Quill Upon the Paper

It is my great pleasure to present...

2011-10-25T05:52:00.001-07:00

... a brand new record, Letters from Sinclair's Eve. And not only that, but a brand new website: Adamwhipple.com! Plus, you are entitled to a FREE DOWNLOAD from the new EP.

What does all of this mean? Yes, sadly, it means that we shall bid a fond adieu to Quill Upon the Paper. It has been our means of communication, the formica-topped diner table over which we've shared coffee, for some 7 years, and we shall miss it. Heretofore though, all notices, articles, and wanted posters shall be plastering the walls of the new site. The fantastic part is that our new web stomping grounds has room for music, blogging, photographs, a store, and other things I've only dreamed of. Like any new house, we'll settle into it.

Letters from Sinclair's Eve is a five-song EP that has grown out of the intimate and haunted grounds of recording at home. It is a testament to the patience and holy encouragement on the part of my wife to see the dining 'nook' at our house populated by a grimly determined old upright, a small and crackly Kimball organ, and stacks upon stacks of instruments in and out of their cases, all hoping for that great day when we get a room to ourselves where they don't get swoopingly put away like the playthings in the Velveteen Rabbit. I spent the course of several months stuffed into this cleft in the rock, sidling up to the piano and dangling mics from the chandelier, hoping to see the back of the Almighty. What started out as a set of demos turned into something new altogether. A four-star chef offering to buy squash from one's kitchen garden would not be far from the mark. It seemed odd as the inklings of the main idea trickled in, but it had a mind of its own.

After many late nights, I packed up these little orphan songs and trotted them across town to Dylen Terflinger, hoping that we could scrub behind their ears and dress them up nice. Dylen was most encouraging, and visibly excited, and we put the music through the wringer, waiting for the gems on the other side. My deepest heartfelt thanks to both the inimitable Dylen of KnoxSound Studios for mixing the record and to the indefatigable Jeremy LaDuke for designing, building, and hosting the website.

Brave New Changes

2011-09-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Approaching.....like a photon torpedo.

Faith of Our Fathers

2011-08-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

This is an entry that I wrote a little over a month ago, then put under my pillow, wondering if it would be worthwhile to post it. It is somewhat revealing, you might say, but I think it might be all the more worthwhile for that.

I turned the radio on in the bathroom today, in a move of errant whimsy.

Occasionally, I will listen to preaching on the local station that airs that sort of thing. They also deign to play Christian call-in radio shows as well, which gives me pause. How did those begin? Presumably, most people call in because they've heard the host giving helpful advice to other callers. But who was the first caller who thought he'd take a shot and dial up Dr. First-Name-Only (there's a red flag) and see what he had to say? There are very few logical Books of Genesis, so to speak, for call-in radio shows, and I daresay most of the explanations are dubious.

However, this time, there was a pastor on who was preaching about something-or-other. Having heard many of these fellows, I recognized his tone and the cadence of his language, and it struck me as encouraging a doctrine of fear. Not Fear and Trembling, mind you, just fear. Fear of the current culture (or, arguably, the lack thereof) and fear of the degenerative social norms seemed to be the flavors of the day. I turned off the radio with a mixture of disgust and humorous pity, and a terrible thought came to my mind which had been brewing for days.

It began, or at least surfaced, when my friend and I went to see Transformers 3, the title of which tells you most of what you need to know. We entered the theatre on July 3rd, and exited on July 4th. The three hours in between were packed with a sugary conflux of explosions, larger-than-life robots, a busty heroine, miniature soliloquies on freedom and justice, and more American flags than can be counted. I went home, slept, and the next morning, read the Declaration of Independence, the Mayflower Compact, an essay by Cotton Mather, and an excerpt by Christopher Columbus. All this transpired as, a few miles away, downtown was preparing for a celebration in which the 1812 Overture would be played in time with a deafening fireworks display. Now, I enjoy fireworks, but compared to a reading of the Declaration of Independence - which would attract far fewer patriots to a public park - explosions for fun seem rather lowbrow. In this decidedly snobby frame of mind, it occurred to me that the founding fathers, so often lauded by people who have never taken the time to read their work, might not have been people of simple faith.

Simple and Complex, I thought. Some people have Simple Faith, and some have Complex Faith. People who are high logical, as the founding fathers of necessity certainly were, might find themselves wrestling with angels more, as it were. The thinking man, by definition, has more questions. Obviously, I knew which side my bread was buttered on. I was highly logical, I thought. My faith was Complex. This is, by the way, not a pretty story.

Two things came to mind that countered this elitist cognition. The first was the remonstrance of Paul to the Roman church. "Who are you to judge some other master's servant?" he chides them. "To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for God is able to make him stand."

Perhaps we should not call these flavors of faith simple and complex. In the best sense, they are like bridge designs, I suppose. Over the same chasm can stretch both the Roman aqueduct, stalwart and grizzled as some old sea dog, and the spindly steel harp strings of the suspension bridge. When I hear those words - simple and complex - roll off my tongue though, I cannot help but recall the poignance of the second thing which came to mind.

Jesus drew a child out of the crowd, as if picking a daisy, and juxtaposed him against the righteous swagger and belch of the disciples. Unless you become like this, you won't be a part. The subjects of the King are all like children. He didn't elaborate, but it is striking how simple a child's faith is. There are hard questions, certainly, but the child's faith is never convoluted through a series of pathetically dusty dogmas and intellectual backflips.

As my pastor put it, following Jesus is simple, but not easy.

Why Fiction?

2011-08-09T20:02:00.000-07:00

I love nightly walks around my neighborhood, when the summer sky can't go dark but holds out an aching blue note of twilight while the the moon glitters like a diamond. I am given to occasionally making these walks barefoot, relishing the cool of the ground in the dark beyond a blazing day. My feet will get black and scuffed from the road, but as I pad across the terra firma, overhung with the boughs of oak and elm, I am reminded that I am connected to this earth, that I am part of it, that it affects me and I it in the awkward grace of our dance. One of us wobbles and reels while the other staggers and shuffles. We each step on the other's feet, but we keep cutting our seven-step rhythm, she gamboling about the heavens and I scribbling in little journals.

In the business of writing, I constantly try to convince myself that it isn't worth the bother. Thankfully, in this regard, I'm not the best of the Devil's advocates. Either that or there are few twelve-step programs to break an addiction to wordsmithing. Continually, though, I trip over the question, "Why?" Why do I do this? For me? Probably. For fame? Probably. For the service of Truth which is the source of and permeates all reality, superseding it with a Glory that would destroy us were it not veiled? Um. That's a question I have to admit I'm not qualified to answer, although the previous two reasons have thus far proven rather unfruitful in some blessed measure. As a reader of fiction, though, this is a far easier survey to take. The more I read fiction, the more I know why I read it. Pure enjoyment and sometimes escapism give way to the interior magnitude of stories, lending scope to the cramped exterior of reality. In a culture of almost diabolical sunderedness between people who, via the internet and cell phones, trade digital summaries for actual personal encounters, fiction reminds us of the sheer unplumbed size of the created world. In that respect, odd as it may seem, fiction gives us truth. Immersed in it, it starts to characterize the way we view the world. It is a waking dream that eventually forces us to look again at the seemingly obvious in front of us.

Good fictional characters become a sort of hagiography of all the real characters in our lives. That girl who had a miscarriage in chapter nine is your sister when you blink a couple of times, though its not so much through empathy as through the suspension of disbelief. When we open ourselves to fiction, to the idea that anything could happen, people - dare I say, inevitably? - become more than the sum of their parts, their quirks, their jobs, and their political leanings. They literally thrum with possibility and hope. You can even hear it in tragic characters like Brett and Jake in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, rattling in between the lines of their dogged and pathetic semi-loyalty to each other and crackling pleasantly in Jake's humor at his own injury. If there is hope and possibility singing in the lives of these ink-and-paper human sacrifices, these mortal ephemera, then the Puckish gleam of curiosity will quietly ask, "What about the guy across the hall from me?"

Or, as C. S. Lewis put it, "You have never met a mere mortal."

Every marginal encounter on the street or in the cereal aisle is the brushing of shoulders between two souls robed in flesh, two immortals sashaying blithely through temporal possibility of Grace or otherwise. This is a role of fiction: to remind us of the unbearably imminent humanity - and the iconic Antecedent of the humanity - of our friends and cohorts, of our enemies and rulers. As Saint Paul put it, "Some have entertained angels without knowing it." You probably can't write that kind of character intentionally. At least, I can't, but in honest writing it seems to happen on its own. Because you probably can't do it intentionally, this is not a practical reason to write fiction, though it may be a very good reason to write it. Even better, it's a reason to read it. It is a joyous thought against the cynical backdrop of crying, "Lies," though, and that's reason enough to scribble and scuttle over paper every day.

Live against the stunted egotism of the denouncing of joy.

Where Have You Been?

2011-06-27T21:32:00.000-07:00

God is not concerned with where you have been. He loves you here and now.

This is a paraphrase of so much of what we, the Church, are preaching, at least in the West. The God we serve is not concerned with our past, with our sins of yesterday, with our baggage and our mess. Our manifesto is that of an animal: exclusively concerned with the present. An animal does not know much about Then, but only Now. This can be helpful in a number of ways, I would bet, given the Pharisaical stigma attached to the church. People anticipate being labeled and misunderstood at church. That’s the expectation we’ve earned. It’s been there so long the jokes have grown old. Go to some other church in another city, or turn on the AM preaching station for several hours, and you’re liable to hear the same comedic bombshells plunk across the airwaves.

“I know I’ve got to finish or the Methodists will get to Don Pablo’s first.”
“There’s room at the cross, but not on the back pew with the deacons.”
“The young folks are doing interpretive movement; we don’t dance here, I know.”

The lines have grown stale and musty, and well they should. Our pitifully backward concern with getting scoured and scrubbed up, “prayed up,” dressed up, and regimented up enough to come to the table of the Lord forgets the pointed story of the wedding guests. This one had some pressing business, this one a car to buy, this one was leaving town. “I’m sorry, I must…” ran the flippant backward glance, the parting shot that they all tossed over their shoulders like so much salt for good luck. I cannot come, instead I must do elsewise. So the master sends for anyone and everyone. The servants round up a couple necking in the park, a man riding the bus just to have something to do, an iron and square-framed business woman who just got demoted, a teacher, a midshipman, the miller’s scrawny lad, a mother and her daughter swept from the market with bread and celery in hand, the town drunk, and a man who can’t help but talk in rhymes. They tote them all out to the mansion, gathering the surprised and the curious along the way.

We, in our expectation of cleanliness, forget this. We forget that cleanliness is only next to godliness in one drastically limited sense. Any parent who has wiped smeared cake from the face of a gleeful birthday boy has glimpsed the limits of the virtue of cleanliness. For he who wraps himself in zeal and lightning as a garment also bore the tongue-in-cheek purple of a mocking robe soon to be snatched and gambled away while he was beaten. The man himself died for all so that we might not be afraid to come to him. “How I have long to gather you,” he said, looking out over the city, the bitter turn of the bread of sorrow already on his tongue.

How then, can we say that Christ has no concern over our past? To say this is to render moot the bloodshed of the Rood, the parched throat and labored breathing, the betrayal in the garden, the silent refusal to defend himself, and the forgiveness he gave despite it all. Jesus came to die because of my past, my present, and my time to come. Necessitated by the very Love that hovered over void and formless water, then went jubilating the world into being, he sees at once all the time which I occupy. My past has not slipped his mind. Neither my tomorrow.

This device of acceptance – God not being concerned with your past – is not acceptance at all. To accept me without my faults is to accept me in part, to look at me as perfect by my own half-merit, without the blood of Jesus washing me clean. Love is not that easy, though. Simple, but not easy. If family life teaches us anything, it teaches us that love is rarely earned and never convenient. It is not because God is absentminded and needs an extra dose of Ginkgo Biloba that he accepts me, it is because He Loves me. In the course of time, he will bring me to face boldly the horrors of that very past that I trawl behind me like the polluted train of a wedding gown.

We are so concerned with everyone feeling accepted that we obfuscate the rules of acceptance, but the human heart will drag its dirty laundry with it everywhere until it is washed and put in order. Everyone comes with a hobble around his neck, and to say that when you come to church that you have left that behind you is an insult to the indefatigable memory of the subconscious and the unfathomed knowledge of God. I’ve been in worship services and been encouraged to leave my cares at the door. I believe that little could be further from the desires of the Almighty. A Hebrew towing an obstinate goat – indeed, a scapegoat – through the gates of the temple would certainly understand taking his sins and cares to church, and I think that was the intention. The Architect of that institution desired that we should understand the picture painted before us. Yes, we are come that He may deal with us, but He will deal with us in Love. It is not love in some vapid iteration of, “All is forgiven,” but Love which asks again, and then again, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”

Yes, bring your past. He fears nothing, for none is His equal. Do not be afraid.

Inspiration

2011-06-09T22:15:00.000-07:00

This is some of the most beautiful, mournful work I've ever heard. It is by a young, masterful composer named Eric Whitacre. Carve out a few minutes. Get out your good headphones or good speakers, go into a quiet room, and immerse yourself in this sound. Then go back, and immerse yourself in it again. Every nuance and cherished note has poetry and truth to offer and to reveal.

Sleep by ericwhitacre

Language: An Ancient Tree

2011-06-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

"Which ones are right?" Donna asks me.

I glance over the slides on the computer screen.

"This one needs to change, and this one," I tell her. "Oh, and this one. I can't stand the ________ Hymnal."

"Don't they use the same hymns?"

"Well, they change them, to make them more understandable to a modern audience."

A familiar sight nowadays for those who read antiquated writing is the editorial process, eradicating commas and superfluous dashes like the little man behind the curtain. Pay no attention to him. I am the Great Oz. Yet, if we are not careful, we will be lulled into the loss of a language that is our heritage and runs in our blood. This is not, of course, popular. Modern folks don't like to admit that there are any strings attached to them, old, new, or yet to come. We like our so-called individuality, erroneous though it may be. "It takes a village to raise a child," goes the saying, but adults are not done being raised. We have an attachment to others, past and present, and we need it.

The reason editors, especially of hymnals and prayer books, do their well-meaning level best to disrupt this, is to provide us with sacred and venerated literature that is easy to understand. That's certainly helpful to those of us who are not scholars of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Old High German, Middle English, Elizabethan English, Victorian syntax, and a host of other near-impregnable tongues and dialects that give shape to our history. Recently, I read my way through a theological work by George MacDonald (1824-1905), excellently edited by Michael Phillips. Syntactically, it was thick enough to read as it stood. I cannot imagine the difficulty without Phillips' help, though he gives some examples for reference.

However, with documents for corporate worship, and, I might summon the gumption to imagine, with the Scriptures (though that is certainly far above my head), the 'dumbing-down' of the language, by degrees and over time, dumbs down the congregation. Consider a quote by Madeleine L'Engle:

When I asked why, in the Prayer Book General Thanksgiving, God's inestimable love had been changed to immeasurable love, I was told that the laity found inestimable difficult. That's pretty condescending, in the nastiest sense of the word. Immeasurable is not simpler than inestimable, and in the context of that glorious prayer of Thanksgiving it is a weaker word. When I asked a multi-PhD-ed clergyman why the quick and the dead had been changed to the living and the dead, I was told that young people did not know the word, quick. I asked, "How are they going to know if you take it away from them?"

-Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols

What a great question. How will we ever learn the formal weight of "Thee" and "Thou" if they are replaced by "You" and "You," which not only use the same over-saturated word to express different parts of speech, but a word that we use to refer to ourselves in the informal? The differences are subtle, but over time they regraft our thinking like a grapevine to a trellis. No, L'Engle goes on to say, language should not be stunted. It is alive and should grow, but "the manipulation of language by the academic elite because they underestimate the ordinary, faithful churchgoer" is an objectionable thing. I would go on to say that a tree, growing larger in its bole year after year, does not leave the inner bark behind. Take a tree apart, and you will find that the inner bark had long ago become the scaffold by which the entire structure stood erect through gust and gale. So it is with language. To abandon the linguistic bastions of old, because some publisher thinks less of the intellect of the general public, is to speak a hollow tongue without meaning or poetry.

To recall the weight of He suffereth long over He is patient is to give credence to the truth that patience is a form of suffering, something that it makes us cringe to think. See the longing, however, of autistic kids' parents for a day without strife and stress, and see the longing of the children for a day of un-frustrated communication, and you will see that there is suffering in patience, and in love. This is only one of the ways that antiseptic language shift misdirects our thought, but the examples are manifold.

How amazing of children, though, to learn one word as quickly as another, even at a late age. Teach a teenager that "to know," in King James' parlance, means "to have sex with," and you have opened the door to a realm of understanding about intimate love that all the abstinence curriculum in the world never could. Yet as adults, with our underestimation of children's ability to learn, we often assume that our ability is not even so fresh and ready as theirs, though it is both ready and armed with greater experience.

Let not ship of thy attention run afoul on the slothful rocks.

Mexican Rice Missionary

2011-05-23T19:22:00.001-07:00

My creative energies have been spent on a few all-consuming projects as of late. They've also taken, it must be admitted, an occasional backseat to things like mowing the yard and doing the washing-up. I have poured them into my family as well, and that has been more valuable an expenditure than anything measured in silver and coin, though I confess I'm not yet stout enough to look those particular virtues in the eyes. Still, spinning spoons at the stovetop like some desperate vaudeville dreamer, I've conjured a few tasty gems out of spices, butter, and humble tubers. These dishes and their ilk find their way to the dinner table, where two lovely ladies with no company affiliations, no accolades, smile and savor the God-given fare. Such is the ritual here it Sinclair's Eve.

And the world never measures it.

Everyone recalls how Mama made that beef casserole, and you rarely hear the World complain that such stuff is of no account, even though it be outside the grasp of empirical knowledge and reckoning. In this, perhaps, the World knows it has little chance of victory, and so it wisely remains silent. In this, the unsung creativity of people for their families, the World meets a fell nemesis.

I have spent many a minute lately pondering and postulating over the nervous figures surrounding CD sales, photography purchases, and bookbinding. Yet these are only the treacherous waters of getting art and its stories to you, so you may take art home and write the next chapters, as it were. In the end, it is still one of us telling the story to the other, who listens with fertile ears.

Here at home, Mexican rice and chicken is recognized by no printed review, but it's inspired by the same Holy Ghost who billows the temple curtains and shuffles spookily across the attic floor of my soul. I find the laundry, the dinner table, the yard, and the communion of storytime to be a mission field. And like so many mission fields, the one who set out to effect change is himself changed, often with greater cataclysm than his congregation.

My aunt, who is a masterfully peaceable homeschooler of eight children, has a blog filled with succinct but valuable gems on this subject. For more reading, see Little Sanctuary.

O. bin Laden and the Sparrow

2011-05-02T08:23:00.001-07:00

Dead upon the ground lies a vulture. The rain trickles down and a little sideways with a sorrowful patter. There are no men in suits, no human eulogy. There is a vague sound in the chilly thick air as of the shuffling of six folded wings. There is only one attendee. The lone mourner speaks a heartfelt benediction over the black lifeless feathers on the grass. A rough stone suggests the remembrance of a menhir. Forget-me-nots and buttercups wreath the animal with the bittersweet calico of grief and joy. It soared high as the highest in its time, despised and rejected among men.

In the South, at least, I drive past dead animals so often that it is easy to grow numb to the twinge in my stomach when I recall the loss of life. Any life. That is not to say I don't eat meat. I am as grateful for Chicken Tetrazzini or Shrimp Scampi as the next guy, true. But it is also gladdening to know that the Lord attends the funerals of sparrows - and vultures. Most of the time, He's the only one.

In the last five years, we have seen the deaths of two men of power, both of whom used that power to incite fear and violence and to oppress. Their actions were Evil. The strictest Atheist would have to at least nod his head in half-hearted assent.

And yet.

And yet, it's frightening to hear people cheering the death of anyone. To hear songs of exultation and cheers, to have Death in any form lauded, is or ought to be disturbing. Lewis talks at length about the extent of patriotism in The Four Loves, and I am not inclined to disagree with him. He doesn't mention this, but I think it fair to say he would see no harm in relief at the death of an enemy. Certainly, the lengthier the enmity, the greater the relief. But Proverbs comes to mind, and Obadiah. The text of Obadiah is mostly a malediction against Edom, the nation of Esau.

You should not look down on your brother in the day of his misfortune, nor rejoice over the people of Judah in the day of their destruction, nor boast so much in the day of their trouble.
-Obadiah v.12

Do not gloat when your enemy falls;
    When he stumbles, do not let your heart
        rejoice,
or the Lord will see and disapprove
    and turn his wrath away from him.
                                                            -Proverbs 24:17

Greater men have tried and failed to unravel the Will of God with regard to the condemnation of God, so I do not pretend to understand that. But I cannot find it in my heart to sing patriotic hymns when an enemy falls. The Created of God is the Created of God, be he an enemy of the people or no. Thank God such a threat is abated, and thank the soldiers who put themselves in harm's way that we might be free. But know that God attends the funerals of even every sparrow.

Power Outage

2011-04-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, a wrathful gale beat a path through Knoxville, tearing up ancient and enormous trees in old neighborhoods like mine. I am always at odds with myself when it comes to these things. Storms gives me pause for my family's safety and the inconvenience of replacing things like windows and shingles, but the near-unbridled power of all that wind and water, heralded by the tympanic cannon-blasts of thunder, always thrills my spirit. It is difficult to stem the desire to go and stand in the writhing tempest (foolish as that may be).

The storm had blown through quickly, dissembling to reveal the golden shimmer of evening sunlight glimmering off the last remnants of rain and cloud. Steam rose from the street for hours afterward. People wandered through the neighborhood, curiously assessing the damage. I walked through the lampless dark after nightfall, exhaling gratefully at the conspicuous number of near-misses - weighty turrets of oak falling across power lines, streets, mailboxes, but only a few houses. It could have been much worse.

Beneath the star-drawn sky, unhindered by the nervous hum of electric light, people had lit candles and lanterns. Houses on the wet night-blue street had no faceless flicker of TV casting the pallid light of a satellite trance from every window. Incandescent glows could be seen in bedrooms, living rooms, and on porches. Neighbors sat together in their driveways or walked about, checking on each other. Certainly we are all guilty of a degree of voyeurism, but there was also a peace. Like waking from a muddled dream and seeing the tangible world before you, people had little entertainment save the company of each other.

As I posted previously, I spent the next to the last week of Lent chasing the dream of shared music and stories through the Midwest with a visionary cadre of musicians. Bill Wolf, Taylor Brown, Emilee Cook, Terry and Helene Mahnken, Carl Smith, Chris Dorsten, and I blew through three states and five stops, enjoying the company of some wonderful people. The last two dates were in Knoxville, with the tour finishing at St. John's Cathedral downtown. Greg Adkins, who played along for the last two shows - not to mention on the record - and who is one of the most passionate artist advocates I know (being a gifted songster himself), put together a quick video from setup and soundcheck. Enjoy. Oh, and Jill Andrews sings. Like I said, Enjoy.

The Land that Claims Me

2011-04-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is departure day for my first tour. Of course, I ought to be in bed, but I feel the need to stay awake and procrastinate, like a mud-hungry boy on the eve of his first camping trip (with real fire). In the preparation though, unexpected beauty has hit me like a long-forgotten embrace.

I've been reading a lot of women lately: Kathleen Norris, Madeleine L'Engle, Anne Lamott. Add to that a handful of men whose writing is not particularly masculine. I don't say this is a bad thing. Nor do I say that I can pinpoint exactly what it is in writing that evokes masculinity or womanliness. I am beginning to sense that the world behind "...in His own Image...male and female created He them," is wider and more mysterious than we often credit. Chesterton said that it might take a person a hundred readings for his eyes to be opened to the meaning of what he was reading. Perhaps I am on my ninety-ninth.

I have long been infatuated with the idea of going to Scotland. That is to say, permanently. It represents to me both an adventure and a homecoming to the peaty soil that claims the bones of my ancestors. Its forlorn beauty and miles of windswept moor, its wise and mighty shoulders of metamorphic rock bound in grass and furze, its lonely bird-haunted coast, they all speak to the poet in me like a liturgy. Dig deep, wrestle in the wilderness, the Spirit is like a wind coming and going. I can't deny the restlessness in me that is always looking outward, always feeling my heart sigh with the sound of every airplane, pregnant with possibility. I have friends over the Atlantic, true, and I always long to see them and kiss their faces and laugh at their jokes, but I'm not even sure if it's them I'm truly after. There are many longings, woven into a humanly inseparable tapestry of desire to pack up my girls and head across the sea.

Then tonight, I stood out on the back porch pinning laundry on the lines. Laundry - there's that womanly sensibility coming out. Kathleen Norris calls it a meditative activity. I cannot do it quickly, it makes me slow down. In slowing, feeling the vernal cold on my skin, hearing the dog tags jingle in the dark yard and the Paul Simon train horn in the distance, I felt an unearthly and wonderful peace with this place. I don't know if it has begun to exert some claim over me, to subject me to itself. I have spinach, broccoli, thyme, and lavender in the chilly Spring ground, casting hopeful shadows of family meals to come. I mow the yard and watch the blackberries leaf into wily green scimitars of vine here at Sinclair's Eve, and it feels as though this place and the people near me have some say in my heart. The individual in me longs to refuse, longs to maintain that staunch loneliness that marks me as this thing or that thing.

I feel the start of it,
A knee-jerk Reaction
in the bowel of the Well
in the middle of the Island
I used to be.

I am inescapably part of this community. A product of it? I do not know. Yes? No? After some fashion, probably. It would be arrogant to say that I live anywhere and yet eschew the constant influence of my friends, my neighbors, my enemies, be these people or principalities or the Rivers that clap their Hands. I am starting to be at peace with the idea. And now, of course, I pack my bags to drift through the Midwest for a few days. Absence, and the heart.

Loving Blind

2011-04-09T19:22:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to everyone who tuned in to 96.3 to hear us on Remedy After Dark on Thursday. Burt, Patricia, and I piled into the storied old studio whence J. Bazzel Mull broadcast southern gospel for more years than anyone likes to count. I loitered in the front office of the building, reading the plaques on the wall, and discovered that Reverend Mull had been blind from the age of 11 months. He is dead now, but this bit of trivia made me wish I could have a conversation with him. He spent most of his life as a radio tycoon of sorts and a music promoter. He had a long-standing relationship with The Chuck Wagon Gang - whom Greg Adkins and I played opposite to a humorously sparse crowd at the Tennessee Valley Fair. We can't think of it nowadays without laughing. I had only vaguely heard of The Chuck Wagon Gang before, but the name unfailingly brought to mind a bubbling vat of beans, and that's never dull.

