Lee Camp et al

I find it helpful to say that we’re never not cultivating in one way or another. Or as my friends Rob and Kirstin put it: Culture is not optional. Which brings me to the joy of knowing Lee Camp.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, things got weird and weirder for folks in the South who insist on giving precedence to (or try to try to give precedence to) the Red Letter words in the old Bibles. And before I tried my hand at writing a book about it, I was in peculiar need of a community of people peculiarly committed to not losing their minds in this regard. In a footnote in a book by Stanley Hauerwas, I heard tell of a thing called The Ekklesia Project which I tracked down and, from my remote location, joined.

This put me in contact with a kind of rebel alliance in the land of my sojourn. One of my fellow Ekklesia endorsers, it turned out, is a Lipscomb history professor named Richard Goode. The fellowship of thoughtfulness into which Richard would invite me, a fellowship largely made up of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, is a longer story, but this was still 2001, and we’d just agreed to meet for coffee at Café Coco. To my delight, his friend, a New Testament professor, Lee Camp came along.

I hesitate to put it this way, but it strikes me as too funny not to: Lee’s labors—a gathering of consciousness-raising culture-- are like a crystallization of every form of non-embarrassing Christianity Nashville has to offer. He’s a chronicler, a collector, and a curator of available righteousness. It could be a skit, a sermon, an explanation, a tale, or his own performing of a very long but eye-rubbingly apt Bob Dylan song. He wrangles it all together in every event he puts on (together with others) under the Tokens moniker, but he can also be counted to bring the good prophetic word at the most unpopular of times (not that the prophetic word is ever especially popular).

We once sat together at a clemency hearing, hoping that hearts and minds might bend toward justice on behalf of one of our brightest students even as I we were dumbstruck by the pain and rage we witnessed as we listened to the family of the victim in whose murder she was an accomplice. We discussed our feelings at length in the parking lot. And I felt largely spoken for when Lee put it all into words a few days later. He follows up on his on the tensions, the sadness, and the joy he experiences. Tokens is one especially fruitful form of Lee Camp follow up. The beneficiaries of his lifelong following up are, I suspect, countless.

So, it’s happening again tonight in Nashville. This time at the Ryman. It breaks my heart sometimes, but I love the principality that is Nashville. Tonight, I imagine it’ll look and feel just a little more redeemable. Come on out.

Endtroducing Will Marsh

Not too many moons ago, Sarah and Dorothy and Sam and Peter and I knew the thrill of having the singer-songwriter, Will Marsh in the house for a few days. Quietly social, keenly observant, and wittily bemused he was, especially when we put a question to him, but all of this took on a very different hue when he consented to open for Bulb in the basement that is the Bank Gallery. He does that thing—Aimee Mann does it, as does Beck—where he goes vulnerable to the point of self-deprecation to the point of funny to the point of liberating for everyone paying attention. I got some words of explanation out of him later on: “It's a long-held belief of mine that some mode of desperation is at the heart of all great rock music.”

            There was an exceedingly fantastic item on hand, The Berlin Etc. EP, at the time, and I’m very pleased to offer up a signal flare for a full-length situation at this time. Wander over thisaway to spy the lyrical campaign in which he explains himself. And I believe you might find him at least persuasive as we have. Get in on the act. It’s a win for everyone. Cast your vote today.

Simply Tuesday

Lou Reed once observed of Laurie Anderson that, in a better age, people would be building statues in her honor. This marked one of those rare instances in which, it seemed to me, I knew exactly how Brother Lou felt.
The above recording is just about twenty years old, and it represents a time when Sarah was entering what Joni Mitchell refers to as the star-maker machinery behind the popular songs. She didn't stay there for long, but we still run into people who've paid her heed over the years and said so. One such person is Emily P. Freeman whose blog Chatting At the Sky is drawn from Sarah's song "Tuesday." Today marks the release of her latest, Simply Tuesday, and it seemed fitting to celebrate it accordingly.
Sarah, in the meantime, is still at it with all manner of work that affords delight--much of it completely free--yonder over here. Feel free to take a gander.
And deep thanks, Emily, for noticing.

