The Wise Trip On Grace

It occurred to me that a good number of people with whom we hang these days might not know this side of my...What do they it..Better half. If you can pull yourself away from the fact of the devastatingly charming woman for a moment, the song is also really something. All seamless I reckon.
Happy Bloomsday,
jdd
p.s. One can apparently acquire a crisper version on ITunes.

Language will cease.

My brother Joel is reading 1st Corinthians 13 during my cousin's wedding this evening (Congratulations Susan and Cliff!). The power of cliche, Joel observed, is devastating. And what I believe he meant is the way we shrink-wrap the passage to fit our greeting-card-sized, sentimental sensibilities (not that there's anything wrong with greeting cards). Joel says 1st Corinthians 13 is, among other things, a political critique, a critique that gets bypassed whenever we reduce Paul's privileging of real, live, doable love to something that 'sposed to happen in the sweet by and by. "Language will cease," isn't strictly "Just you wait." It's a relativizing of all our noisy gong/clanging symbol goings-on right now. Our carrying on over politics and doctrines and what we're mad about, when it's bereft of love, really is even now exactly nothing. And when people can't sense love in what we're going on about (e-mails, blogs, writings, opinionating), it really isn't going to get through. It might be full of sound and fury and sincerity but it signifies nothing. Joel sealed the deal (rather casually over coffee while the boys stared at Cartoon Network) when he noted that some e-mails are filed under "noisy gong" the moment he sees their subject heading. The scatter-shot, mass e-mails, I should clarify on his behalf, not when anyone's actually talking to him. Anyway, the idea that Paul was writing a letter to particular people in danger of forgetting what prophesying, pontificating, and prattling on are for (what people are are for) hit me anew today. Wanted to make a record.
A jarringly redemptive next week to everyone.

Song and Dance Man

This probably isn't the best way to introduce the uninitiated to Buddy Greene, but it is does ope the curtain a little. Sarah and I passed a few days in Texas talking Bible and Dylan and Shakespeare and John Hartford and sharing songs with him and the gathered at an amazing place called Laity Lodge. A prevailing topic: What does Big Rock Candy Mountain have to do with God's economy? That sort of thing. Such a rich, invigorating time. Shout-outs to Buddy and Vicki and Kenny and Laura and Stephen and Amy and all the assembled heartbeats.

"Difficult-To-Say-In-Words Things"

I like him so much...I don't always have the words for why exactly...And maybe this is why...Bless him.

"a word is elegy to what it signifies"

Robert Hass has mostly made it into my head by way of his work with Czeslaw Milosz, but I'm fast becoming an enthusiast of the fellow apart from all that. Here's the one that's getting to me lately...say "blackberry" three times.

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

© 1987 Robert Hass

The Impression You Sell

Sarah and Steve Mason and I were celebrating Fun Boy Three's "Our Lips Are Sealed" last night and working our way over to the therapeutic-charismatic powers of Tears for Fears when it was remarked, "80's music...It's all there." I'm feeling the resonance of many a witness lately, and this one came to me on the Ipod today. Please join me in my exploration of this chronically, underestimated poetic-prophetic resource (I initially serendipitously misheard the opening line as "The deception we're TAUGHT":

The Fixx...One Thing Leads to Another

The deception with tact
Just what are you trying to say
You've got a blank face, which irritates
Communicate, pull out your party piece
You see dimensions in two
State your case with black or white
But when one little cross
Leads to shots, grit your teeth
You run for cover so discreet
Why don't they

Do what they say, say what you mean
Oh well, one thing leads to another
You told me something wrong
I know I listen too long
But then one thing leads to another

The impression that you sell
Passes in and out like a scent
But the long face that you see
Comes from living close to your fears
If this is up, then I'm up
But you're running out of sight
You've seen your name on the walls
And when one little bump
Leads to shock miss a beat
You run for cover and there's heat
Why don't they

Do what they say, say what they mean
One thing leads to another
You told me something wrong
I know I listen too long
But then one thing leads to another
Yeah, yeah, yeah

One thing leads to another

Then it's easy to believe
Somebody's been lying to me
But when the wrong word goes in the right ear
I know you've been lying to me
It's getting rough, off the cuff
I've got to say enough's enough
Bigger the harder he falls
But when the wrong antidote
Is like a bulge on the throat
You run for cover in the heat
Why don't they

Do what they say, say what they mean
One thing leads to another
You told me something wrong
I know I listen too long
But then one thing leads to another
Yeah, yeah

One thing leads to another...