Still I was amazed at the man's blindness, mostly because of his marriage. He had never seen his wife's face, looked into her eyes, yet their marriage was undoubtedly dedicated according to the tales. It reminded me of the Lover in the Song of Solomon. The Beloved sees his face, but we never do. She describes him, wonderfully and eloquently, but description of a face, no matter how good, always falls short of seeing the person with your own eyes. Yet we are commanded to fall in love with a groom whose face we've never seen. Like Elijah, we see the back of him everywhere if we're paying attention. Walking through the majesty of the world he created, smelling the piquant cleanliness and the cool rush before a summer rain, running our hands across the rustling crowns of broom sedge, feeling the sun and the snow, it's like seeing the back of someone you know in a crowd. You rush to catch up with him, but he keeps walking, almost as if he knew you were there. Doggedly you call out his name, and he waits at a corner until you get close before taking off again. He seems to want you to follow him. You still haven't seen his face. How does a blind man fall in love? Is it the best way? I don't know, but we're all hoping for it in some way or another.

In the chasing of that groom, Bill Wolf, a great, humble, and dedicated songwriter - who I'm privileged to call my friend - put together a song cycle called Easter Stories & Songs. A gaggle of folks that graciously includes myself is leaving town in a few days to drive under the wide skies of Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio to share the music. If you're in the area, come by, because you're an invaluable part of the conversation that is Us. The dates can be found to your right, dear reader. Also, they are on Bill's website. If you call Knoxville home, or at least the land where you wander, we'll be playing both West Towne Christian Church (April 20th) and St. John's Cathedral (April 22nd). This music is joyful, like silver out of the crucible, and I hope we get to spend the evening sharing it with you.

Cultivars of Grace

2011-03-18T21:09:00.001-07:00

It is my vacation. The girls and I returned to visit my in-laws in a hiccup-sized town in the Florida panhandle scrub country. The scarlet waves of clover billow in the wind (I avoid the words "crimson tide"), and the jonquils give rise to the suggestion that Spring would soon dance out of the wings and onto center stage, moving even the brittle live oaks to a greening. Ah, the oaks - our alter egos according to Isaiah, and always the last to sprout leaves.

Going down for a visit is always a ritual of mixed emotions. On the one hand, I am lovingly haunted by the stark, lonely beauty of those wide, forgotten flatlands. They are the face of Moses, of Elijah, of Christ walking out of the wilderness to speak to the people after a harrowing unmasking of the self before God. On the other hand, the town is awash with my wife's memories, cracked and rusted in the marches of time. There is always the mixed wine of tidings good and ill. Small town life seems to either drift away, leaving a nostalgic shadow in its wake, or it stays near and becomes ingrown. It is very good, but emotionally taxing.

Taking shelter from a midday rainshower, I ducked into the old potting shed on the property, a ramshackle affair being continuously given the nudges of resurrection by my father-in-law Richard. It being mid-March, Karen, my mother-in-law, was in the midst of coaxing audacity out of a few timid tomato plants and Brussels sprouts beneath grow lights. The rest of the shed was taken up with mud-stained gardening implements and dusty bric-a-brac. A small selection of gardening volumes and cookbooks lined a shelf, and the prehistoric hulk of a tiller squatted against a wall. Stacks of upside down flower pots filled in the gaps between spades and hoes and watering cans. It was all dead tools, or at least only potential energy. The only life present was the fuschia feathering of miniscule tomato leaves under womb-colored light, and I couldn't help but think of my upbringing in the church.

So many of us, in the States especially, were brought up surrounded by the riches of Scripture and the admonitions of humble and human saints. We were immersed in the silly but wonderful and purposeful vagaries of our respective traditions, enfolded in great clouds of witnesses, the channels and vessels of grace. Yet in the midst of it all, life seemed strangely absent, or at least hard to come by. Given all the books and tools, one would expect life to be overflowing, but it was merely a secret, waiting pregnant in a dark corner like a dormant seed. Somehow or other, God shook us loose into life, pruning and urging, feeding and covering before frosts. It is no wonder, then, that many of us don't easily recognize the Spirit in saints who sprouted like wild mustard on the fringes of some wasteland, their joyous golden sprays of blossoms unseemly and unhinged in their grace. They are the AA Christians, the profligates-turned-preachers, the outlandish stories of failed suicides becoming visions of Christ and the saints. They are the Twain to our Fenimore Cooper, God's wry grin over the ornate and ludicrous prose of our theology.

Surely they must often grow frustrated with us. They leap toward the light with all their strength, all their soul, all their might, often failing in spectacular fashion without the bourgeois skills of hiding it. We require gentle prodding and rich soil to grow, while they latch onto any near scent of the Gospel and explode with praise. My view of them is the poet's view, not the theologians. Of course it falls blithely short of an understanding of Christ's parable of the soils (the theologians' views fall short too, one might argue), but truly I sometimes long to be like one of these, wild and unbounded in love, passionate and expressive. My comfort is in the knowledge that the author of life is the author of both the wolf and the dachshund, the mustang and the cart pony. Both wild and tame shall be in his fold, but even on our best days, none among us approaches either the inward cultivated richness or the wild outbound leaping of the love of God.

Temple Sounds

2011-03-14T14:01:00.000-07:00

There was a line outside. Men with goats, bulls, doves, bowls of flour and oil, all stood about waiting until the priest was ready to receive each of them. Some spoke to their neighbors, glad-hearted and expectant. Others were silent, watching from within themselves as if from a long way away. Added to this moderately patient crowd was the cackling racket of the animals. The helpless bleating of lambs and flapping of pigeons in makeshift cages played a reckless counterpoint over the disquieted lowing of great bulls, one scuffing its hooves anxiously, one searching through the grain sack of a waiting stranger with its great purple tongue. Goats grunted and whined and stared about with their almond eyes. All these, of course, contributed to an extensive carpet of defecation which every waiting man was keen to avoid, most of them with the mild attentiveness of one who is acclimated to such things. The Judean street bustled about them in the jovial ho-hum importance of its daily market affairs. Men and women carried bundles of firewood, homespun fabric still suggestive of the oily, metallic smell of sheep, precarious jars of water, bags of dry spelt, dates, grapes, stonily crusted loaves of bread waiting to be broken open to reveal the wonderful riches inside – all of it accompanied by the hocking sing-songs of those who would trade, their voices trying not to betray the desperation to sell.

Upon finally entering the gates, each man from the line was greeted by a terrific onslaught of his senses. Smoke and incense perfumed the air. The priests on duty looked positively monstrous, their ceremonial clothes saturated with blood spatter across the aprons, their sleeves acrid with smoke. The cacophony of wounded livestock echoed off the ornate walls, mingling with the tinkling of tiny bells from the priests’ once beautiful garments. The greatest sensation was the smell – blood, death, cooking, incense, offal, smoke, singed hides – all of it together in the expansive and elaborate temple court. One could never grow completely accustomed to it. In the heat of the day it was almost unbearable, and you never left forgetting it.

This is the place where sin is atoned for. The raucous din and unforgettable smell surrounded by lavish architectural adornment paint an unmistakable portrait of the intersection of holy mystery and the chaotic business of redemption. It was not, is not, sexy, and never shall it be. It is the necessary mess, the alluvial muck wherefrom springs the golden corn of wheat – life-giving only when it has fallen into the earth and died. Redemptive work saturates us in the leprous putrescence of sin, not as those who partake, but as the physician’s assistant – doing his fallible best – is covered in the smears and viscosity of the physician’s work. His life is lived in a rhythm: scrub up, dive in, scrub up dive in, scrub up, dive in, with all the human business of living and learning in between. With tending, and with time, what he finally sees emerge from beneath the caked bandages and dripping tubes is the wholeness of a human being.

House Show

2011-03-04T20:45:00.000-08:00

Amid the trumpet blasts of daffodils, the spangling of crocuses, we gathered in the home of two dear friends. They were gracious enough to allow six unpredictable musicians (are there any other kinds?) houseroom to set up the fittingly weird marriage of electronics, strings, wood, and metal. We had rehearsed, but what we hoped for was not a perfect show. We hoped for a miracle, that blatantly real and unearthly thing that happens when Good gets out of control and we begin to hang on for dear sweet life.

The table was weighed down by the richest of fare. We ate and drank and stepped up to the microphones with fear and trembling. All the world is desperately important - life and death. But when the last note had rolled out like the trailing whisper of a thundercloud, we realized that we had been a part of something which was more than the sum of its parts. I am thankful. Much thanks, as well, to all those who came to Nate and Emily's house tonight. It's never the same without you.

Cast List:
Taylor Brown - drums, percussion, piano, hats
Burt Elmore - electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, banjo, bedlam
Robyn James - viola, vocals, stomping, clapping, grooves
Ethan Norman - acoustic, vocals, Saxony
Patricia Peacock - cello, stomping, clapping, fantasy creatures
aw - guitar, harmonica, accordion, piano, vocals, shenanigans
Nate & Emily Sharpe - house

Vegetables in the Calendar

2011-02-11T08:10:00.000-08:00

I'd had it planned for four months. I was going to retreat to Gethsemani Abbey in rural central Kentucky for three days and two nights in January. In the dead of winter, I would be alone with God and my thoughts in a place where silence was the rule rather than the exception. I didn't have any sort of understanding of why I wanted to go. Andrew Peterson, an artist I know, had gone and seemed to get something out of the experience. Friends of mine had read Thomas Merton, the founder of the abbey, and they seemed to be on top of things and rather devil-may-care. Surely there was some connection.

In recent years, this kind of thinking has begun to be lifted like a veil from my eyes. Certainly, retreats and reading the meditations of saints is valuable, a worthy activity. But it is not the pure seed of the Gospel, and furthermore, it is not always what I presently need. This is a lesson I don't want to learn, of course, but I continue to be led to it - like eating my asparagus.

Then, my mother tore a bit of her knee and had to schedule surgery to fix it. Also, various microbes were circulating, pressing down a season of sickness on Knoxville and environs (and everywhere else, I assume). So, four days before I was supposed to leave for Kentucky, I found out my mother's surgery was scheduled for the morning of my departure. Then Kat and I discovered that some unnamed malady was being shared at the babysitter's house. All of this was pointing toward a kink in my calendar.

"Honey, whatever you decide, that will be okay with me," said my gracious wife. I knew, of course, that it would be impossible to send our daughter to the sitter's while Kat went to work. My dad couldn't take off work to keep her, and my mother was out of commission for some time. I began to fill my mind with a selfish inward monologue like a vat of burbling witch's brew. How ridiculously unfair! How could they schedule surgery at a time like this? Reading between the lines of my thoughts, this meant, I'm supposed to be going away to be HOLY. Where do they get off interrupting that? It's quite shameful to say this, really, but it's true.

So, two days before I was scheduled to leave, I called and left a message saying that I was very sorry, but I couldn't come. Some "family stuff" came up. I told their answering machine (monks apparently don't talk on the phone all that much) that I would love to come back at a later time, and I apologized for the eleventh hour cancellation. The phone call left a fist-sized pocket of abjection and disappointment in my stomach. I stewed a while over the guilt of being that selfish. Then I commenced with ploughing a first-class rut in which I could sit. Enter: the wife of Zebedee.

Sometimes Scriptures will follow me around for a while until I get the point, like "a little white dog," as Anne Lamott says. I reread and reheard the story of the mother of James and John a few times that weekend and later. Jesus begins a long walk to Jerusalem. The apostles sense the calm before the storm. Salome walks up to Jesus, taking him by the elbow, pulling him aside. She kneels before him.

"I have a request of you."
"What do you want?" he says, rather brusquely.
"Let my sons sit at your right and left in your kingdom."
"You don't know what you're asking."

He then turns to the young men and offers them the bitter wine of martyrdom. They drink the cup Jesus himself drank. Salome gets her wish, but like the story of the Monkey's Paw, it's nothing like what she imagined. It was my desire to know why I would be going to Gethsemani. As the time approached, I grew apprehensive, trying to remember the many things I had read about solitude, silence, meditation. Then, it was all taken away, and instead, I was given a weekend of spending time with my only daughter. The lesson? It certainly begins with, "You don't know what you're asking." What you say you want is lightyears away from what you need. The lesson is still being learned, but it's good.

Even asparagus can be alright sometimes - sauteed and wrapped in prosciutto.

Another Tune

2011-02-05T22:46:00.000-08:00

The recording of demos continues. Cheers!

They Painted Over Locks by Adam Whipple

The Beginning and the End

2011-02-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

Traditionally, we've put Sunday at the beginning of the week to commemorate the rising of our Savior. The Gospel says "on the first day of the week," the women went to put spices at Jesus' tomb and were astounded to find the stone rolled away. There are sons of God, robed in the light of the Lord, seated on the giant boulder. I always like to imagine their feet kicking in the air like kids on too-tall McDonald's seats. Mary, eyes blurred with tears, recognizes Jesus when he says her name. All this happens on a Sunday - the first day of the week. So we remember.

But God rested from his work on the seventh, the last day. The last day was the one set aside to recollect, to meditate, to breathe deeply. So, the Jews rested on the last day of the week. This causes minute rifts in the Body of believers. Some say this, some argue that. Some recall the pagan namesakes of the days - Saturn and the Sun. That's neither here nor there. I have grown up going to church at the beginning of the week (Sunday, according to every calendar I've ever seen, save one). I've gone to church on Saturday nights as well, relishing the late, sun-strewn mornings and big lazy breakfasts with my girls on Sunday.

This also is neither here nor there.

However, I do enjoy the idea of viewing that big family gathering as the end of the week. Usually, seeing it as the beginning, I associate it with unwieldy metaphors of putting gas in my spiritual car tank, preparing me for the long weekly slog through mires not peopled with the sons of God. Then I come to Friday and need either a pick-me-up or a cigarette, though I don't smoke. Maybe there's credence for this idea: the great sending-off, the broken champagne bottle and the bon voyage. Even so, the idea of that messy, raucous, delightful family meeting as the end of the week, the final gathering at the Grey Havens, holds great appeal for me. I strive through the week, looking forward with anticipation to when I will be amongst a host of Kingdom people, all surrounded by a cloud of witnesses like brilliant heat waves in the drab February air. Finally, I am amongst others who do not belong, who come from a country into which we shall one day set our feet, seeing on the horizon a city with high, open gates. Ah, the end of the week. Welcome to the feast.

It is preparation for the last and greatest Feast, the one that is ever-renewed, ever-lived. This too, is a sending-off.

The Wonderful Company of Failure

2011-01-22T19:57:00.000-08:00

There are certain books that keep resurfacing from my shelf as short reading. Initially, each was a small project like any book, a quaint or wrenching or hilarious journey through other worlds. After a time though, they became my favorite reruns. If I was depressed or bored or inclined to procrastinate, I took them ought as if calling an old friend. This is not intended as a slight on the authors – I am fairly certain that, in some respect, they at least appreciate the $19.99 spent, regardless of my emotional proclivities at the time.

It was perhaps a year and a half ago when my friend Nathan passed to me a copy of Paul Collins’ Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books. Any moderately sane person reading it will feel disheartened by its nostalgic fugue of failed efforts. I read an article on Barbara Follett in Lapham’s Quarterly yesterday that further demonstrated Collins’ seeming fondness for lauding the obscure failures of Western literature. He captures a delicately heartbreaking expression of the fact that everything and everyone will eventually die, like the realization I came to this year: I cannot read all the books. Sixpence House runs the danger of being perpetually morose, but I can’t help going back to it. I find myself happy in the company of people who have both failed and succeeded, not excepting people who see their forgotten successes as failures. I think I enjoy this weird museum display of disappointment for the same reason that the confessions of others bring me the healing freedom to confess: I am not alone.

Until we are blatantly rebuked, we labor beneath the delusion that each of us is alone with our mistakes and losses. It’s nearly impossible to shut out that childishly braying voice in my head that nonchalantly dismisses the faults of others as trivia. That’s all well and good for him. I only wish I had his set of light-hearted problems. Instead, I’m an utter [insert reprobation]. It’s a lie only denuded by the unnatural grace of confession. I find hope in the stories of others’ foul balls and strikes because I see that they’ve continued plodding. Knowing my record to be mostly composed of foul balls and strikes, it is a strange and wonderful comfort to believe that, if I keep walking, something fantastic might surprise me. Also helpful is the staggering irony of a published book containing lengthy autobiographical passages on the failure to be published. Thank you, Paul. We who write are emboldened.

New Tune

2011-01-19T18:19:00.000-08:00

The unassuming fellow before you is none other than the illustriously talented Ethan Norman. He and I spent the better part of about two years playing shows together and co-writing the occasional song. Ever since I opened a parcel this Christmas to discover the blessing of a recording program - once again, Thanks, Dad! - I've been trying to stay busy converting all the music in my head to a format other than synaptic structure. It's a lot easier to figure out how a song will sound when you can hear all the horrors of bad lap steel playing (care of yours truly) instead of trying to imagine them. This is a wonderful tune Ethan and I wrote (mostly Ethan, actually) about a French lady we've seen on television. I'll let you figure that one out. Enjoy.

Apple From This Tree by Adam Whipple

New Photos

2010-12-31T15:04:00.000-08:00

I've had a few rolls of film sitting by the front door for ages, waiting for me to bring them to fruition. Finally, I took them to the lab, and here are a few of the jewels that emerged. The rest can be found at my Flickr site. I always get a giddy sense of anticipation sending photos to the lab. "Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days, you will find it again." Shooting photographs, playing with light, is a treasure hunt in the dark - with film, at least. Perhaps that's part of the draw to film for me. I desire hard-earned satisfaction, full of characteristic minuscule imperfections that I can never quite erase.

The Geeky Neighbor Who Loved Me

2010-12-28T18:39:00.000-08:00

Years ago, when I rode in my dad's truck listening to Rich Mullins, Sandi Patty, and early Michael W. Smith - who, like Dick Clark and Paula Dean, doesn't age - the radio dial would lean constantly toward 89.1 FM. My dad would drive down curvy East Tennessee roads with his elbow out the window, quietly singing harmony to familiar tunes tinnily buzzing out of the speakers of a white Dodge pickup. I myself learned to sing harmony to that stuff, my fake, peer-induced attempts at liking Nirvana notwithstanding. The station went through changes over the years, changing their target demographic from the middle-aged single to the Starbucks-fueled soccer mom, but resolutely keeping ties with all digital content that came pouring out of Nashville's recording studios. Eventually, of course, they realized that Soccer Mom's Soccer Kids like music too, and they began the occasional tangent into DC Talk and other offerings of Forefront Records.

This was my musical tour through middle school, my aural window to a world larger than Halls Crossroads.

Then came our falling out. 89.1, Love89, plowed onward with its target listener pleased as punch, and I heard "Vitalogy," "The Wall," "Zoso," and other gems from my aunt's collection. I spent my high school years with a foot in each world, loving bands like Jars of Clay and Caedmon's Call who made decidedly engaging art. Then, after years of impolite snickers on my part, the geeky neighbor, who I'd long written off, extended his hand across the fence to me.

I was a singer/songwriter with vague dreams of playing great songs for attentive crowds. I shunned anything kept ties with all of that trite and pigeonholing nonsense. My first record was made up of a bunch of one-takes sitting in front of a microphone at my parents' church. I'd been listening to the Counting Crows and anything I could find that was acoustic and depressing - ergo, the sound of said record, but Love89 accepted it. A guy called Kris Love had started a new program called the Detour, playing local folks, many of them friends of mine. He played embarrassingly terrible cuts from my record and found speeches full of kind words to say about them. Then I made another record, better and with only one or two embarrassments, and Kris played that one as well. Not being a soccer mom, I still thought the main format of the radio station was a trifle geeky, but I had to admit that anyone who would play my record (and say it was not only good, but worthwhile) had my attention.

My geeky neighbor (If Love89 could speak, would they call me, "My pretentiously esoteric neighbor who fancies himself a pillar of the intelligentsia?") and I had since waved to each other over the fence more often. I've even whispered quiet words of admiration over the station. Yet today, I awake to find that it shall all pass away soon.

Love89 has been sold, the DJs will lose their jobs, and the format will be replaced by a syndicated Christian radio source out of Los Angeles or someplace. I watched a news report summing up the story, and a woman lamented that the local flavor would be gone, but "at least there will still be Christian radio." This caused an amount of ranting on the part of me, the pretentiously esoteric pillar of the intelligentsia, until my graceful wife told me to put down the telephone and the flame-thrower and rethink my principles. I shall miss my neighbor, who championed my music and the music of my friends, passing it along with words of encouragement and praise to people who otherwise would never have paid attention. It is my hope that someone or something else will arise to do the work that was done by the DJs and programmers of that station. Keep the old radio warm and close; good music needs a home.

Listen up.

Behold the Lamb of God

2010-12-20T20:33:00.000-08:00

Most people have something which they define as "My Christmas," sounding vaguely like some kind of cute, frothy computer application (My Pictures, My Hard Drive, My Collection of Nosehairs, etc.). A decade ago, I stood in New City Cafe at 116 South Central and gave Andrew Peterson a geeky grin as he handed me a copy of his new record "Behold the Lamb of God." Since that time, it has been the cohering variation of my Christmas, leading me annually back to that theme from which all variations spring, Christ himself. This year, I've had the honor to participate in a hometown production of the song cycle, in a grand telling of the Story. For the past several months, I met with Greg Adkins and Bill Wolf, a couple of local Creative Arts pastors that I'm delighted to call my friends, to plan rehearsals, draft willing participants, and stand on a pair of stages in a whirlwind of a musical narrative of the Advent of Christ. I hesitate to call it a show, a performance, or even something that we did, even though there was an undeniable element of labor. It is more something for which we strove, and which we found, to our joyous surprise, had surrounded us all along. It was more than the sum of its parts.

Here is a taste of our Sunday morning, an offered handful of vignettes. Enjoy.

(from Greg Adkins' blog...)
Here is the complete list of musicians and singers in alphabetical order:

Adam Adkins - shakers, tamborines, congas, djembe, percussion
Greg Adkins - piano, organ, acoustic guitar, hammered dulcimer, vocals
Kevin Bower - vocals
Chad Covert - drums
Craig Covert - vocals
Burt Elmore - electric guitars, mandolin
Angela Hemrick - vocals
Robyn James - viola
Sarah McAffry - vocals
Grayson Mynatt - violin
Matthew Nelson - electric bass, upright bass
Patricia Peacock - cello
Nathan Sharpe - acoustic guitar, vocals, washboard
Andy Vandergriff - vocals
Mandy Watson - vocals
Adam Whipple - acoustic guitar, piano, organ, penny whistle, lap steel, accordion, vocals
Bill Wolf - acoustic guitar, banjo, accordion, vocals

(from me...)
Also, Kenny Woodhull and Mark Nelson emceed respective Sunday mornings for us. It is truly beyond words to describe what an honor this was. Thanks to Greg and Bill for making this happen in community and for having vision. Thanks to everyone who sang, strummed, stomped, drummed, bowed, hummed, and walloped. And certainly, thanks to everyone who listened and participated in the Telling of the Story with us. Merry Christmas unto you. The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light.

The Burgers of Thankfulness

2010-11-28T20:27:00.000-08:00

My wife and I rode with my parents and my brother for Thanksgiving vacation, because one of our cars was cooked and we didn’t have the money to pay for gas to Atlanta. This meant four hours crammed in a minivan with a fortnight’s supply of cheesy snack crackers, fuzzy heirloom blankets, and songs with too many electronic piano overdubs. My daughter, who is one year old, slept most of the way and looked out the window for the rest. This is a blessing I am determined not to overlook. After a barbeque extravaganza in a house with twenty-three of my amazing and wonderful relatives, in which I imagined my aorta raging like a French lobbyist, we began the pilgrimage home. I was certain that I could implement my strict regimen of penitential celery consumption as soon as we got in the car, but no. It was not to be.

We pulled into the local suburban Mecca beneath the smiling glow of neon signs which cast lard-colored halos around our heads. They offered all the best cures to our dwindling waistlines: Vietnamese bistros, Irish pubs, Mexican haute cuisine, coffee shops, ice cream shops, coffee-flavored ice cream shops. Most places had appetizers which consisted of butter deep-fried in canola oil. To cure our ills, we pulled into a famous high-end burger chain and tumbled in the front door to a Crisco-pasted American dream in simulcast.

Behind the hostesses, whose Aphroditic figures revealed that they had never consumed a smidgen of the restaurant’s hearty offerings, stood an eight-foot-tall plastic Statue of Liberty holding a neon-haloed burger where the torch should have been.

Give me your wired, engorged, befuddled masses yearning to eat the slaughtered cattle of your teeming shore, she proclaimed.

To add to the American trance which salted every onion ring, there were televisions amok. Mostly on the same flashy sound-bite news channel, they encircled the unsuspecting patrons like white collar drug pushers. There was even a television recessed into the floor so as not to take up space while we waited for our table. I recall seeing some children squatting around it like little Neanderthals, soaking up the warm commercials. As we ate, the televisions, in antiphonal unison, heralded the obligatory Thanksgiving tale of people being mangled in the annual midnight shopping rush and camping out for weeks in front of an electronics store, living off dried noodles and a solar-powered cell phone connection.

However, this evening, my church gathered in celebration of being the Beloved of Christ. Folks brought dishes baked with love and we spent time taking communion and sharing in the beauty of what the Lord has been doing in our city and our lives. This body of believers has been around for half a decade or so, and by the grace of the Lamb, she has already endured trials that have – at least in the well-publicized world – brought schism and bitterness to churches long established. I must stress, especially to myself, that it’s not our doing, that it’s certainly not mine. If there is any part for us to play in this, it is honesty. That’s the embarrassing element that has helped the most on our part: that awkward admittance of brokenness. It’s only in the wake of honesty that Thanksgiving can take place. All my blessings are mine, my own, my precious – until I admit that I earned nothing but scorn and shame. But the scorn and shame have been taken away.

Happy Thanksgiving. Don’t watch too much TV.

Happy Birthday

2010-11-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

In lieu of having an entire new record, I've joined SoundCloud, allowing me to put new tracks on here for your listening pleasure. Hopefully, I'll find my Radioshack folder with all those crazy demos and live recordings, and I'll have a treasure trove to offer here. This was a present I made for my wife's birthday. Merci beaucoup to my father for putting it together. Enjoy!

Nighttime by Adam Whipple

Spirits of the Red City

2010-11-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

A man sat on the couch between the stage and me on Thursday. He was an unnerving character, black suspenders superseded only by a black vest, wild curly hair that crept about his face in lupine fashion, and the silvery pommel of a dirk protruding from a sheath upon his belt line. Yet I recall that I saw him in tears at one point. Despite his former saunter about the room, his mildly roguish appearance, he had wept quietly as the band had played. The rest of the time, he was given to a trance-like regimen of dancing in his seat, eyes closed, lost in the music of the Spirits of the Red City.

