Ugh, you like THAT band?

I'll admit it. I'm kind of a music snob. Or at least I used to be.

These days, I'm lucky to get a new CD every two months or so, or rely on my friends to introduce me to new music (for which I'm eternally grateful.) Back in high school, that wasn't so much the case.

I was THAT guy. You know the one. The guy who had a CD case full of obscure bands, often with starkly modern cover art, containing music that was barely recognizable as music by most standards. But hey, true art is incomprehensible (he said, nose lifted high with disdain for the peons below, listening to their Coldplay and their Keith Urbans.) I thought I was better than people, because I thought I had taste.I thought I was smarter, funnier, and more absurdly interesting than anyone else on the school bus driving to the football games.

I took solace in my hubris back then. Sometimes I still do, but that has been beaten out of my by the humility that comes with minimum wage, not living off of Mom and Dad's paycheck. I enjoyed it, reveling in my feigned superiority back then, at least a bit. This realization of my prideful ways is something only seen in hindsight, because if you had asked me then why I liked those bands, I would have given you a very different answer.

I liked it because it was different.

Different from the stuff they played on the radio, and different from what other people listened to. It didn't sound like something they would package in a neat verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-breakdown-chorus format for mass consumption.

I liked it, because I felt like it was mine.

That sounds really selfish, but I actually thought that music was just for me. All my own. Those songs were lying deep within my soul from birth, and I just hadn't heard them yet, or at least understood them. Music from Beck, Modest Mouse, Radiohead, Moby, Muse, Gorillaz, Straylight Run (yes, I liked THEM too), R.E.M. Dave Matthews Band, Fatboy Slim, and the list goes on. Some songs were actually on the radio, but most were not. It wasn't the singles that really spoke to me, it was the B-sides. The unknowns. The ones that would probably never get heard outside of the band's fan base. These were mine.

Songs like "Bankrupt on Selling" from Modest Mouse, with lyrics that bleed with cynicism stemming from rejection and damaged dreams. Like "Rockin' The Suburbs" from Ben Folds, comical, angry, and relentlessly goofy all at once. Like "The Chimbley Sweep" from the Decemberists, waltzing their way into my head with Dickensian ballads of mirth and melancholy.

I could go on. I really want to. But I'm not because I want to get to the point of this rant.

I like music, very much like I like a lot of things. I liked music then and I like music now because it revealed something to me. It could be new, or something that I knew a long time ago and I forgot. It could be something strikingly beautiful, or dimly lit and crying. It could be quirky, or angry, or (dare I say it) incomprehensible.

I look back on it now, and it feels very much like I feel about my faith now. There was always something new to explore, and a new idea, or a new sound. I'm sure that my musical leanings helped form my theology. But I'm also sure that I can't wait to hear a new song, because that's just one more piece of God I get to see.

I'm like butter.

I'm on a roll. I think i'm gonna play catch up here.

This past year has been a roller coaster. I've gotten engaged to my wonderful fiancée Laura (whom I love most deeply!), my financial aid has been good, then bad, then worse, and now back to good. I'm still working at the Fondren Library at SMU, and I'm still an M. Div. grad student at Perkins School of Theology. I'm now living with Thomas Wesley Moore, a gentleman, scholar, and Master of Sacred Music student. As of now, I'm working late nights at Fondren, and am looking forward to homecoming at Texas State tomorrow (Go Bobcats!).

Whew. That was a lot, in a nutshell.

I feel like my life has been in between slow motion and, fast forward, lurching inevitably to a distant date that seems to never come, and then goes by all too fast. My patience and my faith has been tested all too many times to count in Seminary, and while I feel like I've benefited, I have to ask whether or not we really have to go through as much as we do to become pastors. 4 years of school, plus a rigorous ordination track within the United Methodist church, and not to mention trying to work and have some semblance of a personal life thrown in there... It's enough to make you go bald. Which I am. I'm going bald. I don't want to go bald, but I am, and that's just one more thing to worry about.

I was talking to my Word and Worship professor, Dr. Mark Stamm, and we got to talking about ordination. He said that it has all too many overtones of baptism, which is a good thing; it is a matter of initiation after all. It even follows a similar educational track and timeline to early baptismal preparation ceremonies. I wonder if we would have as many Christians today if we upheld a 3 year initiation process for baptism! We would certainly take the call to being a Christian more seriously, I would tell you that.

Anyways, thanks for indulging my ranting.

A vaccination

Last year, in my intro to theology class, I wrote a paper on atonement, specifically on a version of atonement called "recapitulation." Just so you guys get some of how I think sin and redemption works in the world, here's my take on it in this paper.


"...If one is willing to think of it as a divine healing, then let’s indulge in an extended metaphor of Christ as a series of vaccinations, and sin as the disease that it treats. A vaccination is given to strengthen the body’s natural resistance to a disease. As time goes on, and more vaccinations are received, one would become more and more resistant to the condition of sin. This is very much the way in which recapitulation works. Depending on whether one believes in original sin or not, sin is either an inherited disease or one that one is infects from an outside source. Either way, this sinful condition can be treated by an association with and acceptance of Christ. If someone ignores the condition, sin might very well become fatal, and this fatality is the means of divine judgment. It very much reflects the sentiment made by Kathleen Norris, that hell is defined as “God’s absence.” By choosing to deny the treatment, one runs the risk of separating themselves from God, fully succumbing to the condition of sin; in essence, the condition is of self-imposed imprisonment, activated by learned or inherited self-centeredness, constantly being expressed by actual sin. However, by recognizing this condition and actively seeking treatment, one can in effect become healed, and made full and complete.

The other claim of the model, that the church is the body of Christ, is related to sanctification. In the medical metaphor, Christ becomes a part of us. More historically, the way recapitulation is set up is that we become a part of Christ, and that the church is Christ’s body. This is more than just a connection to the divine; being a part of the body of Christ means that we are also connected to everybody else that is associated with and is a part of this body. One could go even further with this concept and say that everything is connected, even beyond the church, since “at some level and in a remote or intimate way, everything is related to everything else.” All of creation is interrelated, and the body of Christ is the reflection of this interrelatedness. The church is, or should be, the most visible and direct presence of this connection..."

(Footnotes:

Norris, Kathleen, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 315.

Schmiechen, Peter, Saving Power: Theories of Atonement and Forms of the Church, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdsmans Publishing, 2005), 232.

McFague, Sally, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology, (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 27.

Wait, what? I have blog?

Hello, O dusty halls, o forgotten pixels. I have returned! I've ignored this thing for about a year, so I figure I'll boot up the old blogshop for old times sake. Things have just been so busy for a year and a half, I'll have to dwell on them for a little while. I figure I need to recap everyone, so I'll just do a retrospective over the next week or so in blog posts. Who knows? I may just put my creative writing cap on! You know the one. The one with glitter on it.

--Grantimus Prime