The Gifted...

What could be more Rock and Roll than the deconstruction of Rock and Roll.
Is this Rock and Roll?

Post-Celebrity Age

The unflashiness of the thing, to my mind, ups the volume of its credibility feeling and it gets me wondering if we're entering a time when more and more people are less and less wowed by celebrity, a time when famous people are expected to come to us more notably unplugged and on the level. It's as if he's apologizing for the idea that his two-cents might have an impact. Anyway, Joe Versus the Volcano ROCKED.

Storytelling Belongs to the People

Gathered Intelligence. I wonder how it is (or why it is) that I feel inclined to send a dollar even though I don't know what the story-line is. Maybe it's because I think I'd like all these people. They remind me of my friends. Or something. Here comes everybody.

Bring It

Infectious.

T-Bone Burnett on Being There

What I wanted to say...

Cheik Abdelbassit

I wanted to throw this into the Qur'an business.
This video of tajwid (rendering beautiful) the recitation that is the Qur'an seemed appropriate to the question of whether or not we're receiving a text when it has yet to be, as the expression goes, music to our ears. ALSO, shout outs to Stephen Archer (who jumped into the conversation in the original Qur'an post). I can't think of him without recalling our common interest in Peter Gabriel's Real World label maybe 15 years ago and his love for Sam Phillips' song "The Private Storm" which (I think) resonates with some of the issues discussed. I'd post the song if I could. Here are the lyrics in the glorious meantime:
we lock the hurricane indoors
looking for shelter, we deny and ignore
afraid that our words bring clouds we talk in code
the thunder or cruel perfection covers love
and we're cold

the private storm
and our souls are worn from the tears
the private storm
and it rages on through the years

no warning the ground pulls out from underneath
we tiptoe through air until we see the blood on their teeth

time doesn't heal, the scars turn into wounds
as we walk lightly silence screams in the storm

Southern Pinwheel Galaxy

Responding to the Qur'an

This might be of limited interest to most, but I done read the Qur'an and even wrote out questions and comments for the course I'm taking...Here's what I had to say/ask/wonder. I reserve the right to change my mind concerning all of it. Let's call this a field report:

Surah 2: How can it be that it can’t be doubted? (2) Only the sinners will doubt and get it wrong. (26) I begin to wonder if this is one of many instances (others unrecorded and unremembered) of a group of people trying to claim the continuity that other, more powerful and privileged communities of Jews and Christians (self-described anyway) wanted to keep to themselves. (120) Maybe the supposed outsiders are attempting their own form of reform from without and within. (25) Those who mislead and get misled are a constant theme and moving target. An anxiety of continuity persists throughout

Surah 3: Maybe the questions have to change. It isn’t who’s Jewish or Christian. It’s who’s submitting to God. Abraham, in this sense, is Muslim. (67-68) And maybe the revelation (and who’s submitting to it) is an ongoingly open question. (70-71). Given the controversies that already beset the communities (Jewish and Christian) which claim continuity with Abraham, there’s something almost comically tragic in the the hope for “An equitable word between us” (64). Is “Bear witness that we are Muslims” best translated, “Bear witness that we too are among those who are actively submitting to God?” Might submission (Islam) have been lowercase (islam)? (85) Beware those who debar “from the path.” (99) God knows what you’re doing.

Surah 4: I’d always heard that Augustine gave us this business of flesh regenerating in Hell for the purpose of being burnt off again. It’s interesting to see that tradition continuing here. (56)

Surah 5: How does one sell a revelation? (44) The notion of “increasing in arrogance and unbelief” (so don’t pity them) brings to mind the hardening of Pharoah’s heart which always struck me as horribly unfair. And yet, the idea of an oppressed minority daring to conclude that even the spirit and the personal volition of tyrants is somehow within the purposes of an all-redeeming and just God (in the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an) doesn’t leave me unmoved.

Surah 6: Every grain and every leaf and all manner of goings-on recorded “in a Clear Book.” (59) Should this be distinguished from the Qur’an? Is this the “Mother of the Book?”

Surah 7: “Remember how He made you successors after the people of Noah.” (69) This is especially worthy of note in view of the possibility that Muhammad and his community were being forcibly (or perhaps non-negotiably) deprived of a sense of succession among “the People of the Book.” “Wait then until Allah judges between us; for He is the Best of judges.” (87) Delayed judgment of this sort (let God sort out the dogma, seriously), when held to, might prevent many a violent quandary. Very pleased to see a witness to it here.