I've known a few places and times in my life where I felt that I glimpsed the wild side of the Holy Ghost. We now say 'Spirit,' I suppose because 'Ghost' is a little too flesh-and-blood, so to speak. It is a word closer to the sticks and stones that break our bones than to the words that never hurt us. But, like all ghosts, the Holy Ghost is one for whom we are totally unprepared when he (she?) comes. Chains rattle, and often come off. Doors open and shut. People speak outside their mother tongues.

I often get the feeling that, everywhere there is beauty - and I've not found a place that is exempt from that - the Lord is there. The Holy Spirit moves in the dried-up Windsor tie ritual of a Sunday morning meeting and in the weeping of the execution chambers. She is always whispering, like the sound of wings. Is it the ritual of Sunday that calls her? Certainly not. It is the need of those who are garbed in the robes of death, be they expensive woolen affairs or numbered orange jumpsuits. For that is the Will of the Father: to, as the hymn says, "Rescue the perishing, care for the dying. Jesus is merciful; Jesus will save."

Unaccountably, the Lord speaks in untold ways to those who will listen to no others. The people who believe in traditional niceties will probably have to meet a John the Baptist who eats bugs and looks like Jeremiah Johnson. The congregation that is comfortable in the rote litany of drunkenness will be more apt to attend a tent revival that they don't see coming.

The sound in Morelock Music crescendoed into a unified living wall of cello, guitar, pump organ, flugelhorn, and voices. Oh, those voices! A gypsy lament skirting past the moon will raise the hair on your neck, and catch your ear with a shadow of beauty as it bends round a star. Underneath the lights on the stage, the band unearthed their hearts and poured them into the microphones. Everybody listened, lost in the music, and hopefully someone was a little more Found than when they came in that evening.

I'm glad to see the occasional glimpse of unity strewn about the culture. It's a blessing to see the toughest crowd weep over beauty. I don't know where the Spirit comes from or where she's going, but it's good - unnerving, but good - to see icons of the Lord of Creation in places where I least expect them.

Art and the Church

2010-10-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

This is a letter I sent to a friend of mine after reading a letter by artist Makoto Fujimura. To be clear, my intent is not to whine or engender cynicism. As my wife consistently reminds me, we at Sinclair's Eve (our house) trust the Lord to provide. This still seems worth posting, if only as food for thought. The picture is of GM Hopkins.

In making music, writing books and poetry, in taking photographs, my ideas usually have to do with highlighting the beauty of this creation and the ways that it reflects on the Creator. In front of me at this moment is a photograph I took in Scotland, entitled "Sustenance." A board sits upon a restaurant table. Upon the board are a small glazed ceramic bowl of tomato bisque and a few crusts of homemade bread. The silver glint of a spoon twinkles out of the darkness beside the bowl, like a sword in a stone. I see the bread and hear the words, "Remember me." I can taste it just by seeing the photograph. I can hear the melodic tremor of Scottish voices around me in the cafe. I can feel the salt-sea chill sifting through the crossbeams of the ceiling, crying adventure down the street. The photograph is alive.

Yet, I walk past this and see six undeveloped rolls of film beside the front door, waiting like unopened gifts until the money appears. I've nearly forgotten all that is on them. I play shows with an album's worth of songs that have no home, wondering when the money will appear to fund the making of a record. It is a bitter thing to see building after antiseptically designed multi-million dollar building go up in the name of Jesus and wonder when I'll have to break down and flip burgers to feed my daughter. It is frustrating beyond description to see churches believe that they need projectors, sound systems, drum shields, mic stands, and computers upon computers just to be A church, and discover that none of it is offered in the support of my ministry (not to mention that none of it defines what the Church is). I say ministry - the work that I do, I do because I was made to do it. I am learning to come in to this idea. I can refuse, but not only would that be disobedient, it would destroy me as a person. I want to sing songs to you and tell you stories, that the God of Heaven might be magnified, that our consciences might be pricked. Not only that, I want to hear your responses. I don't want for many Good-Jobs and That-Was-Greats. I want to hear that the Holy Spirit brought Truth to bear in your life through what I did. Otherwise, my work feels worthless in the Kingdom. A great artist can effectively be rendered impotent by ceaseless praise, but can be en-Couraged and quickened by an account of how his art was a catalyst of holy change.

But how can I ask for money?

I, who have been given the task of seeing poverty and pain and bearing witness to the needs, cannot in good conscience speak of my own monetary need to the church. Children are sick and enslaved and hungry. I am disgusted at myself at times when I sit down with a plate of food in front of me. How can I ask for money? The welfare of people supersedes the development of film and an executive producer. Still though, at the end of the day, it would be good to have these things. I know that the war on poverty is endless, and I know that budget woes persist. But when the Church cannot answer difficult questions that the World (being the Devil's natural advocate) justifiably raises, I wonder why she, by the denial of her support, would silence the voices of those among her ranks who would ask the same questions in love.

As an addendum, let it be known that this is effectively the transcript of a personal inner argument for me. It is neither a manifesto or a doctrine. I do think the Church should support artists, and I believe Scripture supports this, but here again, if help is given because I or we complain, it might not be the help of a cheerful giver. I do not wish to deny the holy impulse people have to give unbidden.

Net Worth

2010-10-11T21:59:00.000-07:00

A 10 o'clock showing of The Social Network gave me cause to look up information on Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and a tiny incongruence caught my eye. Disclosed in a little grey panel to the right of the Wikipedia page is number. It says this: Net Worth - $6.9 billion. Neither can I remove the final image of the movie from my head. Jesse Eisenberg, as Mark Zuckerberg, stares unsmiling at his computer while a caption touts him as the youngest official billionaire.

What is a man worth?

In the job hunt around town, one comes across little lines on work applications. "Desired Salary," they beg of you, giving you a dollar sign and space to write down your preferred number. Any fool can see the psychological game afoot. What is a man worth? Are you worth as much as your work? How much is that worth? If you earnestly sold the sweater to a man who gave it, willingly gave it, however begrudgingly, to a bone-cold bum begging for change, do you have a share in keeping a cold man warm? If he is reformed and works diligently, becoming the VP of a company and gives five grand, willingly, however self-centeredly, to an ailing school on a Navajo reservation, do you have a share in the literacy of poor children?

Of course. The tiniest mote of a share is still a share, and a sweater is woven of many threads.

If you want to know what a man is worth, then lose him. Proceed, then, to fill the hole left by him with anything but him. You will, at length, find that the more you pour into this hole, the emptier it gets. The mathematical term for this is Infinity. This is to say that you, and everyone you see, is of Infinite worth. It comes with the territory of being made in the Image of an infinite One. Some part of me is indelibly rooted in the joyfully pealing and weighty sound of the Name above all names. Some part of you is, too. It's good to meet you.

Divine Forgetfulness

2010-10-08T06:17:00.000-07:00

My wife's gifts as a dancer have often put me in close proximity to the folks at her studio. I've been made to regard this art form which many from my Baptist upbringing would have, in decades past, declined to acknowledge. Thank God that attitude is changing. At the very least, the wonder in me must concede that the human body is a spectacular work of art in itself, and that is not to mention the dancers' abilities to be poetic with it.

I have the gift of being infinitely squeamish about my own corporeal workings. If I have to go get blood taken or have some part of me "looked at," it turns my mind toward the reality of my own organs. There they are, having worked inside of me all this time. How little attention I've paid to them. But when their existence stares me in the face, I feel a mild dizziness and a strong desire to shiver and think about something else (which, of course, causes me to think of nothing but). Not so with my thoughts of other folks. I can watch you from afar and be amazed at how your lungs and mind and heart keep you moving, mostly without your consent and certainly not according to your oversight. It's quite wonderful to consider, but perhaps my discomfort also deserves some consideration.

Paul's little poem in Philippians chapter 2 has always had something to say to me, but mostly, I am struck by the Divine Forgetfulness that Paul so eloquently paints in the first couplet about Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,
   did not consider equality with God
      something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
   taking the very nature of a servant,
   being made in human likeness.

In the Greek, the phrase "to be grasped" almost has a violent, rapacious connotation and is rather ambiguous. The ambiguity translates into the English. It could mean that the Lord did not think himself able to be coequal with the Father. It could also mean, however, that he did not particularly think of his equality with God much at all. Often we read that little opening stanza like this:

"Despite the fact that he was God, Jesus did not consider himself equal with God."

It feels good to us to paint that picture of humility. It's an easy thing (and also inversely comforting) for me to be down on myself all the time. A different reading, though, might go like this:

"Because he was God, and that's the way God is as a man, Jesus did not think of himself much at all."

That one is harder. I am no Greek scholar, and the scholars themselves differ on the meaning of this line, but I feel as if that forgetfulness is closer to the heart of our Lord than the piety of the first reading. And, of course, Paul admonishes us that "our attitudes should be the same" as the Lord's. Forget yourself. Or, to put it another way, Lose yourself. Lose your life. Forget where you put it. Set it aside in lieu of someone else. Greater love hath no man than he who lays it down for a friend.

In getting your mind off of you, it's certainly less apt to make you squeamish.

On the Silver Screen

2010-09-30T19:19:00.000-07:00

About two years ago, my dear friend and co-conspirator Ethan Norman took me out to Roane State to see a local film made by Brooks Benjamin. Bill Landry, the cathartically voiced narrator from The Heartland Series, was there, as were some other local folks of note, politicians and fans. The idea was to launch a film and arts series bringing money to the lovely easily forgotten area of Rockwood, Tennessee. I don't know if it ever worked. Ethan and I played a beautiful old theatre near there once. A friend of his named Mary Kaye (yep, you read that right) renovated it and has tried doggedly to have concerts there. I felt terrible a few months ago because I couldn't afford to go play a show without Ethan (his family and friends were the only folks who showed up at the last one).

Ethan told me that his music had been featured in the film. What we didn't know was the extent to which it was featured. In the film Twister (a personal favorite at the Whipple household), music is usually featured as a background mood-setting device. It works well, but doesn't have much meaning beyond the fun you have listening to it. In the movie we saw at Roane State, Boys of Summerville, his songs beautifully captured several of the characters' more vulnerable moments. Three of his songs were featured, and were mostly played in their entirety. Contrary to his protests, I nudged him up onstage with the actors and director at the end for the Q&A session.

Also, I experienced something strange. I saw the trailer for Let Me In, a disturbing vampire movie about a little girl, while unwittingly letting the Eels music play from another website. It really made me quite tenderhearted toward the film, even though it's supposed to frighten my nose hairs off.

Fear not, a good blog post is coming soon. There are many goings-on, and I want you to have a well-crafted account of them. Patience. Drink your tea. Listen up.

Anger: Old Men and Ents

2010-08-25T20:28:00.000-07:00

The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.

-James 1:20

I've heard more than a few preachers speak on getting "good and mad." That is, having a meek anger that responds in the way God would respond - an anger that drives the will to heal injustice and feed hunger, to stand for the broken and weep with the hurt. It is an anger to which I aspire, but that I cannot claim to have felt much. Most of my anger is of the destructive kind which serves a sovereign Me. Mine. Like the mindless gulls in Finding Nemo.

Reading a lovely, shattering, and refreshing entry today about Andrew Peterson's visit to Kentucky author Wendell Berry (read it yourself HERE), I was given, in the quieter moments of this evening, to thinking about old men and their anger. In my family tree, seeing an old man angry is a rare thing. Once, when I was younger, my mother's father took me to the driving range and attempted to show me the proper interlocking grip. I took my stance as he stood behind me and leaned over my shoulder. With all the enthusiasm my spindly boyish arms could muster, I reared back and thwocked at the ball, which nimbly skipped across the ground and to the right. Then I turned around to find that I had also thwocked my grandfather soundly upon the head. He hadn't made a sound, but held his bleeding ear with a pained look and calmly stated that it was time to go home.

This is one story among many. Not that I routinely golf after kith and kin, of course.

Compare this with my generation specifically. I drive the manic highway to and from work, regularly glimpsing those denunciatory bumper stickers proclaiming "Tolerance" or that we should "Coexist." Much do I doubt that any orthodox Wiccan would prefer association with Jesus of Nazareth who called himself God, With God, the Son of God. More to the point though, people between the ages of 15 and 30 are some of the angriest I know. We march about like magnesium flares, soon to snuff out with little to show. Most of the anger I see in young people finds its outlet in badges and bracelets and more indignance. Truly, injustice ought to horrify us, but to neither campaign button nor argument. It should horrify us to action. But, like fireworks and glowsticks, we burn dazzlingly and briefly, never giving any heat.

Old men, however, are perhaps more like Ents. They are much slower to anger and do not get excited for much. After all, "it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish, and we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say." Perhaps it is that they cannot afford to be angry over much. An old man may be crotchety or stubborn, but not often wroth. Perhaps it is ulcers or high blood pressure. Perhaps they know better than I that time is short. But an old man who is a deep well of the Love of God will rarely be stirred to anger, and beware when he is. The anger of the Lord is the anger of Love, and it will thrust mountains aside and silence the bleating of oceans in its fury. Like Treebeard and his cohorts, it may be a man's last march, but it will accomplish much and will bear justice in its train.

Tomatoes and Tares

2010-08-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

The garden is on its last leg of productivity. My friend Stewart's zealous labor and my mattock-swinging and baffled miracle-watching are come near to the close of this season, and you can tell. The onions and potatoes have been upturned and eaten, the garlic pulled and minced. The lettuce has bolted but doggedly droops in the heat; the cilantro has gone to seed. A lonely zucchini keeps flowering like a bride in bloom but can't find a mate for the bees - at least, I suppose that's how zucchini works.

And the tomatoes. They are still producing, towering over their ropes like punch drunk boxers in the ecstasy of fruit-bearing. Lemon Boys and Stripeys and beefsteaks flash like fecund jewels in the grinning sun, but my task is to collect them, to nab the bounty before the rabbits come. Amongst all this, the weeds encroach, a multitude of blades around the ankles of the cultivars. Johnson grass lofts its banners to claim its native ground. Tickweed and fescue crowd the okra like a mob. Still I harvest.

"And that is you," said the Shepherd. "Tomatoes and tares."
"As I recall," I rejoined, "the wheat and the weeds were different folks altogether."
"That's right," he said. "But this is you. Filled to overflowing with weeds, and still there are fantastic tomatoes and little pods of okra. And the carrots and popcorn haven't even come in yet.

And it shall be weeded."

Mrs. Goodstuffs Benefit Show

2010-07-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

Babs, the dear lady who is the culinary saint behind Mrs. Goodstuff's, had a stroke a while back and is on the mend. In the meantime, the restaurant has had to close its doors and the family will have a hard row to hoe to pay the hospital bills. I'm joining good friends Ashley Wells and Lisa Speck of The Songbirds in playing a benefit show for them Tuesday night. Come out to Remedy in the Old City on Tuesday for great music and dessert.

When Wrong Art is Right

2010-06-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

One bite into
a ripe fig
is worth worlds
and worlds and worlds
beyond the green
of Eden.

- from “Figs”, Erica Jong, from Love Comes First, 2009

What is it about art which supersedes theology? This is the coda of Erica Jong’s poem, which postulates that it was indeed a fig which was offered by Lucifer and taken by Adam and Eve. The last line bugged me, but I understood it. The entire poem is a thing of beauty, rolling into the consciousness with the persistent velvet rhythm of a heartbeat. I can taste the flesh of the fruit in the cool of the day. But here, the last line. I disagree. Wholeheartedly do I disagree, and I can hear a hundred preachers duly shaking their heads and restating that No, it is not worth it. I hear Satan offering Jesus “all of this… for I can give it to whomever I choose,” and Jesus’ reverberating dismissal of the devil.

Somehow, though, the line itself, and many lines of many poems and songs besides, ring true. I can say that it is merely touting the virtues of the taste of a ripe fig and therefore is true though its hyperbolic language, but dissecting a poem feels coldly logical. Also, it discounts the poem as a whole. So what is it that allows me to nod knowingly to this work as it is read in verse while at the same time fervently refuting if it descends from the pulpit? I believe the answer to be Honesty.

The reason that art resonates with us, that theatre beguiles us and paintings make us cry and music soothes savage beasts, is that it is honest. First and foremost among artists of all media is the knowledge that if your work does not speak of that which wells up within you, then it will be of little value to those who hear or see it. A photographer takes photos to show people beauty or horror where she sees them so that others may see also. A songwriter pens lyrics that reveal his human condition so that, when he plays, our human condition will not make us feel so alone. A painter unearths what he sees in the subjects so that we will not miss it.

And many times, it is all wrong. It does not line up with the five points of Calvinism or the Nicene Creed or the Westminster Catechism. We nod in assent though, and occasionally try to sequester it off as a part of our lives which does not belong in Church or polite company. I can’t help but recall though, that the One who gave notice of his perfection by giving the Law, also weeps and laughs and rages and smiles and creates. Theology and art are inseparable as the Godhead is inseparable. Theology, at its highest, leans toward the beautiful ineffability of art. So art, at its highest, speaks great theology. All that is required for theology to be worthwhile is that it be True. What is required for art is that it be Honest. John Wesley and Johnny Cash are not as far apart as we might wish to believe.

This is not an excuse for us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Part of being honest is telling the truth about how you feel. Another part is telling the truth. How you feel is worth something though. When I hear this poem, I can taste the flesh of the fig, and in that moment, I know God has touched the fruit itself and smiles that I enjoy it.

Gollum and I Glimpse the Sun

2010-06-18T19:03:00.000-07:00

On the rare occasion that my dad and my grandfather are out to dinner together, there's always this little spat over who will pay the bill. They each try to get the attention of the waiter first and secretly fork over for everyone's meals. On ministers' salaries, this is always a mystery to me. It certainly has to be a sacrifice, but they say nothing. As for me, I'm much more the kind of guy to snatch a muffin out of the box of leftover pastries if the food bank doesn't come pick them up for a while. I'll find some clever excuse for doing it - always quick to my own defense. They'll just go bad after all. But in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking that I was raised to pay for what I get. It's a blessing and a curse, surely, especially in the context of a relationship that's built on grace and that commends those who work hard not to be a burden to anyone.

I confess, I'm never good at receiving gifts. Today, my birthday, I've been made much of in the form of cards, gifts, well-wishes, and the like. It's well proven that I'm terrible at all of this. Some element of that inward and ingrown creature in me thrives on being left Alone. It lives in stunted and rancid darkness on the rejection of proffered Love. It is promising to feel the light shine on that ugly thing and reveal what it once might have been, what it could be again. It is a Gollum, and deep inside lives a Smeagol, vaguely recalling notions of friendship, of grace, of the absolutely unconditional gift. Part of it must die when it comes into the sun.

Out of sheer lack of practice, I suppose, I exhibit the perverted and graceless side of that good character which causes my dad and his dad to try to pay the bill first. The same drive which, in the hands of the Spirit, longs to give to others and to stand out of the limelight for the Glory of Christ will, away from the life-source of the Spirit, become a thing that cannot bear the wonderfully foolish love of being celebrated by others, and this for fear of the pain caused by Love. For to be loved is to be presented with the possibility to let go of one's own blame, and to release that blame and guilt is to step blindfolded into the floorless expanse only to find that it is also without a ceiling. To allow yourself to be loved is to disremember your own faults. Thank God, we have no authority to judge them anyway.

Photo Exhibit

2010-06-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

This and other photographs are now hanging down at Remedy Coffee. Take your friends and go have a cup of fantastic brew at this, my favorite nook in the Old City. Enjoy, and I hope they bring beauty to your world. Many thanks to Sean for letting me hang them.

Why I Love Music

2010-06-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

A young lady with muscular but graceful shoulders and dignity underneath her spectacles took the stage. The audience, myself included, was adrift in the breathing wash of anticipation as she paused to gather her thoughts and then moved to the microphone.

The sound of a soul crying out
The sound of a soul crying out
Me say Oh,
My soul cries out

-Rhea Scruggs

She was one of many to catch us off guard and remind us how to moan, how to deeply expend the dammed up rivers of the notion that everything is not okay. That night, as I was standing around at Remedy Coffee, someone asked me if I would judge the slam poetry contest. So I played my part in the ludicrous idea of attaching a number to someone's art. I wrote scores on a dry erase board and held it in the air each time a poet finished, hoping they would all recognize the travesty in what I was doing. Truth be told, they were all honest and beautiful. But more than that, they taught me. Faces screwed up into screams and were lined with passions; hands became bullhorns in the air. The failure of decency, the perpetuation of hatred, the exclusion and rejection of Love - these were expounded, and we were made to remember and to be free from the bondage of false smiles. And I remembered why I love music.

The heart, like any other thing, requires a little lubrication now and again. If your body has no salt and no water, you will sicken and die. Plants without nitrogen go awry. And the heart, without beauty, loses the ability to sing its joys and woes. Linford Detweiler of Over the Rhine said that when all your prayers run out, sometimes a song will do. I need that more than I often realize. As a person who stands behind a microphone and often spends time marketing something very human, I quickly teach myself to distrust my emotions. Soon, the stoicism petrifies into pure cold logic. This is not a place you want to go.

The Jews had a practice of hiring mourners to weep at funerals. I used to think this was the epitome of vanity, but anymore I'm not certain that's the case. Something about a woman wailing, something about that guttural human sound, unleashes the chained emotion within us. That sound, that awful sound, feels as if it could twist bone and rend the very air. A person weeping makes it okay to weep ourselves. Perhaps that is the territory of beauty, and despite all our pompous intellectualism, it cannot altogether be written off as trite. A sunset will nearly always stir the waters of the coldest heart. Let us pray the lepers take initiative to step in before the pool is stilled. A little girl's blue curious eyes, so soon from the face of God, cannot but capture you if you're willing to simply look. Truly, emotion is often a bad judge where balancing the checkbook and driving in traffic are concerned, but without it I cannot be human. I need art, honest beauty, to streamline the movements of my heart.

I drove down Rutledge Pike in the evening. The rolling farmland and aged hills spread out beneath the summer sky, and fireflies scattered like hopeful stars across the earthly firmament. We are like them, each of us flashing a signal beacon across the dark, desperately hoping not to spend the brevity of our lives alone. I remembered beauty, and that laughing and crying were sometimes very nearly the same thing, and I remembered how to be human.

Words I Don't Use

2010-05-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

There are a great many gorillas in the room, most of them 800 pounds.

Discussions in the church have always ridden on a razor's edge. As in marriage, we must often end by apologizing and gracefully accepting another's forgiveness as it is gracefully given, and all this in honor of the Lord Jesus. But if conversation in the church is a briar patch, discussions between the Bride of Christ and the world are a thin rocky path skirting a cliff. In order to maintain good relations, the church has sometimes sacrificed necessary doctrines. Mostly, these losses are subsumed into our daily habits. We are the boiling frog; we would never do it if we knew the consequences.

The power of language is something we have forgotten to believe. Call anyone who is not a Christian a 'pagan' or 'heathen,' and you will quickly rediscover the power of language to elicit a reaction by laying bare the face of an issue. So instead, we say 'non-believer' or, less often, 'unbeliever.' The problem with these words is that they presume an initial condition of sainthood, which, according to Scripture, is as false as presuming that man is intrinsically good. Am I saying we should go about insulting the greater percentage of humanity to its face? Certainly not. But do we speak justly by employing euphemistic language? Are we fair to people by pouring honey over stale bread?

Perhaps these two words are not accurate. 'Pagan' is a Latin leftover from the outworkings of Constantine's empire. It refers to country folk, rural people, when Christianity was wed to the state and spread throughout cities first. 'Heathen' - referring to people who live on the heath - is its Old English counterpart. So what do we say? 'Infidel' is probably the most accurate. It is also Latin in origin and refers to a person "in-fidelis"; "without faith." But, of course, we have heard it used both by Muslims and by caricatures of Muslims, even though it hearkens back to a state which warred against Islam for centuries and is not an Arabic term.

Should we call people pagans or infidels? I've heard it used in sermons and seen it in essays by men I regard highly, but I've neither said it to an infidel nor heard it said thus. It would always require explanation, but perhaps that's a good thing. People called 'unfaithful' will generally argue the point, and this begs the question, "To what, then, are you faithful?" The very nature of the conversation also begs the Holy Ghost to ask, "Are you speaking with a tongue of Love?" Mostly, being hardened to the Grace of God, I am unable to do so. What Grace I accept, though, must not stop with me, but must flow through me. All told, I do no favors by glossing over the Truth.

Warrior Bricks

2010-05-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

Northern Alabama offers the mountain traveler a unique respite from walking uphill and downhill and uphill. With the exception of a few topographical minutiae, your feet will only take you forward. That is, straight forward in a slight arc accounting for the curvature of the earth's surface.

I told my wife and her family that I was going to go work on Saturday afternoon. This meant that I was going to attempt to find a small and rather pretentiously artistic hovel that served coffee in the midst of yet another American town being slowly eaten by Walmart (or, if you're in my household, That Which Must Not Be Named). And I told them I was going to walk. Only Katrina was not astounded. So I packed up the laptop and took to my feet through the streets of desperately manicured lawns beside forgotten gravel lots and lovely Victorian houses converted into law firms. It's always the same kinds of businesses that circle dying Southern towns. Law firms, tanning and nail salons, used car dealerships, bondsmen, and junk shops, once held in check by the indigenous population, now flourish in the hole left in the economic food chain. There are precious few distractions for small-town young people, and it is disconcerting to know that certain distractions can support four branches of Joe's Bond and Loan in a five mile radius.

So I walked past the town square, glad to see a bakery, a gym, and a jewelry shop holding down the fort. I went by a world-famous secondhand shop (truly, it is world-famous) and only found an autobiography of U2 that seemed worth the ballooning price. My feet took me down a street called Willow. I have a habit of scanning trash on the ground with my eyes. It has a story to tell, in its fashion, of the ones who left it there. Amid the refuse along the sidewalk, a brick caught my eye. Depressed into its baked and weathered sienna was a single word:

WARRIOR

I had to pick it up, of course. I carried it with me with all intentions of giving it a good home and use back in Knoxville. But we didn't go by to pick it up later. If you pass through Scottsboro, Alabama, it's sitting by the telephone pole at the corner of South and Willow. Use it well. Such a brick could be to you the reminder of what you are as you leave your house to succumb to the illusion that your life and job are banal realities. We all need reminding of what's at stake.

I walked on down Willow, hoping to find a suitable place, or to give up the ghost and come eventually to the parking lot of That Which Must Not Be Named, where stood a Huddle House, a dependable fortress of coffee and bacon grease. The problem was, I had forgotten that there was a turn I was supposed to make. I walked past it, imagining that I had perhaps forgotten each unfamiliar landmark. The heat of the sun shooed me into the shelter of a place called the Dairy Bar, where I received a treatise on salvation by grace through faith and a fantastic peanut butter and Reese's Cup milkshake. Southern people are truly fascinating when you give them the chance to be. That sounds like I'm not one, but just let me get tired or angry, and out slips the drawl. No doubts there.