We Built This City On Rock and Roll

Dear Everyone.
This is a meandering word, a whisper campaign, and a hodge-podge of announcements intended to catch up all interested parties in various goings-on especially if you're one for whom Facebook and Twitter and Instagram are forms of Antichrist.
To begin, I have a new book set to appear early next year. You're looking at the cover. As was the case with the previous three, it's possible that it might rearrange the mental furniture of many a reader. I'm hoping it will.
Dorothy and I also journeyed to Bonnaroo together and chronicled the experience. Our witness can be received here. This particular piece can be meaningfully read alongside my thoughts on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly and a Tom Waits' song on Father's Day.
While I have your attention, I invite you to take in this meditation which includes one of my most treasured stories and a recent attempt to bring Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Case, and Doctor Stephen Strange into conversation with one another.
And...I believe that's it for now.
Thank you for your time and attention.

Reality Scarecrows

Take stock of those around you and you will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it with a certain fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ideas are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.

José Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses 

Most Biblical Question Ever Posed By Sitting President of These United States

"Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law?"
This strikes me as the most righteous (biblical, prophetic, Jewish, Christian, evangelical, choose your own affirming adjective) question ever posed by a sitting POTUS. I welcome other nominations. Thank you, John Lamb, for calling it to my attention. 

You Can't Step In the Same Art Twice

Like a wise child whose imagination has somehow survived the pressure of popular conceptions of adulthood, Andy Harding is one of those rare people who's uniquely committed to devoting his adult energy to art, to feeling fascinated and doing something about it. What's more, he knows how to talk about what he's up to, how to invite people in, and how to keep us laughing even as we try to see the world more truly and soberly and beautifully, which is to say, artfully. He's at it this weekend at the Tinney, and you'll be degrading your own genius if you can go but don't. Here's the word on the amazing man's latest The Cygnus Loop (Cygnus, incidentally, is a northern constellation chilling out along the Milky Way. It's all Latinized Greek for Swan):
Andy Harding's work engages in a dialogue between materials and concepts. His process entails drawing, coloring, cutting, shaping, and layering disparate materials into harmonious compositions to explore the dynamic cycle of order and entropy that bears witness to both the emergence of form and its dissolution in the multifaceted processes that make up the natural world. Harding's finished pieces call to mind scientific diagrams, natural forms, and even abstracted figures in their wriggling, writhing shapes. Living beings, materials, ideas, and forces all occupy distinct positions in the grand web of relations, yet nothing is static. In essence, this work is a reflection or a meditation on both the interrelatedness and the unique singularity of all things.

Celebrating Our John Sharp

Today at Centennial Park, friends and family will gather to celebrate the life, the work, and the world-expanding neighborliness of my cousin, John Sharp. In all that he was up to, John schooled everyone and anyone nearby in the work of being righteous stewards of our own enthusiasms. Whether he was describing food, a sound, Dungeons and Dragons, James Blish, a film, a musician, or a neighborhood, he was always inviting us—challenging us--to love people, pleasure, and place more than we feel we’re allowed to under the tyranny of what’s “normal.” If there arose a convention or custom that stands in the way of someone professing or getting animated about what they’re into, John would calmly destroy it with wit and magnanimity. Even his intellectual analysis—and I can’t think of anyone more positively intellectual than John—was a form of love. A few weeks ago, as he both celebrated and critiqued the things that happen on Facebook, he blurted out a quip that betrayed his effortless range: “I wanted George Jetson and I got George Orwell!” As ever, he was looking hard for anything that might aid or obstruct the work of people being good to each other. And in a whirlwind of curation involving books, music, toys, and ideas, he was hell-bent on keeping the things he loved in circulation AS GIFTS. He knew (and artfully demonstrated) that this is how the work of waking up to ourselves gets done. His life was a feat of attentiveness. May we live up to the gift he insisted on being in all he was up to. Love, prayers, gratefulness, and telepathic good vibrations to Terry Sharp, Judith Sharp, and Sarah Sharp Reynierson. Thank you for showing us what it’s all about, John. We miss you badly.

