everything is broken... and held in God's love

Today's musical meditation and biblical reflection for Lent...

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Let me say out loud at the start of this reflection that I process life – and learn best – through music. If you know Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, he posits eight different ways people make sense of the world: some of us are body-smart and prefer kinesthetic education while people-smart learners gravitate towards interpersonal encounters. There are word-smart folk who thrive verbally, rational-people with follow the path of logic, nature-smart people who learn best in creation, self-smart souls who use intrapersonal and intuitive educational tools, picture-smart people who prefer visual/spatial resources, and music-smart people who make sense of the world through song. Over the years I’ve discovered that when it comes to theology, spirituality, and most other intellectual pursuits I take my first clues from music as well as nature, silence, and poetry: the mystic’s path of learning is how insights, facts, and wisdom are clarified within me.

That’s why I insist that my education into the foolishness of God’s love began with Bob Dylan – well, Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Neither would have considered themselves evangelists back in the day, but that’s how I heard their music. I was literally stunned into consciousness and enraptured by the energy, creativity, and sex appeal of the Beatles. On Sunday, February 9, 1964 I had a personal Pentecost when I heard those cats singing and playing on the stage of the Ed Sullivan show. It was as if a veil had been lifted and for the first time, I saw that life had meaning. I was enthralled by the Beatles and still consider them salvific.

Just a year before, during the first March on Washington, I became a Bob Dylan fan: songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A’Changing” spoke to my heart when I heard Peter, Paul and Mary sing them. And when that snare drum crack that opens “Just Like a Rolling Stone” jumped out of the radio at me while sitting in a car in July 1965 waiting for my mother to come out of the Zayre’s department store I knew that the gates of heaven opening for me.

But there were two songs in particular that introduced me to the sacred clown who sees the promise of the spirit beyond the sorrow without ever diminishing the pain of real life. The first was Dylan’s break away from folk music anthem, “My Back Pages,” that came out four months after the Beatles hit the stage on Ed Sullivan’s show. It goes something like this…

Crimson flames tied through my ears 

Rolling high and mighty traps

Pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my maps

"We'll meet on edges, soon, " said I 

Proud 'neath heated brow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I'm younger than that now 

Oh, that great refrain: I was SO much older then, I’m younger than that now. I didn’t know it then, but it was written during a time when a young Bob Dylan felt like quitting the music making world.  He’d written a ton of stunning protest songs – beautifully poetic musical masterpieces celebrating confrontation with the status quo, civil rights for people of color, and the sacredness of the anti-war movement – and he cherished those songs. They came from his heart.

But as so often happens, Dylan’s most ardent supporters, in this case those on the political Left, wanted him to keep on churning out more and more social justice anthems. And, truth be told, young Bob Dylan wanted to do more with his music that be a social justice Tin Pan Alley. He wanted to make more poetry, evoke more creativity, invite more introspection. He, too, had been knocked out by the Beatles and yearned to explore what rock’n’roll and electric guitars might add to his repertoire. But to the doctrinaire commissars of politically correct culture in NYC at the time, this was forbidden as rock’n’roll was considered collaboration with the idolatry of popular culture. For a time, he gave-in to this pressure releasing yet another acoustic album in August of 1964 – but nobody knew what to do with this one: yes it was acoustic and didn’t exactly sound like rock’n’roll, but its vibe was wild and restless. It was weirdly esoteric, too – much more about the inward journey than the outward work of social change.

It opens with the totally goofy: “All I really want to do… is baby be friends with you.” Includes “Chimes of Freedom,” “Motorphycho Nitemare,” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and that great refrain: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” My favorite verses close the song:

In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand 

At the mongrel dogs who teach

Fearing not I'd become my enemy 

In the instant that I preach

My existence led by confusion boats 

Mutiny from stern to bow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I'm younger than that now

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats 

Too noble to neglect

Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect

Good and bad, I define these terms

Quite clear, no doubt, somehow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I'm younger than that now 

The story goes that when his Left-wing critics heard this album, and thrashed his creativity, Dylan was ready to throw-in the towel. But before doing so, he did what all sacred clowns and tricksters do: he took a road trip. A vision quest. The North American equivalent of Christ’s time in the desert – where along the way to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, he heard the Beatles. AGAIN! And he, too had a revelation: I could be making the same kind of joyful, rebellious music as the Beatles, but from a creative and eclectic American perspective. That’s when the Master went electric with tunes like “Subterranean Homesick Blues, “Just Like a Rolling Stone” and “Maggie’s Farm.” In essence, Dylan started to reinvent American popular music by bringing the blues together with his ginned-up, psychedelic poetry – a combination of Rimbaud meets Chuck Berry while cruising a party at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. These were experiments in genre-bending driven by lament and abstract social commentary. My favorite saturates a blues form with a kaleidoscope of hallucinatory lyrics Dylan called “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” for only God knows why. It starts off like this:

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez

When it's Easter time, too

And your gravity fails and 

Negativity don't pull you through

Don't put on any airs 

When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue

They got some hungry women there 

They really make a mess outta you

Now, if you see Saint Annie, please, 

Tell her, "Thanks a lot" 

I cannot move and my fingers are all in a knot

I don't have the strength to get up and take another shot

And my best friend, my doctor 

Won't even say what it is I've got 

He’s singing about the personal and political apocalypse brewing in America in the 60’s albeit with a trickster’s sense of humor. It was radical social commentary for those educated in the parlance of Allen Ginsberg and T.S. Eliot. At the same time Brother Dylan is making THIS type of magic, John Lennon is coming to terms with his shadow which lets him know that he cannot keep on keeping on without confronting HIS inner demons. He’s got all the money, booze, sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll notoriety that anyone might crave – he’s at the top of his game– but he keeps crashing into a relentless and self-destructive inner angst that tears him apart. He tries to mask his suffering with upbeat rhythms and jangling guitars, but lyrics like” “Help – I need somebody. Help – not just anybody. Help – you know I need someone. HELP!” tell a deeper story – and even as a goofy 9th grade adolescent guy I could hear the despair underneath all those happy sounding country’n’ western guitar riffs. If you strip “I’m a Loser” down to its essence, you’ll hear something like this:

Although I laugh and I act like a clown 

Beneath this mask I am wearing a frown

My tears are falling like rain from the sky

Is it for her or myself that I cry? 

I'm a loser - and I lost someone who's near to me

I'm a loser - and I'm not what I appear to be 

These are the songs that connected me as a young, spiritual mystic to the path of Christ’s descent and the journey of self-emptying I was learning about in church. In a way I could not explain then, these songs sounded and felt like Lent to me. The more I listened, the more I heard a link between the spiritual practices of prayer and fasting, the stories of Jesus in this liturgical season, and what I would eventually come to know as the archetype of Jesus as the sacred clown.

These songs convinced me that it was not coincidence that a Holy Lent mirrors the spiritual formation of Jesus in the desert: just as he was called into a season of solitude, silence, and searching, so are we. Lent isn’t about giving up chocolate, it’s a letting go of illusions so that our spiritual maturation might take on the same gravitas as Christ’s. During Lent, Jesus is shown to be simultaneously fully human – fragile, anxious, broken, hungry, and alienated from both God and other human beings – and thoroughly committed to the downward mobility of the sacred clown who trusts the folly of God’s love more than everything else. Fr. Thomas Keating of blessed memory, an early leader in the Centering Prayer movement, writes: “Jesus appears in the desert as the representative of the human race.”

He bears within himself the experience of the human predicament in its raw intensity. Hence, he is vulnerable to the temptations of Satan. In the New Testaments, Satan means the Enemy, the Confuser, the Adversary, that mysterious and malicious spirt that seems to more than a mere personification of our unconscious evil tendencies. The temptations of Satan are allowed by God to help us confront our own wounds. If relatives and friends fail to bring out the worst in us, Satan is always around to finish the job. Self-knowledge (you see) is experiential: it tastes the full depths of human weakness. (And) in the desert Jesus (experiences) all the primitive instincts of human nature (and our wounds.) (Keating, The Mystery of Christ, Liturgy as Spiritual Experience, pp. 40-41)

The gospel text for this day in St. Mark tells of a time when Jesus explained the rhythm and upside-down logic of his ministry to those he loved. It reads: Jesus began to teach (his friends) that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. So, Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter saying, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on things above, but on things below.’ The story continues with:

And calling a crowd together along with his disciples, he told them: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their soul? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’ (Mark 8: 31-38)

In an intentionally visual manner Jesus points out the rhythm or cycle of spiritual maturation – integrating things above with those below so that our vision is not dualistic but unified in one, organic whole – and then goes on to describe what growing up in the Spirit includes: Rejection by those with power and status, physical and spiritual suffering, various types of dying before our physical death and then the blessings of consolation and renewal.