I left the Dairy Bar and continued down the highway past the municipal airport (read: strip of pavement and a hangar). Finally, I came upon the steeple of a Baptist church that I knew I had not passed. I went inside to ask directions, and was told to go back the way I had come. The fellow spoke as if his tongue had been stung by a bee. He had been mowing after all. I asked him if I could simply cross the ridge behind the church to get back to the highway. I could hear the sounds of trucks beyond the trees, and certainly I would get my bearings from atop the land. Sure, he said. I could do that. So I, minus one machete, entered the scrub and bramble behind the church building. After struggling against the first briar patch and watching a neon green snake slither over my shoulder and drop to the ground, I considered my decision. Then I kept going, trusting my Carolina upbringing to see me through the undergrowth.

There are patches of land in the Smokies referred to as "Hells" because of the difficulty in getting through them. They are justly named. This was just as bad, except no one had made a path around it. I pressed and stamped through walls of blackberry and thorny vines unnamed until, fifty yards into the ordeal, I came to my senses. Then came the problem of getting out. After a passionate use of the "saw" on my Swiss Army Knife, and a lightsaber-like wielding of a stout rod of maple, I emerged from the wilderness and back into the sun.

If there is a gleaming moral to this story, it is that, though I am an idiot, a good seven-mile walk will do even an idiot some good. I did sit down to get some writing done finally. It was at an Arby's over a tall plastic cup of iced tea. Sometimes pretentious artistic environs must give way before utility. Warrior bricks are often found in the unlikeliest places.

Lux: A LeConte Meditation

2010-04-05T19:32:00.000-07:00

I met Blaine in the parking lot of the Starbucks where we both used to work. The parkway through Sevierville and Pigeon Forge was a rancorous purgatory of internal combustion. No quest is complete without its obstacles. We loaded into Blaine's upstart Nissan and took a back way, skipping most of the traffic. We skipped Gatlinburg as well, climbing the bypass into the park. The Great Smoky Mountains: a beautiful soggy compendium of rugged unforgiving creation and a cloud of human beings who try to come as close to the wilderness as they dare. I usually laugh a bit haughtily at the out-of-state or out-of-place folks, even as my conscience declares that I am no frontiersman.

We got out of the car into a balmy seventy-five degrees of sun-bathed parking lot, surrounded by the stately landscape of trees older than our parents. After Louis arrived, we shouldered our packs and began pacing the six miles up Alum Cave Bluff Trail to the top of LeConte. April breathed spring at the bottom, and past the sharp saltpeter odor of the bluffs themselves, we noticed signs of winter's tenacious hold. Patches of ice still clung to the deeper copses of trees. Snow drifts were still in the process of melting down the trail. Up near the top, our going was slowed to a methodical pace as we gripped the cable to our right and made our way across the two feet of packed ice that covered the trail for a couple hundred feet. No false steps were allowed.

The top was no different, except the possibility of falling wouldn't kill you. You would however be guaranteed a leg soaked up to the knee if you sank through the snow into the meltwater below it. I had longed to sit out on the rocks of Cliff Top with my penny whistle and play, but I had left it in my car. The wind was beginning to whisper when we arrived, and it was already sixty degrees at four o'clock. I walked into the lodge to look around and saw a man sitting in a corner playing one of two weathered guitars.

"Are those yours?" I asked, knowing that a few church groups were present.
"These are for everybody," he said. I couldn't contain my gladness.

I sat down with the other guitar, which was blessedly strung with new strings. After I noodled around for a minute, he asked me if I would come play for him and his friends that evening. It was like finding an old friend I didn't know I had. Blaine, Louis, and I went to a Tenebrae service in the dining hall that evening after sunset, where we heard and meditated on the story of that terrible Friday which we now call Good. And I did get the opportunity to share a goodly selection of songs with folks in the lodge later that night.

The next evening, from the comfort of my own bed, I scribbled down these words:

Saturday, that Saturday.
I took no staff, a borrowed bag,
my brother's coat, the mountain long
of toe and ice-crowned shoulder
before us three,
to keep our vigil:
sunset west from howling cliffs,
sunrise east, where myrtles grow.

Seven candles, seven lamps-
stars now caught up in the hand.
We heard the Scriptures, writ and wring,
upon the heights of thawing land.
Candles, now before the cross,
one by one our breath lay low.
"Post tenebras," quoth the ranks
of fishermen who did not know,

did not dare to hope behind
the padlocked bars and shards of souls.

Post tenebras, Saturday.
O my God! that Saturday.
We, like sheep in winter shorn-
that sun should shine on this cadre-
Post tenebras, what? What now?

The final candle blown to naught
like a spirit given o'er,
vinegar upon the words,
many comers rise to go.
In the dark I long to sit.
O, remember Saturday.
Not one scrivener could dare
the weight of sorrow to convey.

I walked alone through a world
still bound in ice. The shadowed
spruces perfumed the burial yard
in my mind and heart.
Did they live in the promises?
Could they understand: the taxman,
the women, the fishermen?

From our years away, we must
revisit their darkness,
breathe in their woe.
Only then can we begin
to grasp at our rememberance:
Post tenebras, Lux.

The Beauty of Boredom

2010-03-01T18:25:00.001-08:00

I'm not so sure that God is concerned with being entertained.

-Rich Mullins

Jack Neely, one of my favorite hometown writers, hit nearer to the head of the nail than I've heard in a long time. He questioned the eatery surplus that befalls Knoxville, wondering if it was not time for another form of mid-afternoon entertainment. If you pick up the local daily paper or turn on the news, you'll certainly feel the dam-burst of theft, rape, and murder. It washes over you from the front page to the obits, until you become voyeuristic in order not to feel everyone else's pain. But turn the leaves of the local alt-weekly (once independent, now incorporated), and you find another sort of medication. It seems a bit more hopeful, more grounded in possibility than in pessimism. So what is your alternative? Well....uhm, food. And music. And pictures, and then food. Then music. Lather, rinse, and repeat. As one who is a songwriter, photographer, and to my friends and family, a chef, I have more red flags arising in my mind when someone tells me that I did a good job than when my work is ignored. True, it is partly because I am too inwardly focused, crafting golden calves out of my own self-examination, but I'm also concerned. More than for those close to me, I am concerned for my city.

It's disconcerting that Jesus grouped people together by towns. Woe to Korazin! Woe to Bethsaida! And he goes back for more in Revelation, picking apart the churches across Asia Minor for their overall failures, desiring not for each man to learn the languages of love, but for them to sing together, desiring that they should raise a chorus. Along the concrete veins of Knoxville in autumn, if you chance upon a quiet second between passing semis, you might catch the strains of a cacophony pouring out of some maple where the flocking birds have paused on their south-bound road. Each spring, they split their ranks and mingle with strangers from next door, all singing different tunes. But in the dying seasons, they find their kind and pour out a single overwhelming concerto. So, if we are of a kind, what is our symphony?

Music is a way of life for me, as are words and all the arts thereof. To say otherwise for any man is to wish him unto misery. In a society that is crafted of words, in a creation that was sung into existence, we can't forego these fabrics. But when did they become ends unto themselves, as they are in my town? I suppose it is true everywhere, otherwise all our media oddities - i.e., YouTube, reality TV, Entertainment magazine and its ilk - wouldn't have the scrapings of a market. Otherwise, art for art's sake has to find another reason. I don't know if it's a Western bent, but I suspect that it feels just as good to be entertained in every other corner of the globe. What might we be trying to avoid?

Again, I love music. My wife will recount for you the silly mess I become when I see a Renoir up close. And, being American, I love food. But the art of all these things isn't meant to distract us. It is meant to focus us. You don't have to be entertained. Like man is made from dust, there is a wealth beneath every mundane moment, a possibility in every awkward pause.

Gadzooks! Another stupid advertisement!

2010-02-23T20:07:00.000-08:00

Since the advent of viral marketing, NoiseTrade - i.e., the makers of the fantastic download widget on the sidebar to your right - has had the gall to take advantage of the fact that we all talk about Superbowl commercials and anything else we find interesting. I've talked about Noisetrade before, so I won't go into that again, but here are a few updates.

You can now download my record for FREE by inputting only your email address and postal code. This helps me to look at places where people are listening to my music and will help me to plan shows in the future. It also puts your email on a list so that I can keep you informed at whiles. No, I will not send you an advert for Canadian medication. No, I will not fill your inbox with email about cheap fake Rolex watches. No, I will not send you a puppy. Have no fear. The download page, NoiseTrade.com/adamwhipple, also includes a tip jar, just like that one sitting on the bar at the coffee shop. Free download. Tip if you like. Not a bad deal. Noisetrade will send you a follow-up email a little ways after you download. This invites you to tell folks about what you've heard and toss a buck in the tip jar.

I'm a fan of the low-pressure environment. Hopefully, this will be just that.

LEGITIMATE BLOG POST COMING SOON. EDITING IN PROGRESS.

Defying the Genre

2010-01-26T20:13:00.000-08:00

The first question that crops up is, "What kind of music do you play?"

It rolls across the table from genuine faces and goodly people who mean well. But it's the wrong questions. I've asked it myself, and it's poor communication of what I'm hoping to unearth.

What I really mean to say is, "Who are you?"

That is, if indeed your main vehicle for communication is music, then how can I get to know you through your music? Or photography. Or poetry. Or cooking, cobbling, building. Somehow, who we are always shows up in our work, especially when we're passionate about it. "What kind of music do you play?" or "What sort of shoes do you make?" are just shortcuts because we feel pressed for time. And perhaps rightfully so. It does take more than a lifetime to really know a person.

Because of all this, I am appreciative of beauty in defiance of genre. I was privileged to share in some as my friend Rob Laliberte took the stage at the Square Room this past Friday. Take time and listen to his work and that of a few other gents I know. I'm terrible at writing reviews without sounding insincere, so I'll let the music speak for itself. Enjoy.

Rob Laliberte

Brantley and Stephen Cox

Peter Barbee

My Excused Absence From the Interweb

2010-01-06T20:09:00.000-08:00

There was a short list of valid excuses for absence from school. It allowed for sickness if only a doctor could prove it. Therefore, if you had a two-day stomach bug which would quickly pass, your parents had to fork over the money for the doctor's appointment to secure that Golden Ticket signed in illegible scrawl that would guarantee you a clean record. One can see the lack of motivation. Other than that, there was a death in the family. I always wondered if that had to be done on official paper as well. In my mind I saw confused kids bearing legal copies of coroner's certificates to their grim and stoically encouraging teachers.

"Grandpa died. Here's the paper. Can I make up my work now?"
"Our condolences, little Johnny. Here's your fractions worksheet."

Well, here, in ascending order of importance, are my excuses for not writing on my blog. I have the papers to prove that one of them exists.

~1~

This, A Walk Across the Rooftops, was the final installment of a four-piece collection of records I have by The Blue Nile. Being their earliest one, it originated from an equipment company hiring the band to record something to show off the quality of the recording hardware. The music was so good that the company formed a record label just to sell it. I'll stop geeking out now. See me if you want to hear more.

~2~

My parents got this for me for Christmas, and it's already warming me heart with its quirky personality. Sonically, the grace of Excuse #2 is a little more subsumed than that of the album, but it's undeniably present nonetheless. Said the interweb to the typewriter, "We are displeased." Said the typewriter, "Perhaps I could tell you a story. That might cheer you up."

~3~

I've had this one since October. Its aesthetics are not as refined as either the album or the typewriter, but its sheer sonic range exceeds them both. Also, it poops, pees, vomits, cries, eats, sleeps, babbles, wiggles, smiles, watches, and is in general the prettiest of the three.

Sorry for any delays in blog updates. I am occupied. I shall endeavor to improve.

Between Two Cities

2009-12-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

As with all recent First Fridays of the month in Knoxville, this last one was devoted to the art and music without cost up and down the chilly sidewalks of the city. I don’t get out much on First Fridays. The truth be told, whenever they roll around, I don’t think about it, and I’m often more inclined to spend the time staring across to the other side of the couch at my wife whom I’ve not seen for half a day. But I happened upon two friends at a bus stop, and I was blessed not to get away before they told me of the daring plan they had hatched. In short, it was to host a concert in their downtown apartment featuring the musical stylings of Joseph Gillenwater. I smiled politely, but underneath the placid surface I was flabbergasted. Joseph Gillenwater? The oft seen but rarely heard wunderkind of quiet, blessed, indefinable music whom I’ve not heard play in years? I laid plans of my own to be present at the occasion.

I sometimes feel as though my heart is aloft somewhere between Knoxville and Nashville. I’ve grown up hearing the Nashville sound spill out of the radio in all its glitz and glamour and honesty and clarity. The winnowing process that I’ve gone through over these few years has led me to appreciate great art from Music City and also to appreciate the greatness in art that had a bad day or was ill treated. I’ve learned a lot about how to make music from those mid-state folks, and I owe them more than they know or I can repay, but the Nashville sound is certainly a different thing than the Knoxville sound. Nashville is big on business. It’s where people go to “make it.” Everyone there is a musician or a writer, down to the quiche-wielding chef who catered to my dad, his cohorts, and tag-along me at the Sound Kitchen. Music feels like a big deal there, as it should be if it’s paying the mortgage.

Knoxville? Well, Knoxville just isn’t. We’re not as concerned with the business end here, and that plays through in the tunes. Joseph Gillenwater’s music and attitude are, at least to me, quintessentially Knoxvillian. This was the guy who, when I met him at his local food market job, told me that he wasn’t really interested in recording. All my Nashville pipe dreams and ploys balked and crumbled like a playing card house in the face of this unconcern. Besides that, this makes Joseph’s music difficult to catch. You have to watch for the opportunity, but as I told my friend who hosted the evening, it’s like finding a pearl of great price buried in a field. Few other things that move with such quiet humility and grace could hold captive a room of fifty boisterous people, many in various states of inebriation. But, in his unsophisticated way, Joseph shuffled through a telecaster, a banjo, and a small but characteristically quirky electric organ in the effort to convey blessing to us. We were all spellbound. What is more, when we thought the sound couldn’t get any smaller or sweeter, his sister Jessica got up and sang a couple of songs with him.

Many records I hear spur me toward the idea of recording, of seeing what sort of life these songs can take upon themselves. But hearing Joseph spurs me on to write, to gather my most desperate hopes onto paper and hum them into someone’s ear at a tempo not exceeding the pace of frost melting in the sun.

Tongues of Fire

2009-11-09T14:06:00.000-08:00

Caution! Achtung! Warning! There's a sticky subject ahead. Not that we shouldn't admit that we have elephants in the room, but we do often have a difficult time doing so. Still, it must be said that we are called to redeem, to be Christ wherever we go. In recent years, it has come into vogue in our world of the Kingdom to be glad for our freedom to curse. Or, since I think that how Scripture (and indeed any authoritative text of the ancient world) defines cursing is a far cry from our so-called four letter words, I will heretofore refer to it as 'cussing.' That sounds much earthier than, "You shall walk on your belly, and dust shall be your food."¹ Truth be told, one word obviously is derivative of the other, but we shall let slang refer to slang, and the high speech of the Lord and his servants of old will not come into this discussion.

I've chosen to write about this, in part, because it has both perplexed and irritated me for some time now. But truly, no matter my thoughts on the subject, the Scriptures, a few mature authorities, and sheer common sense have a good deal to say to us all. To begin with, the issue is that cussing is not the language of redemption. Let's allow some air into that before we continue. Am I saying that the oft-mentioned situation of hitting your thumb with a hammer is not a prelude to any vulgarity that may cross your mind? Of course not. Most of us are going to cuss sooner or later, and I don't think we should dwell very much on the specifics of things you don't want to hear from a 5-year-old's mouth.

Men will have to give an account of every idle word spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.²

What concerns me most is the revelry in freedom from a law which has been fulfilled. The Sheep have been loosed from their green-swathed pen to follow the Shepherd through the Dark Countries if they will. But on the way, we enjoy rolling in the mud and filth now and again, just to prove to our fellows that our Sovereign won't give vent to his anger over such trivialities. In the back of all our minds is the possibility that he might rebuke us, but we don't dwell on it. But that same Sovereign has made it our task to let our light shine before men, that they may see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven.³ Let us make way for the possibility that, in some small part, the use of uncouth language in any form may bring about that redemption of the language simply according to the purpose of its use and the person who uses it. If Jonathan Edwards rolled out of the pages of history and said, "I hope [insert frustration here] burns in Hell," I think I'd pay attention. But if Chris Rock says it, it gets filed away in our memory banks under "Mildly Humorous" and we long to laugh about it at the office coffee pot. It's true, we don't like high speech. We prefer Hemingway's pointedness to Fenimore Cooper's florid descriptions.

But when musicians kick off the sales of records with the idea that it's controversial to say "shit" and artists paint nude studies with emphasis on genitals, then we've crossed the line from redeeming words and pictures to selling shock. And honestly, unfortunately, it's no longer shocking. Except, of course, to the legalism crowd who has thrown out the baby of untamed great art with the bathwater of borderless voyeurism - and yes, they're found mostly in churches and older generations. The younger and perhaps more urban Christian that finds it hip to cuss has missed the purpose of speech entirely. Even Pagans (that is, those who are not Christians) have discovered this. Consider a letter to the editor from my hometown weekly.

Every time I am reading your publication and come across a term like “really sucked” or “kicked ass” or “it takes balls,” it is like being in an art exhibition and coming across a canvas where someone has merely blown their nose. These sentiments never change and I just long for more eloquent times; Virginia Woolf and Henry James would have gotten any point across without having to subject readers to unnecessary vulgarity.⁴

Blown their nose? Yes, I believe that about sums it up. And our personal speech in this Soundbyte Era is little more than a collection of mindless and profane exclamations. Amongst believers, we must be reminded not to "use our freedom as a cover-up for evil."⁵ But "let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you will know how to answer everyone."⁶ Should we expect Believers and Pagans alike to express anger in their language at times? Most certainly. But amongst those called to redeem culture and "take every thought captive," we should also expect speech to be a little more efficient in its usage, and more beautiful in its scope.⁷

And if you made it this far, enjoy one of my favorite slam poetry performances by Taylor Mali.

1. Genesis 3:14.
2. Matthew 12: 36-37.
3. Matthew 5:16.
4. Cynthia Markert. Metropulse. Letters to the Editor. September 23, 2009.
5. I Peter 2:16.
6. Colossians 4:6.
7. II Corinthians 10:5.

Friday at the Square Room

2009-10-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

This just in: Because of new FTC guidelines, I must disclose that I received my copy of North! Or Be Eaten for free from Waterbrook/Multnomah Publishing, in exchange for writing a review. I probably should have mentioned this anyway, but it did not occur to me. All legalities aside though, I still could not help but thoroughly devour such a delicious tale. And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Live at the Square Room
Friday, October 16th, 8pm

Andy & the Andys

If you're doing nothing this Friday night, you should leave your nothingness and go with all haste to the somethingness of this concert. If, perchance, you are doing something, then you should stop immediately upon the hour of 7 tomorrow evening and go to the concert. Not only are three of the best songwriters I know gathered under one roof as a band, but my friend Andy Vandergriff is opening for them. I would geek out and pee on myself while spouting the unintelligible gibberish of the socially inept. But I'm not opening for them, Andy is. And yes, we've all thought of every possible joke about Andy and Andy and the Andys, so we won't mention them. I'll see you at the show.

The Carpenter's Furniture

2009-10-03T19:35:00.000-07:00

Here is a story I wrote after sweating and cursing through the refinishing of two antique pieces of furniture for my daughter's room. I love heirlooms and storied family treasures. The idea is to keep a copy of this story with the furniture for future reading. Enjoy.

The Carpenter’s Furniture: a Redemption Story

They began life as a handful of seeds. Or perhaps what merely amounted to a handful, for they had never been gathered together or held in anyone’s hands. Long they lay in the ground, waiting while winter visited its breath upon their elders above the surface. But then, something inside said that it was time, and they began to change. It was hardly noticeable, really. No one paid much attention when any of the thin green saplings poked their brave noses above the dirt. That was as they wanted it.

But soon their skin hardened into bark and they added years to their lives, piling on the seasons of flood and drought, until one day, a man came and called them by a name. It was not the name they had known when they were born, the name that ran through their sap and roots and stretched out to the smallest twigs of their branches, the name that the sky spoke when it looked down upon them. It was a foreign name: “May-puhl.”

“May-puhl?” they thought, and they questioned one another along the breeze that ran through their grove. The man was young, it seemed. Men did not live as long as trees, but this one seemed to think himself old enough for judgment. Then he took out a long, serrated knife, and cut them all down. It hurt terribly, and they didn’t understand, but they bore their fate with the patience given their kind. Other men came and carved up their bodies and carried them away, where they were divided up and rendered unto planks and facings.

Time passed, and the planks were bought and sold and nailed and glued together. A carpenter from Alabama happened upon a collection of them and paid out quite a sum, taking them back to his shop excitedly. For many days he stared at the wood and drew up plans, hoping that his work would feed his family. Then, on a Saturday in April, he began to work, beveling edges and routing grooves, ripping boards and gluing joints. His wife would occasionally look in on him. He moved from the larger bits to doing some scrollwork on the apron of two pieces. They seemed to his wife to be turning into a bureau and a vanity. The scrollwork was new to him, but he threw his heart into it, and in the end it turned out well. The bureau and the vanity were sanded and stained and went up for sale in his tiny storefront.

There they sat for a time, and the carpenter began to think less of himself and wondered about the value of his skill. But upon an unexpectedly warm day that September, a lady came in the door. The timing seemed queer, Uncanny as the carpenter’s wife later put it. For the lady searched round the storefront and decided on exactly those two pieces which had languished for months. She offered a sum for them which was strangely a few dollars more than what the carpenter needed to make rent. The carpenter took it with a meek and thankful look in his eyes, and he loaded the pieces into a truck to deliver them to her house, which turned out to be a small affair tucked away on a large farmstead near a bend in the river. Cotton bolls were beginning to open in rows stretching away to a line of elms that towered in the distance toward the south. The field to the north, away from the river, held a vast crop of late bush beans that hung like green jewels in the sun. The dirt road ran straight on a slight causeway between fields. The carpenter drove up to the house, which had apple trees surrounding it and a large kitchen garden. He unloaded the bureau and the vanity and carried them into the sitting room, hoping to meet the farmer himself, but the man was nowhere to be seen. The lady thanked him and offered a basket of vegetables to him as he left.

She, though her frame was delicate, worked happily to move the two pieces into respective rooms, cherishing the idea of her husband’s return. And return he did. Late in the evening, he came down the road in the seat of a red tractor, his weary shoulders slightly hunched at the wheel and an exuberant border collie dashing about the path around him. His wife met him at the front door. Dinner was ready, but she wanted to show him a surprise first. She led him into the back bedrooms of their tiny house, and he stopped in the doorway when he saw the new furniture. His mind quickly rifled through the accounts, drawing up beads of sweat on his forehead when hard times came fresh on his memory, but then he saw the joy in his wife’s face. He let it be in good faith, and he smiled and thanked her for the gifts.

It was several years later, when the farmer’s wife took sick. She lay in the bed trying bravely to manage a smile on her wan face, as the farmer did his best to work his land and care for his wife. He wished that she had borne children who might help with the work, but they had none. At last, the malady conquered her, and she died. He buried her and mourned deeply, but did his best to continue the work with his dog for company.

As time passed, he fell in love with another woman, much younger. They married at length, but she, being immature in ways, was jealous of her husband’s first wife. She despised the bureau and the vanity, knowing them to be cherished gifts. Late one afternoon, out of youthful spite, she hewed the legs off of the vanity, and painted both pieces a creamy white. To be truthful, it was a rather dashing hue, although the vanity was now little more than a child’s desk. The farmer himself said nothing, hoping not to upset her.

Years crept up and flooded away again, and they, despite this offense, were faithful to each other and bore two children: a daughter and a son. The young girl inherited the carpenter’s furniture as a bedroom set. Initially she did not know the tainted history of it, but as she grew they saw fit to tell her. Soon, she married a quiet man, a jack-of-all-trades as it were. He was a musician but was studied in many arts and had industrious hands. They also bore two children: a son and a daughter. The little girl inherited the carpenter’s furniture in her turn, and cherished them as heirlooms.

Upon leaving home to attend school as a young woman, she met a strange young man who liked music. Different though they were in their persuasions, they fell in love and were wedded. They bought a house in the city, and she brought the furniture up from her mother’s house to be their own. In the course of time, she came to be with child, and they decided upon a use for the carpenter’s furniture. Their child would also inherit it, but they desired that its history should come upon a different chapter. The young musician liked wooden and storied things that were well built, and bent his mind toward stripping the furniture of its creamy coat, which had now crackled pleasantly over the first finish. Many commented on the quality of the cracking, saying that it had class and was beautiful. But the musician and his wife reasoned that, as the paint was applied in spite, it should be undone in love.

Many hours of longsuffering work they spent, painstakingly removing the layers of yellowed paint and even the stain beneath. The musician’s friends came by to help. A black man from New York worked side by side with him, and alongside their work, they freely discussed the angst between the races of black and white men in the South. They worked as brothers, and were glad to have a freedom from the constraints of fear, at least between themselves. The musician found a man begging on the side of the road, and gave him the chance to live with dignity again by working for his food. They ate and worked with each other for a day, and the musician prayed over him and sent him off.

Most of all, the musician’s wife worked beside him, even though she was greatly with child and could not easily move about. After they had stripped away the years of paint and stain, they put new legs on the vanity and sanded the carpenter’s furniture again. Once, the vanity was left out on the porch, and the wet air bowed the paneling on one side. The musician was angry with himself, but sought knowledge about kerfing. He kerfed the panel himself and patched it, sanding it again when it was dry. The musician and his wife also began to stain the furniture a deep and dark tone, nearly black. Patiently they worked as the furniture took up all the space where they once dined as a family. Persistently, they stained and sanded and stained until it was done. It was polished and handed down as a set to their first child, a daughter. That is how it came to be here.

Book Review: North! Or Be Eaten

2009-09-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

According to George Lucas, the second section of a story is where you must place your characters in the worst situation possible. This only works if the audience identifies with the characters, if they care about them, and I’ve found that I can’t help but care about the three Wingfeather/Igiby children. They have now proven themselves to be the seedlings of the royalty that runs in their lineage, and in Andrew Peterson’s second installment of the Wingfeather Saga, North! Or Be Eaten, their royalty is pitted against a vast and sinister array of villains. Even more difficult are their battles with the devils on their shoulders as they flee the soulless Fangs of Dang, the Stranders of the East Bend, and the pitiable beggars who lost children to the Fork Factory. Uncle Artham, the elder throne warden, does his best to remain lucid as he slips toward madness. Tink broods uncertainly and reluctantly over his future kingship and the responsibility thereof. Janner struggles to live up to the task of protecting his often frustrating and argumentative family.

