Mixtape Lives

After the train wreck that was the last post, I think I need to offer a bit of a corrective and (hopefully) clarification. This post is a bit hastily baked, so be kind. Remember, I'm more of a tortoise than a hare.

I don't think anyone can seriously argue that humans aren't creatures who integrate. By our very nature, we emerge from the pressures of our environment - of our family, community, and culture. We are creatures who define ourselves through relationship with that which is other.

In practical terms, this means that I don't know who I am without the sum of my experiences. I don't know who I am without everything that has happened in my life up until now, including my relationship with you. And, like it or not, you don't know who you are without me. We inform each other, and in so doing make each other who we are. This shouldn't be news to anyone.

These lives that we create with each other are mixtapes, made up of our experiences, relationships, beliefs, hopes, and dreams. Each of our mixtapes are as unique as our faces or our fingerprints, and might even be connected to them. Yet our mixtape never stands alone. No matter how hard I try, songs on my mixtape are your songs, taken from your mixtape, though they are made over in my image. Or, to put it another way, the threads in my life tapestry are lifted from my interaction with others, and arranged as I see fit. And, in turn, others lift songs and threads from me. This is simply the reality of being human.

Which brings me to a quote from Darrell Jadock in 1990:
"The problem here is not that one's worldview or experience influences one's reading of the text, because that is inescapable. The problem is instead that the text is made to conform to the world view or codified experience and thereby loses its integrity and its ability to challenge and confront our present priorities, including even our most noble aspirations."

My argument in Mixtape Letters is that we must strive to uphold the integrity of the thing we are approaching, in order to truly hear what it has to say - to find it's "point".

But once we have the point what should we do?

It seems to me that our inevitable response to the challenge and confrontation the point brings is to enter into a dance of integrating experiences and relationships and points into our own mixtape lives. The dance is not bad, on the contrary. It's just that we need to allow room for someone or something to teach us a new dance, or to correct the dance we're currently dancing. Sometimes we have to listen to another mixtape, as hard as we can, while turning down our own. (In other words, we start with as close to the original point as we can get, and then integrate that point into our own context.)

Sometimes, as I enter the dance of integrating, I find things that are simply incompatible with who I am and what I hold dear. In that case, I might reject the point. In most cases, though, I just reject the parts I don't like, and keep the stuff I do like. There's nothing wrong with that, but it seems to me that I have to be honest with myself about the fact that I just did something to alter the original point as I form it over in my own image.

I believe that God has invited all of creation into this dance since the beginning of time. It is a dance that occurs in the very atoms that make up the universe, and a dance that God, as trinity, dances as well. In fact, His very being is what allows the dance to exist. As time passes away and this universe runs out of the energy to dance, it is also my belief that God will remember my unique but transient mixtape life, and invite me into a different dance - one in which I will get the chance to learn an infinite number of new steps as I dance with the Trinity for eternity.

Mixtape Letters

This summer, one of the toys I got was a Zune MP3 player. Like all Microsoft products, it has some problems, but all in all, I really like it. Plus, I got it for cheap, and that makes me happy.

With my Zune came a free two-week subscription to Zune Marketplace, which is basically like all-you-can-eat iTunes. Any songs I downloaded from Zune Marketplace would play as long as I was still subscribed, which after 2 weeks became no-longer-free.

Being the music lover that I am, I started furiously downloading whatever I wanted. A little Billy Joel here, a little Kanye West there. A smidge of Mercy Me, a bunch of Moby. A sample of Fergie, a plateful of Pink. A scoop of U2, a handful of Linkin Park. You get the idea.

But I noticed something interesting. At the end of my time on Zune Pass, I had only downloaded one album intact. For the rest of the material I downloaded, I only had a smattering of individual songs, which I had combined into finely tuned playlists. Basically, I had a bunch of mixtapes that I had cobbled together to satisfy my particular tastes. Screw the artist and the concept of an "album", I want track #4 only, and then I want to put it with track #10 of something completely different. Because, you know, it's all about me.

Some artists, like Radiohead, won't let you download individual tracks, because they view their albums as a cohesive whole. They won't submit to the demands of consumers, which take only what they want, when they want it, and discard the rest. With Radiohead you have to submit to the tapestry they create, rather than the tapestry you, as the consumer, want to create for yourself.

Unfortunately, this same consumeristic mindset invades our faith. All too often we, as Christians, don't read books like Genesis or Matthew as if they are a tapestry of their own, demanding to be read as a cohesive, stand alone whole. Instead, we take particular chapters and verses out, and use them as we please. We read only chapter 3:23-24, or 17:24-28 rather than wrestling with the fact that the whole book means something larger than those verses. We mix them together into playlists that make us feel predictable ways about ourselves, or about God.

