Occupy Christmas Music: Songs and Albums Worth Tolerating

I can't think of anything else to write about, so I'll write about this: my wife, because she loves me, bought me the She & Him Christmas album. It was the first thing I saw as I walked through the door after a three-day trip. I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm really looking forward to it. She & Him is a group made up of Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward--Zooey of Elf and New Girl fame; M. Ward the accomplished alt-folk singer-songwriter and one of the Monsters of Folk. The songs they record for She & Him are reminiscent of mid-fifties pop-chanteuse music; I saw them in Chicago for free with my in-laws at the Millennium Park amphitheater and quickly gobbled up both their releases, so yeah, I was eager to hear what they did on a Christmas album.

I get bored easily with Christmas music, to be honest. So much of recorded holiday music is opportunistic and pandering. You're more likely to hear harps and violins at the Wal-Mart in December than you are to hear them in heaven, and there's a reason for that. But when I find Christmas music that's different, that someone took on for the challenge of it rather than for the quick buck it churns out, I take notice. So I thought I'd offer a list of songs and albums that I've come to rely on during the holiday season. I welcome your feedback and supplements.

These Are A Few of My Favorite Singles

• "O Holy Night," by Tracy Chapman. A song that's far too often overblown (see this for an example) is made especially poignant and pensive by a reliable folkie.
• "We're Following the Wrong Star," by Billy Bragg and Ben Sollee. I can never seem to get enough of Billy Bragg, and the fact that he even has a Christmas song fills me with Christmas cheer.
• "Gabriel's Message," by Sting. Sting recorded this song for the Very Special Christmas project years ago; the version on his more recent holiday album isn't as good, but it's still good.
• "St. Stephen's Day Murders," by Elvis Costello with the Chieftains. Leave it to Elvis to sing about murder for a holiday album.
• "Angels We Have Heard on High," by Crystal Lewis. This contemporary Christian musician turned jazzy for her Christmas album, and this one is the best track among a number of greats. "Slow down, fellas," she jokes during the band's jam. "What's your hurry?"
• "God's Own Son," by Nicole C. Mullen. I want to write a Christmas play just so I can choreograph this song. Funky tuba--what else needs to be said?
• "I Saw Three Ships," by Bruce Cockburn. I've actually only ever heard this once, and I've never found it since. But it's awesome.
  

These Are a Few of My Favorite Albums

• Shawn Colvin, Holiday Songs and Lullabies. I'd listen to this all year round if it didn't make me self-conscious. Best tracks are "Love Came Down at Christmas" and "Little Road to Bethlehem."
• Jars of Clay, Christmas Songs. I like Jars a lot; we've seen them in concert several times. They interpret songs in really interesting ways. Best tracks are "Winter Skin," "Wonderful Christmastime" and "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day."
• The Brian Setzer Orchestra, Boogie Woogie Christmas. Seriously, who's cooler than Brian Setzer? Best tracks are "Blue Christmas," "Sleigh Ride," "The Nutcracker Suite" and "The Amens."
• The Blind Boys of Alabama, Go Tell It on the Mountain. The singing group collaborates with an eclectic bunch of singers. Best tracks are "Last Month of the Year," ""Born in Bethlehem" (with Mavis Staples) and "I Pray on Christmas" (with Solomon Burke).
• Oh Starling! Joy. This is probably hard to find, since it was produced as a fundraiser a couple of years ago for Scum of the Earth Church in Denver. But it's cool. Look for "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen."
• Bing Crosby, The Voice of Christmas. C'mon. It's Bing. "Mele Kalikimaka" is wildly entertaining, and "Adeste Fideles" is old-school brilliant.
• The Fab Four, A Fab Four Christmas. Christmas songs arranged to sound like Beatles songs. "Away in a Manger" sounds just like "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away." This will probably eventually get old, but it hasn't yet.
• Sufjan Stevens, Songs for Christmas. Every year for five years, Sufjan and friends put out an EP of Christmas-themed music. Then they boxed it. I lost volume 2 somewhere along the way, which is bitterly disappointing, since it includes "Once in Royal David's City." But "We're Goin' to the Country" and "Lo! How a Rose E'er Blooming" are great, as is everything else.

That's what I've got. What have you got?

Please Pass the Funk

Happy Thanksgiving! A litte Sly and the Family Stone to put you in the mood.

A psalm. For giving grateful praise.



Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.
Worship the LORD with gladness;

come before him with joyful songs.

Know that the LORD is God.

