“I want to expose the wound to as many people as possible because there may be someone who could help the healing” :: Jeremy Current, Watershed Charlotte

There are moments of artistic openness that as a listener you absolutely have to seize, to grab ahold of knowing that you’re likely to learn something incredible. This was made true for me this past Sunday at Watershed when Jeremy Current, a guest vocal artist, began telling some of his story. While exposing some of the wounds that birthed one of his tunes he shared the quote above.

I was absolutely captivated, evidenced by my leaning forward in my chair and widening eyes. What I felt was a combination of a deep connection with this truth and yet an amazement at the succinctness with which he was able to verbalize truths that have taken me 30 years to even acknowledge. There are still chasms to cross before I begin to understand it.

It is not that I was unwilling to be vulnerable for fear of showing weakness. There are not enough über-masculine bones in my body to justify this. Essentially vulnerability required me to be satisfied with being embarrassed about the nature of my wound and required others to be at all interested in my being wounded and needing healing. Neither were realities that I could comprehend.

What I’m learning about vulnerability, though, is that it is provides the fuel for inspiration, transformation, and even revolution. Consider the concept of famous last words. When faced with challenge, defeat, looming destruction it depths of your soul, your heart, your core desires are the things that come out. The most well-known response when staring down the barrel of a gun is: “Please … I have a wife and family.”

These things come from down deep. It’s unfiltered soul-speak without any pretense or filter.

These are the important things.

The “I don’t want to be here anymore” things.

The “I don’t know what to believe” things.

The “I’m sure we can make it if we just have one more chance” things.

And, it is often in the vulnerable moments when we hear ourselves audibly speak the confessions and fears and troubles and questions that have been floating around in our heads that change can take took.  It’s fertile ground.  It’s shaken.  It’s soft and prepared for new things.

Seize those moments when you or someone close to you is being vulnerable.  Drink in the confession.  Let it stimulate your mind and heart. Let it stir your soul.  Let it connect you to another being.

And while you and I may never stare down the barrel of a literal gun, our hearts will break and our souls will be wrenched. We’ll be disappointed in our self.

Our failure.

Failure, though, and disappointment are the critical components for relationship.  Transparency breeds trust.  It is in the togetherness of life that my vulnerabilities and your concerns become our collective strength.

“Pobody’s Nerfect”

If the state of the world wasn’t enough to have to deal with, we all go through life adding on and disposing of mental baggage. Sometimes it’s a lack of confidence. Sometime’s it’s rejection. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s much more serious. Many times, however, our baggage accumulates from the myriad of mistakes that we are prone to make or the poor decisions that we felt would end with a different set of circumstances.

What complicates life is that we can have an aversion to just coming clean – of telling someone that we messed up, that we’re not perfect, that we haven’t got it all figured out.

Success in 2010 depends on a great deal of self-promotion. We have to be conscious of presenting the idealized self. And so on Facebook we tell other’s about the books we’ve read that affirm the image we’re trying to project. We careful craft our status postings to reflect the level of sophistication we want to portray. In real life we buy suits and cars and homes that reinforce our status and dress for the job that our ideal self deserves.

So it makes sense that we hide the aspects of our lives that are less than desirable. Having skeletons in our closets can be scary (I do not want to be attacked by zombie skeletons when all I really wanted was a sweater… just sayin). Admitting these skeletons can mean that you won’t get that job, or that thing, or that you will lose respect, or admiration, or that you ego will no longer be stroked.

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, it is the catharsis that comes from telling another human being about your shortcomings that may help you deal with them. While I can speak only anecdotally about this (that is, I have no proof), there is a change that happens when you move from a defensive, hidden posture to an active, humbling posture in relationship with someone. There is a definite shift. It may be just the simple reality that the truth has been spoken and yet the world around us has not spontaneously erupted with laughter or ceased to exist whatsoever.

My situation on this front was one where I falsely believed that I had to live up to an idealized version of the real me. And so there is baggage that I’ve accumulated over the years that I made every effort to veil. To have someone else know these things, I rationalized, would have been far too costly and, frankly, embarrassing. Mine was a personal struggle, I reasoned. There were times when I even tried to convince myself that it would actually be harmful to the OTHER PERSON if I were to tell them.

(As an aside, I do realize that I’m speaking very cryptically at the moment. This IS intentional. If I’m interested in going into detail, I’ll do it in person… not to the safety of my computer screen).

