Peter Gabriel and his emotional toolbox for grieving

"I Grieve":

it was only one hour ago 
it was all so different then 
there's nothing yet has really sunk in 
looks like it always did 
this flesh and bone 
it's just the way that you would tied in 
now there's no-one home 

i grieve for you 
you leave me 
'so hard to move on 
still loving what's gone 
they say life carries on 
carries on and on and on and on 

the news that truly shocks is the empty empty page 
while the final rattle rocks its empty empty cage 
and i can't handle this 

i grieve for you 
you leave me 
let it out and move on 
missing what's gone 
they say life carries on 
they say life carries on and on and on 

life carries on 
in the people i meet 
in everyone that's out on the street 
in all the dogs and cats 
in the flies and rats 
in the rot and the rust 
in the ashes and the dust 
life carries on and on and on and on 
life carries on and on and on 

it's just the car that we ride in 
a home we reside in 
the face that we hide in 
the way we are tied in 
and life carries on and on and on and on 
life carries on and on and on 

did I dream this belief? 
or did i believe this dream? 
now i can find relief 
i grieve

I hate to disagree with
 
Peter Gabriel:

"I Grieve" was conceived after Gabriel looked over his catalogue of music as if it were a catalogue of emotional tools. He found one major missing tool to be one to cope with death and therefore "I Grieve" was born.  
"I Grieve" wiki (hear him say this on the 9/11 video below)

I think Gabriel's canon/cannon  (including his songs with Genesis ) is full of tools to help him/us grieve/lament/deal with death.. ("With only one colour, dead"  etc etc)


One of my favorites (though not officially about death, but death of a relationship):

This old familiar craving/I've been here before/ this way of behaving/Don't know who the hell I'm saving anymore/Let it pass let it go let it leave/From the deepest place I grieve/This time I believe....
Peter Gabriel - Love to be loved from Al Ex on Vimeo.

Also, note..he quoted himself (from the song above) to the song at hand ("I Grieve").

"I grieve"
Two  naked words we don't say enough in/as church.
I grieve not grieving.

Of course, any song dealing with grief/death is transferrable to new contexts,concerts, and Sitz Im Leben situations  ("U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday is a classic example; see this):

Gabriel performed the song live on the television show "Larry King Weekend" on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, during which Gabriel said that his two daughters were living in New York City on 9/11 and he could not contact them for a while, and that this song was for people who didn't hear anything from their

relatives then.^[8] It was not, however, written specifically for 9/11, having appeared on the City of Angels soundtrack in 1998 (in an earlier version) and

performed live

prior to 9/11.  "I Grieve" wiki

Soundtracking Grief and Missing Jesus

"And I miss you..."

Like many Coldplay lyrics, I inevitably intrepret this line (from "Warning Sign"...listen to it on jukebox above) as being about Jesus; to Jesus:

"I miss You." (complete lyric at this link, and at bottom of this`post))

Chris Martin misses Jesus, worships him, and evangelizes about him. For a living.
He can't help "witnessing" to the Rolling Stone reporter who interviewed him:

"I think a lot of our music comes out of that (God). I definitely believe in God. How can you look at anything and not be overwhelmed by the miraculousness of it?"
-
Anyway,missing Jesus..

Surprisingly, Jesus himself specifically addressed the question of what disciples should do when they miss him:

Fast.

John Piper, in a great book free online, comments on this scripture:"Fasting is not a commandment, but a prediction of what will seem normal for those who miss the Bridegroom."

To miss Jesus is to fast; as fasting is grieving.

I grieve not grieving.

The "no cliches" and honest (almost guaranteeing it wouldn't sell well in Christian stores!) classic on grieving, Wolterstorff's "Lament for a Son" is now also free online (probably because it didn't sell well in Christian stores!) here It is not to be missed. I realized reading this section, written after his son died, that this is hauntingly similar to what i feel

a)after returning from a mission trip (especially one like this one or this one).

b)in the midst of a fast

Which means that's when I do my best grieving; and are liminal moments I should seek to capture in other contexts; especially in the "sacrament of the present moment"; everytime I do something unordinary and "everyday", like walk into a store:

"I walked into a store. The ordinariness of what I saw repelled me: people putting onions into baskets, squeezing melons, hoisting gallons of milk, clerks ringing up sales."Have a good day now." How could everybody be going about their business when these were no longer ordinary times?....I tried music. But why is all this music so affirnative? Has it always been like that? Perhaps a requiem, that glorious German Requiem of Brahma. I have to turn it off. there's too little brokenness in it. Is there no music that speaks of our terrible brokenness? That's not what Imean: Is there no music that fits our brokenness The music that's ABOUT our brokenness is not itself broken. Is there no broken music?
- Wolterstoff, p 55

Aside: I hope Woleterstorff ha since discovered Coldplay, Radiohead, Sigur Ros et al.

Zach Addison, who lived six blocks from Ground Zero in 2001, recounts and juxtaposes the "back to 'normal' " and the "everything has changedness"of grief:





Later that day, we walked around ground zero with wet towels covering our mouths. It was impossible to breathe. Today, I barely remember what she looked like, but together, we walked out of that apartment into a world that had forever changed. We opened the doors to our apartment to strangers - people that had been caught in the storm of debris outside. We offered them towels and band-aids for cuts and bruises. I was talking to one of these strangers in my kitchen - I instinctively apologized to her for my dirty apartment. She laughed - a real laugh. It was silly and completely ridiculous. But she understood I was just as scared as she was. I drank a beer in my living room with a 50-year old businessman who worked at Smith Barney. 10AM - him and I shared a Pabst Blue Ribbon. It was a strange new world, indeed....

....(at the site) all we could hear were the sounds of firefighter’s locator beacons. See, the firefighters wear a little gadget that emits a piercing noise when it’s not reset every few minutes. In the event they become unconscious and/or trapped, these beacons can alert someone to their presence. A chorus of hundreds of whistles, everyone of them attached to a dead man - screaming from a pile of rubble.
-Zach Addison


If I don't fast, i don't hear the whistles when I'm shopping. Or listening to (broken or unbroken) music. Or preaching. The whistles are still attached to dead men. Dead men like Jesus. Whom I miss. Or at least miss missing.

If I don't allow myself such grief/fasting, (Dr Jerome Levin suggests) I will plunge into addiction.

It may mean I may not even know or love Jesus.


A warning sign,
I missed the good part then I realized,
I started looking and the bubble burst.
I started looking for excuses.

Come on in,
I've gotta tell you what a state I'm in,
I've gotta tell you in my loudest tones,
That I started looking for a warning sign.

When the truth is,
I miss you.
Yeah the truth is,
That I miss you so.

A warning sign,
You came back to haunt me and I realized,
That you were an island and I passed you by,
You were an island to discover.

Come on in,
I've gotta tell you what state I'm in,
I've gotta tell you in my loudest tones,
That I started looking for a warning sign.

When the truth is,
I miss you.
Yeah the truth is,
That I miss you so.

And I'm tired,
I should not have let you go.

So I crawl back into your open arms.
Yes, I crawl back into your open arms.
And I crawl back into your open arms.
Yes, I crawl back into your open arms...

Since "there's no end to grief," let's "set endless love to musical performance" so in the ruins we can know that "to know is to mourn"

photo credit

As I have said/confessed/sung/prayed  more than once, "I grieve not grieving."

                   But I finally realized that that  itself is inherently grieving, and thus a good place to start.

May He who began a good work in me be faithful to complete my encounter with grief..

Life is ruthless, indiscriminate....and ultimately loving....in supplying us the traumascape and holy ground of grief.

                   But often we need to gather..or enter into... a soundtrack and soundscape to 

                                                                sustain, sanctify and hold our grief-ground.

"Songs to Grieve By" could be a delightful name for a Spotify playlist.  I'll have to claim it.

     Of course the songs that make the cut  don't have to  all be  classically sad songs;

                                             laments, wails 

                                                                         and Pink Floyd downers.

Even though life is often best "tuned to minor chords"..

                    Some  of the songs selected should be uptempo and upbeat, 

and shamelessly embedded with unrepentant joy..

"California" by U2 is an intriguing choice.

The rocker is hardly a dirge; though a quick read at some of the lyrics might cause you to guess that it is.