It is he who made us, and we are his;

we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving

and his courts with praise;

give thanks to him and praise his name.

For the LORD is good and his love endures forever;

his faithfulness continues through all generations.

I EXIST!!

I suppose that I will be forevermore plagued with the sick expectation that sermons preached about pride, narcissism, egocentrism, selfishness, and other related behaviors and outlooks will reference my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville--this despite several instances of frustration to date when preachers have failed to reference it. But the topic still holds my attention, three years after the book's release. So I was pleased to read, of all things, Sarah Silverman's insights into the root causes of self-aggrandizing behavior in the recent "comedy issue" of Entertainment Weekly. Here it is; I hope you like it as much as I relate to it:

Hecklers are a heartbreaking breed, desperate to connect at any cost, positive or negative. Like a kid acting out for attention — even if they get spanked, at least it's contact; even if they get punished, at least they've garnered focus. When I get heckled, I tend to give the heckler what he wants — attention; to be ''mirrored,'' as the shrinks say. Sometimes I do an impression of what they probably won't be saying the next day: ''Oh, man, remember last night when I was like, 'You're f---ing Matt Damon!!'? That was so awesome!'' (Just to be clear, this is by no means encouragement — if the heckler spells trouble or f---s up my timing, they're skillfully escorted out by very subtle yet giant men.)

A guy once just yelled, ''ME!!'' in the middle of my set. It was amazing. This guy's heckle actually directly equaled its heartbreaking subtext — ''me!!'' Another time I was listening to Howard Stern and a young listener called in. He was being an a--hole so Howard hung up on him, but just before he was disconnected I heard him say, real quickly, ''I exist!'' Those were the only two times I ever heard a heckler say what he really, REALLY meant. I am real! Even if I make you mad, Mommy/Daddy, it's still proof — I EXIST!

Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Young Man: My Goodreads Review of Joe Jackson's A Cure for Gravity

A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage by Joe Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some of my friends probably wouldn't buy it, but I was a pretty melancholy kid. Stuff affected me pretty heavily, from the offhand comments of kids and adults who didn't know they were being mean to the scenes from movies that didn't know they were being poignant. My melancholy extended to music and particularly music videos, which I watched with cultlike devotion. Among the more resonant are a couple of Joe Jackson songs off his album Night and Day: "Breaking Us in Two," in which a woman packs her things and walks the long cobblestone road to the train station to start a new life, only to then gain some fresh perspective on her current life; and "Real Men," in which a young boy (probably about my age) struggles in vain to understand what constitutes masculinity. It wasn't till twenty years later that I actually bought any Joe Jackson music, first the single "Common People" that he did with William Shatner (buy it; it's killer) and then the two-disc retrospective of his long career, which includes his hits "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" and "You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want," and a wide variety of other songs. Jackson is an eclectic songwriter, drawing on his classical training and jazz interest while working hard to remain true to his working-class roots and connected to a real, popular-level audience. And yet he's something of a perennial outsider, never quite at home in any environment. The videos for both songs that resonated so strongly for me have him not as the love interest or the protagonist but as narrator/commentator, in but not of the story being told; his pop music has always reflected his appreciation for other genres, and his forays into other genres have never shed his identification with pop.

That homelessness carries through his book A Cure for Gravity, written before "Common People" but well after "You Can't Get What You Want" fell off the charts. I found myself comparing the book regularly to Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, which covers a similar time period and point in an artist's blossoming career: Martin writes up to the point where he moves from stand-up comedy to film acting; Jackson writes from childhood through to the release of his breakout album Look Sharp! Both writers are philosophical about their craft and the culture they inhabit, but the books remain quite different, demonstrating the divides of chosen art form, age (Martin is nine years older than Jackson, a fact reflected heavily in how each experienced the 1960s), place of origin (wide-open Texas for Martin; working-class north England for Jackson) and outlook. Martin writes seemingly from retirement, with the voice of someone looking back on a life of relative ease; even his hardships are cast as welcome learning opportunities, and his point is, more than anything, appreciation for life and what comes of it. Jackson's book is roughly twice as long and reflects a hardscrabble life, a perpetual outsider's look back on what he's struggled to make of his world. His portraits of influential people aren't uncharitable but they are sometimes startlingly frank. He's not retiring or even resting as he writes; his long passages of memoir are frequently supplanted by well-considered arguments about the public role of music, the responsibility of artistry, the twin temptations of both a cultural aristocracy and a consumerist culture that rejects challenge and demands to be catered to. Martin writes a memoir; Jackson writes an "agendoir."

