Jam of the Week: Jesus Walks

It takes me a little while to catch up with the mainstream. It's not a conscious choice, I assure you. But at the age of 24, I'm doomed to be a very geeky old guy that's completely out of touch with the youth.

I tuned into the hit song "Hey Ya" by Outkast a year after the song had been released, and quite a while after the rest of the world was pretty sick of it. But there I was anyway, shakin' it like a Polaroid picture while the rest of the world was on to something new.

And the pattern has remained the same for everything else. There are so many great songs that hit the top ten, and since I'm more likely to hear the top ten NPR news headlines than I am even one of these songs, they all slip past me until one year later I crawl out from under the rock to check out what these crazy kids have been listening to. And by the way, this new song "Toxic" by Britney Spears is awesome. No really! Oh, and check out "Drop It Like It's Hot" by Snoop. All songs that came out a long time ago to which I am only just recently jamming.

So now that hip hop's current king of the mountain Kanye West has graced the covers of all the top magazines in anticipation of his new album Late Registration I finally go out and check out his debut release The College Dropout.

Why am I sitting here talking to you now about Kanye West? Why, oh why did the name Britney Spears even come up on this blog at all? I am well aware that I'm verging into celebrity territory best left to the the experts. But I recommend that my gentle readers sit down and give a listen to what Kanye West has to say.

It's really surprising how much this song has touched me, given how wary I am of blind faith, and how much I avoid blatant Christianity in my own life, but here is a very sincere and beautiful song that has so much to say about why we try at all.

Kanye West touches on something that many of us are missing. While I rigidly walk the path of the intellectual theologian, I lose sight of what faith is really all about. Many of us spend an awful lot of time arguing scripture into the ground while the rest of the world is in serious pain.

Kanye West isn't here to argue theology; he's only here to explain what works, really truly works for him, just another person struggling through life (and yes, even rich celebrities at the top of their game struggle through life).

West highlights for me an important distinction between the argument and analysis of Jesus, and how Jesus plays out in our personal, individual lives. "I ain't here to argue about his facial features / Or here to create atheists into believers / I'm just tryin’ to say the way school needs teachers / The way Kathy Lee needs Regis that's the way I need Jesus."

I'm someone who, despite publicizing many of my beliefs in a public forum such as this, is very uncomfortable with sincere faith. I am uncomfortable with sincerely sharing my faith. I can articulate an argument, I can refute technicalities, but when it comes to sharing very personally what works for me, saying exactly what gets me up and going through my life, living my faith, I back down. I hide it and don't want to share it.

West touches on this in his own song. "So here go my single dawg radio needs this / They said you can rap anything except for Jesus / That means guns, sex, lies, videotape / But if I talk about God my record won't get played." Talk about anything, but not God.

So with a little inspiration from Kanye West, here's a call to action. Instead of refuting a belief, instead of over intellectualizing God to the point where talking about God has no point, instead of debating for debates sake, lets talk about what works. What works for you and me to get by? How does God work in your life?

For me, it starts with music. I can lie on the floor, face to the ceiling, and let the notes wash through my brain reminding me that the struggle is beautiful (thanks to Talib Kweli for connecting the words "beautiful" and "struggle" forever in my mind). The music creates the notes I need to create the beautiful chord that is my own life. It's a completion. It's like jazz. We take what life throws at us, and we improvise the notes that make it beautiful. That is how Jesus walks in my life.

Hard to swallow...

My grandfather has a joke that goes something like this:

Every church (in his priestly experience, Christian church) has to swallow just a little. Not every person agrees with everything the church does, and there's just a little you have to swallow.... Mormon's just have to swallow the most.

It is just a joke, but it speaks to a larger problem that I see, and I'm not talking about the Mormon church.

The problem is the idea that a religious institution would ever force any belief on a person, or that an individual would have to "swallow" anything. Now I'll be the first to admit that the previous sentence sounds a little naive, and I intended it to be so. But let's back up here and think about what a faith community should be.

Ideally it should be a community center, a place for people to come and recharge, a place for someone to find pastoral support, a place to find community. Community and pastoral support are, for me, fundamental. It should be a place where you feel safe and cared for. A faith community, be it a church, an organization, a gathering or even a pair of people, must be in itself a sanctuary to those involved.

The mistake we make, I think, is that we assume that religious institutions are where we find answers and where we let someone else do the thinking for us. Now this is the moment for me where it becomes difficult. On one hand, for me a religion of answers defeats the purpose of having faith at all. But on the other hand I like the idea that we are faithful because we seek the answers of life.

If we seek answers, we must have questions, and to have questions we must be allowed to have questions.

For me, I can't be part of a community that does not allow me to ask questions or to question what I see. This spans all aspects of life, from the religious to political. If we are not allowed the freedom of thought, and subsequently the freedom to question, then liberty, true liberty, in it's crazy Orwellian way, has perished.

A faithful community has a responsibility to its members. It has to care for them, nourish them and love them. If the community is not prepared to deal with the questions that each member brings to the table, than it is not prepared to care for, nourish or love those members.

So when I approach a community of faith, or even a conversation, it is vitally important to me that I am allowed question, to even doubt what I hear. Because without questions, and without doubt, there can be no faith.