This section has haunted  (stalked) me for months

I've seen for myself, there's no end to grief/That's how I know

 And why I need to know/That there is no end to love

All I know/And all I need to know is                          There is no end to love

                              

U2 has faced an unimaginable string of losses in recent months:the 

Bono's harrowing accident,

   the death of the band's chaplain, the indefatigable  "north star" Jack Heaslip,

         the death of Larry's father the week of the tour kick-off..

and yesterday , this:

Pastor Rick Warren:

U2's road manager for 33 years, the amazing Dennis Sheehan died suddenly last night here in LA. Dennis was a calm and kind Christian man. The team is heartbroken so Adam, Larry, Edge, and Bono asked me to share some scripture, words of comfort, and pray with them right before they walked on stage tonight. After sharing the ‪#‎ChooseJoy‬story from my son's death, I asked "So how do you go out and do a concert when your heart is hurting?" Bono said "We choose joy!" Right. Pray for Pam who lost the love of her life.  link

That  version of  "choose joy" is not some "name-it, claim it" happy-clappy motto (Denial is not just a river in Egypt),  but  a hardwon  naked trust in the endless love that is know only through the crucible of endless grief.

That doesn't preclude anger..even yelling at life, grief, the grieved...and God.

"I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Comfort me, COMFORT ME, COMFORT ME!!!" -Bono at end of "Wolves." #RIPDennis #U2ieTour

— Tim Neufeld (@timneufeld) May 28, 2015

Last night, at the end of "Raised by Wolves," itself a stunning public griefsong, Bono snippeted Psalm 23 in the outro (as usual), this time followed by "Comfort me.  COMFORT ME, COMFORT ME!"  (see video below).  Psalm 22 and 23 are two sides of the same whole and holistic grieflove lamentjoyprayer (see"The Lord Be With You...Even When He’s Not!")

Even St Paul unapologetically confessed, "I had no peace of mind."

                 And as another singer has added/midrashed "Peace of heart is better than piece of mind."

Peace of heart...finding love limitless in the midst of limanality and limitless grief is the only ways and means of knowing anything.  Not to mention are only lens for  knowing as we are known. ( By the way, we can know the Unknown Calle)r.

Note the last line  of that excerpt of "California"-- "there is no end to love" ---is itself a clear nod to Paul's 1 Corinthian's 13 insistence that "love never ends."

But do check well  the line before that, which has baffled me: "There's no end to grief.  That's how I know there is no end to love."

This  apparent nonsequitur and profound truth   is also thoroughly  Pauline.  NT Wright has detected in Scripture, notably in Paul, an "epistemology of love."

He even suggests that it must inevitably worked out in art; specifically music...even more specifically "musical performance":

....Is this then a reinforcement, from a musical point of view, for Dorothy L. Sayers’ thesis in The Mind of the Maker, to which I referred earlier?  Is there then indeed a Trinitarian pattern to the work of the artist or writer which, reflected back, provides some kind of evidence of who God may be?  I am not sure that this thesis can be sustained by itself, or that a natural theology built up by that means without help from elsewhere would arrive at anything approximating to the God and Father of Jesus, the giver of the Spirit.  But when the creative and aesthetic project meets the scriptural revelation — mediated, of course, through the thinking of the household of faith — then the two can perhaps at least be complementary.  I have explored elsewhere what I have called ‘an epistemology of love’, in which the sterile opposition between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reductions of ‘knowing’ are transcended.   I think, and hope, that what Paul Spicer and I discovered in our work on the Oratorio was something like that: a love for the subject-matter, a love worked out in art and scholarship, through which we both learned and grew and grasped afresh some of the central matters of Christian faith. And if this is true it may be a pointer to something else - something which the whole Theology Through the Arts project is all about: the non-reducible, and not merely decorative, function of imagination within historical work (as Collingwood insisted) and also theological endeavour, as well as in musical composition and performance.