Surah 8: “Allah stands between a man and his heart” (24) is an awfully evocative principle in regard to the community’s stand-off with other traditions (a “Search your heart to discern justice between us!”). We all scheme away but “Allah is the Best of schemers.” (30) In view of Allah, may our own schemings be forever relativized. I like how the fifth of the booty reserved for Allah seems to be synonymously reserved for the orphan and (a personal favorite) the wayfarer. (41)

Surah 9: Would this be the only appearance of “Son of God” status being attributed to Ezrah? (30) Interesting to note the critical apparatus being applied retroactively to “the statement of unbelievers of yore” (false witness?) now emulated by contemporaries. Interesting too to imagine people awaiting with trepidation the “breaking news” of Muhammad’s latest surah. (64) Did Muhammad claim to occupy a “No Spin Zone?” “Go on mocking,” because the truth will out!

Surah 10: “I have dwelt in your midst a lifetime before it [the surah].” (16) Is this the speech of “the Clear Book?” A generalized revelation always available (before and after the Qur’an) to anyone with an ear to hear and an eye to see? “Thus We expound Our Revelations to people who reflect.” (24) Being on the lookout for revelation is tantamount to being a person of critical reflection. The ethical imperative of wondering why. The religious text as a feat of attentiveness. Have a go at your own. See what you can do you so-called truth-tellers. (38) There are “signs for a people who listen.” (67)

Surah 11: Come up with “ten-forged surahs like it, and call upon whomever you can, apart from Allah, if you are truthful.” (13) Why can’t (or shouldn’t) someone else call upon Allah too in their compostion? Is there a space for equal- opportunity attempted revelation? Might humility of conception (“God wants the following as far as I can tell.”) be an entrance fee to the witness box?

Surah 12: Only the “unbelieving people” despair “of “Allah’s mercy.” (87) I’d prefer that despair not be an evil in itself. I’d like to see a Qur’anic equivalent to some of the darker Psalms and the “Why hast thou forsaken me?” plea.

Surah 13: No power of signs except by “Allah’s Permission,” and “every age has its own Book.” (38) Wow. Gospel of pluralism? “With Him is the Mother of the Book.” (39) I wonder if there’s something to work with here.

Surah 14: Something haunting about the haste, the empty gazes, and the vacant hearts of the damned. (43) Zombie films come to mind.

Surah 15: This bit on Satan (39) as well as the stuff about Satan refusing to bow before the creation of Adam seems very reminiscent of Miltonic cosmology. Muhammad as “the plain warner” (89) also brings to mind the possibility that the prophet’s self-understanding might have undergone undue elevation in what comes to us of the transmission. “Plain warner” sounds like a humbler beginning perhaps than divine dictaphone.

Surah 16: Are there pre-Qur’anic accounts of “sperm drop” (4) and blood clot origins?

Surah 17: Not sure what to make of the “hidden curtain” manifested when Muhammad recites. (45) And I confess I think of Joseph Smith’s eye-glasses (Urim and Thummim?). Does this mean that only the “true believers” get to say what the recitation was? Is somebody getting cut off here? “Falsehood is ever perishing.” (81) Is anyone with an honest question or a shadow of doubt merely “ungrateful?” (89) Moses: “I think that you, Pharoah, are doomed.” (102) Nicely spoken. The old plot is thickened.

Surah 18: I’m confused as to what’s going on with the people in the cave (and their 309 years of lingering there). (25) Is this a way of looping around past Mosaic tradition (going further back). And the figure of Khidr (a Tom Bombadil-type, a phantom stranger) seems to be an outweirding of the Jews. You can’t handle the truth! (75) I sure didn’t know that Alexander the Great made an appearance. (83-85) He too is incorporated into the good pleasure of Allah.

Surah 19: Something interesting about the “the form of a well-shaped human being” (17) and the mention (which I wouldn’t have expected) of Mary’s labor pains (23). Is Jesus referring to the Mother of the Book or his own book out of which it was somehow derived? (30) What’s the book of Idris? (56)

Surah 20: Is Moses referring to the Clear Book/Mother Book? (52)

Surah 21: We didn’t create the heavens and the earth in sport (later, in jest). There’s something appealing about this. And while we’re at it what’s with all the royal We’s? (16) “They fell apart into factions; but they will all return unto Us.” (93) I wonder if this might be read in a universalist sense?