Meanwhile, we are allowed in on the spotty and questionable history of the Igiby clan as we know it. Why is Podo Helmer so afraid of the sea? What brings him to scoff at the dragons that everyone else finds so majestic? We find out more about the power behind Leeli’s songs and the abominable origin of the Fangs. As I turned through chapter upon chapter, I found myself more and more on the verge of tears as the family was ripped apart and sent through one crucible after another. Janner goes to the Fork Factory. Tink faces the bitter end of all those drawn away by the Black Carriage. Podo finally greets his grim history. And Nia and Leeli are forced to watch patiently as these men, young and old, scramble to stand on two feet as they are repeatedly tried. Through all of the family’s seeming failures they somehow draw nearer to a victory, the face of which they never could have recognized before.

The environs of North! are bedazzling in themselves. Andy takes us from the green boughs of Glipwood Forest to the dizzying heights of Fingap Falls and Miller’s Bridge, to the grimy and oppressed streets of Dugtown, where hundreds of secret hallways tunnel beneath the city. Beyond that there are the crystalline chambers of Kimera, the cold and stony passageways of the Phoob Islands, and finally, the Dark Sea of Darkness itself. But if all these places weren’t enough, Andrew has crafted a world beyond them, complete with history and rife with tales and characters that cry out to be unearthed. We discover the ancient and tragic lives of the dragons themselves and the reasons for their deep and painful sorrow. Early secrets of Aerwiar are revealed, and we are told of the greedy sabotage of Ouster Will and the fall of the world.

After On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, Andrew Peterson again attests to his craft as a consummate storyteller, bringing his love of narrative (which has long been a part of his songwriting) once more to the written page. I am so glad that this is the sort of story he has chosen to tell. The more I dig into the annals of Anniera, the more depth I discover. There are older languages which have yet to be fully expounded upon, maps which invite me to consider the boundless adventures beyond my own horizons, and the predominant temptation of genealogy that calls me to consider well the rock from which I am hewn. I hope fans of Tolkien, Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Wendell Berry, and the like discover this book and its predecessor. A great shortage exists of authors who are willing to undertake the monumental task of spinning a world and all its history and trappings out of literary thread. It’s good to know that there is another of these daring souls at large.

-Andy Peterson's website
-The Rabbit Room
-The Wingfeather Saga Online
-Waterbrook Press

A Long Draught of Truth

2009-08-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

It's the greatest feeling when you're playing at an outdoor venue and innocent passersby stop in their tracks and cock their ears to catch what's happening. If one were to be slaughtering chickens in person to the music of Liszt played backwards, I think the stopping in the tracks would also occur, but for different reasons. All told, we had a great time playing at Market Square, begging like Elijah that there would be no rain for the next hour.

Here's a bit I wrote before my last trip to Scotland. Many thanks to Ted for graciously asking me to write it, even though I didn't seem a very good sport at the time. I beg your indulgence, as it's rather long as blog posts go, but I feel that it unearths many things that might help you understand whence I come where my faith is concerned. Come, let us open the bottle. 'Twas a good year.

I usually wake up every day feeling like I’m walking with all certainty toward the gates of Hell. This does not bode well for a life of faith, some would say. Others, deeply concerned for me and my pathological need to be validated, would tell me to abandon Christianity and find something that affirms me more effectively. The problem with that is that I can’t cling to Christianity. I can try, but all things around which I can wrap my mind will eventually crumble. I’ve been asked to write my testimony, my story, as a Christian. That is, what Christ has done for me. I consider myself a writer, sort of. I’ve written pieces which have been published, if only in a small collegiate anthology. I’ve written songs that people have identified with and recorded an album which has sold a few copies, but my mind balks at the task of narrating what Christ has done for me.

This is not, let us be assured, because he has done nothing for me. He has rescued me, does rescue me, and continues to rescue me from myself, from “this body of death.” (Ro. 7:24) He has changed me from a lustful, fearful, narcissistic, prideful wretch into a wretch who is still all those things, but doesn’t desire them as much anymore. The change, you might say, is negligible. But you would be wrong. I don’t really know if I’m as lustful or fearful as I used to be, but my desiring to be other than that is cataclysmic. There are other things as well that I don’t know, such as if I’m going to heaven or hell. I have many characteristic idiosyncrasies, but certainty is not among them. The irony is that, the more time I spend in the company of Christ, the less certain I am. I heard a program on the radio today that trumpeted assurance as one of only a few qualities that defines Christians against the milieu of worldly doubt. I assume that the man who preached this is a studied apprentice of Scripture and has had more education than I care to imagine, but somehow, I disagree with him. If doubt were not so human, faith would not beguile us so. I do know followers of Christ by sight sometimes. It’s a light in the eyes, a lift of the tone of voice, a choice of words, a holy silence that often gives them away. These things are only the outworking of love. Still, I couldn’t tell you who is “getting in,” myself included. My friend Doug and I laughed together about our inability to go around looking up people’s Calvinist skirts. In the midst of all my religious insecurities though, in the empty shrine of certainty, there resides a brilliant seed of hope.

Of that, I only know that God, in Christ, desires me. My company. And he desires that I should desire him. And how I am desirous of him, and how I long to hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Come and share in your master’s happiness.” In this I hope. And how I fear the quick and tasteless dismissal, “Away from me, I never knew you.” Like all loving fathers, his wrath is far better than his absence.

But, I don’t remember ever getting saved. That’s a term that church-goers use to describe those who will be in the presence of Christ at either death or ascension, whichever comes first. All others, according to the Scriptures, will experience death a second time, which doesn’t sound so bad at first, except that the second time around, death is possessed of a little more longevity. Jesus, in order to describe it, quoted Isaiah, saying that:

“… ‘their worm does not die,
And the fire is not quenched.’”
-(Mark 9:48)

In the same breath, he called the second death by a name: Hell. The New Testament records it as Geenna or Gehenna (Γέεννα), which is a transliteration of what Jesus was actually referencing: the Valley of Ben Hinnom. It’s remembered as the place where Canaanites sacrificed their children by burning them alive to appease the god Molech.

That’s the sort of thing we need saving from. But I grew up in a church-soaked society where getting “saved” was about praying what folks commonly call “The Sinner’s Prayer.” It usually goes something like this:

Lord Jesus, I am a sinner. I am helpless to do anything right on my own. I need you. Please forgive me of my sins. Please come into my heart and life and be my Lord and Savior.

It honestly sounds a little bit silly when you say it like that. We in the church derive this odd practice from Paul’s epistle to the Romans. He says that “if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) Imagine that you had a friend you had known for a couple of years. This person has taken it upon himself or herself to befriend you and listen to you and stand by you and serve you in your needs. All of a sudden, you wake up one day and decide that it’s a good time for it, so you call your friend up and ask, “Will you be my friend, from this day forth?” I would honestly be a bit hurt by that phone call. Haven’t we been friends all this time? We could say that “The Sinner’s Prayer” is a bit like a marriage vow, for our relationship with God in Christ is compared to marriage often enough in the Scriptures. But even then we must admit that the marriage vow itself is not love, which is learned over a lifetime of practice both before and after the wedding ceremony. And not all marriage vows are “[believed] with [the] heart.” But the vow is important.

Now, I’m not writing this to denounce “The Sinner’s Prayer” (which will ultimately be either denounced, or affirmed, or both by the Scriptures) or to say that my understanding of Romans is above and beyond yours. The point is that I’ve been saved countless times. That doesn’t mean I’ve prayed a certain way or that I’m holier than the next man. I couldn’t tell you, though, the day that Jesus breathed his Holy Spirit upon me and I became a new creation in Christ. Did it happen on one of the two or three times I walked the aisle at church to become a Christian and be baptized – my “public profession(s) of faith”? Maybe, but I doubt it. It is more likely that I was pursued by God long before those days and that I did not begin to fall in love with him until much, much later. I was, and am, the hard-to-get bride.

I suppose that a few people were blessed by my baptisms and altar-call responses. If so, that is the redemption of Christ, not the holiness of those symbolic actions. After those days, I was a little hellion. I spent a great deal of time getting into relationships that ended in terribly broken hearts and inflicting wounds on other people as well as myself. I was egotistical. I didn’t think much of the church, and I was cynical and bitter. I was interested mostly in myself.

I can’t say that God has set me free like he’s set some people free from alcohol addictions or drug addictions. This story isn’t very dramatic. It’s not movie material. Thank God, because I don’t think I’m strong enough not to become unhealthily interested in its darker chapters. What I do know is that, today, whatever day you are reading or hearing this, there have been small graces and unnoticeable instances in which God has set me free from the slow, chilly bonds of iniquity that I bring upon myself. There have been small raindrops in this desert that I am. Tiny blossoms blink from the fringes of my landscape like the faces of faeries glimmering through the grey foggy curtain of this rusty, wishful, and staggering world. I don’t know if I’m going to heaven or hell. Most days, my desire for good theology coupled with my incredible self-possession sits like a February stratus cloud upon the understanding of my soul. In the end, though, I do know a few things.

He loves me. Jesus, the Father, the Holy Ghost, loves me. They love me. Three-in-one, the Godhead, the mystery of the Trinity, loves me. And it’s too much of a blessing for my intellect to bear. My mind can’t take it in, and my heart longs for it so. Second thing, when I was saved doesn’t matter. No one’s going to buy me a bland white sheet cake with my name in salvation bracelet colored icing for my “Salvation Day.” Salvation is hardly about us. The fact that God loves us more than we can guess or measure is only secondary in matters of salvation. The primary issue is that he is able and he is Love. And though my salvation is secure in Christ, who sees this grand prism of time as merely a picture painted, it is also a daily wrestling – a daily “work[ing] out… with fear and trembling.” (Philippians 2:12-13) As my friend Kenny said it, “I was saved; I am being saved; I will be saved.” I must meet the angel daily at the ford of Jabbok, strive against him, and receive the crippling and humbling blow that becomes a blessing. (Genesis 32:22-31)

Every prayer is a sinner’s prayer. God still uses me, addicted in my own right to the feeding and numbing of myself in many ways, in his unfathomably rich and loving plan. He has used me to write music that has brought people hope and, somehow, freedom. I have connected with strangers through music. I have prayed with people and there have been cracks mended in broken spirits in some small measure (and also cracks made in my own hubris). All of this is by the working of the Holy Ghost. It is the keeping of “treasure in earthen vessels, so that we know that this all-surpassing power is from God, and not from us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7) I am still egotistical. I still want to serve only myself. All appearances to the contrary are usually self-serving in that they increase people’s view of me as a righteous person. But somehow, the work of the Spirit is deeper.

There are geothermal vents on the ocean floor, radiating heat into the frigid darkness of the deepest ocean trenches. Life explodes around them, existing in the warm afterglow of the earth’s molten flesh. That is the work of God in my life. Against all the odds, warmth and light exist in the deepest blackness. Life flourishes. Blessing is given and received. And so, I must arise and pray for grace to escape the cocoon of self that forms around my soul like a second skin in the night. And there is boundless grace. I must say with Paul, “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God – through Christ Jesus our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25)

A Wireless Hippie

2009-08-14T20:21:00.000-07:00

We stood under the weighty red light of the WDVX "ON AIR" sign, me with my accordion, Ethan armed with a six-string, Katie wielding a fiddle that had curves in all the right places. Behold the garden of trussed-up gyspy tune-flowers. We finally got to press some of these new songs up through the dirt and see them turn green for the first time. I remember watching an old woman in the crowd who kept bobbing her head knowingly as every lyric washed into the microphone with the whispers of l'Eau de Vivre. I had a wild idea that washed up in my mind off a sea of wild ideas, so I asked Red, the DJ, if it would be okay if I simply gave away CDs to everyone there. After they let me, I have to tell you, it's an addiction that grabs your heart with its left hand. I'm so excited to play another show just so I can try and give away some more. That said, the resident hippie has sledged yet another wall of archaic anti-technologism.

As you may have guessed by the elephantine 'widget' on the sidebar, I have joined up with something called NoiseTrade. This is a company started by Derek Webb and Brannon McAllister, among others, for the purpose of creating a new format for sharing songs in this day and age of just-add-water instant life. Despite what you (or I) may think, people do prefer to tote iPods around and isolate themselves in a world of personal soundtrack, as opposed to sitting and listening with all intent to a record through actual speakers. We prefer constant noise as opposed to appreciating music because it is a different sort of reflection of the world's noise than the world itself makes. So, in the interest of letting you hear the art that has been made (hopefully a good bit of that art encourages us, ironically, to unplug), Derek &co. implemented a system in which the buyer pays the artist whatever price the buyer decides. Or, you can email five people about the whole thing and download for free. You can listen to it in your iPod, and then hopefully, you'll come out to hear the artists when they play shows - the connection is much stronger there, I assure you. So we have now eliminated the middle man. No one likes being in the middle anyway.

Thank you guys so much for listening in as we got to be part of a legendary show (locally, at least, the Blue Plate is indeed a legend). When you get to stand on the same stage that has seen David Wilcox, Bela Fleck, Del McCoury, and Mary Gauthier, just to name a few, you oughta get a little nervous. That's what I tell myself anyway. Now, go get on NoiseTrade. There's good music to be heard.

Listen In

2009-08-06T23:25:00.000-07:00

I've been added as a last-minute audition to the roster of folks playing at the Blue Plate Special next week. If you don't know about this program, it's a live radio music show on WDVX in downtown Knoxville, daughter of the old Midday Merry-Go-Round and spunky thrice removed cousin to the Grand Ole Opry. Last time I played I expected a small crowd because of the rain, but a decent and involved crowd showed up anyways. It's always a great way to spend lunch. Come out and join in. Or, if you can't make it - as it is lunchtime on a business day - you can crank up your radio to 102.9 or 89.9 FM in Knoxville or hear it streamed live at WDVX.com.

Adam Whipple and Zachary Scott Johnson
WDVX Studios (@ Knoxville Tourism & Sports on Gay St.)
August 11th, 2009
12pm
Absolutely FREE!

Breaking Yellow Bricks

2009-08-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

Days upon days of rain have come upon us, blessing some and cursing others. There's a house in my neighborhood with the roof bashed in from the weight of a falling oak. Half a century of tree branches were one day beautiful and the next were a profanity upon the lips of the house's now weary former occupants. But vegetables are bubbling up from their vines and bushes like gems in an earthen diadem. And as the summer ends and children go through the chrysalid whirly-jig of becoming students, I start to get that itch to try and get shows at colleges. Smoking pipe dreams, I look at the movies in my mind of how well the students will listen and connect with the music. I get all woozy when I think of driving home to tell Kat, "I sold [insert outlandish number] CD's!" It all seems so feasible and magical until I open that email account or find that phone number, the one at which I will leave a message like a fishhook in a murky sea.

I don't like to advertise myself.

Advertising myself gathers like too much espresso in my blood and I get ahead of the one I am to walk beside. Daydreaming and money get in my head and bully into leaving that powerful but lovingly yielding peace in the sufficiency of the Lamb. I forget to listen to the task given me. I forget to create because I am created. I forget that "the worker is worth his wages," but the wages are not near worth a worker. The stories disappear, and the truth becomes a clanging cymbal.

So I am always somewhat loathe to talk to people when I play at a church. I have learned to be have grace to say "Thank you," and move on, glad that the thankful ones were blessed. But, right now, indeed for the last several months, Katrina and I have been between churches. It is certainly a journey, complete with its blessings and cursings found in both the hardship and the ease. But when you play at a church, and then are asked - as undoubtedly you will be - where you attend church, the answer I must truthfully give to this question elicits an enthusiastic suggestion that I should join whatever church it is I am helping out that week.

Please, please understand, I love to help out churches with music. The opportunities are grand, and I am learning to have the grace to be served with Thank You's and That Was Wonderful's. If these things were not given to me so graciously, I would probably topple into the ever-present trapdoor of prideful self-loathing. But I cannot follow the Thank You's like a yellow brick road to assurance of where God would have my family and I attend church. I don't know where we are supposed to be right now, but there have been blessings amongst the uncertainty. If anything, the recent wandering has given us a beautiful view of who she, the Church, is. Our horizons are certainly not broad, but they are not as constricted as they would be if we had been seated in the same pews every week. No, this is not a good reason to leave your current fellowship to experience the world like a younger brother with half an inheritance. But it is collateral blessing, and I am grateful. And I feel like we are nearer to obedience than when we began. Autumn is indeed coming. The moon feels fuller, pregnant with waiting for the harvesttime. The squash plants have succumbed to the soil, and they will hopefully be hoed back in and replaced with broccoli or cabbages - or, if I get adventurous, parsnips and pumpkins.

And the beautiful knelling of October has always been the time both for coming home and for walking until your feet take you to places you knew not where.

Beside the Kawiwi River

2009-07-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

I awoke at about 5:20am local time and looked around the room at the young men breathing quietly in their bunks. Despite the fan and well-running air conditioner, the atmosphere in the room was sticky with the smell of Pacific salt. I slipped on my running shoes and walked out the door. The sun was still behind the crest of Nani Ka'ala, and the mist that ever enshrouded the mountain glowed like a pillar of fire and cloud. It was still a bit cooler outside than I had imagined it would be.

I started down rumpled sidewalk of Ala Hema Street and out onto Farrington Highway, running northwest past the homeless shelter with its barracks-like construction and razor wire topping its chain link fence. A man and a woman sat on the curb inside the compound and smoked cigarettes. The man waved at me offhandedly and I managed a short breathless vowel of hello as I jogged. Beyond that, the shoulder opened onto a wide green field - sprinkler fed on the leeward side of the island - that bordered the intermediate school in the distance. I decided to make the end of the field my turnaround, and I laughed a little sadly at the gang tags that labeled the reflector on each telephone pole with the name "Saint." Aloha kakahiaka. Aloha Iesu ia'oe, even in the face of darkness.

If you listen to the dry savannah grasses in the Diamond Head caldera, you can here it in their whisper. God still lives here, amongst the hopeless. The fields are ripe, and the workers are few. In the beautiful faces of children who were so happy just to play with pipe cleaners and stickers and hear Bible stories, in the awkward but grateful smiles of their older cousins and aunts and uncles, their neighbors, their 'ohana, who were glad to stand around and talk with us, you could sense the hunger and the humility, the readiness.

I spent the week working on the third floor of Pu'u Kahea, a hundred-year-old sugar plantation house in Waianae, Oahu. The foolhardiness of those in charge to give me the task of redemptive carpentry was astounding, but I couldn't have been happier than to put my hands on the old cedar walls and to breath the astringent smell of that wood as we cut it and reformed the room. It smelled a little like lime Gatorade. We fought with the angular ceiling and the endless termite damage as others in the group took on various projects around the grounds of the camp. But the greatest reward was probably seeing the smile of a couple little girls as they collected our addresses on the last night and excitedly told people that they had learned how to talk to God.

Scotland: Lunar Epilogue

2009-07-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

My second excursion into Fife was on Sarah’s bicycle, and was also late into the evening. By my reckoning, I had run further than I had ever run at one stint. Therefore, I should be able to cycle much further than I could run. I took the same route, enjoying the ease of my travel across the bridge and glad not to pass anyone on the narrow pedestrian causeway. Water stretched out in a black expanse to my right, whispering tales of Perth and its history, and to my left, where the North Sea looked back at me with its thousand-mile stare. The tiny lights on the shores of Fife stood like cheery guards above every door.

I bore left onto the paved bike trail that paralleled Newport Road, hoping that the tiny LED light affixed to the handlebars would be brilliant enough for me to make my way without vaulting over a curb. I passed the small tourist rest stop and the last of the streetlights and continued on until I was forced to slow down to be able to make out the edges of the trail as it followed the road. The grade seemed to slope gently downhill toward the water, which lapped peacefully several hundred yards to my left. After navigating some gates and detours, strategically placed to guide cyclists through construction, I began to consider the fact that I was not tired. I would eventually have to turn back, because I would ride all the way past Tayport and out onto the immense sandy promontory that lay at the edge of the forest on the shores of the sea. Either that, or I would ride all the way to St. Andrews. Neither prospect bore the hallmarks of responsibility, but I couldn’t help but think about the beauty of sitting alone on the forgotten beach until dawn and watching the seals come up onto the land and peer at me warily. As I stopped to consider whether or not to turn around, I chanced to look back toward Dundee. Above the Law and slightly to the left, hanging like a crescent emblem of war and peace above Lochee, the moon was draped in a deep ruby blush. I stood there on the lonely road, and she slowly sank behind the northern horizon, drawing to her the ocean and the years and the minds of all men quiet enough to look. Her uttermost tip went down just above Bruce’s house, and I wished that he was there to see it. I decided that I would turn back, but not before I had gone as far as this tiny road would take me.

The bike path left the side of Newport Road and plowed on down the coastline, beneath trees that further shaded the already dark track and made every sound stand out in my ears. I passed homes that glimmered through the trees and a lighthouse that stood oddly dark on the beach. The trail lead up back into the streetlights of Commonty Road and seemed to terminate near a small graveled parking lot, next to a grassy landing where a park bench sat empty. A sign said, “Danger: Steep Cliffs.” I got off the bike and walked to the rail surrounding the tiny park. Gorse bushes grew persistently on the cliff face and shielded the shore below from view. So many of the kids we had dealt with that week came out of apathetic or malevolent situations. Many boys of ten and eleven already had a keen sense of streetwise bravado that made them feel safe as they balanced on the edges of aloneness and fear. The girls were greeted by pop culture that told them that their identity was merely sexual. The wisdom of the day spoke in languages of haute couture and catchy guitar riffs. Entertainment is a jealous queen. Across the estuary, an oil rig was being built, its scaffolding highlighted from beneath by a halogen glow. The one thing we all seem to agree on, the preservation of our planet, is a litany of concern over that which will burn in the end. What of that which remains? I wondered about Knoxville.

Through a Tiny Window

2009-07-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

There's still so much wonder about sending film off to get it developed. You give a tiny roll of possibility to someone you don't know, hoping that things turn out alright. Then comes the delicious and terrible waiting, your anticipation building until you can't stand still. Then you finally get that little package back and rip it open like your golden ticket is inside, finding your memories like paper gems.

After much anticipation, at least on my part, photos have started to trickle in from the trip to Scotland. I finally wised up and went to Thompson Photo down in Mechanicsville. No more Walmart, Walgreens, Kroger, cheap crap, kid with a job pushing a button and no training. Here is a tiny sampling of what is to come. Go to my Flickr page for the full gallery.

Scotland: Like A Final Breath

2009-07-03T21:03:00.000-07:00

For now, as I have to get back to writing some other things, this will be the final installment on the latest Dundee trip. There is more, but you'll probably have to put a cup of coffee in front of me and hear it firsthand. Thanks for reading.

The sun rises at about 5 a.m. in the summers near the sixtieth parallel. I had brought my neon Nikes in my suitcase, and in a fit of folly I decided that the dead of night was a good time to go for a jog. I slipped them on and put my fingerless gloves over my hands, dressing in some respect like an aerobic panhandler, all neuroses and passions. I tucked Sarah’s spare set of keys into my glove and slipped out the door into the stairwell, which was dimly lit with a toady orange light. The sounds of my footsteps echoed off of the concrete walls with a muffled resonance, as if the world still had its head on the pillow. I slipped out the wooden door of the breezeway and began to run toward the silvery Tay. Paton’s Lane led me down upon Magdalen Green where rabbits lolled about chewing the shallow grass in the dark. My shoes crunched on the gravelly sidewalk and every one of the creatures froze and raised its ears, seeking for sounds. I passed the green and went on beneath the amber streetlights beside the steel girders of the Tay Railway Bridge. The current bridge sits beside the closely shorn pylons of the former one, which collapsed during a storm in 1879, killing 75 people aboard a crossing train, including the son of the bridge’s recently knighted architect. While this, even with over a century of separation, is unfathomable as a tragedy, it must be noted that the crash was immortalized in song by William McGonagall, who is often cited as the “worst poet in the English language.”

I ran on along the sea wall beside the estuary and past the grocery store and museum with the black water whispering in tiny waves at intervals as the tide pulled toward the moon. Once in a while, I would pass an orange life ring and a rescue hook hanging on the railing in case of someone drowning – either accidentally or otherwise. How many suicides are there in a city full of alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and teen pregnancy? I was glad to be out that morning, but how many people were staggering through Dundee’s endless capillaries and alleys, finding their way into flats or hotel rooms or unmarked doors? I was determined to make it to the far end of the other bridge about three miles from Sarah’s apartment. I made the staircase below the bridge that led up to the long walkway across the Tay. A man sat alone in the guardhouse that looked down on the roadbed. Anemic UV lights colored his lonely room with a green tint, and he sat and watched the tiny television on the counter looking like Charon at his dreary coast. I was struck by a sudden desire to go and talk to him, perhaps to prove to myself that there was indeed life. Maybe I wanted to prove it to him. I turned my face toward the converging lines of pale streetlights that stretched out ahead of me and started to run across the wide river, following the long straight line of sidewalk and passing only one tired stranger as I jogged.

I did at last make it to Fife, all 3.3 miles, but that’s not the point of this little story – and I’m aware that the distance is not that impressive. The point is that I turned around to walk back across the bridge, and the light that had burned all night with a sapphire suggestion under the horizon of bleak Hilltown grew into a blazing dawn. A third of the way back towards the Dundee side, I had to stop. I couldn’t stare straight into the sunrise, but having run further than I’d ever run at one stretch, and that in the middle of the night, I wasn’t going to turn away until I’d seen our local star come round into view above the distant sea. The stranger I’d passed while running finally caught up with me and went on his way with the barest of nods, his ears submerged beneath headphones. I turned once to acknowledge him as he passed and then looked quickly back toward the east, and from behind the stone battlements of Broughty Castle, the light exploded outward like a solitaire.

Scotland: Queen Street Station

2009-06-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

The conductor for the shuttle bus pointed all in the direction of a tiny inlet of asphalt. He rattled off instructions in a high Glasgow tongue and several of us disembarked, stepping uncertainly in the way that he indicated. The small cul-de-sac was actually a car park for cabs, several of which idled there on Woodside Way like oversized bees waiting for passengers. Above them stood a white portico with the words “Queen Street” emblazoned on the side of the grimy overhang. My luggage rattled behind me on the bricked sidewalk as I walked through the automatic sliding doors, which would have closed had their efforts not been punctuated by a steady stream of people rolling out onto the street.