I realize that I have thus arrived, as a non-specialist, at more or less what Aquinas says in his famous formulation: ‘As grace does not destroy but perfects nature, it is right that natural reason should serve faith just as the natural loving tendency of the will serves charity.’  There is of course a dangerous circularity about reaching that conclusion about method precisely by engaging in what, I hope, might be an instance of it happening in practice.  But I think I have said enough to show that this is a fruitful area for further enquiry and experiment, especially if — though this would be a matter for specialists to enlighten me further — what Aquinas meant by ‘natural reason’ is a large enough category to embrace aesthetic and artistic integrity, the composer’s and conductor’s sense of ‘what works’.  Certainly in this case the composer’s — and conductor’s — aesthetic and artistic integrity ‘served faith’ in a way that makes the ordinary jobbing theologian and preacher jealous.  If all theology, all sermons, had to be set to music, our teaching and preaching would not only be more mellifluous; it might also approximate more closely to God’s truth, the truth revealed in and as the Word made flesh, crucified and risen. 

 NT Wright, link

Is this how the band got through the concert last night?

Is this how they get through every night?

I too have felt (well, maybe not; which is itself the problem) the deaths of a series of loved ones:

a cousin who was like a brother, dear friends from church...

and I have grieved not grieving.

And even though I have been weaning myself from the evangelical idol of certainty  in recent years (and that is a grieving indeed)..

   in recent weeks, thanks to U2's "California," and their healthy navigation of their own grieving, I have been learning and leaning into all that I need to know.

Steven Garber writes of Walker Percy (whom I am pretty sure is a U2 influence):

One of his best stories is Love in the Ruins. It is the first of two novels featuring the character Tom More, a fictional descendent of Sir Thomas More, “the man for all seasons” who, in the 16th century, was the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Chancellor of England – and who refused to go along with Henry VIII’s desire for a divorce, so lost his head and his life. Percy’s More is a bad Catholic, a wandering husband who drinks too much, and a brilliant doctor. Written with a finger to the wind to the social turmoil of the 1960s, Percy wrote of Southern life embodied in the institutional frailties of the Love Clinic, a place where physicians and patients are thrown together in their hopes, longing to belong to someone somewhere.

Literally and metaphorically staggering his way through the story, More develops a machine that promises to save the day for the Love Clinic; he calls it “the qualitative/quantitative ontological lapsometer.” For anyone with ears to hear, attentive to the Enlightenment Project of the last few hundred years, Percy here captured the fundamental flaws of the modern world, fictional as they were in imagination and conception. When More is asked about the nature of a lapsometer, he replies – innocent as a dove, wise as a serpent – “It measures lapses – in the human soul.”

The dreams and debates of modernity, cascading as they are into postmodernity, are always at the heart of the human condition. It cannot be otherwise, as we are never more and never less than sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. So we take our place as folks who long to love and to be loved. Percy understood that with an unusual eye: historically, philosophically, psychologically, politically, and, yes, theologically, seeing the complexity for Everyman and Everywoman. We want love, yet we also know how hard it is to love and to be loved.

There’s the rub. To know and to love; to love and to know. Can both happen at the same time? Can we do both? Can we have both?

Most of the time it seems impossible. For reasons beyond the scope of this short essay, I would argue that human beings more often than not choose cynicism or stoicism as alternative accounts of life and of love. Rather than an epistemology of love, a way of knowing that is manifest in loving, we choose to protect our hearts, “knowing” with the poet Byron that “he who knows the most mourns the deepest.” To know is to despair. To know is to flounder. To know is to mourn.  link

Related:

• "Know Kidding" = "Know Love" ?
• Wright: Epistemology of Love

• Crowder goes slumming /Psalming: Gilligan's Island, R-rated T-shirts, automated urinals, St. Airport...and sunsets and sushi
• Pepsi, Sex, Elevation...& Mission Trips That Are Actually Missional
• Soundtracking Grief and Missing Jesus
• an impossibly bad ending that's good news
• No Sanctified Church without Grieving our Grief

Moving From Postfundamentalist Masturbation to Holy Foolishness: Missing Jesus

"9/11 was an act that had clearly been designed for television."
-Karen Armstrong, "The Battle for God" p vii

"Sometimes (the new fundamentalists) have been driven to acts that are deliberately self-destructive....it is difficult to imagine a more nihilistic act than... the Muslim suicide bomber...and the bizzare antics of the Bakers and Jimmy Swaggart represented a nihilistic revolt against teh more sober fundamentalism of Jerry Falwell."
-p.10

If annihilating nihilism "by cultural masturbation" is not the best approach ( a "good movie or two" would be better),

then annihilating nihilism by nihilism itself, is probably not the best approach either.