He is describing the path of spiritual descent where you let go of control, give your heart, mind, body, and strength to God lest you forfeit your soul, and incrementally learn how to become empty so that you might be filled with God’s grace. Or, as I heard St. Bob saying, we practice letting go of being so old and controlling that we become younger, freer, and more fun to be with than we ever were before now.

We go out into the desert as Jesus did, confront our fears, anxieties, obsessions, wounds, and ego, practice emptying ourselves by trust, and wait upon the Lord to renew our strong. Without the desert, or the road trip, we remain spiritual children. That’s why every year Lent begins with Jesus inviting us out into the desert. Join me. Follow me. See how I do it: Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it and you will learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly. Ok? Those songs carried me to Lent – they led me to the path of Jesus – and they still do. Given the multiplicity of musical styles I’ve learned over the years, I’ve also come to trust that there’s more than one way to make sense of Christ’s call to a wilderness vision quest road trip, too.

· Fr. Keating believes that the three temptations of Christ involved saving himself, seeking the affection of others, and giving up control over his own destiny. Each challenge from the Confuser called for a choice: hold on to the illusion and idolatry of power, or, relinquish control and trust God without qualification.

· Fr. Henri Nouwen came to trust that the desert was where Jesus had to decide between the way of upward or downward mobility. The diabolical one, Nouwen said, told Jesus he could be relevant by doing something the world wanted like making bread out of stones for hungry people. Or he could be important by doing stunning and impressing the world by jumping from the temple tower and surviving. Or Jesus could become powerful by turning his back on God and pledging his allegiance to idols that captured the world’s imagination and attention. “Do this and I will give you dominion over everyone and everything. To each challenge and every temptation Jesus responds with humility, choosing greater trust and the promise of serenity by accepting what truly cannot be changed.

The contemporary musical artist, Alanis Morissette, offers a slightly different take on the descent of the desert in her song, “Thank You” – and that’s the one that feels MOST like Lent to me. It sounds like Keating and Nouwen embracing with encourage-ment from Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault and Thomas Merton. It is ALL about releasing resentment and fear into a sacred silence that moves the journey along with a funky, New Jack City groove:

How bout me not blaming you for everything 

how bout me enjoying the moment for once 

how bout how good it feels to finally forgive you 

how bout grieving it all one at a time 

thank you India - thank you terror 

thank you disillusionment 

thank you frailty - thank you consequence 

thank you thank you silence 

the moment I let go I got more than I could handle 

the moment I jumped off of was when I touched down 

how bout no longer being masochistic 

how bout remembering your divinity 

how bout unabashedly bawling your eyes out 

how bout not equating death with stopping 

Thank you India - thank you providence 

thank you disillusionment 

Thank you nothingness - thank you clarity 

thank you thank you silence 

This is the archetype of the sacred clown singing about God’s upside-down realm to popular culture through music. Artists like Warren Zevon and Patty Smith are masters. So, too, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Joni Mitchell, Joan Osborne as well as Leonard Cohen, Fiona Apple, and Gil Scott-Heron. These are the songs of Lent coming from the heart of a still speaking God who calls to us in love even as our culture tries to keep us stone-cold tone deaf and rhythmically challenged. They’re telling us that desert time, the path of descent, the serenity of letting go, and downward mobility is a great way to practice dying before we die. And for Christians this is the heart of the way of Jesus during Lent. And if you’re really into the groove, you start noticing, feeling, hearing, and sensing that the journey into the desert is intimately intertwined with our baptism.

We aren’t baptized just to get ourselves – or our babies – right with the holy or cleansed from sin. Ours is a tradition of original blessing not original sin no matter how mixed up the patriarchal church of the Empire got it. So, just as Jesus set out for the wilderness and his spiritual formation in the desert after his baptism, so, too, do we because baptism and the desert are for the healing of the world. It’s not only a personal, inward journey: it is how we bring healing to the world

First, baptism – like Eucharist - is grounded in community. St. Paul explains that when he was baptized, Jesus was immersing himself into a life of radical solidarity with the human condition not merely water. He wasn’t baptized for selfish reasons, but to show us how much he loved us. I think Philippians 2 got it right: Though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God to be something grasped at or held on to. Rather, Jesus emptied himself and took the form of a servant – some texts say a slave – and entered into the fullness of the human experience. First of all, baptism is ALL about solidarity and communion with those Christ loves.