Surah 22: Leave to the particular nations their own “sacred rite” (67) which We gave them. Bring on the pluralism.

Surah 23: And yet, there’s this notion that the rites were reduced “to mere tales” because these nations weren’t sufficiently just or reverent. (44) Myths became (or were rendered) merely mythological. Interesting.

Surah 24: I wonder if verse 33 is a unique word of compassion for rape victims.

Surah 26: Maybe the talk of the perverse poets and their aimless wanderings is an attempt to make strong distinctions between those who presume to take down recitations (224-226). The borders are historically fuzzy. Poets, pilgrims, and unlettered prophets all.

Surah 27: I hadn’t heard that the Qur’an shared with the Hebrew Bible such instances of interspecies dialogue (18 and 22-25).

Surah 28: I’m receiving a sense of what seems to be the Qur’an’s preferential option for “the downtrodden in the land.” (5) I especially like the bit about Moses being warned about becoming yet another tyrant in a very long line. (19)

Surah 29: “Taste now what you used to do,” (55) strikes me as interestingly purgatorial.

Surah 30: Something very compelling in the Qur’anic economy’s delegitimizing of usury and elevation of alms as the real multiplication. (39)

Surah 32: “To warn a people to whom no warner came before.” (3) I think again of the deal-breakers between Jews, Christians, and emerging Muslims and wonder how it all might have gone down differently. Were the People of the Book to whom Muhammad was exposed too blatantly hypocritical? Could he see no continuity in their claims of continuity? Did he feel called to cobble together his own?

Surah 34: If Muhammad’s Lord “hurls down truth,” (48) could this be in keeping with the generalize revelation of Surah 10. Is revelation hurling down on the attentive everywhere?

Surah 35: The false gods aren’t even in possession of “a date’s crust.” (13) Nice.

Surah 36: “To warn a people, whose fathers were not warned and so they are heedless.” (6) Again, where to find the righteousness? “Forgiveness and a generous wage” (11) Excellent antidote to spiritualizing. “Master Register” (12) There’s that that meta-text again.

Surah 37: Things take a turn for the interplanetary (6-7). Protection from extra-terrestrial invasion? Forsake the gods for a poet possessed?!? (36) What else is there? Interesting elaboration of the Abraham/Isaac exchange (“I have seen in sleep that I am slaughtering you” 103). The costliness of being counted among the steadfast.

Surah 38: I’m puzzled by the account of Solomon getting the message when he finds a dead body on his throne. (34) Did They make an offer he couldn’t refuse? Allah as the chief of schemers takes on a new meaning when Satn says “By Your glory, I will seduce them all.” (82) Excepting, of course, the sincere servants.

Surah 39: A Book “insistent and corroboratory.” (23) Is this a summons to investigative criticism.

Surah 40: “That is how Allah places a seal on the heart of every arrogant bully.” (35) The Qur’an, it seems to me, is an anti-bully document.

Surah 41: I like this business (the imagery anyway) of people’s skins bearing witness against them. (20-22)

Surah 43: “What if I were to bring you a more certain guidance than what you found your fathers upon?” (24) I find it interesting to note that he isn’t calling the “fathers” liars. He’s suggesting that his hearers found “their fathers” on something less certain than what he (the Prophet) proclaims. The possibility of idolatry (or reification) cuts in myriad ways. I think of Jesus’ “You have heard it said…But I say to you.”

Surah 45: “This is an illumination.” (20) With all appropriate qualifications, I think I can probably affirm as much.

Surah 49: Allah knows all about your so-called religions. (16) The question: Are you submitting to Allah now?

Surah 50: Allah is closer to man than his own jugular and knows all about his inner insinuations and false religiosities (16). What the prophet brings is for anyone with a mind open to a witness (37).

Surah 51: Is there pre-Qur’anic material on ‘Ad and Thamud? (41-43) Does this refer to events in Muhammad’s life?

Surah 52: More assertions of inimitability. (34)


Surah 53: “Only a Revelation being revealed” (4). Interestingly not lofty or heavy-handed.

Surah 55: I am anxious to read a commentary on this one.

Surah 56: I’ve known the first fashioning if only I would remember? Interesting. Have I really seen what I’m tilling? Good question. Who’s doing the sowing? (62-64) Am I lying to myself as I read the discourse? (81) Dang.