We might even talk ourselves into the false belief that this approach is incarnational and redemptive. But this is not what Bruggeman means by"embodying the thing dismantled." (see part 14 here).

Karen Armstrong notes a "postfundamentalist" strand in all three monotheistic religions which would spiritualize sin, completely embrace nihilism, and thus violence and sexualization. Is it
ironic or inevitable that the most fundamentalist fundies will betray their fundamentalism while ostensibly claiming to drink carefully from its wineskin? :

Reconstructionism and the Christan Identity have left Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority far behind. These are a form of post-fundamentalism, which is more frightening, intransigent, and extreme... In the same way, the9/11 hijackers seem to represent some sinister new development in Islamic fundamentalism...Mohammet Atta drinking vodka before he entered teh aircraft..The idea that a Muslim martyr could go to meet God with vodka on his breath is as bizarre a thought as that of Baruch Goldsten, the Jewush fundamemtalist who gunned down twenty nine Muslims...enjoying a bereakfast of bacon and eggs before carrying out the attack...

Most fundamentalists live strictyly orthodox lives....(but) the ignorant barbarism that (the new fundamentalists) have followed..is the (brand) they have vowed not only to abjure but also to eliminate. The hijackers seem to have gone out of their way not only to disobey the basic laws of the religion they have vowed to defend but to trample on the principles that motivate the traditional fundamentalist..

One Messiah figure advocated a form of "holy sin". The times were so desperate that something entirely new was required. Old values no longer applied; there had to be a new law, and a new freedom that could only be achieved by a flagrant disavowal of the old norms.
Karen Armstrong, "The Battle for God" p ix-x

In a sense, these last two sentences are accurately applied to what Jesus instituted in Mark 2:
New wine and wineskins. He was not deconstructing Judaism/Phariseeism/ entirely; even though "something entirely new was required." In a nutshell, the "new law and freedom" was the "new wine of new fasting." Jesus even flatly announced that literally NO ONE would be dumb enough/fundamentalist enough /post-fundamentalist enough to even try to cram new wine into old wineskins and fast the "old" (postfundamentalist) way.

But in the words of DC Talk, "what have we become"? Who have we become? The "no one" that Jesus spoke about. Why is Trucker Frank kicked out of a Christian bookstore and not the most blasphemous book title one can imagine:

"How to Put New Wine into Old Wineskins."

!!

How about that, a "How to Do What Jesus Said Can't Be Done...And No One Tries."

What would Tyndale ("couldn't hit a bull on the ass with a banjo") do?

Was the whole structure of Jewish ceremonial, fasting naturally included, indeed consonant with the new spirit of the followers of the Messiah?

A new spirit must find new forms of expression.
(Alan Cole, Tyndale Commentary on Mark)

"Fasting is not a commandment," John Piper insists, "but a prediction of what will seem normal for those who miss the Bridegroom." But violent sexuality of annihilating nihilism cannot produce "the sorrow which find expresion in fasting" (Cole, 72)

I grieve not grieving.

"Why would you want a superannuated, impotent octagenarian?"

That's what my 83-year old friend (whose wife died several years ago) says he asks those well- meaning widows at church who ask him out.

"But more importantly, I am still in love with my wife;
and I don't miss you."

If we are still in love with our Bridegroom; and miss him---which leads to the new wine of new fasting, we won't cave into temptations to sleep around with other church members, other gods, or other wines...

..especially those "frightening, intransigent, and extreme" postfundamentalist ones.


We live in "desperate times" again; where postfundamentalism is still alive in our ecclesiology and missiology...and as such subverts our subversion and hijacks us into forsaking the necessary "holy fool" approach for the "holy sins" that are
"designed for television."

We can't get there without fasting.

I grieve not grieving.

Related:

Q. "How do you drink new wine?" A. "Fast!"

It's Sunday, but Friday's coming: Bob Hyatt, Bruce Cockburn, Monty Python and Lady Galadriel

(picture credit/story)
Reading in seminary the chilling passage in Wangerin's "The Orphean Passages" where the pastor can't even speak on Good Friday has hopefully cured me once and for all of the extreme end of the"It's Friday, but Sunday's coming" spectrum.