I want to be able to say that the act of telling people about these experiences has been very rewarding. They’ve not. Or, at the very least I would not use the word rewarding. Perhaps I need only to go back to the opening line, here, and say that it has been cathartic. The world, in fact, has continued, as have my relationships with those on the receiving end of my confessions. Now there are people in the world who seem to think about me in much the same way as they always have, except now I KNOW that they know that I am not, and cannot be, perfect. And, so, I no longer have to chase after this unattainable ideal with the same fervor as before.

The other interesting component of this experience has been the affirmation of “there can be good in every situation” mentality. For me, this good has been a new down-to-earth-edness that didn’t exist before. For you readers of Velvet Elvis, it’s the take “super-whatever out back and end his worthless existence.” This humility has come in waves. The first recognition come with an admission to myself that something was amiss. My behaviors didn’t line up with my beliefs and claims. I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. That took a while to sink in before I could move on to step two: needing someone else to know that I’m not as good as I thought I was.

Step two is altogether hard, incredibly worthwhile, and sometimes unexpected. For me, it started following a flippant, passing remark during dinner one night at a local pizza place. The opportunity blindsided me like nothing had ever blindsided me before. Within the eternity that was just a couple of seconds, I reasoned that this was do or die; a “you HAVE to walk through this door” moment. So I did. And with that, the remorse and guilt and fear that saturated my consciousness for literally half a lifetime began to precipitate out. It was visible. It was just there. In the open. It could be measured and poked and prodded and evaluated.

But it couldn’t be ignored. And it couldn’t easily be dissolved back out of sight.

And then today I had the opportunity to be the first to walk though that same door rather than simply responding to someone else’s first move. It was undramatic and worthwhile and altogether incredible.

Once and for all it suddenly seemed like something separate: something that wasn’t me, but something that had continued to live parasitically from me. It didn’t drain me of happiness or joy or life. It just took the excess. It didn’t need all of my self-confidence. But it took enough so that other areas of my life suffered. It thrived when I should have been thriving. It lived when I should have been living.

It suddenly seemed so overdramatic to have spent such a great deal of the last fifteen years working to hide and feed this life-sucking leech.

And so freeing to live free of it.

From here, your guess is as good as mine as to which way this will go. I’m not expecting it to be the easiest thing in the world. Once you get used to living a certain way, changing is a challenge to put it lightly. But it’s intriguing to me that it’s in my weakness that I’m strong. It’s in my shame that I’m proud. It’s in my pain that I’m alive.

There are a few moments that I can honestly look back on and say they’ve changed my life. The day I learned about “active and passive” living and my wedding day are two that come to mind. I suspect, in a few years that I’m living another of those moments right now.

Both the interviewer and the interviewee were middle-aged or later and both had vivid recollections not just of playing out side as baby baby-boomers, but being forced by their parents to play outside… the “don’t-come-back-in-until-dinner” variety of playing outside.  There was a freedom in this that was taken for granted as children, but was dramatically real.

Later the conversation turned to questioning the course of events that have seemed to turn that scenario on its head.  We now live inside our homes, parenting our children from the business end of our remote controls, allowing them to soak up the rays of the LCD, without ever guiding them to thrust their hands into dirt, of lying in the grass.  We certainly never utter the words, “Go outside and play and don’t come in until dinner.”

Their supposition was that we are afraid.  We have a sense that the world outside the protective custody of our homes is a dangerous, perverted, evil place where criminals are lying in wait.

What’s interesting, though, is that year after year, rates of crime against children continue to decrease.

Could it be that the world is just not an interesting enough place to support the 24 hour news cycle?  Some days, obviously, there’s enough to saturate the airways, but it’s probably more accurate to say that the world is otherwise pretty boring.  So, in an effort to sell advertising space to companies that want evermore viewers, we hear about the same abduction or plane crash or ongoing investigation, over and over and over.

The market has taken this to the extreme now with unrepresentative voices like Beck and Olbermann being the archetypes and leading the pursuit of polarization.  More money is made when more of our eyes are glued to our televisions and when our notions of living in safety are irrationally questioned.

Wikipedia says that terrorism is “the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.”  I realize it’s a bit of stretch to call our media outlets terrorists.  But, I dare you to watch with an objective mind and simply count the number of references that are meant to induce fear, or question your safety, or make you believe that it’s more likely than not that a cold-war era nuclear missle is en route to your backyard in suburbia…. RIGHT …. NOW.

My advice: go outside.  Enjoy it.  We’re not meant to live in fear of war or terrorists or socialists or conservatives.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

Someday I’ll fly
Someday I’ll soar
Someday I’ll be so damn much more
Cause I’m bigger than my body gives me credit for

After listening to the thoughts of Desmond Tutu from my last post, I imagine God to still be inspiring writers to write profound thoughts that someday will be canonized into The Bible II.  The prophet John Mayer has spoken.