The Infinite Everywhere Alive

Folks who follow these matters have been waiting for Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer for a very long time. Way back in the nineties, he spied within Bonhoeffer’s witness a whole new way of conceiving the self: “The new being emerges in and out of togetherness…Jesus Christ as life together activates the living consciousness of the other as neighbor” (Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of Theology). From there, as teacher, memoirist, and historian, Marsh took a long and fruitful detour into America’s Civil Rights era, interviewing, recording oral histories, and chronicling a past that isn’t at all dead in God’s Long Summer, The LastDays: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South, and TheBeloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil RightsMovement to Today. Beloved community, the fact of it, the vision of the thing, and the way it's always before us as a possibility is also named in his notion of LivedTheology, a project he exemplifies and enables and seeks to cultivate in others. It’s a vision of holistic gospel which makes Marsh the kind of person who would see a live connection at work where others see different compartments, issues, isms, and fields of study.

Take for example the spirit that moved community organizer John Perkins to return to live and minister in Mississippi in 1960 even when his brother, a decorated WWII war veteran, had been murdered by a police officer there 13 years before, dying in his arms as his uncle searched in vain for a hospital that would treat African Americans. Where does this spirit connect to the motivations behind Will Campbell’s ministry to imprisoned Klansmen or Bonhoeffer’s decision to return to Nazi Germany? Read Charles Marsh to find out.

I’ll mention too that Marsh is the kind of person who would take the time to introduce Jon Foreman to John Perkins to see what would come of it. What comes of it is this sort of thing.

So….I drop all of this on you to celebrate the arrival of Strange Glory (the title of this post comes from a phrase on pg. 13) AND to notify all Nashvillians that Charles is among us tonight (Thursday 6:30) at Parnassus Books. Come on out and be delighted. 

Wishing and Hoping

Having written a bunch of things in pencil in a library book while listening to Jaco Hamman speak at Belmont this morning, it occurred to me that I could transcribe what I wanted to while erasing away and simultaneously putting it all in a post. Here goes.

“Destroy the mental representations you carry about others,” he advised. He also asked for a show of hands of anyone who’s dating anybody or hoping to. This counsel is for everyone in every kind of relationship. You’ll have to regularly give up what you knew (or thought you knew) of the person you mean to love. Otherwise you’re relating to an image or an impression instead of regularly taking in the fact of a living person in process, well worthy of love.

And then a lengthy one from Abraham Heschel’s The Prophets: “What impairs our sight are habits of seeing as well as the mental concomitants of seeing. Our sight is suffused with knowing, instead of feeling painfully the lack of knowing what we see. The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know.”

The possibility of knowing what we see (instead of merely seeing what we know) and remaining perpetually open to the fact that we don’t yet know what we’re looking at in a person, a painting, a story; that there’s always more to be revealed (seeing and thinking apocalyptically) is primarily accessed through…wait for it…hope which Jaco very helpfully contrasts with wishing. “Wishing knows exactly what it wants.” Wishing is what many of us are up to, habitually, most of the time, but hope is more radically alive to the bigger, unguessed picture, the unexpectedly true and beautiful ever around the corner, to whatever might awaken us to ourselves and each other, undoing our prematurely made-up minds. When we’re hopeful, we’re eager to repent of our woefully limited imaginations when it comes to other people and their infinite preciousness, complexity, and richness. All of this is a central theme—I’m guessing—in his book A Play-Full Life: Slowing Down, & Seeking Peace, which I’m about to bust open.

He ended with is favorite proverb. It’s African: “My friends who love me grow on me like moss.” He noted how moss has been valued for its healing properties by cultures throughout the world and contrasted this saying with a more popular one: “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” With all due respect to Brothers Jagger & Richards, he challenged us to eschew the practice of rolling stones, in spite of its predominance in our speed-and-mobility crazy culture, and consider the virtues of slower, steadier, more deliberate relationships marked by hope and expectation.

Hope everybody has an enriching weekend.

jdd