Surah 57: Everything that happens is “in a Book, before We create it.” An easy matter for Allah. Color me pleasantly puzzled. (22) The People of the Book need a renewed reverence for all that is and isn’t in their (or what they take to be their) books. (29)

Surah 58: Allah is witness. (6)

Surah 59: Pity the poor immigrants. They are the truthful ones. (8)

Surah 63: Word of hypocritical speakers as “propped-up wooden logs” is a nice image. (4)

Surah 65: “You do not know, Allah may perhaps bring about something new after that.” (1) I wonder if this implies that “the bounds of Allah” might be further elaborated upon beyond what Muhammad is receiving. Maybe this is only talking about babies.

Surah 67: The challenge to fix my gaze upon creation repeatedly to see if I might discern a crack or two is rather cool. (1-2)

Surah 68: Oh God, let me not be mad.

Surah 71: In the Noah account, drowning in water followed by burning in fire is a strange image. I’m noting too Noah’s personal prayer for the destruction of unbelievers. (25-26)

Surah 73: What’s up with the wrapping? (1)

Surah 74: The problematizing of prayer bereft of charity toward the destitute is good to see. (43-44)

Surah 75: I wonder if this is spoken in response to disgruntled members of the community who’ve come to expect a more immediate manifestation of resurrection. I wonder if the deferral of the Day of Decision calls into question to their minds, Muhammad’s legitimacy.

Surah 81: This is just a reminder for those of you who want moral reform, but you can’t want it unless Allah wants you to want it. Deafening rhetoric indeed.

Surah 83: Is the Underworld a book inscribed? (8-9) The Higher World too? (19-20)

Surah 88: Muhammad remembers (or is made to remember) that he is a mere exhorter (not called to dominate). (21-22)

Surah 90: Someone sees you squandering when you’re squandering. Always.

Surah 91: I recall the business with the she-camel appearing earlier on. (13-14)

Surah 95: Do I deny the righteous judgment? Am I denying it now?

Surah 50: The “Night of Power” is, I take it, the occasion of the descent of the recitation. (1-4) Is it one evening of revelation or does it refer to a number of them?

Surah 99: An atom’s weight of good will redeem. An atom’s weight of evil will bring reckoning. Wow.

Surah 100: The information comes.

Surah 107: Sounds about right to me.

Surah 114: “The slinking whisperer.” Well-rendered

Old Country, Where Art Thou?

I don't really know where to begin. It expands the sphere of sanity if we let it. And I worry (ever since Todd Greene put it this way in conversation) that the haste with which viewers and reviewers and organizations praise it might mean that we have yet to receive the wisdom of its vision. Are we thinking through the Why's and the How's of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's wise posture? Do we sense the power and the glory of his unsuccess? Will we let the film bear witness to what's going on?
I have a lot of Buddhism, James Lawson, Radiohead, _The Road_, Bulb's _Digital_, deconstruction, and Mu Wing to blog about, but I also have a book to finish. The kids are a delight. Sarah's music is making its way into many a mailbox (and she's amped over all the orders). Biking to Vanderbilt, partaking of its library, and having excellent conversation with students and faculty is a whole lot of fun.My sister, Elizabeth, is blogging beautifully. And thanks to Luther Blissett's _Q_, I'm going nuts for the Anabaptists again.
I suppose this is me saying, "More to come..." before the year ends.
I hope everyone's Christman has been weird and spacious an redemptive and inspiring.

Stand by the jams,
jdd

All Manner of Things Will Be Salvaged

“Resurrection is verified where rebellion against the demonic thrives."
William Stringfellow