Desmond Tutu said this during a portion of a recent interview that dealt with his good friend, the Dalai Lama:

“Do you really think that God would say, ‘Dalai Lama, you really are a great guy, man.  What a shame you’re not a Christian.’  I somehow don’t think so.  I think God is just thrilled because no faith, not even the Christian faith, can ever encompass God or be able to communicate who God is.  Only God can do that.”

This flies directly in the face of what traditional theology teaches.  How many times have you heard, “No one may come to the Father, except through me,” which implies you have to come experience the Jesus that this brand of church is promoting before you can graduate to some distant heaven far away in the clouds.  In church we are taught about love and grace and mercy which flows from God in heaven – God IS love, after all – and yet when we see these traits in people who aren’t traditional God-heads, we puzzle as to how non-Christians can experience and show these traits.

Perhaps God is bigger than we, “his body”, give him credit for.

It’s human to want to compartmentalize – and put concepts in neatly and clearly defined mental boxes.  God is bigger than our mental boxes.  It’s tempting to think of God in terms of metaphor to put his character in terms of something that we can understand, but the problem here is that every metaphor quickly breaks down.

God is big.

But how to we reconcile the words of a book that says “no man comes to the father except though me” with a spirit and an understanding of Jesus that is so loving that he wouldn’t see anyone not be part of the family.

We’ve got one mechanism – it’s our choice.  Our go-to default position on this has been – “it’s a gift that is freely offered” and you’re stupid, dead, ignorant, irrational NOT to take it.  This functions, but doesn’t remove some of the callousness – God throwing his hands up and saying “The ball is in YOUR court – I’ve done all I can do.”

We sometimes tack on that not “accepting God’s gift” makes baby Jesus cry to handle this.

But, maybe, we’re starting in the wrong place – maybe we’re reading too much into the english translation of greek words that were written thousands of years ago. Perhaps instead of reading that Jesus is the only door that leads to the father so if you don’t accept his love prepare for eternal damnation we should read Jesus is the way through eternity and He has revealed himself to so many people in so many ways that everyone can have access.

It’s a much different interpretation that resolves the “only through me issue.”

You can’t own God.  But the Christian church (and to be fair, all of our faiths) have staked their claim.  My God does this.  You (lower-case g) god doesn’t.  We’re trying to contain the uncontainable.

Sure, this is heretical – I understand.  But how much more like Christ would it be to drop the us-and-them mentality, the “homosexuality is an abomination” approach to life, the drive for pious perfections and simply replace bad circumstances with good circumstances, and to replace good circumstances with better circumstances?

It is utterly irrelevant to me if when I die I was right or wrong.  I don’t care what heaven is like.  I’m OK with Zen-like questions surrounding my Christian faith.  I don’t need answers.  What I need is to express faith in practical ways by being friendly, sharing food, washing cars, giving money, hugging, and relating to people in completely unconditional terms.  I am motivated by a belief that we’re all created in the image of God and that your soul and mind and strength are equally as valid as my soul, and mind, and strength.

He’s bigger than His body gives him credit for.

Firstly, I believe that it is perfectly justified to say that we are a selfish people. We have learned to be possessive of our belongings, or family, our freedoms, our guns, our time, our food, our privacy, and anything else that can be construed as being ours.

We are irrationally self-indulgent – “I absolutely need a pedicure today” or “What a long day at work… I need a beer”

We are unnecessarily self-reliant to the detriment of community. Our deepest friendships are often tainted with worries about boundary issues and limitations on what can be expected of one another.

We hoard our effectively limitless material wealth in gargantuan homes.

Secondly, you must understand that Idiot is an interesting word for a lot of reasons. It’s generally meant as an insult. It assumes some sort of comparison – that is, “I’m stupid compared to you.” But if you go back far enough, it actually comes from a greek word that means “own/private.” A man that keeps to himself, that does things his own way.

We are now in an alternate universe where the man who was once considered worthy of insult for trying to do things outside the bounds of community is now exalted as the fully self-actualized archetypal human.

Something is amiss.

I’m indubitably aware that we are victims. Marketers appeal to our sense of individualism, our desire to rise above the commoner and excel, to ride the tidal waves of commerce and materialism and prestige to new lands that need conquering. We are ourselves unselfish. Rather we are creatures persuaded into this harsh lifestyle of wine and LCDs and imported automobiles.

Excuses are meant to minimize the effect of one’s own mistakes and misgivings.

And as people die from starvation, and as others are held down by failures of systems supposedly designed to help, and as resources that could help are hoarded, our advice seems all the more surreal:

“Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, get your life back together, do something with your life.”