Hiding its bulk behind shops and tiny stone inlets, a cathedral of transportation arched its back above the seven sets of tracks. The sun shone through the frosted glass skin of the station. People sat quietly in bunches or drank coffee or paced or plowed forward with bits of luggage in hand. The spindly ticking of bicycle wheels and the snuffling of dogs mingled with a river of human voices. My nagging loneliness from the long journey was lost in sheer amazement at this grand business of moving people. Men and women of Indian descent stood about pressing the crowds to buy cell phones. A group of German accents congregated jovially and walked through the gate to board a train. The marquee on the wall flashed its heraldic scheduling as the trains all left on time – that is to say, within fifteen seconds of the clock changing to their scheduled minute of departure. It was an impressive showing of punctuality.

I found an automated ticket machine in the breezeway outside the grandeur of the terminal. After retrieving my ticket, I decided that it was high time to get the sound of native speech in my ears again. I walked back and forth down Georges Square looking for a local dive before deciding on the pub right outside the train station. Two women who might have been mother and daughter squeezed out the thin red door under the sign advertising “The Junction Bar.” A tall, well-built young fellow with long dark hair who could have passed for an American manned the bar. A couple of old men stood at a high table working their way through several pints and laughing over business. The quickest reminder of the many tasks and problems at hand was lopsidedly planted two tables down from me. A man whose age had been furthered by drink sat and preached a stream of incoherent cursing at the invisible person in front of him, who, judging by the man’s conversation, was waffling between occasional acquiescence and outright denial. The vibe in the pub seemed to indicate that the drunken man was something of an embarrassment. He was by far the loudest representative of the clientele. I pulled my luggage up beside me at the table and glanced over the menu trying to remember the song and dance of ordering food in a foreign country. After no one came over for a while and I remembered that it is customary, in a pub, to order one’s food in person at the bar, I walked up and asked for the haggis and a pint of whatever local stout was on tap. It is always a puzzling sensation to thank God for beer. My conscience which tells me that I should pray thus also suffers from the erratic spasms and hissing fissures of legalism. But I was glad to have arrived and to eat, and sitting back with a plate of local fare and listening to conversations, I let the sense of the place – what the French call terroir – wash over me.

Taking pictures inside a public train station in a country that is beset by terrorism is not the healthiest of endeavors, but not to be deterred, I forewent dessert at the pub in lieu of finding the right shot. A man in a uniform came up to me and politely informed me that I should not take photos of the station. Understanding his concerns as a representative of the government, I left my post outside the front doors and went to take more covert photos inside the station proper where so many good shots were hidden amongst all that Euclidian architecture and steel framework. Trying to get a finger on the pulse of the country, I picked up a free independent weekly and flipped through the articles, landing on one about a British musician that had moved to Montana to find writing time away from the frenzy of recording and shows. Still, peace eluded me. Often, the Peace of Christ is something I try to find by seeking out instead of resting in. This anxiety causes me to avoid my iPod or anything else that could be entertaining in order to keep from being what Neil Postman called “amused to death.” But, finally, when I got on the train myself and discovered that, unlike in the airliners, I would be alone at my table, I acknowledged the fact that God made me a musician – and that music, to me, is much like a lubricant to the wheels of prayer. I turned up Rich Mullins in my ears and Glasgow rolled away as we entered darkness beneath her streets. The distance and movement was measured only by my body telling me that we were rocketing onward. My face stared back at me from the darkened window until, without warning, we emerged far from the crowds in golden fields of oilseed rape beneath a cobalt sky.

Scotland: The Hat Exchange

2009-06-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

Not to be contradictory (although I am), but in lieu of doing an entire story like last time, I've decided to leave this as a series of smaller vignettes. If this disappoints you, know that it disappoints me as well. But, I've got some other writing to work on, and I can't have this hanging off my neck like a vampire bat. I've also got some other exciting developments coming up that I've got to get ready for, so I do hope you'll pardon my use of a smaller blog-friendly format. In our microwavable McWorld, I'm sure you won't mind. I'll try not to mind too much.

Ward Road, between the hours of midnight and 4 o’clock, is a thoroughfare of debauchery. Modesty whispers unnoticed from every young lady’s closet, and what little clothing makes it onto the street is outmatched by bare skin in sheer volume. London, a smaller club which is infamous for its admission of minors, spills out into the road to the immediate northeast of Central Baptist Church, its crowds barking at the edge of riot. To the east is a short walk to Fat Sam’s, Social, Liquid, Déjà vu, and a host of other establishments.

Our group, of which I was the youngest by far, walked back onto the street at about 2:30 a.m., gathering around the hatchback of Andy’s car, where we set up shop giving out free tea, coffee, and hot chocolate to anyone who would accept it. We also gave out flip-flops to any girls who had tired of navigating the broken sidewalks in torturous three-inch heels. It truly is an amazing feeling to give things away to people who don’t deserve it. This is harsh to modern ears, but to approach the truth, we must understand that none of us deserve anything good. Certainly, when we are drunkenly staggering about the street and vomiting the curses of repressed disappointment onto any and all bystanders, we do not deserve a free hot drink, free shoes, and a patient and open ear. Gary, Andy, and I walked up and down in the throng, attempting, with perhaps a surprising degree of success, to convey that there was something helpful to be had at no cost. I walked on toward the blue neon lights of London and asked around.

“Do you guys want a free coffee or cup of tea?”
“Wha’?”
“Coffee,” I persisted. “We’ve got free coffee and tea just down at that silver car.”

This exchange sometimes ended in the dulcet tones that nothing is free and that we must be peddling something, though, looking back, I hope it was never us doing the peddling. A young fellow ran by and snatched my hat off my head as I was talking to some people. He never turned, but placed it on his own head, ran down the street a bit, mooned me, and continued on toward parts unknown. The two girls I was talking to, presumably out with the young opportunist, apologized profusely. I thought of Jesus saying, “If someone takes what is yours, do not demand it back.” In my head, I heard it voiced by Gerald Lay, who played Jesus in a passion play at my parents’ church years ago. I wandered toward the car, hoping that the guy would decide that the joke was over and bring it back. After a while, he and his friends did come back in our direction.

“Is that your hat?” said Andy, seeing him.
"Yep,” I said, feeling that old pride creep up that I had not said anything to that point. It was all a bit funny.
“Did you give it to him?” Andy asked, wide-eyed.
“No.”

Then the Irishman in Andy took over, and he strode mission-mindedly after the drunken young man, returning a few minutes later with a somewhat crumpled version of my wide-brim hat. I would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall for their brief conversation.

The sky began to suggest dawn as 3:45 rolled past, and the crowds began to dissipate. There had been no riots between the marines and the police, and we thanked God that the night had been rather peaceful, considering. The ladies with us, a quiet, cheerful, and diligent bunch, began to pack up the milk and sugar and cups with an industry that flew in the face of the late hour. We carried everything back across the street and into the office to do the washing up and to pray. The streets, as we left the office, were astonishingly, quiet. A few rogue seagulls tossed on the early morning wind above countless bits of paper and old fish and chip boxes that littered the pavement. Not a soul moved in the street beyond ourselves as we bid each other goodbye and I got into Andy’s car.

“You know people who talk about second-mile Christians,” he quipped as we drove to Paton’s Lane, “I think you’re maybe a third or fourth-mile Christian.” This was in reference to my doggedness in staying up late and getting up early – though “early” is debatable – in the past week. Though my tirelessness was more akin to stupidity and stubbornness than to any sort of righteous industry, I mentally added our small conversation to a short list of comments that I won’t soon forget.

Scotland: Decompression

2009-06-06T14:32:00.000-07:00

It's Saturday now. I got back in the States Wednesday night, and I still haven't had the time to decompress. Like a shelf with one bookend, I have several volumes of experience from the past two weeks, held up on one side by multiple gatherings with the rest of the team. We prayed, talked, sang, took communion, and rehearsed some light sketches. I felt, for the first time, decently prepared. Now, I am staring at the latter end, and hoping that the books don't topple into a useless heap. I need that pause for reflection, and I need to write it all down - to write the Hell out of it, and dwell graciously on the Heaven that is left after editing. That's probably not accurate theology per se, but I think it's a pretty good writing assignment.

Hopefully Sunday and this evening will provide the time that I need to work through this. I have been and shall be doing something I've not often done before: praying over my writing. A friend at work told me that, if I'm going to write something about this trip (as I have before; see A Diary of Dundee), she'd like to read it. I have to laugh at myself that the Holy Ghost should need to nudge me to do what I'd like to do anyway. So, when I have it all compiled (I hope it won't take more than a week), I'll post it here as a finale to the "Scotland" series. I hope you don't mind some repeated events; I don't want to break up the continuity of the narrative.

Oh, and pictures are coming.

Scotland: Drama in Lochee

2009-05-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

Somewhere, deep in the Dundonian labyrinth that is the neighborhood of Lochee, half our team spent our afternoon and evening with thirty local kids - playing games, singing songs, doing crowd control, talking about Christ, doing more crowd control, etc. It's one of those mixed blessings to throw out your voice on the afternoon of the first big day trying to sing over thirty rambunctious youngsters without a microphone, and then to have God give you the ability to continue singing on into the even times. We shall suffice the medical assessment to say my throat hurts. But, to grander things we go.

The highlight of the evening, for me, was finally getting the kids quiet enough to make rain. I think this is something Rich Mullins used to do at his concerts (sort of in the "Hallelu, Hallelu" format), but my friend Nathan showed it to me and I've enjoyed the time ever since. If you're ever due to be in front of a crowd with time on your hands, ask me about making rain. The most interesting part was that, after our meeting, some kids pointed out to me that - almost whimsically, I think - it was actually raining. Thank God, the jokes on me.

We did a couple of our dramatic sketches, and I'm still a bit in the dark on how I feel about that. Drama itself is a tool, so we know that it is indeed fallible. I'm not really certain of the Scriptural parameters surrounding drama in corporate worship. I keep leaning towards a biblical study on worship, but I know that twenty people will instantly recommend fifty books to me on the subject. It is a short list indeed of people whose literary recommendations I follow. Ditto with films. Those books might have to go on the stack of must-reads - somewhere beneath a good novel. Wind in the Willows and Gilead, I think.

Scotland: Riding The Train

2009-05-22T14:18:00.000-07:00

"Nobody tells you, when you get born here
How much you'll come to love it and how you'll never belong here."

How much can one drink in with one's eyes? How long can you keep open those two windows we are all born with?

Lindsay and Iain were apologetic that I had to take a train from Glasgow, that no one was there to pick me up at the airport. But their apologies fell on the ears of a man greatly blessed. How can you describe a countryside where you feel that you cannot widen your soul enough to take in all its beauty, where you feel as if every stone, every blade of grass, every patch of dirt, every drop of water, is pregnant with significance beyond the stuttering conveyance of any human tongue? I turned on Andrew Peterson in my iPod and glued my face to the window on the southern side of the train.

The wind raced us over the lowlands past astonishingly yellow fields of rapeseed in bloom, past a young roe buck wandering the tracts of a farmer's field, past rabbits that lolloped in meadows wiggling their ears and noses in their secret language. And in the distance between Perth and Dundee, rainbow after brilliant rainbow fell from wandering storms that scattered the impossibly cerulean sky, ringing of the colors of that final ephod, affixed with the stones of the tribes. I had to work to keep from weeping in front of the other passengers.

What contrast, that hearts so bleak can reside in lands that so profoundly call one to wander the lonely road to Love - lands on both sides of the Atlantic. It was my prayer that I would be given eyes to see the beauty in souls (including potential beauty) as I so quickly see it in lands that will one day be swept away. O, God's great love of beauty! If that which is visible and will be destroyed is so great among creation, how much more that which is invisible, how much greater that which is indelible. May we have eyes in our spirits to see that "which will never pass away," and in the midst of a land where "not one stone will be left upon another," to be diligent in laying up treasures "where moth and rust do not destroy."

The Enemy's Schemes

2009-05-11T19:44:00.000-07:00

“There is nothing new under the sun.” ¹

If I chance to leave the confines of my house, or look at the flyers persistently adorning my front door, or happen to peruse Craigslist in pursuit of musical jobs (hint, hint), I am greeted with ubiquitous announcements that there are new churches starting. They convene in warehouses, abandoned storefronts, coffee shops, buildings borrowed from other churches, and virtually any space that can accommodate a stage-and-audience arrangement and be cheaply appropriated. This is wonderful in terms of the Gospel being sown over wider and wider fields. Yet, what Gospel do we sow when our claim is upon something new? To be frank, the Gospel itself is older than time. It is the music and the models and the slapstick efforts at what is often termed “relevancy” that are fancied as new.

There is much danger to be encountered in attending church because of an interesting type of music or a clever way of ordering the service. There is probably even danger – greater danger, if we are honest – in attending church because of an engaging sermon. Is there anything wrong with any of these? Certainly not. They are tools and vehicles. They are supernatural two-way roads that lead us in one direction or the other. The danger is when we, as we are so apt to do, lose the perspective on our wandering hearts. We forget to ask for wisdom and discernment. We forget to ask the Father to “Show [us] if there is any offensive way in [us], and lead [us] in the way everlasting.” ² Music and sermons and surprises are powerful emotional vehicles that are more tangible, in our fallen state, than is our God. When we do not meditate on the character of God as these things hold sway over us, we are hastily prone to give the praise stored up in our hearts to that which is seen or heard or sensually experienced, as opposed to him whose “worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.” ³ That is how music becomes “a clanging cymbal.” ⁴ That is how sermons become “rules taught by men.” ⁵ We cannot blame the musician or the preacher for what our hearts do with what our ears hear. These men and women are fallen as well, but “the soul who sins is the soul who will die.” ⁶ “Above all, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” ⁷

As a sometime worship leader, I am probably more prone than most to give credence to songs instead of to the Creator of music. I must be distrustful of my heart – that lump of flesh within me that beats life into my limbs, that seat of cataclysmic emotion that is “deceitful above all things.” ⁸ That sounds rather harsh, especially when all the world would tell you to follow your heart. Indeed, “the desires of your heart” are laid there by God himself when you are surrendered to his will. ⁹ But, here again, we must be clay in his loving hands, thrown again and again upon the hard stone of the potter’s wheel, thinned with water and warmed with chastening friction until we are supple and ready for beauty. Therein, beyond the crumbly iron fringes of our human wills, is a beauty that sits rightfully at the feet of the One who is himself Beauty.

¹ Ecclesiastes 1:9
² Psalm 139:24
³ John 4:24
⁴ I Corinthians 13:1
⁵ Isaiah 29:13
⁶ Ezekiel 18:20
⁷ Proverbs 4:23
⁸ Jeremiah 17:9
⁹ Psalm 37:4

Andy Vandergriff, Action Bowler

2009-05-04T21:47:00.000-07:00

From the Writer's Almanac

2009-05-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

I try to make a habit of listening to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac whenever I'm near a radio at ten till twelve on weekdays. Today's serving of poetry was so iconic and pointed, that I had to put it here for you. It's a poem by Anne Porter, widow of the late American painter, Fairfield Porter.

Music
by Anne Porter

When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother's piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold

And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying

Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country

I've never understood
Why this is so

Bur there's an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow

For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest

And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country

We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams

And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows

Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.

The S. S. Nameless

2009-04-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

It has been nigh upon a week since I have plugged my retinas in to the world wide web. This past week has been a hodgepodge of going to work and catching up with all the work on the home front. The circadian tasks of mowing, hoeing, planting, and watering have given the gift of a slow two-step to my hesitant bones. It's spring, says creation to my senses. Put your fingers in the dirt.

I've felt rather thinly spread as of late. My chores are piling up like little dragons that want slaying. So, in the interest of slowing down, putting my nose to fewer grindstones, writing, and gardening, here is a vignette I jotted down recently.

I am inescapably American. It crops up in my nagging addiction to conveniences. Like microwaves and the internet, my default timeframe shouts, "Now!" like Veruca Salt at a toy shop. So, after expending a great deal of time and energy riding my bicycle and the bus to work (not to mention mooching countless rides from friends, neighbors, and my dear longsuffering wife), you can imagine my elation at buying a new car. A couple of old friends had a nameless land yacht sitting around, waiting for the world to turn. So we, in the interest of expediency, put down some money towards it. But the convenience began to go to my head.

I was able to fit more into my days. Long jaunts to rehearsals across town no longer conjured up visions of me pedaling for hours, dodging angry motorists with an accordion strapped to my back. So, I gladly accepted invitation after invitation, and forgot the hidden graces and quiet blessings of a necessary longevity - of a requisite patience. O, to ride the bus and spare oneself the ability to arrive faster by racing harder. O, to sit on those rumbly seats in the din-full corridors of public transportation and meet people who hail from the distant planets next door. I met clowns and paupers and clergymen and politicians. I was given a finger on the pulse of the city, a cross-section of the virtue, vice, and vitriol that ran through the hearts of all my neighbors. Would that I could also refuse engagements out of mere necessity. "No, I'm sorry," I would say, "I have no way to get there." And then I would tend to flowers and vegetables, or bake bread or write poetry or music.

But now we have a second car - a nameless Oldsmobile chugging gasoline across every mile. I shall be a great deal more thankful when there is a carseat in the back and convenience plays host to the need of taking the kids to their grandparents' house. But there are good sides to it already. Its wide seats have seen hitchhikers. Its power windows have been lowered to feel the wind as the city's cadence blew in to my ears. And the drive back home from work is worlds away from a two-hour commute after eight hours of slinging coffee. In all honesty, I will have to learn to manage my time more prudently (including my Sabbaths). I'm going to need to practice my "No." This new car (new to us) wants christening. I'm thinking of calling it Nimitz.

Even All Things

2009-04-13T20:15:00.000-07:00

Easter morning, I awoke to the lilting sound of mockingbirds enshrining the backyard in song. The sun, soft and golden in the cold clean air of the dawn, whispered his temporal light through the bedroom curtains.

"Arise, and know that he is risen."

I've never been one to enjoy a holiday. To me, the celebration and circumstance has usually outshone (or overshadowed) the essence of the occasion. But this morning, I awoke to the earth quietly rejoicing in his name. I kissed my sleeping wife and left before eight, almost giddy at the prospect of lending organ and accordion to the music at Greg Adkins' church. Ever since the church acquired a Hammond B-3 with a Leslie cabinet, I've been almost jittery in anticipation of playing there. For one thing, I worship better with an instrument beneath my fingers. For another, I think that both my accordion (Mabel is her name) and the Hammond are resurrection stories in themselves. The organ is actually on loan from Danny Rosenbaum, a fellow whose name crops up now and then in conjunction with other old New City Cafe names. But the organ itself predates Danny. It predates my parents. Its story is one that I do not know, but it indeed has a story to tell. This year, that story entered the chapter of resurrection.

Mabel also predates my parents. Who knows her history? She hails from Italy, and certainly languished in at least one garage or attic in her time (probably several, truth be told), wondering when she would again find her voice. She found her way to my mother-in-law's music classroom at the hands of a man who simply didn't want the thing taking up space anymore. I fixed a couple of keys, and she has new straps. And again, through the radio and over the internet, she has traversed great distances and played in the hearts of people. A new chapter, resurrection.

May we, the languishing, the dead, the overspent, find new birth at his hands. May he grant that we should be the tools of his workmanship. May the songs we bear extend from his heart.

The Longest Saturday

2009-04-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

9 a.m. rolled out of the western sky on Good Friday and reminded us all what it was like on that ancient day. The sky darkened and furled its brow, lightning cackled back and forth and a gale caught up the torrents of rain and tossed them sideways. The earth itself remembered the death of its maker as twisters sauntered around the southeast. And then, there came Saturday.

The long day, when those few huddled behind locked doors and their world – our world – stood at a dead and apathetic calm. Too fearful and too shocked to venture forth, I can only guess at their stunted conversations and waxen stares. The weather seemed to oblige us again today, with clouds gazing ambivalently from a directionless sky. The sun has occasionally snuck a peek from his high castle keep before hiding again. The world both hangs in wait and buzzes onward with its forgetful motion. How it must have seemed then. Rome went about its business. The Pharisees remembered their Sabbath, mostly in the pompous manner they had kept with for so long. Ships came and went at Tarshish. Pagan merchants caravanned across the Negev. But a few dour faces in Jerusalem waited in the dark doldrums of their grief.

Across town now, the mall drones with activity. The interstate is a whirlwind of trucks and travelers dodging the glaring orange barrels. People buy and sell, eat and drink. But some deep part of all creation still waits for tomorrow.

Simon is Surprised

2009-03-01T10:52:00.001-08:00

One of the most unnerving things about miracles is that no excuse is made for them. I'm not talking about the straw-grasping scientific conjecture which attempts to explain the inexplicable. I mean the paranormal. We as a people are a bit obsessed with the paranormal. Maybe its our overarching fear of death, that immaterial border beyond which empirical though cannot reach. Perhaps we simply have a fascination with the fantastical. I suspect that both of these are true, and yet miracles do not subscribe to either characteristic. In the most immediate terms, they just are what they are.

Besides the important context in which Jesus performed miracles (although "performed" is not a great translation; the Greek "ginomai," translated "performed" in Matthew 11:20, has more in common with bringing something into being than with performance in the modern Western sense of the word), there is a conspicuous absence of taboo or spooky language. There are no creaking floors or clanking chains. Jacob Marley and the spectral King Hamlet are nowhere to be found.

A virgin is pregnant. It is no wonder that Mary asks "How can this be?" as if she were asking how a stopwatch worked. Her frame of reference for God is firmly rooted in reality, not the deception of light shows and wand-waving, much as I enjoy Harry Potter and find a pressing sense of Gospel truth woven amongst its narratives. Mary's character, as spoken by Gabriel in Luke 1:28 and revealed by her submissiveness to God ten verses later, stands in stark contrast to that of the superstitious Simon the Sorcerer. Simon, according to Acts 8, had made a long enough career out of amazing people with magic for word about to spread throughout Samaria. He seemed to think that the movement of the Holy Ghost was more akin to a magic trick than to the genuine and immediate action of the Divine.

Surrounding miracles, the language of the Scriptures is rather journalistic in its sparseness. What was water is now wine. A blind man sees. A leper is made whole. A dead man is quickened. There are no wands or flourishes. There is no spooky music.

This Too

2009-02-15T20:00:00.000-08:00

"Behold, I am making all things new."
Revelation 21:5

Since about the year 2000, when I began to be a part of the New City Community in Knoxville with some regularity, I have been increasingly immersed in dialogue about and surrounded by the action of redeeming culture. In my own cynicism toward the church, an attitude which I have regretfully done more to disseminate than I have to debunk, I neglected and sometimes rejected the idea that the Western church and her often silly sub-culture could even be redeemed. To me, she was a grown woman, holding the scruffy remnants of old gaudy dresses over her figure in the looking glass, fantasizing about the glory days. I still speak sometimes as if I'm not a servant on this storm-tossed ship, as if I'm not terrorized enough by billows and gales to wake Jesus in the bow and scream, "Do something!"

In our seeking for a church, in our strained and distracted attempts to listen for the quiet breath of the Holy Ghost, Kat and I have walked through expressions of corporate worship like wings in an art museum. We have sung, studied, taken communion, prayed, supped, rejoiced, and lamented with people from a couple handfuls of backgrounds. In all of them, I have seen the working of Christ. I have seen the rivers of grace flow through hearts, clearing the jetsam of flood and storm until the banks are clean. It has been humbling to watch the limits that I imagined for God's grace fall.

This past two weeks, we have attended a church that, for all practical purposes, puts on a rock concert every Sunday. Now, I don't use this terminology lightly, having been to enough rock concerts to know the difference. But when, to go with your music, you break out the fog machine, the gobos, the down-looking-up camera angles, and did I mention the fog machine, you have a rock concert. My inborn distrust of all things done in Dog-and-Pony-show style has put the rock show as corporate worship experience fairly low on my list. Now, I've taken part in good preparation and worship with a back beat. I've even taken part in the rock show as worship, especially at student retreats. And musically, I worship more easily with an instrument in my hands. So this probably sounds quite hypocritical. In truth, that's accurate. But it's not accurate for the reasons you might think. More than condemning something with my words and blessing it with my actions (which is a way of further crippling the culture), I have doubted the power of God to redeem, to "seek and to save that which was lost."

Standing in the auditorium today, I couldn't help but hear him say, "This too, shall be made well." And now I can't help but remember Paul telling Titus that "to the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and their consciences are corrupted. They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him. They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for doing anything good," and also speaking about those "having a form of godliness but denying its power." (2 Tim 3:5)

So God is the God who redeems fog machines. And gobos. And for those of you who don't have a clue what a gobo is, next time you see a spinning light design on the back wall or the stage floor, you'll know. Now, if we could just get some in every house church in China, the world would be a better place.

Weilding Weaponry

2009-02-09T20:45:00.000-08:00

I am given to an appreciation for words. If you follow this blog long enough, my overarching delight in delicious diction will likely become annoyingly obvious. I love to arrange them and watch them dance into a revelation or a recollection in someone's mind - even in my own. I also love to do the same with music. These are the tools given me, but wielding them in the work of the Kingdom is something else. I have said before, and I continue to find it true, that inspiration comes at the oddest times. Ask a thousand artists where they get their inspiration, and you'll get a thousand different answers. Rarely, if ever, will you get the answer, "When it's convenient." Inspiration for me comes when I'm riding in the car, driving, listening to new music, and oddly enough, showering. Most of the time, it's not convenient, but it cascades like a vernal mountain stream when it comes. Then, an even stranger thing happens. I sit down with a pen and paper, or I go to the piano or pick up a guitar, and, sometimes instantly, the wellspring dries up. Where did it go? Here I am, ready for the muse to sing. But she has become a shy ghost, a thinning apparition in the air. While I would like to blame it all on this, it's not true. What did happen? Two things, I think.

First, it is proven that I had expectations of ease. When I picked up the guitar or the pen, I wrongly supposed that the music or prose would flow from it like magic from a wand (though, as Neville Longbottom proved to us, wand-waving is not as easy as it looks). Truthfully, it might be easier than usual at that point, depending on my inspiration, but the creative mechanism is a sort of Chinese finger trap. If you pull on it too hard, you'll only get stuck. It can't be forced. Second, I don't practice enough. There's a scene in The Last Samurai (yes, the Tom Cruise movie) where Nathan Algren is learning to fight with a katana. After badly losing several practice bouts, one of the other warriors comes and tells him he has "too many mind."

Nobutada: Please forgive, too many mind.
Cpt. Algren: Too many mind?
Nobutada: Hai. Mind the sword, mind the people watch, mind the enemy. Too many mind.....no mind.