I've been meaning to post something on Harmon Wray for a long time. He died in July, and the notes I took during the memorial service have been sitting around awaiting blog treatment ever since. An amazing, inspiring man I'd like to emulate. The lively, self-deprecating seriousness with which he took the teachings of Jesus (specifically in his friendships with and advocacy of individuals living within the prison system) was an inspiration (and maybe a bit of a scandal) to the people who knew him and knew of him. A deeply irreverent man, Harmon studied, practiced, and embodied a determined (and often amused) irreverence toward any notion, idea, or system which failed to practice appropriate reverence toward human beings. But he had a strong sense of APPROPRIATE reverence. You could feel it when you were around him.
Harmon's way of seeing things was narrated and celebrated during the memorial service in a creed my friend Ray Waddle once heard him intone: “I don’t believe God gives up on anyone, and neither should we.” Throughout the service, in story after story, Harmon’s friendship and hospitality to those considered beyond the pale (grounded in his faith in a God whose redeeming love is, unrelenting, indiscriminate, and without end) was recounted. Richard Goode, a history professor at Lipscomb (and another good friend), spoke of Harmon’s articulation of the possibilities of Restorative Justice and his work at the Riverbend Maximum Security Prison where, since 2003, he led a project whereby faculty, from Vanderbilt and elsewhere, conducted classes comprised of divinity school students and inmates. By Richard’s account, Harmon’s ministry with and to the inmates was a commitment to “the socially exiled and disinherited.” And as Richard shared what Harmon’s friends from Riverbend had to say about him, the shape of his life began to fit almost seamlessly within a vision of the eschaton that overturns many a reigning hierarchy, what Miroslav Volf has called, “the final social reconciliation." In view of and in faithful testimony concerning such visions, Harmon often observed aloud to the inmates that they were his church.
The week before Harmon’s death, Dean Shoemaker, a Riverbend inmate, told Richard that, upon arriving there, his cellmate had advised him to become acquainted with Harmon at the first available opportunity. While Shoemaker hadn’t been especially interested in furthering his education, he attended Harmon’s class anyway and ended up engaging him in a one-on-one conversation. As Harmon asked him questions, Shoemaker made mention of the fact that both of his parents had died and casually noted that, from here on out, there was no one left who loved him.
At this point in the story, Richard looked at the congregation and said, “We all know what Harmon said in response.” Without hesitation, Harmon said, “Well I love you.” And for the first time since he’d been incarcerated, Dean Shoemaker broke down in tears.
Richard remarked that exchanges like these, as everyone knew, characterize Harmon’s life, and, in the retelling, I believe the exchange was made to serve as a call to witnessing practice, to enact and facilitate such redeeming occasions, to remain alive to them even beyond the redeeming and witnessing occasion that was the service itself. As it was between Shoemaker and Wray, it could and must be for everyone assembled at the service. An opening has occurred, and, within it, the faithful will locate themselves. Or as Jurgen Moltmann puts it: "What was impossible before will then become possible. Energies will awaken which before were constricted. A future will be opened which was hitherto closed and inaccessible. Over against the reality of the visible world awaken the possibilities of change for that world, and its transformation into the kingdom of God."
In some sense, the service questioned, as Harmon often did, the audience’s sense of decorum. And it problematized the ways of revering (perhaps the false reverence) that characterize much ceremony. Harmon held everything up to a kind of redemptive (and redeeming) skepticism, and his seeming irreverence was, paradoxically, a deeper valuing of the human (all humans), a deeper sense of the tragic, than I’ve received from almost anyone I’ve ever known. He was even skeptical of his own sense of reverence (lest it mistake itself for practice). In light of his eschatology, he wouldn’t credit much. It all remained tentative. It made him a lot of fun to talk to (or a pain in the neck.
When Rev. Ken Carder returned to the podium, he spoke in a more self-consciously bemused fashion about the tension involved in taking seriously, as a witness, a person like Harmon. He spoke of the present world and the coming world and the fact that the world to come is forever impinging upon this one. Carder noted that we’ve all made compromises with this present world, and he said that, when it comes to the compromises he’s made with this world, nobody reminded him of them more than Harmon did. He noted the difficulties Harmon had in finding funding for his work in restorative justice and how his lack of certain credentials only added to the difficulties. And he emphasized that these issues were not Harmon’s fault, but merely further instances of the resistance Harmon met when he tried, as a faithful witness, to bring God’s world into this one. Carder’s words were met with deafening applause when he proclaimed that the world Harmon sought to represent will prevail. And the congregation was led in a prayer of thanksgiving for Harmon as a sign of the astonishing grace of God, followed by a prayer that God would disturb our despair even now that we might better follow, with renewed invigoration, Harmon’s example.
The service was not without an occasional sense of otherworldly consolation. There was talk of Harmon hearing, at the moment of the memorial, a voice saying, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” But in a fashion a-typical for many memorial services, even this was powerfully grounded in the hope of Harmon’s practice, a practice compelled by the notion of life lived before death on earth as it is in heaven. In keeping with the evangelical revolution he brought to his relationships, the service left its attendees with the sense that the world is more full of redemptive possibility than we have yet imagined.

on their side

We're following this one in hope and prayer and (I want to say) a sense of solidarity. But as soon as the words are out I feel very much like a mere armchair theoretician of nonviolence. Color me moved and (to whatever extent I can manage it) mindful. And may we all be ennobled by their way, not unrelated to Jesus' way, of warring on terror.