All too often, we blur together bible stories until they have no distinctive context. This is especially true at Christmas. The story about Joseph being told to marry Mary? Only in Matthew. The story about Mary being told she would give birth as a virgin? Only in Luke. The story about the Magi following the star and bringing gifts? Only in Matthew. The story about the shepherds seeing angels and coming to worship Jesus? Only in Luke. The idea that the word became flesh and dwelt among us? Only in John. Most Christmas stories, though, are the ultimate mixtape of all these stories crammed together. In fact, I would bet most of us can't even conceive of the Christmas story without the mixtape. We have, in fact, designed our own tapestry.

I recently saw this happening with Genesis as well. Instead of reading Genesis as it's own tapestry, threads and verses from other tapestries were pulled out by preference and applied to particular verses of Genesis. What results is a tapestry of our own making, apart from what a book is actually trying to say. We, in fact, become more interested in our own mixtape letter than an actual Biblical letter. And in so doing, we get caught, once again, in the curse of folk theology.

I wonder, as I interact with christians in my church and at my work, what would happen if we let the confusing parts of Genesis, or of the prophets, or of Matthew actually confuse and disturb us through the unique tapestry they weave, rather than calming ourselves with a well constructed security blanket? What would happen if we looked at the Bible more as an art gallery about God and humanity - with each painting standing alone, yet somehow related to its neighbor- rather than a single smeared image?

What would happen if we ditched the mixtape letters? Can we? Should we?

Hi. My name is Ben, and I love music.

"Let me whisper things
You've never heard before"

Sometimes I feel like I need to go to a support group for people who love music. In my daydreams, this group wouldn't try to encourage me to quit music, but would encourage me to get more and more into it. Someone would bring a new album every week, and we would listen to it, groove to it, and deeply contemplate the lyrics. And we would be so good at it that we could make money. That way my title would be: Benjamin Rhodes, Music Lover.

"I read bad poetry
into your machine.
I save your messages
just to hear your voice.
You always listen carefully
to awkward rhymes.
You always say your name
like I wouldn't know its you..."

Melissa and I were talking the other day, and I mentioned that I love music for the lyrics - I love the message of the song. The music simply give the lyrics motion. Unless, of course it is classical music (think Bach), or an overpowering guitar solo, then it's all about the music. (Sigh...where is the philosphical-conceptual space for music?)

"But every now and then I'd swear I'd see
you standing
On a sidewalk,
In a restaurant,
From a taxi passing by."

Music to me whispers message about people I've met. It whispers things about places long in my past that I want to keep connected to. It reminds me of situations that made me laugh or cry or feel alive. Music speaks to me of God, and his connection to me. It speaks to me of myself, and my connection to God. Certain music becomes a soundtrack for a place and time. This doesn't happen because I sit down and listen to the song, it happens because my soul sings these lyrics to me - it whispers them when I think of people and places from long ago. Truth is, I sing about almost every person I have a meaningful relationship with in words that aren't mine, but have become mine. Sometimes I feel bad that I think most Christian music is technically and lyrically inferior to secular music. Then, I just pop in a new CD and all my worries fade as the music sweeps me away.

"He used to do surgeries
On girls in the eighties,
But gravity always wins."

Sometimes, lyrics frame how I think about things. When people analyze where they are in life, how they've fallen into particular patterns and situations, I think of music. I think of the way lyrics turn a certain phrase. I think of how creatively and descriptively and subjectively these lyrics describe life. They hold me hostage to ways of thinking about the world. Hostage in a good way.

"I stood on the edge
Tied to a noose
But you came along
and you cut me loose"

Music releases my inner muse. Music makes me more creative than I would otherwise be. I live in the lyrics. I find my space between the notes and words. I create whole worlds there and derive stories out of those worlds. I find meaning and purpose there. When everything about my bourgeoisie life seems droll and dull, music reminds me that there are ways of thinking about things that are full excitement and life. Music pulls me from crisis to creative.

Here are some of my favorite lyric snippets. (Can anyone identify where they come from?)

What are some of yours?

"Tears Stream
Down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace"

"Oh Simple thing
Where have you gone?
I'm getting old
I need something to rely on."

"Are the streets you're walking on
A thousand houses long?
Well that's where I belong
And you belong with me,
Not swallowed in the sea."

"Sundays were made for this..."

"On a platform I'm gonna stand and say,
That I'm nothing on my own..."

"The more skin you shared
The more that the air in your thoat would linger
when you'd call him your friend."

"I was waiting as you drove away.
The sunlight was falling
you were writing backwards
on a dusty window pane."