I'm going to bend this a little bit, but I think it still fits. The point is, the more I practice the foundational things, the less I have to think about how to accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish musically or prosaically. Not to sound too acid-trippy about it, but when I've practiced to where the guitar is simply an extension of myself, I don't have to fight against it. I simply play, in the most common sense of the word. No mind. I don't worry about how to play, I just do. In music, this quite obviously comes in the irritatingly banal form of scales, arpeggios, and chords. I also try to play back what I hear others play. In literature, it's not so black and white. Most good writers who give us advice (and I would recommend Anne Lamott and Madeleine L'Engle) tell us to write something every single day. Write anything. Start by describing an apple and let it take you somewhere. Let your mind wander - let it out to play. Or, if you're like me and you're trying to figure out who characters are, put two arch enemies at a coffeeshop table together and see what they say to each other. It's like your own little highbrow version of Jerry Springer, if there is such a thing. It's quite entertaining, and, more importantly, quite revealing.

The Cheapest Cabinet Money Can Buy

2009-02-06T21:28:00.000-08:00

In our constant quest to keep the house in ship shape, Kat and I bought new wooden filing cabinets with some gift money to replace the old metal one which was buckling on the sides. So, after watching Kat assemble the beastly things, I did some fixing and drilling and general manliness to them to make them work, since not all the parts that came in the box worked. Not being a construction worker (though I have before) or a soldier (though we employ women as well) or a wrestler/football player/professional decimator of things, I greatly appreciate opportunities to express the general manliness of lifting, sweating, laboring, and dirtying perfectly clean flannel.

So I was feeling pretty good about myself. Enter: conundrum. We were left with the tragic-looking stack of our old filing cabinet sitting around the house. Now, a friend I know from work roams around in his truck (again, manly) picking up sheet metal and taking it to the scrap yard for extra cash. Aha! says I. I can stuff this sad thing into the car and get money while recycling and feeling masculine. Nobody loses here.

I entered the scrap yard on Fifth Avenue in our Toyota Corolla with a bike rack on the back. I knew something was amiss when I pulled the car up into a muddied moon-scape of a parking lot beside grimy, indestructible pick-up trucks with massive trailers and beds. Further along, past imposing mountains of rusty rubble, the obligatory magnetic crane, and a guy wielding an acetylene cutting torch, there were enormous dump trucks full of rusted out buckets from front-end loaders and pieces of bulldozers and barges. You get the picture. So, I pull up and find out that, no, my filing cabinet is sheet metal, and we only take big chunks out here in big chunky metal land. I'll have to go over to Central.

I navigate the Corolla out of the junkyard (if only cars could gawk like those Wallace and Gromit characters), and we head over to PSC on Central. Same deal, smaller piles, sharper objects. I ask around and find out I'm supposed to get on the scale. I do so and am then directed toward what can only be described as Hyacinth Bucket's worst nightmare. There's a toward with a magnetic crane and a tiny metal shack on top. Around it, piles of scrap metal sit in a moat of stagnant mud like strange pagan offerings. People have backed their cars up to it and are flinging engine blocks, AC parts, and all manner of flotsam into the muck around the proboscidean crane. What is there to do, except do likewise? I back up to the mud and toss the filing cabinet in onto a scattering of metal shelves lying half-submerged in nasty water. Then, I am directed off to the scales again. After a second weigh-in, I park and walk into the building. I expect to wonder what desk to go to, but there is no question. I find myself in a paneled hallway, eight feet by three feet, maybe. There is a teller window, covered in two-and-a-half inch thick bulletproof glass. The lady takes my ID and gives me a paper upon which I put my signature and my left thumbprint. She gives me back my ID, a receipt, and the check they cut for our filing cabinet - one dollar, and eighty cents.

At the time of this writing, I feel a little sorry for our old filing cabinet, sitting out there in that nasty pond in the skeletal shadow of that malevolent tower, which might any day pick it up to be chewed into bits and melted down. It was a good filing cabinet while it lasted, holding our documents like the most patient secretary.

Never Underestimate an Irishman

2009-01-18T18:19:00.000-08:00

Especially a passionate one with a microphone.

Said Bono, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

"Let freedom ring. Let freedom ring. Let freedom ring.

This is not just an American dream, but an Irish dream, a European dream, an African dream... an Israeli dream.

And also, a Palestinian dream."

Bearing Witness

2009-01-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

I've never been good at proselytizing. Those of us who grew up in the Baptist tradition called it "witnessing." "Proselytizing" sounds a bit more like something you would do in a laboratory, but all the church literature, at least when I was a kid, implied that this was some sort of requirement. If you didn't do this, you were a sinner, you were going to Hell. The action itself was usually subsumed in bringing your friends to church, hoping that once they got there, they would succumb to an emotional breakdown when confronted with the bare truth of the Gospel, no matter how ineptly we presented or represented it. The necessity of proselytizing was written into our desire to be teetotalers and non-smokers and to patiently wait until marriage to have sex (although we never used words like "adultery" and "fornication," preferring to incorrectly simplify both in the word "sex"). It was sometimes said that our friends - people who smoked, drank, had sex, cussed, etc. - would notice our abstinent behavior and wonder at the differences in our lives, and also at the impetus behind those differences.

Well, notice they did. Wonder, they did not. The reason for this, at least in my own case, was probably that there was no particular impetus beyond my own mercenary sense of Christian duty. If we are to believe the depths of our souls which the Truth plumbs - according to the Gospels, Proverbs, Psalms, and narratively, all of Scripture - then it must be said that I was perhaps a greater sinner than them all. In any case, my attempts at proselytizing have been few and rather disastrous. Let it be said, I still measure by my own myopic sense of vision. We cannot discount the windy rushing of a Spirit whose movements we cannot quantify.

At the very least, my experience has taught me that this point-and-click system of theological causality which we, which I, have termed "witnessing," is, to put it bluntly, not. It's not allowing us to bear witness. It's more akin to selling washing machines than it is the introduction of a bride to her groom. It has been very freeing to be led along to understand that Sincerity is the name of the horse pulling the cart of seeker-sensitive apologetics. It is certainly not obligation, not Should. Yes, we should, but God loves cheerful givers. Givers who are glad to see someone else have it. Givers who cannot wait to pass it along and forget about it. On our best days, this is not most of us. I'd like to think myself a cheerful giver, but when someone gives me a gift card, and I blow it all at McKay's on used books for myself, that's not selfless. I might deserve to spend it on myself, we could say, considering it was a gift to me. But we can't chalk that up to being selfless.

In the same vein, I'd say that our genuine Father God appreciates earnestness in presenting the Gospel. In Paul's writings, when he lists off the groups of people who are going to suffer death a second time, liars are consistently among them. I don't know if the reason for this is specifically legal - at least, not in the easy way we'd like to think. Perhaps liars are pointedly listed because we need to be honest with ourselves to drink from the cup of Christ. "A man should examine himself before taking the cup" (1 Corinthians 11) certainly does not mean that we should have achieved some semblance of temporary perfection brought on by a mechanical plea for forgiveness the second before the bread and wine touch our lips. So what does it mean? In all likelihood, it means that we should have a meek view - that is, an honest and gracefully realistic view - of ourselves. Honesty is a prerequisite to faith. Dishonesty requires no faith, because it only needs itself.

My realistic view is this: I can't witness without caring for a person. I can't care for a person without being silent long enough to pay attention and appreciate the small graces in that person's life. I can't do that without the grace of Jesus.

Decrying the Vernal Turn

2009-01-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

After a day down in the high thirties, the temperature in Knoxville has stretched up to a balmy forty-three degrees, and a rather hypochondriacal cloud cover has cast over the new year's sky.

I took the dog for a run down the road after getting home late, but our usual route was made eerily new as the ensuing fog made sport of our perception. The distant alarmist voices of dogs and the parting chatter of friends were muffled in the mist and amplified in our imaginations, sounding like otherworldly songs as they passed through the electric drone of halogen streetlights. The fractal trees were etched even more clearly upon the air, revealing themselves as the bones of a proud neolithic race that, according both to Genesis and all theories to the contrary, has outlived us so far by at least a few days.

The rhythmic streetlamps, like worshipped saints, only lit the way unto themselves. All that was past them was a blur of fog, brought on by the slightest warming of the cold, wet air. After the divine turning of events, the first human tromp toward our supposed Jerusalem is a walk through mist. And we wait, even in the dead of winter, for the coming of the sun, as it laughs away both clouds and streetlights, eschewing all imitations. We wait, for the clearing of the air.

A Wedding and a Crucible

2008-12-11T21:44:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, I was an usher at the beautiful wedding for two friends of mine from school. As I ush-ed to the best of my ability (I am possessed of considerable ush-ing prowess), surrounded by a contingent of my classmates, I had a small but pivotal notion:

I was never a music major. At least, in the most romantic sense of the words.

It hit me fully as I was sitting in the back of the church sanctuary during the ceremony. There was a small choir in the balcony to the right of the stage, singing wonderful music familiar to anyone who had spent four years at the CN Music Department under Doc Thorson. We were all trained classically, immersed in everyone from Tallis to Scarlatti to Bach to George Crumb and Paul Hindemith. But they, it seems, have all gone on to chase higher education. Many of them now have careers teaching music to school children. They are classically trained musicians. I am a folk musician - with some classical training.

This all washed over me at once. Beth McDonald, my classmate and contemporary, sat on stage and played piano as her mother, who does the editing for my dad's compositions, played the thunderous pipe organ until the chandelier quivered on its chain. The chamber choir sang, and I couldn't help but grin - grin to be a folk musician.

It's a position of inadequacy sometimes. All of my friends are better than I at something, of course. That goes without saying. Most of them are better at everything. If you read back a little, you will find that I recently obtained a Facebook - though I'm not sure that "obtained" is the right word, since it feels like some part of me has been cleft away in the process. This has rekindled my interest in discovering what stories these early chapters of my life have gone on to create. It's as if we're a Choose-your-adventure book, with all the adventures happening simultaneously. Scrolling through the websites of my friends and acquaintances, I find people of great conviction, talent, and perseverance. Let us be certain, it is not beneficial to play the comparison game. How much less beneficial to compare oneself with a myopic facsimile of a person, such as the representations of ourselves that we share online. I, for one, am definitively incapable of rendering up anything close to a holistic description of myself in a single blog page. Even when 99% of the writers out there are better than I, I would wager that their own prodigious talents balk at the task of complete self-description.

The funny thing about all that academic claptrap is that it doesn't hold water when my heart gets on that pity party. But still, I am a folk musician. And I'm okay with that. Especially when confronted with the crucial icon of a giddy groom and his beautiful bride, eyes all ablaze as a bush, in flame but not consumed.

An Essay

2008-12-03T08:42:00.000-08:00

Andrew Osenga wrote an extremely redemptive and freeing song on his last record, which you can download here on a 'pay what you want' basis (and as a songwriter, I encourage you to pay him something). The song is called "Staring Out a Window (My Confession)," and it's about coming to grips with being made by God. I say all that because I wrote a miniature essay this past Halloween, and it feels like it resonates with some of the same ideas.

All Hallows Eve, 2008

A cowboy walks the littered shores of Mars. He collects a wintry porridge of sand and shale on the soles of his shoes and listens to the pounding of the October wind at sunset. A pair of mallards beats against the west with all their might. Geese muster their ranks and plow the air in noisy fleets looking for quiet sand from which to scrounge the desperate and vivacious grubs. A blue heron, a living dinosaur, cocks his muscular neck into a crossbow before giving up the ghost as the telltale American footsteps clamor down the beachhead and break the meditation of his hunt.

This winter, like all winters here since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, will be one of leanness on the lakes. The Tennessee Valley Authority itself seems to bloom and die in reciprocation to the turning of the earth, as the lakes are lowered like great tubs in autumn to ease the burden on the coal plants, brought on by an armada of heating units and electric blankets, which flourish into life at the knelling of the equinox. Now the endless murmur of tiny waves that dance along with the planet’s do-si-do laps against a boneyard left by summer’s storms and celebrations. Driftwood lies along the distended beach like the skeletons of long-forgotten wars, and wolf-spiders scuttle among its serpentine shadows, with wary eyes driven by thin arachnid bellies. Only they and the browning moths are left to flit through the crevices in the cold.

Can these dry bones live again? O Sovereign Lord, you alone know. For now, we live with the planetary exiles by the water, hoping against the laws of vision that the bloodlines of resurrection are still written into the fabric of this dead land. It is still beautiful here, in a ruddy heathen way, like the face of Esau. And tiny, brittle scrub and bushes doggedly grip onto the barren and crumbled parcels of rocky dirt whence the waters receded. There is yet hope.

I’ve come down here to escape the happy ferocity of the Hallowe’en party at my relatives’ lakeside house. I donned the uniform of a cowboy only because it was the nearest incarnation to my standard mode of dress. I would have been content to spend the evening as a stoplight or some other famous yet obscure character, but I refuse to be an uncomfortably dressed stoplight or obscure character. Other folks at the party do not have such reservations. There were a few more cowboys among the crowd, but they seemed descended more from the Las Vegas or Nashville variety, as opposed to the variety that herds cattle. There were a couple of Indians – Native Americans, to be specific – and a hippie and a go-go girl, not to mention the creepier attendees with horrific latex masks and plastic-smelling fake hair. I wonder what toddlers think as they are dressed as bumblebees and train engineers and paraded among their role models, who now resemble the occupants of a five-and-dime store toy bin. Is it scrawled into their bones, is it still scrawled into ours, that this is a day to remember the lessons from the lives of our fallen forbearers? Can we face the pointed recollection of our own storied mortality? Can these dry bones live again?

The overweight yet strangely sagacious retriever comes down to the marooned wooden dock with me and inquires of my attention. I throw a few sticks for him and watch him fling his girth after them into the forgiving buoyancy of the chilly lake water. In the softer parts of the sand, I can see our footprints – mine, squarish and smeared with deep heel impressions, and his, chubby and familiar. Even more lightly, the trails of inquisitive raccoons and the trim footsteps of thespian killdeer are scattered in the mud. After three throws and the ensuing games of tug-of-war for a big limb, the dog walks away up the bank with his prize clamped in his jaws. He spent all summer swimming the breadth of the inlet and wandering the neighborhoods on the other side, until residents there threatened to shoot him when they couldn’t stave off his overzealous greetings. I’m not certain that I’ve got it in me to shoot a dog. That doesn’t make me a very good cowboy, but like the lake bed in summer, I am in costume. The romantically dressed waters of Hallowe’en recede, and I am revealed – nothing but a barren and muddy boneyard where spiders and skeletal birds haunt the wan light. This one day, we each don the image of something else, not usually caring too much what that something else is, as long as it’s not us. The rest of the year, we struggle a bit more valiantly to keep from being who we are, because we know who it is under that cowboy suit. We recognize dry bones at a glance.

But I’ve seen dry bones dance.

The Day the Pony Express Died

2008-11-30T11:58:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's true. I've relinquished my tenacious hold on the eighteenth century. I've acquired a Facebook. I feel a bit like I've sold my soul to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Your welcome. Does this mean we can finally be friends?

New Photographs

2008-11-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

We'll have to postpone our collective meditations and notes on life for the moment. But I wanted to let you know I've put some new photographs up on the Flickr site. Enjoy.

Photographs

Be Demanding

2008-11-11T20:16:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of democracy, I've decided to put up this little widget on the sidebar that gives you the opportunity to demand that I come to your town and play a show. Basically, it gives me a chance to see the vox populi spelled out in good ol' internet stats, which, as we all know, are highly reflective of what's really happening in the world. I'm intending to get out and play a weighty passel of shows in '09, and if you want one near you, speak up.

Let it be known, however, that if there's not a cafe or bar or church where I can play, I might just call you up and ask to play in your living room. We could make a house concert of it.

Old Skin Horse

2008-11-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

I've never spent a year of my life on anything. Unless you count school, to which I did not apply a great deal of focus, or growing a beard, which happened because I neglected to shave, I've put most of my time into short, easy endeavors, until now. I've tried to keep this a secret up to this point, because whenever I let the cat out of the bag before it's time, my plans seem to disintegrate like instant oatmeal with too much water, a la James chapter 4. So, after being as vague and aloof as I could be about this for a year of my life....

I am so excited about this record. I'm not feeling particularly well, as I've caught some sort of throat cold, but even though my candy coating is a little stale at this point, I feel a bit like a little schoolgirl with a new pony. A pink one, with a white horn. I've thought this out, as you can see. The lack of time is about the only thing that's keeping me from driving all over town and handing these out to people I know. And people I don't, for that matter. Here's the skinny, though. You can download this at Digstation.com today. And in a few days, as I understand it, and according to the process, you'll be able to download it on iTunes.

So please, download away. And leave a review if you enjoy it, or if you think it needs work. If I need anything, I need good dialogue about the pursuit of excellence. Thank you for listening. Turn the lights down, the dial up, and enjoy.

Pre-Releasing

2008-10-27T21:17:00.001-07:00

There are those times when jogger's high overtakes you and you don't realize how tired you are until you stop running. Rewind to this past Friday at the V Cafe, at the CD PRE-Release show for Old Skin Horse. After I got through the obligatory stomach butterflies that always seem to happen when things are bound to get interesting, I think I (along with the cavalcade of monstrous talent behind me) put more energy into those songs than I ever have before. The line-up went thus:

Michael Dean - bass, accordion
Ethan Norman - acoustic, vocals
Andy Vandergriff - acoustic, vocals
Bill Van Vleet - drums
Jim Walker - lead electric
David Whipple - trumpet
+me on acoustic, electric, and vocals

David Van Buskirk plowed in from Nashville and opened the whole show for us. His fu manchu left us in awe (and made me think he looked like a younger incarnation of my uncle, Steve), and I was humbled to meet someone who had given so much for the Kingdom of God. I would retell those stories I heard, but justice would not be done if I did so. You shall have to sit down with him and ask him about Africa and bicycles.

The second block of the night was given to Ethan and Michael playing Ethan's tunes while the lovely Carla Huxtable (yep, you read that right) sang back-up with the imposing amount of gumption it takes to do that when you're not accustomed to it (as she is not). I was glad to have the opportunity to sit back and hear those songs through fresh ears and from afar. Not that Ethan and I have played together for eons, but it's easy to fall prey to the habits of old guitar parts when new ones might be the direction that the song wants to go. If it takes on a life of its own (and we hope it does), then playing stagnant riffs is like adding poison to the water. It was good to see those songs take on life.

As for my set, I've never heard Song for Dogs with so much energy. For that matter, I haven't heard any of those songs with so much energy. But you'll have to come to the next show to see that sort of thing happen, because I'm a little too lethargic to eloquently expound on anything right now, and I'm going to bed.

And, by the way, Old Skin Horse comes out on iTunes on November the 1st. So go download it and drink it in.

"You will be hated..."

2008-10-13T10:38:00.000-07:00




The front page of today's Times

Book Review: Churched

2008-10-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to think, since I often judge a book by its cover, no matter the well-rooted maxims that seem to run in our mothers’ milk in the South. The press quote by A. J. Jacobs, editor of Esquire magazine, is what gave me a small and materialistic sense of faith in the book. Let the proviso of your readership, however, be that my own apprehension is no reason to avoid something as harmless and potentially life-altering as a book.

Matthew Paul Turner, the author of the famous book The Coffehouse Gospel, keeps his tongue crammed well into his cheek from the get-go in Churched. Throughout the book, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for him to give some sense of context to balance out the slight bitterness to the subsumed chuckle that runs the length of the pages. I’m not sure that it came in the way that I wanted it to – spelled out in legalistic fashion, that is. The context of his banteringly down-to-earth satire is instead found in the certain warmth you feel for the entire cast of characters in his memoir, despite their cornucopia of silly flaws. The best part about this whole read is that Turner taps into the strange and warring sensations and emotions that children (or adults, for that matter) who are brought up in church are faced with. This goes double for folks who have grown up Baptist. Triple for Southern Baptist. Triple for me. For the record, I don’t think that it was an accident for me to read this book at this particular chapter in my life.

Perhaps the wondrous effect of being able to laugh from a safe ink-and-pages distance at the absurd fears of the adults around the childhood vintage of Matthew Paul Turner is that we can walk out onto the street afterwards and laugh a little easier at our own religious nervous tics and those of our nearest neighbors. The polite and slightly neurotic chuckles that we often purport as being legitimate peel back a bit to reveal a true sense of being alright in our own skins, and we get to really laugh at the nonsensical bits, which are certainly manifold. Anyone who has been burned by the misguided fires of religiosity can take a second to share in this, and those same folks would probably do well, while reading, to imagine themselves in a circle of chairs in a taupe-colored room with a ficus plant, saying things like, “Hi, my name is Adam, and I can’t stand the feel of clip-on ties.”

Oh, and by the way, the other shoe does drop in the end, with the great weight that only a crazy sense of hope can have.

          -Matthew Paul Turner:  Official Website

          -Churched on Amazon.com

A Whistler 'Neath the Tree

2008-10-06T20:09:00.000-07:00

Ethan and I loaded up a fifteen-passenger van last Friday with enough sound equipment to satisfy a hungry Bruce Springsteen booking agent. Then, with a PCA logo emblazoned on the side, we trekked out to the John Knox Center past Kingston to play music for a middle school retreat. Heaven help us when we do these things, for we inevitably become the de facto coolest people around for the weekend.

All told, I rarely get the opportunity to look cool playing electric. It's probably a good thing. I think that it was really just a blessing to be a blessing to people. I definitely enjoyed the lack of responsibility beyond setting up, breaking down, and playing. Past that, we got to spend quality time with Kim and Donovan (that is, the speaker and her jovial husband), watch the Canadian geese take off like a fleet of winged trombones and belly-flop into the waters of Watts Bar Lake, watch the moon chase the sun down the Western skyline and blush with the hue of a deep flame, and drink gallons upon gallons of mint tea. For me, I think that the highlight was probably playing Vespers for the two nights that we were there. Friday night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I took the tin whistle and stood down on the dock beneath a merrily flung Milky Way full of shooting stars. I played a couple of hymns that tolled across the inlets of the lake while mysterious splashes from tiny Leviathans dotted the shallows.

Saturday night, a passel of folks went with me. We walked a trail along the edge of the lake to the aptly named Vesper Point and stood on the ramparts of a stone wall beneath a weeping willow while I played more hymns and a little improvisational prayer. Beyond the sound of the whistle, there was nothing but quiet. It was the first time in the whole weekend when nobody spoke. Our very silence was the holiest prayer we could have offered. Kudos to Ethan, Adam, and Josh for making the weekend one of brotherhood as well.

Next Friday, if you happen to be in Berea, Kentucky, you should stop by Ground Effects and give ear as Ethan and I play our show there. If you get there late, we might play another show just for you. Wouldn't be the first time, and we don't mind.

Book Review: The Road of Lost Innocence

2008-09-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

                    Sometimes I cannot forgive,
                            and these days mercy cuts so deep...

                                               Oh My God, Jars of Clay

I imagine myself sitting at a table in a folding chair in the shade of Pol Pot’s infamous S-21 prison. A dark young woman sits down across from me and we have a cup of tea. She is a slender, graceful figure and carries herself with a dignity that I don’t normally see, from anybody. It is not the carriage of malignant hubris, but of a quietude and a belief that human life is sacrosanct. Somaly Mam has come to tell me a story, the story of her life. The Khmer Rouge is neither the subject nor the scapegoat, but its role in her life makes the location of our interview an appropriate one if I am to, in some personal measure, comprehend the gravity of her tale. We sip our tea and exchange pleasantries, and then, in the spare language of a deeply scarred refugee, she begins to outline for me her descent into the grotesque and malicious underworld of Cambodian and Southeast Asian prostitution. She did not enter this hellish world, as women often do in the West, out of necessity or to make spare change or on a badly timed whim. As difficult as it is to hear, Somaly Mam was given first to a Chinese merchant by a man who called himself her Grandfather. He owed the merchant money, and as payment of the debt, he gave the man Somaly Mam’s virginity. She was twelve.

I imagine myself as a sort of reporter, sitting down with her to write out her story, because that is the bald-faced way that she tells it. But as her conversation with me progresses, I find that I can no longer write these things down. I can no longer comment. I simply read on, because, for the time being, at least by listening, I can somehow bear a small part of this burden. I say that to spur myself on toward bearing more of it or more of something like it later in life.
Somaly was further raped and crushed by her first “husband,” a violent soldier under the new socialist Vietnamese government. She was given to this man without her choice or consent or consideration. He was no better than her Grandfather or the Chinese merchant, and, in order to provide for herself while her husband was off fighting the Khmer Rouge, she worked the night shift in an abysmal clinic where war casualties poured through the doors and the doctors raped the nurses. This was all as a fifteen-year-old. Eventually, after her husband had been gone for many weeks, her Grandfather came back and took her to Phnom Penh and sold her outright to a brothel.

At this point in the book, I think I read on just for the sheer motion, because the overwhelming darkness that had chased this woman from her childhood builds and builds in your mind and heart with the weight of quicksand on your chest. That anyone could survive, could be capable of mercy, could keep from wasting away with bitterness and murder in their heart – this much is a miracle. That someone could give their lives to bring that mercy to others, that life might be restored, that people might understand this grace – that is the blessing of Jesus.

I can't distance myself from the suffering of these girls. We carry the same wounds. I share their suffering, their horrors.

                                                           -Somaly Mam

After a decade or so of rape and torture, and after her escape with the assistance of a French humanitarian worker, Somaly began to construct ways to help the prostitutes still in the system through her contacts in French relief organizations. This became the seed of what is now AFESIP, which today helps to rescue these girls, and sometimes boys, who are often as young as five (to ensure virginity), and to rehabilitate them in a safe environment. The genesis of this project was a struggle in itself, as Somaly Mam and her friends battled entrenched corruption in high levels of both organized crime and the government in order to force the hands of politicians and police in exposing and arresting pimps, brother owners, and investors in the brothels and the trade. Her organization has also been committed to educating men about prostitution, AIDS, and also the pure side of sex, and debunking the widespread beliefs that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS and make you stronger and more youthful. They have not simply stigmatized or blamed the clients, but have listened to them. One of the biggest cultural barriers to overcome is the Cambodian manner of silence. Because these things are not proper to speak of in public, it is difficult to spread the education about this touchy subject.

During the Khmer Rouge regime, people...learned not to trust their neighbors, their friends, their family, their own children. To avoid going mad, they shrank to the smallest part of a human, which is "me."

                                                           -Somaly Mam

I am not usually one to take many recommendations from friends. When someone tells me that I should read a book or see a movie, my initial response is to refuse. Nevertheless, because this is so important, I am asking that you discover a way to hear this story. You can order the book from the Somaly Mam Foundation website (which I recommend, as some of the proceeds go to the foundation’s work), or, if you’re in the Knoxville area, you can certainly borrow my copy. Read it and pass it along.

And also, let me encourage you. Since we not only live in a world where little girls and sisters and wives and daughters are sold into sexual slavery to men who are not men, but also where "Activism" and "Awareness" are the new WWJD bracelets, this is something in which you should be involved if it strikes that chord in you. If it doesn't, then you should pray about that, too. I know that I must.