From the book:

"Jesus was dead. There was absolutely nothing left to say."
(click for context)

That's not the expected Good Friday sermon.

But it's the only one we have.

I wrote in my response paper, realizing I didn't get Friday grieving:

"Do I know or love Jesus?"

I don't always love lament, but lament loves me. I grieve not grieving.
Here's my Good Friday message from a years ago..

"The Lord Be With You..,,.Even When He's Not!" 

(click to read)

Yes, I know he's not not with us.
But even though that's the point, it's sometimes not the point.
It's partly Friday on Sunday sometimes.

And Len quotes some wonderful companions, Bob Hyatt, Bruce Cockburn and Lady Galadriel:

Boby Hyatt writes:
“I once attended a Good Friday service where the pastor encouraged us to look at Good Friday positively, to see the crucifixion through “Easter eyes.” To be honest, the bright lights and the upbeat music and mood felt to me like a missed opportunity. His intentions were good. He wanted to protect us from feeling defeated as we meditated on the death of Christ. But in doing so, he robbed us of exactly the feeling and experience that Good Friday is meant to give us.
“Those of us who inhabit the sphere of “American Christianity” live in a world that doesn’t know when, how, or even why to grieve. For us, Christianity is about victory, it’s about feeling better about ourselves. It’s upbeat, inspiring, short, and peppy. I know one pastor of a large church who once asked his worship leaders not to play any songs written in a minor key. Too much of a downer.”
So true. And it isn’t merely an eschatological or symbolic reason that we read in the birth narratives of Herod’s attempt to rid the world of a coming king. In this world, as the Lady Galadriel affirms in The Fellowship of the Ring, “love is now mixed with grief.” It’s much harder to escape this reality when living in community with those attempting to shed their addictions. Sometimes, like Bruce Cockburn sings, “life’s a piece of shit — when you look at it..” (Brighter
Side of Life)...
-Len Hjalmarson
(note: the song Cockburn covers is from Monty Python here.
The Bob Hyatt article is here)

an impossibly bad ending that's good news

"They [left the tomb] said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid."

Uh, no, a biblical gospel can't end like that.

Unless it does.

As it must.


One of the arguments in favor of this probable ending   of Mark's gospel (16:8) is that it's

• real
• really real
• honest
• not nice and tidy
• subversive

The gnotty theological problems with the verses 9-20 ending are notorious.
The main problem with the (yet) other alternative ending (which hardly anyone treats as orignal):

"But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation":

 ...is it DOES wrap things up (too) nicely.

It is brutally and graciously honest.




These short videos on Mark are helpful:
   Joe Dongell
   Ben Witherington

Ben Witherington: Gospel of Mark

At least it doesn't leave Jesus dead..though we need to do that once in awhile.
Ask Peter Rollins about that sometime.
Or Bruce Cockburn and Monty Python.
Or Ray Bradbury.
Or Walter Wangerin:

Reading in seminary the chilling passage in Wangerin's "The Orphean Passages" where the pastor can't even speak on Good Friday has hopefully cured me once and for all of the extreme end of the"It's Friday, but Sunday's coming" spectrum.

From the book:

"Jesus was dead. There was absolutely nothing left to say."

That's not the expected Good Friday sermon.

But it's the only one we have.

I wrote in my response paper, realizing I didn't get Friday grieving:

"Do I know or love Jesus?"

I don't always love lament, but lament loves me. I grieve not grieving.
Here's my Good Friday message from a years ago.."The Lord Be With You..,,.Even When He's Not!"   -

  Yes, I know he's not not with us.
But even though that's the point, it's sometimes not the point.
It's partly Friday on Sunday sometimes.

                -Link: Well-Ended Stories That Don't End Well



If you think this is crazy, you probably aren't ready to hear that Jesus died naked. either.

But that's the good news.
It's the only way the veil is ripped,
and the only means of death being subverted..
and me being converted.

Crowder goes slumming /Psalming: Gilligan's Island, R-rated T-shirts, automated urinals, St. Airport...and sunsets and sushi

It draws from some of the
masters on Psalms: Bruegggman and Peterson..

and has profound theological reflection..