The message seems to be “If you were just a little more idiotic you clearly wouldn’t’ be in this mess.”

As our toxic individualism has grown, we see psychological and often physical barricades to concepts that are obvious in community. Universal healthcare makes sense to those unconsumed with self. Peaceful resolutions take the place of pervasive war metaphor because it’s not OK that innocent men, women, and children should die. To suppose this is necessary evil is to be only half correct.

As dangerous as this individualism to our world at large, I’m aware that cynicism is equally as damaging and it is an aspiration to be free of this. It is my affliction.

To combat this, surround yourself with people that have an unselfish heart, those who have an appropriate perspective on how to navigate these lives we find ourselves in. Long for relationships that intertwine regularly with deeper meaning and purpose and those in need.

We are not alone and we are not meant to live lonely.

What is incredibly telling about the whole thing is that we seem to despise more of the process of achieving this success.  We trudge unwillingly to work most mornings, we fight traffic, we battle deadlines and duke it up for the best positioning on the corporate ladder.

For some reason, at least for part our lives, we’re told to believe that this is the way it is.

I have a friend who often says that he hears that “some people go to work every day and actually enjoy what they do.”

Why are we burdened by these processes? Why do we hate them?

In a cultural coup d’état this same angst, permeates all of the passages of our lives.  Whether we’re fighting traffic on the way to the park, or anxiously awaiting news about a potential raise, or dreading the “travelling” in travelling home during the holidays, or trying to shed a bad habit, our minds are transfixed on outcome, on accomplishment.

When you’re scanning the horizon, you’re bound to miss incredible details right in your path.

I recently watched (for the nth time) a talk on TED.com by Adam Savage, the Mythbuster.  In this video, Savage talks about two of the obsessions of his life as a creative model maker.  First, an obsession with the legendary Dodo bird and acquiring by any means possible a replica of the Dodo skeleton and, secondly (and perhaps even more obsessive), a quest for an as-accurate-as-possible replica of the Maltese Falcon as described in Dashiell Hammett’s book of the same name.

Savage recounts spending countless hours, and resources, and finances, and brain power pursuing these projects – completely obsessed with building the perfect models.

Only, as he wraps up his talk, he comes to the realization that the “accomplishments” never were what these projects were about. Quite the contrary – for Savage it’s the pursuit.

It is the pursuit that teaches lessons about living, that stretches the mind and the soul, and that finally wins the hearts of our desired.  It is the pursuit that we remember, that we value.

Accomplishments, then, are merely milestones in a perpetual pursuit – temporary targets that have our attention only for a short while until the pursuit brings us to a new place.

And this is why there ought to be no end to the pursuit – because there is also something more enriching, more worthy of the chase and the effort.  This is also why when we stop pursuing these milestones begin to crack and disintegrate.

Marriages go unfulfilled when we are not continually pursuing our spouses.  When we feel as though we’ve reached some goal, when we feel vows are simply eternal in and of themselves, what was once love begins to wane.

Self-confidence begins to fail when our career pursuits become stagnant.  When we’re in a place that we don’t want to be, when we see no way out, it’s so easy to sit and wallow in self-deprecating despair.  But it’s the pursuit of something different, something new, something better, that renews our energy.

Crave the pursuit.  Value the pursuit.  Keep an eye for these milestones that we all have and that we all aspire to, but seize the moments of every day to learn from the processes of our lives, the journeys.

Because pursuit is what it is all about.

Behind my obviously gruff exterior is a soft-hearted man who would cry at the drop of a hat and its subsequent return to its rightful owner. There is something about redemption and restoration and encouragement that clutches my heart and simply will not let it go before ensuring that my eyes well up and that I have to sniff back tears.

I don’t mind admitting this. I’m not a proud man.

It speaks to a sense of belonging to an inclusive human family as well as a belief that we can live counter to the entropy of the universe. We tend towards chaos. But we neither belong there nor do we have to remain there.

We’re told that God wants whats best for us and has a plan for us. I believe that there is a ‘right’ way for us to live as individuals and as a collective. While I don’t believe that the Creator has packed our calendars full of events and appointments, tasks that we are to complete save eternity hangs in the balance, I think it’s appropriate to say that God would have us live in such a way that we both actively and passively find opportunities to make life better. Simple things. Ambitious things. Things that are a doomed to fail. Things that are overnight sensations.

These things shift our trajectory away from the chaos. They give us purpose and direction in more than one sense of those words. It was the grand intention of God not that I would give a homeless man a sandwich on Aug 17 at 2:34pm but simply that we would live with kindness, generosity, understanding, integrity, and a designed desire to crave justice for our fellow creatures.