Making Believe

The fine folks at Paste (Signs of Life or Just the Power to Charm?) put up my review of Emmylou's boxed set. I was very pleased with it (the collection and the opportunity to put the words down). Sorry to say I'm still having trouble with the linkage, but it's immediately down to your right a little bit (under the attractive Amazon portals). I call it "Making Believe."
Hope everybody out there's having a pleasant weekend.

lyricism of protest

A wee bit overdue, Sarah plays the Greenbelt festival with Billy Bragg and Over the Rhine and drops three (count 'em three) EP's. I find them amazing and crucial (clearly) and anyone who wanders over to sarahmasen.com (or the myspace) can hear and (ahem) buy. Thanks to Tony and Todd (Sarah's Bulb partners alongside Randall) and Chris Leonard and Brad Ritter and Jon Foreman. And especial thanks to Beth Gilmore (the other Goose Girl guru). I penned a splanation on Goose Girl matters below. On a quick personal note, it's a thrill to bike over the 21st ave pedestrian bridge to Vanderbilt as if I have business there on a near-daily basis.

For Those About To Honk
Local artists Beth Gilmore and Sarah Masen Dark occupy the lively intersection where artistry, motherhood, and fairy tales collide. In an attempt at inspiration and crazy prevention, they regularly meet together (with five children between them) and share reading, music, images and various gleanings from their sporadic attempts at intelligence gathering. Noteworthy sparks flew when Beth appeared with a silk screen she cobbled together from a photographic image of a woman taken on the grounds of the Belmont mansion in the late 19th century. In a fit of inspiration, she'd given the woman a beak and raced to see Sarah with an account of the tale of the goose girl.
As the story goes, the goose girl starts out as a princess on her way to be married to the prince of another land. Her mother had arranged it all, sending her packed-up with a maidservant in tow, and the goose girl was expected to perform her duty without much thought. A great distance from her home, her maidservant suddenly threatens to murder her where she stands if she doesn't hand over her clothes (the clothes literally make the princess), and swear that she’ll never tell anyone she was once a princess. Ever unsure of herself, the princess complies and accepts the whole incident as fate.
As the years pass, she ends up under the employ of the prince (who’s now the king) as a keeper of geese. Her work partner, the goose boy, is moved by her beauty, and when she refuses his advances, he issues a complaint about her to the king. The king demands that she give an account of herself, and she insists that she’s sworn to secrecy. She also observes that he wouldn’t believe her story if she told it. At this, he orders her into the kitchen and tells her to tell it (her story) to the stove. She complies, and the king secretly listens on the other side of the wall. Moved and convinced, the king restores her, receives her, and all manner of things are gradually made well.
“Accidental zen training!” Sarah decrees upon hearing the story. And the two begin an ongoing conversation about the goose business women tend to go through. The unwillingness to resist or speak against the chambermaid’s violent ambition is compared to the sound of settling, and they consider the often unarticulated, but weighty expectation women live with and under that they have to make do; they have to make something out of nothing; they have to turn dung to gold. “Women’s work is alchemy,” Beth observes.
And with this line, Sarah thanks Beth for vouchsafing a title for a recent EP, a collection of songs that fit serendipitously within the goose girl theme. Hereby invigorated, Beth arrives a few days later with a title of her own: “Information Migration.” The goose girl is now made manifest, for a time, in the form of one’s and zeroes. A plan is hatched.
Needless to say, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Beth continued to honk away, and Sarah came up with more EP’s (“History of Lights and Shadows” and “Magic That Works”) with handcrafted covers which, like snowflakes, never repeat themselves. Beth will walk willing minds through goose girl culture and Sarah will perform her songs for all interested parties in the downstairs space of Downtown Presbterian Church this Saturday (August 11th) from 6 to 8pm. Appropriately, the gold spun by nashville’s goosegirls is free.
NOTE: If'n you missed the glories of August 11th. I think they're going to do the performance again in some creaky corner of September)

Us Kids Know

Over at Books & Culture they went ahead and put up my Arcade Fire piece. I think everybody'll like it. I'd put a link in this post if'n I knew how, but (for now) you can find it over in that there Broadside section.

Peace and Justice,
jdd