                                        often based on  such profound references as:

• Gilligan's Island (midrash on the "two rescues" of Psalm 40),
•       Nunzilla (see Appendix C)
•                     the Pistol Smoker BBQ in Waco Texas (Psalm 63, map included)
•                           a theology of automated urinals (as commentary on Psalm 84..of course! Obvious!)
• 
  
• It even deals with some serious semiotics by way of an R-rated T-shirt  (full story and T-shirt photo at this link:"David Crowder has 3 words for judgemental pastors"

What other book could this be but the wimpy-bearded David Crowder's "Praise Habit: Finding God in Sunsets and Sushi."   One reviewer has coined it "Dave-Barry-meets-David-the-Psalms," and it was originally marketed for teens.  But though it might suffer a  bit from"youth pastor" style at points,  I shelf it with no shame next to my  Brueggemann and NT Wright books on the Psalms.

" Here is a book about a guy who wants to give something back to God and is interested in helping you and me do the same. He might have accidentally stumbled upon the meaning of life. Dave Crowder is a good writer, and he dares to tell us the truth about himself and his calling. This one is worth reading." -Donald Miller, author, Blue Like Jazz

"I knew Dave was a sparkling musician and a wild, fun person. I knew he had crazy hair and made weird clothes fashionable. I also knew he was a man of honest and vital faith. I should have known he would be a truly extraordinary writer. Now I know! Praise Habit is a delight to read and good for the soul."-Brian McLaren, pastor, author, A New Kind of Christian 

Here are a few random things I like about this book..

Crowder tells a hilarious story which sucks us into a discussion of  public lament  seen from a new angle:  the night the power went out at the Holiday Inn:

"...every room was dark that winter Lubbock night at the Holiday Inn, and there was something shared in the darkness...To pursue praise properly we will bring our public moments into this pursuit, and in doing so we may even gain perspective.

 Walter Brueggemann writes about communal laments as "statements about the religious dimension of public events of loss..the recovery of this mode of psalmic prayer may be important if we are to overcome..the apathy that comes with abdication."

..We are all in our rooms when the darkness falls, and we must make effort and look each other in the eyes, or if the night still covers and we cannot yet see, we must reach out our hands to feel the lines on each others' weathered faces and fumble to trace and feel our mouths as they speak words of shared understanding and longing.  And in our embracing, sparks of praise will splinter the darkness like fireworks. (p. 98)

                               



The fact that there  are "songs that won't let you out of the car."  (p. 146)


The challenge to "paint with fury." (p. 92)

The airport stories.
There has long been something sacred ..and scary?..about airports to me.
 We have even spent part of a "worship service" at our local airport.
I love to study at the airport.

First, he had me laughing about his adventures  in airports  meeting famous people...Richard Simmons, Mel Gibson and Bob Dole. (p. 51, in a section on Psalm 8).
But then, this, which morphed my laughter into mourning:

"and in airports I am occasionally afraid to watch other people, these spaces so full of dark and light.  It's like I absorb the pain..the joy..the place is just so full of humanity and the stuff of living--the sadness of departure, the happiness of return, the heaviness of individuality--those in constant motion and those sitting quietly waiting in covert inanimateness, thinking If I am still just enough  (From the Conclusion: Symptomology, p. 151)

Why am I afraid to be thus afraid? Why do I grieve not grieving?
Am I enough?...

Okay, to end on a light and frivolous note:
Do check out the copyright  page, where he has snuck in all kinds of stuff most readers will never catch.
And do use it to chart your bias towards penguins.  It's the only book I know of where the copyright page is worth the (full) price of the book..

Even that may be a profound lesson in spiritual formation and the Psalms (:

Oh, some links (from both sides of the wars):

• Excerpts from Praise Habits .by Creative Theology
• 
  
• Heretical musician David Crowder’s book “Praise Habit” teaches occultish, contemplative Lectio Divina to young teens

No Sanctified Church without Grieving our Grief

If the good Jewish doc is correct in that addictions (particularly sex addictions) are in part related to inability to grieve (or express anger), how does this work out on a cultural/national level? What might our issues with grief (and obsexxions) reveal about what our culture is addicted to?

