure it is my vocation, along with music and teaching. Furthermore, I feel something becoming more and more congested in me the longer I go without doing it. (Yes, I write poetry, but I'm talking about finishing poems; polishing them; publishing them; sharing them with people who might, as a result of some inexpressible misfortune, need them). Thus I am perpetually searching for the book, mentor, teacher, group (in person or on the internet) that will teach me not only how to really write, but also how to really measure my progress through such dubious terrain. So far, the best thing I have discovered is 'The Practice of Poetry' by Robin Skelton. Unfortunately, I cannot avail myself of the instruction in this book (I have a copy of it, lying unassumingly in the drawer of my bedside table), because I cannot pick it up without freaking my conscience out.

Is this just vestigial knee-jerk fundamentalism? Or is it deeper than that? In other words, is God telling me not to use this book, or are my neuroses and unbelief preventing me from intelligently and productively - and lawfully - pursuing one of the great desires of my heart?