Dancing kids, St. Lou Reed and All Saints Day...

NOTE:  Last night Dianne and I had the real privilege to be two of the chaperones at the Live Out Loud Youth Project's dance.  About 50 kids came for some wild dancing and fun in a safe place. As I watched them - some who were at home in their own skins and others still searching for their own mix - my heart was touched.  They were simultaneously awkward and poised, searching and settled, confused and at peace and it made me think of two very different albeit related men who have touched my life:  St. Lou Reed of NYC and Jesus of Nazareth.  Both reached out to embrace those who are often neglected and sometimes despised.  So as they danced I found myself rewriting the conclusion to Sunday's message in my head.  Here's what came out...

I’ve already told you the story of one saint who touched my heart and changed my life – St. Michael of Cleveland – but let me add one more:  St. Lou Reed of NYC and rock and roll fame. Lou died a week ago today and I’ve been thinking and reading about him all week long.  If you don’t know St. Lou you might not think of him as a saint – he was one of the first rock and rollers to talk about walking on the wild side – about loving misfits and broken souls – about living out loud in bold and brash ways.  He was a wild man and an artist and a visionary and somebody who embodied the truth of real life in ways that could make you weep.

His album, Magic and Loss, is the most poignant elegy about death I have ever heard.  When my sister Linda was dying of cancer 20+ years ago, I played that thing probably a few hundred times in the car – over and over – as Lou sang about what is unfair and agonizing watching a loved one shrivel and die right before your eyes:

What good is seeing eye chocolate - what good's a computerized nose? 
And what good was cancer in April why no good - no good at all.

·    After talking about the brutal ironies and tragic insights of living and loving with a broken heart, the chorus morphs from the lament, “what’s good – not much at all” to something more tender and faithful:  “what’s good – life’s good – but not fair at all.”

One rock critic put it like this:  "No one ever spoke so directly for misfits and freaks (as Lou Reed.) His music, in its genius and its flaws, in its poignancy and its awkwardness, arose from a conscious and explicit desire to give a voice to the voiceless, to express the truths of people who were always told that their truth had no value… One moment he was the poster boy for faggot junkies and the next he was buying a house with a nice yard in the suburbs. He was a walking mess and his work wore these conflicts on its sleeve.”  He was the first rock and roll artist to give a voice and a face to those Jesus called his sisters and brothers – the tired and worn, the broken and battered, the ugly and fat and wounded and forgotten ones the Master celebrated when he said,” Whatever you have done unto these, my sisters and brothers, you have done unto me.”

Martin Copenhaver of the Congregational Church of Wellesley once put the challenge of the saints like this:  Protestants need more saints. The Roman Catholics have over 10,000 canonized saints.  By my count, we Protestants have as few as five:  Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Dietrich Bonheoffer…. And while these folk ARE saints, they are not ordinary enough… they are almost too heroic.  What we need are more examples of people like us have let the love and light of the gospel change their hearts and lives. 

So please, as Dianne and I share with you a brief musical reflection in the spirit of one of my saints – St. Lou Reed of NYC - take a moment right now and call up to your heart one of your saints – some real and ordinary person who has touched and enriched your heart.