Second, this solidarity is born of humility: Elizabeth-Anne Stewart defines New Testament humility as a great tenderness for others not an individual act of sacrifice or debasement. It is compassion and mercy made flesh so that other flesh might be healed, cherished, honored, cleansed, and renewed. This is how the early faith community understood spiritual formation before and after baptism: baptism must lead to a tender heart – for without tenderness, it is not sacramental. It is an empty ritual. St. Mark’s gospel tells a story where after his baptism Jesus looks out upon his people with compassion for he saw that they were like sheep without a shepherd. Those who have known anything of Christ’s mercy are called to look upon one another and do likewise. Again, Philippians 2 is useful: if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if you have known any comfort from his love, any intimacy with the sharing of his Spirit, if you have known the tenderness and compassion of Christ Jesus, then make his joy complete by being of the same mind and sharing compassion with the sisters and brothers. Tenderness and compassion define humility – and humility is the second truth about baptism.

And the third is that baptism demands intentionality. Sometime back in the 90’s a well-intentioned Oprah Winfrey started talking about random acts of kindness – it became a fad. Remember? I had a youth leader who got caught up in this fad who set aside periodic Sunday night gatherings for “adventures in random acts of kindness.” And I thought WTF? Jesus didn’t call us to be RANDOM with our kindness. Capricious with our compassion? Temporary with our tenderness. His commit-ment like ours is to an intentional life of mercy. Even the most selfish soul can blunder her or his way into a random act of kindness every now and again; but those who are followers of Jesus know it takes discipline and commitment to construct your life on it.

No wonder baptism drove Jesus – or led him – into the desert to follow the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: making a commitment to radical hospitality and living as God’s sacred clown takes training. Practice. Prayer and a ton of letting go. Jesus went to the desert to let go of what got in the way of love. And so do we: our commitment to community calls us to keep practicing dying before we die in all the ways we can so that we incarnate the grace of God as best we’re able.

Thomas Merton once said that the deepest connection we have with one another is not communication. It is communion. An intimacy beyond words where we recognize and then reclaim our old-est, deepest, original unity. Our time in the desert of Lent encourages us to reconnect to this unity. Merton added: “there is a point of nothingness at the center of our being," a point of absolute poverty, the small thing within us that Rilke said is always being pulled by "gravity’s law" toward the heart of the world. When we surrender to gravity's law – when we seek to be filled with God’s grace and empty of our own fears – we befriend our own poverty of being and start to rise up rooted, like trees." The knots of our own making are untangled.

Letting go isn’t easy. It doesn’t come naturally to me – maybe to no one. So, in addition to the Centering Prayer I am practicing imperfectly this Lent, I find that I need to go back to the oldest songs of our faith: the Psalms. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record to you, the Psalm that continually gives me the greatest guidance and clarity, it that little Psalm 131: 

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, 

my eyes are not raised too high; 

I am not proud nor do I have haughty looks 

so I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me. 

No, I have calmed and quieted my soul,

like a child upon her mother’s breast 

my soul is quieted within me. 

Hope and trust in the Lord from this time on and forevermore. 

Not long ago, a former colleague – a wonderful musician with whom I once collaborated with on works of the heart – decided to troll and trash me on FB. It is NOT the end of the world, right? And it won’t be the last time it happens either. But if you’ve ever gotten into a spitting contest with the wind you know you can’t win, right? Logic doesn’t make any difference, nor do facts or appeals to God’s grace. And this is as true of those on the Left as it is on the Right. So, mostly these days I just remain silent and choose to use my extremely limited energy and wisdom in other ways. But this time I thought a reply was in order because the attack was so ugly. And untrue.

And almost without thinking – automatically – what popped into my head and heart but Psalm 131 – so my reply said something like: At this stage of my life, most days I’ve given up trying to be a moral arbiter: most things, as the Psalmist says, are just too grand and lofty for me. So, I choose to celebrate the small and good things I can grasp... and trust God to sort out the rest.

So, let me close with one more wee song that I use as a prayer a lot. I sang part of it not long ago at a Zoom birthday party for a beloved friend – and on and off for nearly 50 years I’ve been singing it for myself, too. First because it touched my heart, later because it spoke to me of God’s call to my life. And now as a Lenten invitation to the desert. It’s Leslie Duncan of the UK’s tune: Love Song.

The words I have to say 

may well be simple but they're true 

Until you give your love 

there's nothing more that we can do 

Love is the opening door, 

love is what we came here for 

No one could offer you more

Do you know what I mean

have your eyes really seen 

You say it's very hard 

To leave behind the life we knew 

But there's no other way 

And now it's really up to you 

Love is the key we must turn

Truth is the flame we must burn 

Freedom the lesson we must learn

Do you know what I mean

have your eyes really seen