                    If the world was how it should be,
                         maybe I could get some sleep.
                                               Oh My God, Jars of Clay

Somaly Mam Foundation Website
Purchase the book from Amazon

Apologies

2008-09-14T21:42:00.000-07:00

My apologies to anyone who showed up to see me play at Pellissippi last Thursday. I don't really know what sort of advertisement is going on other than my little websites here, but if you came expecting me and I wasn't there, I am sorry. I was supposed to email the guy booking the shows so that he could send me a contract (wow, that's an authoritative word), but I never emailed him back. When he called me, I was in the shower, and our conversation was the best that can be expected over the crash of water onto a fiberglass tub.

Ergo, I misunderstood, thinking that the initial phone call from him was the cement around the edges. No such animal this time. But he said that he booked someone else, and that there are more gigs coming up, so I'll give it another go, sans the fumble, of course.

Things Beneficial

2008-08-24T19:43:00.001-07:00

Walking through a church building today to see a friend of mine, I came across a veritable trove of historical information, especially interesting to one who wants to know the history of the Bible. A little book called The Pocket Bible Handbook, or Halley's Pocket Bible Handbook, was unassumingly supine upon a shelf in the room. Leafing through it, I realized that I had found a sort of index into Biblical history. I'm going to have to find a copy of that. Here endeth the geeky rant.

I'm on here today to share a few items of business that have been very helpful or inspirational to me.

Nathan Head

First and foremost, this guy is about as patient as they come as I try to dot all my J's and cross my Q's in the making of this new record. He's committed to helping folks make good music, even through a limited budget. He works out of The Garden, his studio up in Sevierville, runs Cubase 4, and maintains a steady gig at the Miracle Theatre acting, dancing, and singing on a rigorous schedule. He also eats at the Fox & Parrot, a British-style pub niched quietly away in a small artistic community off US 321 in Gatlinburg. All of these things make him cool.

NoiseTrade.com

This is a joint venture championed by Derek Webb along with Brannon McAllister, of Portland Studios, David McCollum, who I think is a manager at Dryve Artist Management, and another "industry veteran," Mark Nicholas. The premise is that word of mouth is the best advertisement anywhere. I would tend to agree, given that word of mouth doesn't force artists to sell their souls to the bottom line. At this website, artists submit their music, and people download it. The consumer either pays any price, or tells three other folks, via email, about the particular album.

Ground Effects Coffee House

This little place, run by Randy and Leann Calico (file that under the Coolest Last Names Ever), has been a haven for me when I need a good place to play a show. They are just about the kindest people you could ask for, and their food is a taste bud's fantasy. The coffee is amazing. The stage, though, is not made for tall people. Andy Vandergriff survived it though, and he's one of the tallest people I know in my hobbit-sized world. So, unless you're Yao Ming, you shouldn't have any trouble. Get there early and wander around in the antique store across the street. There's a bookshop a little further down the road and a great little woodworking place near the inn.

A Three-In-One Book Review

2008-08-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

Three new gems for your young one have come out. I read through these out loud (since that is the way you should read stories and small, poetic books) to myself, since I could not find any children to borrow at the time. Perhaps if I had gone through the neighborhood looking for some though, things might have turned out differently. I would definitely be labeled "That creepy guy with the beard." But if you have some children at hand, then I recommend the following reads:

God Gave Us Heaven
by Lisa Tawn Bergen, art by Laura J. Bryant

You get to follow Little Bear on a day with her father as they pal around together. She, like all kids, is full of the questions for which adults can never come up with the perfect answers (Isn't it funny how all our answers are just a little off?). Her father doesn't pretend to know everything, but answers out of his simple faith and patient wisdom, all to the visual tune of beautiful watercolor arrangements.

God Loves Me More Than That
by Dandi Daley Mackall, illustrated by David Hohn

How many bumbles are there in a bumble bee? I don't know, but you can be sure that God loves me more than that number. This book is chock-full of reassurances like that, completed by David Hohn's masterful paintings of beautiful and heartfelt and funny things. My favorite pictures had to be the elephant on the tightrope and the hippopotamus in a raincoat. This is one to read slowly and make sure that the pictures really get taken in.

When God Created My Toes
by Dandi Daley Mackall, illustrated by David Hohn

You may have noticed that this is the same team that brought you God Loves Me More Than That. This book is my favorite of the three. The little girl in it is just about as innocently and sweetly irreverent as one can get, and she's perfectly secure in God's love in the way that we all desire to be, once we are old enough to grow out of our faith and into our logic, to our shame, of course. She wonders, and I have to laugh and wonder if God held his nose to make my toes. And did he ever shout "Hip, Hip, Hooray!"? And the illustrations are exquisitely done and sometimes side-splitting.

TVUUC: Another's Memoir, and Mine

2008-08-16T22:21:00.000-07:00

This is something I had started writing a little while after Jim Adkisson entered the Unitarian Universalist Church on Kingston Pike.

I could hear the crunch of my shoes on the loose roadside gravel. The air was a smoky din of automobile noise and people moving like woodlice on the pavement. I peered over the edge of the walking bridge and glimpsed the cars flying by beneath me on Cumberland. In the space between the railing and the train trestle, just beyond arms length, they looked like a grimy slot machine that would not stop.

This is how I’ve felt for the eternity of the past two days, trying to scramble for some sort of definitive path through the senseless slaughter of Unitarian Universalist church members. It made national news headlines, and even got a spot on the front of the New York Times. I was at work before sunrise on Monday, slinging coffee to the morning commute, and glanced at the front of the page, and some part of me wished that it would have been a bigger section of the paper. Why? I don’t know. I wish it was as big as I know that all our restless natives feel about it. Somehow, the world’s consolation of a sixteen-point font and two-and-three-quarter square inches of print space makes me realize that we are a single broken oyster shell in the surf, smoothing and tumbling into sand. Endless sand.

I had convinced myself that I wasn’t going to write anything about it. All had been written, within hours; all that had been spoken and postulated was thrumming in an electric blue web far above our heads, smoking in the ears of hungry media consumers. As I stepped into a church meeting on the west side of town, I considered telling a friend there that he should be prepared for the fallout that was sure to come. I still don’t know if it’s true. I do remember praying that the shooter was not a Christian, and hoping that he was still alive. Is that selfish? Again, I don’t know. I really do hate that part of me wants to be central to the plotline, and desires nothing more than a necessary soliloquy amongst the action. That guy usually has nothing to say. How much of our postulation for the past few days has been of the spotlight-snatching variety? On the TV, I feel like the city’s grief leaves its banks like the Mississippi into an Iowa cornfield. Of course, to say that such emotional adultery is commonplace is not so much cynical as it is forthright. It’s not really my desire to contribute to that. No amount of news coverage and sympathetic greeting card shuffling is going to make the gaping wounds of misunderstanding bleed themselves into healing. No ribbons or bumper stickers or tritely intellectual nomenclature is going to keep the shallow wounds of the uninvolved open so that we can stand beside the actual victims of this evil. What wound would spur us to stand beside the shooter himself, who, let it be said, is a victim of evil?

I wonder what he had for breakfast. Did James D. Adkisson have the same toast and eggs that Greg McKendry or Linda Kraeger ate that morning? I guess that I like to view murderers as pop-tart sort of people. If they actually paused to thoughtfully cook a one- or two-course meal, wouldn’t that make them sociopaths? Isn’t that what Hannibal Lecter did? Killers who eat quick, dry meals are perhaps less likely to be mulling their actions over so rationally. At least, it’s what I’d like to think. I told my neighbor that I’d rather have crazy people than citizens who go out with evil on their minds. Our own justice system recognizes that some people don’t keep their hands fully at the helms of their actions.

I also wonder if someone would actually post bail for him. Who, with a million dollars lying about, would be so kind as to drop it in the city treasury for the freedom of James Adkisson? On another note, who would be so kind as to sit down and talk to him, or listen to him, as if he had only had a pop-tart and gone out to read the paper that Sunday morning? As a Christian, I wonder if, given the opportunity, some Christian would buy him a cup of coffee. What would he do under the influence of a willing ear? The papers said that he was frustrated with his lack of social security benefits. The internet was swollen with rumors of his ex-wife’s past attendance to the church. The FBI kick-started their investigative machine, because James’ crime wore the shoes of a hate-crime. This is a comparatively new word, and a quietly subversive misnomer. There’s really no problem associating hatred with the violence of that Sunday morning. The clincher is when the word assumes that there are some crimes, nay, some evils, in which hatred is not involved.

We keep a laundry list of hatreds in this world. It might just rival our litany of badly titled “loves.” We have simple hatred, racial hatred, socio-economic hatred, self-hatred, hatred of foods, hatred of situations, projected hatred, socio-pathology, masochism, anarchy, and the dark carolers keep singing. Can we really, by the differentiation and filing of our emotions and actions, gain control over this hateful spiral? That is our desire, isn’t it? To gain control. Why else would we name things with such unimaginative and boorish hullabaloo? If there is anyone being lax, look sharp! Chaos will sneak up into your lap if you don’t name it quickly. This is, perhaps, at least one reason we ask beastly questions like, “Why?” We are cows standing in the outwash of interstate billboard lights. We can no more comprehend “Why?” than they can grasp the advertisements. I don’t know if James Adkisson himself understood why he decided that mass murder was the best course of action.

The president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations
quipped lightly about the strange sound of the thunderheads that had brewed over the candlelight vigil the next night.
“We don’t know who’s speaking outside…but we trust, we have faith, that it is a friendly voice.” I think of Rahab, the foreign prostitute housing the Hebrew spies, saying that the whole land is quaking in fear of their people, in fear of the one who walks before them and behind them. I think of the hearts of Pharaoh’s men at the sight of a pillar of fire reaching down from the night sky and torching the desert sand between them and Moses. We always fear what we don’t know. We always fear to be known as well, even as we are famished for having our naked souls loved with a longing that C. S. Lewis said was almost indecent to mention.

The words “tragedy” and “shooting” are now part of our daily landscape, folded into the fabric like unnoticed strokes of dark paint. Grief is now, for all but those closely involved, the broken nose of the Sphinx. It has always been so, and the circle of wounded suppleness is shrinking. May we see brokenness and still weep. May our souls still be rung like loud bells by the approach of the failed and the fractured. May we not only be shocked, but hurt. Hurt like a man who has eaten something wrong. May our hearts be consumed with the wracking spasms of wrestling with that which has tormented us. And let us not heal quickly, but slowly, and together, not breaking a single bruised reed.

Blessed and Amazed

2008-08-11T21:01:00.001-07:00

I have to show you guys this.

I used to think that these folks were great. Now I think that they're passing fantastic! The V Cafe has been a small and unassuming home for creative, aspiring Christian artists for a few years now. That they're even open to my music, and also that they provide a platform for a wide range of musical styles, speaks to their willingness to dialogue with people about faith and the exploration of all things spiritual. I try to always appreciate a champion of the arts, and these guys are no less.

They have released their first compilation CD of music from folks who have played at the V. They've been gracious enough to put a song of mine on the CD, and to call the whole collection Something About the Journey, which is a lyric from the song Pilgrims. Plus, they graced the cover of the whole thing with a picture of what looks like my favorite section of Rifle Range Rd. in the autumn (not that I had anything to do with that part).

You can buy this CD here or at their website.

The Indigenous Coffee Mongers

2008-08-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

While I work for a national corporation, the name of which I will not share, but which some of you know (and over which some cry "Havoc!"), there are new wild grasses of coffeehouses springing up in Knoxville, locally owned, singular, and rich in passion. I have only tasted the fare of a few of these places, but what I have tasted contains all the depth embodied in the above traits. Their websites are, well...sub-par for the most part, but that is because they haven't really focused on the MySpace-style advertisement of their product. Word of mouth has been their billboard. My wife says that I am probably the single greatest small business advocate in the city. I will say that when you present me with a product that impresses me, I'm going to tell everyone I know about it. That said, here are the newcomers. I hope you will taste them for yourselves.

-De Colores Espresso

Bev Ketchum runs this place, and you can taste every line of her inviting smile in each flavor of gelato that pours forth from this little gem. She's also really cool about local art and music, though, since downtown seems to be the hub of that wheel, her deep West Knoxville location makes it difficult for her to capture the imagination of the customary local art crowd. But if you ever make it out there (and you should), you'll be enchanted. Buy a sandwich and a shot of espresso, and follow it up with a cup of inimitable lemon sorbet.

-Coffee and Chocolate

These guys don't have a website, for the reasons mentioned above, I would guess, among others. I was a little apprehensive about their opening, worrying that they wouldn't make it. For the record, I worry this for a lot of small businesses - more than I could ever patronize. So I've been glad to see them moving forward in the minds of Knoxvillians. My neighbor doesn't like their espresso, but we're all quite picky 'round here (the best espresso I've ever had was in a pub in Dundee, Scotland called The Counting House). I feel that they've at least lodged themselves somewhat firmly into the upper echelons of coffee mongering in Knoxville, however, especially with their desserts. This video should tell you more.

-Blackbird Coffeehouse

This place is extremely new. Tucked deep in the chewy nougat town center of Sequoia Hills, it has capture my interest and whetted my tastebuds. I haven't even been their yet, but I've heard tell. My aforementioned neighbor loves it. Their schtick has traveled far and wide in a short period of time, and I hope that they're a portrait of the zeitgeist in Knoxville. Hours are a bit short for me to make it out there regularly, but I'll be sure to get there soon. The pictures of their personal construction work speak for the owners' passion for the place and the community. They already have quite a few regulars, I hear.

-Remedy Coffee

These guys aren't even open yet, but I have great hopes for them. They certainly seem to have high hopes for themselves and their place in the community. Hopefully, they'll jump right in and catch a good number of regulars, since the Gay Street residential bug is inching ever-so-slightly northward towards Jackson. I'm glad that they're in the Old City, right across from where Cup a Joe used to be. While Java has survived us all as far as local coffee businesses go, and has also been a champion of local and organic foods since the difficult days of Victor Ashe, I'm hoping that this will be the poster child for the Old City becoming a neighborhood again (although the nightlife is always jumping nowadays).

          Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.
                                              -Jonathan Swift

Through Dry Gulches

2008-08-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

We at the Whipple house (still unnamed, as I have commitment issues with titles), are having a hard time readjusting to the institutional church. After spending so much time fighting to be a part of a house church, which, as of now, is still in existence, we've gone for a couple Sundays to a traditional church in addition to meeting with our brothers and sisters at a friend's house over a glorious potluck supper.

I say traditional, but perhaps I better clarify. That evocative word conjures up images in some people's minds of a dear sweet fluffy old lady sitting at an aging upright piano, hammering out a ragtime or bluegrass beat with the left hand and insisting on playing at a breakneck clip. People in overalls clutch their 1611 King James Bibles (not printed in 1611, of course) and belt out hymnody in strong, farm-raised voices. Another fun picture is one of the creepy, emaciated organist sitting in the paltry light of a tallow candle, holding out minor chords as if his patience alone is the root of the perseverance of the saints. Neither of these is what I mean by "traditional."

In short, our little group has been meeting together to study the Bible, pray, and get to know each other in an intimate setting. Going from having no liturgy and all intimacy to having a great deal of liturgy and less intimacy is very difficult. We're feeling a little like wandering sheep, seeking the watering hole where the rest of the herd lies in repose. I suppose that being picky doesn't help.

New Record: Old Skin Horse

2008-08-05T18:17:00.000-07:00

I've been really excited, for the past few months, for everyone to get to hear this music. There's been a lot of work poured into this, and there's a lot of work still to go, but there are a few new cuts on my myspace page, listed as DEMOs.

The release date is September 30th.

Laughing Out Loud

2008-07-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

“Children and aspies have no sense of irony…” – Madeleine L’Engle

“…whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished.” – Proverbs 17:5

"Thank God, the joke's on me." - Born, Over the Rhine

I remember the times I felt dirty because I was laughing. I don’t suppose that I could specifically recall them all, but I certainly remember the feeling. I was like having a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn’t wash out. That feeling like bile, that grubbiness that would not go away, it made me quite tired of myself. There were a few kids at my high school, in my years there, who God had granted the blessing and the curse of being retarded. It occurs to me that any mental defect was only a curse because all of us less-obviously defective people were there to remind them of it.

There was a particular brand of Mnemonic device that we used, like showmen with dolphins, to make a bit of a spectacle. I cringe at saying “we,” but my half-hearted laughter at such things, in order to ‘fit in,’ is proof that I was as cruel a youth as those whose actions my conscience judged to be wrong. I remember vividly a group of kids talking in their loud, vulgar tones to these other kids who took “special education” and worked in the cafeteria as part of their schooling. The subject matter might have been anything: what they were doing at the time, how the morning had been, what they wanted to be when they grew up. It didn’t matter, because there was a spirit of laughter at the answers that were given to these questions. “I want to be a fireman, because my daddy’s a fireman,” was greeted with snickers and sideways looks, because we knew it to be true that none of them would ever be firemen. The tones of their voices had different timbres and pitches. Their consonants weren’t percussive enough to sound like ours, and their vowels were drawn in the wrong places. They spoke like odd music from the Eastern Hemisphere. These exchanges were usually looked upon with the vapid sense of justice that teachers often possess, having to choose their battles and leave the lesser evils be. I remember though, that, even as I laughed, I felt like a villain about it, every bit of the title “Rapscallion.” The retarded kids weren’t quite aware of all the social implications of the conversation, and usually, they were glad for the attention, being mostly scooted along beneath the radar of most of the school.

The Dark Knight presents a character in the form of the Joker who brought up those old unpleasant feelings again. I found myself laughing along with him. Laughter is sometimes quite contagious, even when it should not be. I laughed along with the Joker when he blew up buildings and killed people. I remember a video from a conference at which Rich Mullins and Beaker were teaching, when Rich talked about going to see Die Hard, and Die Hard 2, and recalled how he laughed when Bruce Willis would kill someone and then say something cutely ironic.

I’m not proud of my laughter in moments of cute irony. I don’t think that the God who champions the cause of the poor is laughing when a man staggers because his legs don’t work right. Or maybe he does, but maybe God’s is the laughter that allows the man to be alright with himself. Maybe God’s is the chuckle that keeps me staggering, even with my cripples. There were moments, though, when the laughter culminated in victory.

Kenny was a boy who worked in the cafeteria taking trays and throwing the leftovers in the garbage. When you took your tray, you wouldn’t throw away the scraps yourself, you would hand it to Kenny. I don’t know if he did it because he was told to, or if he did it simply because he thought it would be kindly to do so. I like to think it was the second reason. He wasn’t the most attractive character, with a “figure less than Greek” as the song goes. He had short, curly blond hair and a heavy brow. He was a stocky fellow, and had a wide face that smiled easily. When he mounted the stage my senior year during an in-school awards ceremony at the end of the year, and the principle handed him his diploma, the entire senior class erupted in an unbidden standing ovation. The teachers and the whole student body as well, clambered to their feet in a song of applause. Kenny held the paper above high above his head and shook it in triumph. And God laughed.

Different Cathedrals

2008-07-09T22:17:00.000-07:00

My parents are in Britannia, and the American earth tugs sardonically at my shoes. I would trade places at the drop of a blue hat. I’ve never really seen my native soil, so I don’t suppose that the particular patch of ground I’m planted upon has any claim on me. My roots tend toward the sky. Especially the sky above Atlanta where mom and dad disappeared into the hazy blue in the iron belly of a 747. And the Lord commanded the 747, and it spat them upon dry land, much to my mother’s exhausted relief. My parents went to the United Kingdom because my dad is on tour with The Centurymen, singing first tenor and drawing shallow wistful breaths at the graves of William Cowper, John Newton, and other misfit musical saints. I can see mom and dad having lox and eggs at hotels in the morning, and gallons of tea. At least, that’s how I imagine it. I couldn’t see myself doing any less.

I thought of the span across which my dad and I are flung, now – us two musical pilgrims. It’s really the sort of instance you laugh at over breakfast, because, while he lofts his voice into the stone rotundas of England’s medieval cathedrals, I wander, accordion-clad, down to Sassy Ann’s to play jam band style at an open mic in an old Victorian mansion. While sweet consonance rings in the narthex of some consecrated granite monastery, I politely decline the offer from the nice guitar player smoking something illicit next to me. The truth is, though my head is ringing a little, I had a good time. I’ve never thought of an accordion as a hard rock, jam band instrument before. Strangely enough, neither had anyone else until I showed up with one. I was invited back, though, so that’s a good sign. I was told that the nightcap of the evening is a small acoustic set. Count me in.

When Do You Create?

2008-06-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed Ratatouille, but even more than that, I enjoyed the video about the movie's inspiration. The mini-documentary followed Brad Bird (the Pixar wizard) through bits of the creative process, and also followed their culinary inspiration, Thomas Keller, owner and chef of The French Laundry through a dialogue about his own creative process and inspiration and commitment to work.

One thing that Brad Bird said has stuck with me. The long and short of his point was that you can't force the creative process. You have to pay attention to what puts you in a creative state of mind. What environment makes you quiet enough to listen to the art that is being given you? Do your best to recreate that environment or put yourself in that situation when you work. I suppose that the rest of the process is to do as all the good writers I know say, and to get up every day and write something. Or play something. Or practice - like I need to practice at both the hammered dulcimer and making hollandaise sauce from scratch.

My creativity seems to flow from hearing and perhaps seeing the art of others. When I listen to a new record and it touches me, I feel words spring up from beneath my granite heart. When I write, at least prosaically, I feel that all I must do is write a little to unhinge the door, and then words and ideas will begin to flow. Then there are those painfully inconvenient times when I'm showering or driving. Or selling coffee, as the case may be.

Sigur Ros: Primus et Secretus

2008-06-17T21:29:00.000-07:00

I have, at the suggestions of friends, recently paid quite a bit of attention to the band Sigur Ros. They are an Icelandic group whose music strikes a very organic chord in the psyche and the spirit. My first real experience with them was watching the video for the song Glosoli, which you can watch here on YouTube. I highly, highly recommend it. Watch it few times and really take it in. Another fantastic music video is Svefn-g-englar. These two alone are a redemptive force in the medium of music video, a medium in which I otherwise have little faith.

A few minutes ago, I watched a video for their upcoming album. I was not a little shocked and frustrated when the video appeared to be mostly about a group of people who spend the entirety of the presentation in the nude. I'm not quite certain how I feel about this on the whole, but a few questions and thoughts came to mind.

Where is the line in the sand as far as nudity goes? Where is the mark that says, "This far, and no further"? In Madeleine L'Engle's Penguins and Golden Calves, she talks about the juxtaposition of the human body: how it can either be an icon (that which leads us to meditation on God) or an idol (that which draws our eyes away from the light of his glory). For me, the body itself is a wonder. Just today, as I sat on the bus with people spanning at least four races, I was struck by the wonder of skin. That it should be opaque, that it should function as it does, that it should differ amongst us, is all a grand and wonderful mystery to me. We, as a part of creation, are the words and the paint-strokes of God, a toss-up of color and cut. But skip ahead to the viewing of the body in the intimate expanse of nudity, and I cannot often see it beyond my own idolatry. Perhaps the nature of the male gender to be visual in identification is a strike against me. Perhaps my own faults and disposition are strikes against me. To be honest, I don't know.

A professional photographer friend showed me some photos he had taken. His focus was on the clarity of the image captured. He was proud of his work. He was proud of the fact that you could distinctly see individual water droplets on each model's body. I shifted uncomfortably and tried to appreciate his work and his profession as I watched the stills for magazine covers and beach retreat advertisements pass in front of my eyes. He is much older than I, and has been married to his wife for much longer, but he revealed that he has his difficulties as well in that line of work.

Another dear friend with whom I spoke mentioned the sanctity of the human body. Even the naked body of someone of the same sex, he said, is something which should be treated with a penultimate degree of respect. Call me old-fashioned, or call me what you will, but this is a holy sense of secret-keeping with which I can happily agree. I have done my share of dormitory shower rooms and such, but the idea that everyone's body is sacred warms my soul. The idea of seeing a person naked feels a bit like cutting down an old tree to count its rings.

Sigur Ros has a history of nudging the primal longing for beauty within us. Their music will often brush up against that feeling that brokenness sometimes (perhaps even always) overlays truth. I am quite aware that the European notion of nudity and the American notion of nudity are two different things (though one is drifting slowly towards the other), but I don't know if I can watch that video again. The artist in me is governed by a priest, and the priest by a doorkeeper.

All that said, I think feet are simply amazing, and I like the outlines of metatarsal bones.

The Sound of Many Waters

2008-06-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

Two dear members of the Lord's family got married yesterday, making their mysterious promises to each other, to God, to all of us who desire fidelity and blessing, there in the warm afternoon shadows behind a stone house built before Abraham Lincoln sat on a train to Gettysburg scribbling his small eulogy for the fallen there. There was a great feast, complete with fried chicken, sweet potato casserole, and cheese grits. There was dancing and laughter, and looking back upon it, I am deeply thankful that many of my unbelieving friends and coworkers were present for the holy iconic moment of the making of vows. The stormclouds that had lowered their brows upon the afternoon parted and warmed to the color of ripe peaches, the blush of the bride. It was, in all respects, a perfect evening.

And it was also a perfect coda to the sonata that Kat and I sang along to all week, down in the lee of St. Simon's Island. We were blessed to be counselors at MDA camp for a few days. My camper's name was Jacob, and I seem to remember that name from somewhere, from someone who grappled with the Almighty. A few facts about Jacob: he is, first of all, perfectly ready to smile at the slightest opportunity. He is also further proof to me of the awesome power of meekness, because while I am loathe to create dissonance between myself and those I respect, I am deeply fearful to offend the conscience of this young man, lest I have on my hands the blood of one so innocent. I would be happy to say of myself that I was as disturbed at the prospect of offense toward others, but those whom I wrongly count my enemies - at the very least, by my actions and thoughts - stand as testimonies to my hatred. I am glad for that, because it is telling. It reveals all that the mirror does not show.

But when spending the week with those who are counted as broken, their humanity becomes a clearer looking-glass in which to see my own, much more organic, brokenness. I was glad, after a week of finding myself inadequate to afford my own salvation, to see the grin of a groom, enamored with his bride. I was glad to read from Ecclesiastes and to hear the Songs of Solomon spoken as blessing over the two becoming one. Perhaps, says the wellspring of hope planted in me, perhaps there is a bridegroom waiting to grin at you as well, his bride.

      For love is as strong as death...
           Many waters cannot quench love;
               rivers cannot wash it away...

Quiet Return

2008-06-14T20:59:00.000-07:00

Kat and I have returned from St. Simon's Island, where John Wesley wrestled with the self-same angel that made a limp from Jacob's swagger. I'm doing my best to get back into writing, though I'm feeling the creeping dry whisper of writer's block. Hopefully it will pass soon. More later.