Seeing U2 two months after 9/11, with the scrolling list of victims' names behind them (as the whole world got to see a few months later at Super Bowl halftime) it just felt like church.

What else is new for a U2 gig, you might ask.

This time, it was sanctified church.

No, that doesn't mean the concert was at a Nazarene church; it means the Arco Arena was ritually sanctified.

"Sanctification" is one of the religious terms Kenneth E. Foote laces into his "Shadowed Ground:
America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy." Gotta love a "secular" book with chapter titles like "Stigmata of National Identity," for example.

But it's in his 2002 afterword to this 1995 book (how do you not update such a book to include 9/11?) that Foote shines. Having suggested throughout the work that public memorials/shrines (or lack of) tend to represent sanctification, designation, rectification or obliteration ("Obliteration results from particularly shameful events people would prefer to forget. ... As a consequence, all evidence is destroyed or effaced of the memory.) Many implications for how we grieve, deal with shame/violence/realit; shift in culture, and how we need collaboration, centered-setness, and wiki...in church and culture. Read an excerpt below, and the whole section at this link. And, good grief (yes, it is), hear Brueggeman (and U2) on lament.

I assumed that much time would have to pass before decisions would be made about the sanctification, designation, rectification, or obliteration of these sites. ...but I was surprised by the speed with which the Oklahoma City bombing site emerged as a major national memorial..

I began to wonder — and many people asked — whether these events represent a change in the ways Americans deal with adversity. For a long time I remained unconvinced.. In each traumascape I saw similarities to past events, rather than a new pattern. Now, however, I am inclined to think a new trend may be underway. Over the past two or three decades there appears to have developed a greater willingness..
on the part of many communities and individuals to acknowledge the pervasive role that violence plays in contemporary society..

Until quite recently, events of mass murder, terrorism, and day-to-day violence led almost exclusively to obliteration and rectification..The first memorial I have beenable to identify for a mass murder was the one erected in 1990 in San Ysidro, California..a precedent that other communities are emulating: to designate or even sanctify such sites that once would have been considered too shameful to mark.The University of Texas, for instance, dedicated a small memorial garden in 1999 to the victims of the campus mass murder of 1966 — a thirty-three-year delay...
The most fractious and eventually unsatisfying results occur when one grouptakes charge of decision making and excludes participation by others.
n the aftermath of tragedy there is usually no lack of individuals and interest groups wanting to dominate decision making — survivors, victims' families, politicians and owners, emergency workers, and others all demand to be heard — and time and time again, such groups become locked in adversarial roles

..Top-down planning..generate(s) far more acrimony than bottom-up, grass-roots planning efforts.

..In the first chapter (page 6), I wrote that 'the site [of a tragic or violent
event] actually precipitates debate and forces competing interpretations intothe open.' Now I would go further and say that debate over what, why, when, and where to build is best considered a part of the grieving process. James Young, a noted scholar of Holocaust memory and memorials, made this point with respect to the prolonged and so far unsuccessful effort construct a central Holocaust memorial in Berlin..'You may have failed to produce a monument, but if you count the sheer number of design hours...already devoted to the memorial, it's clear that your process has already generated more individual memory work than a finished monument will inspire in its first ten years.'"
-Foote

On that last note, more years could have been saved by hiring 1990s era U2(:
Many have noted that their prophetic act of performing in Hiter's stadium seemed to help heal Holocaustedness and force the isssue of "individual memory work."
More recenlty they sang to " a balcony where Hitler sang"

Such work is perhaps the only emans of our corporately dealing with addictions, grieving that we don't grieve, denying of our denial of death...

and all that stuff we stuff.

At the Holocaust musem in Jerusalem (in an odd way, one of my 'favorite'...better term: 'favored'... places on earth),
a recorded voice lists at normal reading speed the names of Holocaust victims. A name is not repeated for something like seven years.

I don't remember the number of years.
(Recall this Campolo story about stats)

But having been there, and heard the tape, my memory-work now works.

At Bethlehem Bible College (one of my favorite places on earth), there are bullet holes in the sign.

I don't know how many.
But I know I need to make pilgrimage there soon, lest I forget to remember.