It’s these things that make miniscule corrections to our path – a state of perfect redemption approached by the assimilation of millions and billions of unnoticed acts.

There are aspects of my life that I’m not prepared to share on my blog, and so it makes this next bit much less dramatic. But, for a brief moment in time I was able to zoom out and get a wide-angle shot of my life and realized that there is a redemption that’s been happening all along, a restoration, a return to how things should be and how I want them to be. It’s millions of little things that are coalescing into a beautiful work of redemptive art.

And that may make me well up, just a little bit.

It may equate me with the “Grinch” but Christmas does not do much for me.  In past posts, I’ve alluded to my problems with doing for the sake of doing, free from any rationale.  You may recall my thoughts on church, for example.  This is a quite honest representation of who I am as I person: I need to see the rationale before getting behind something.  There has to be a strategy or a purpose.

To be even more specific, it’s not enough to simply have rationale – it’s not an “as long as you can justify it, I’m in” scenario – obviously, the justification and rationale have to align with my beliefs and morals and personality.

It is at this level that Christmas begins to fall apart for me.

Christmas has become the perpetual out-do-myself game.  It’s on a grand scale so we may not even realize it, but for so many of us, this year has to be bigger than last.  Better parties, blingier gifts, nicer decorations, 1000 more bulbs. I wonder if we haven’t made Christmas into a milestone, some point of reference to gauge our progress (read: net worth) year over year.  Last year I was able to spend $X so this year, if I’ve had a successful year, it stands to reason that I should be able to spend $X + $Y.  If not, we’ve obviously not worked hard enough, long enough, made a big enough impression on the men “upstairs” (either literally or figuratively).  Certainly we give gifts away because it’s what culture and baby Jesus would have us to do, but I wonder if we don’t give in a spirit of self-measurement.

It’s not hard to imagine.  We get a card from someone that’s not on our list and some primal guilty panic sets in.  What is the drive behind it?  Fear that the we’ll “owe” the sender something that will strike the cosmic balance in their favor?  Do we honestly think that the forgotten ones are sitting with a Santa Claus style checklist, cross-referencing every piece of festive fan mail that arrives at their doorstep?  Just because we do it ourselves, doesn’t mean everyone does

My argument is that this is reflective of the yearly benchmark that we’ve set for ourselves.  More cards out mean more friends this year over last.  More gifts out means more expendable income this year over last.  Net growth is what we’re really after when we venture out into the wilds that are our bliss acquisition depots (a.k.a. shopping malls).

It’s important to be self-aware and introspective.  I don’t want to devalue those things.  What is off, however, is our tendency to measure worth in financial or material terms.  Sure, we’re constantly bombarded with financial news.  It’s strange to go through a day without encountering a stock ticker or at least some reference to which direction the DOW has been headed lately.  It’s understandable for us to measure ourselves by the tools that we have around us – in much the same way that I still find temperatures in Fahrenheit or distances in miles to be confusing at times.

In previous posts, I’m clear about my position that Christians have ruined the church.  Something similar is true for Christmas.  I don’t want to put this all on the church – only to say that this season has been ruined for me.

The beauty has been the rediscovery.

We haven’t completely disengaged from the season.  There are things that still have value and purpose.  But becoming indebted to financial institutions is not my idea of a good time.  And Christmas is still a milestone for us.  But instead of measuring the ways that we’ve made more money in the past year, or met new people that need to read the latest installment of the Smith saga and receive a picture of us sitting under our tree, we’re able to figure out ways that we can give.  We know we’re not “wealthy” when you compare our checkbooks to those of our neighbors, but it’s a beautiful thing to not be in want.  It’s an amazing place to be.

It frees you to be able to mobilize resources, no matter how meager, to help somebody that’s in need.  So instead of buying stuff, and wrapping it in stuff and packing that in stuff, we’ve been able to give.  Maybe it’s a house up the street or maybe it’s children in a country halfway around the world.  We’ve participated in programs like World Vision and local programs designed to help children and their families nearby.  The year we’re helping build wells in Malawi (http://www.equitas.cc).

And, if you’re busy buying Christmas gifts this year – don’t worry, I’m not at all saying that you’re efforts are in vain and stupid and a waste of resources that could otherwise be used to feed the poor.  There IS great value in gift giving – that’s the way that many, many people express their love.  I’m simply saying that, for my wife and I, we’ve chosen to reroute the resources we have to other things.

So, you’re not getting anything from us this year…. again.  Honestly, it’s not that we don’t like you  We like you very much.

Merry Christmas