I don't mean that as a critique, although I did occasionally find myself silently accusing Jackson of the pretentiousness that he often defends himself against throughout the book. I find his argument for/against pretentiousness pretty compelling, however. From pages 84-85: "All those old structures [of musical training and apprenticeship] have broken down, and now anyone with a few quid to spend can simply walk into a record shop [note: written in 1999; now you don't have to walk anywhere] and choose from five centuries' worth of music from all over the world. . . . All very well for the 'consumer,' but how often do we consider how it affects the artist? Where does he start, when everything is transient and disconnected? How does he know who to be, when his roots are themselves rootless? . . . Sometimes I think that categories are proliferating to such an extent that nearly everyone, eventually, will be a subgenre of one. Maybe then we'll appreciate content a bit more than style--or rediscover the true meaning of style."

Leave it to Joe Jackson, perennial outsider, first-person observer/narrator of the vicissitudes of life, to take the opportunity to write a memoir and turn it into a manifesto for artists. The book is at times abrasive, occasionally self-indulgent, sometimes indecipherably British. But it's one of my favorite books of the year, partly because Joe Jackson has proved throughout his career that he knows how to get to me, and partly because he's more or less right about the public role of music, the responsibility of artistry, the twin temptations of both a cultural aristocracy and a consumerist culture that rejects challenge and demands to be catered to. Partly, also, because I was too young to enjoy the New Wave that Jackson represents as it was happening, and I relish every window into it I come across. So, for all its pretentiousness, for all its uncomfortable frankness, for all its commingling of autobiography and cultural agenda, I'm thankful to Jackson for writing A Cure for Gravity, and I anticipate dipping back into it now and again to revisit my own past and to get insight into my own future.

View all my reviews

Apocalypse Remixed: The Revelation Will Not Be Televised

Every once in a while the song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by the late great Gil Scott-Heron sneaks into the queue on my iTunes, and I'm taken immediately back to my American history class with Dr. Weiss, where I first heard it alongside "Street-Fighting Man" by the Rolling Stones as an example of late-sixties ennui. But along with the nostalgia is something of an apocalyptic vision of the future. I think of this song as the kind of vibe we out to assign to the end of this world and the inauguration of the next--not the "nah nah--enjoy hell" scorn of the Left Behind set, not the disaster-addiction of the Mayan-calendar Schwartzenerds, not the often tragically wonkish numerology of the cultists. The Revelation (and the "everything new" it heralds) is the sort of thing that offers hope even as it rages against the status quo. Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggested that Jesus judges us even as he saves us, and such an audacious event as the end of the world ought to inspire us to a similar work in the songs we sing and prophetic words we utter. So, with apologies and respect to Gil Scott-Heron, here's a twenty-first-century spiritualized remix of a classic song with an eye toward the future.

***

You will not be able to stay home, sister.
You will not be able to boot up, download or log in or log out.
You will not be able to brush your teeth with crack or meth,
Soda pop or beer during commercials,
Because the Revelation will not be televised.

The Revelation will not be televised.
The Revelation will not be offered through NetFlix
In four parts without previews or special features.
The Revelation will not show you pictures of Ronald McReagan
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by Bill Clinton,
Barack Obama and George Double-You to eat
chorizo sausage confiscated from a South Texas gap in the fence.
The Revelation will not be televised.

The Revelation will not be brought to you by the
Hallmark Tearjerk Theatre and will not star Hillary Duff
Or Timberlake or Timbaland or Gaga.
The Revelation will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The Revelation will not clear up your zits.
The Revelation will not make you look five pounds thinner,
Because the Revelation will not be televised, sister.

There will be no pictures of you and Harold and Kumar
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
Drudge will not be able to report the winner at 8:32 or offer sound bites from 29 districts.
The Revelation will not be televised.

There will be no viral videos of bros tazing schmoes.
There will be no viral videos of bros tazing schmoes.
There will be no pictures of Mel Gibson being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Al Sharpton
Strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and Green liberation jumpsuit
That he had been saving for just the proper occasion--Just Like Us.

Jersey Shore, Jerseylicious, and CSI New Jersey
will no longer be so damned relevant, and
no one will care if Chloe and Lamar can keep it together
Because people in darkness will take to the street
Looking for a brighter day.
The Revelation will not be televised.

There will be no tweets or Google plus ones or status updates
No streaming video of hairy armed liberationists
And J-Lo blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Ke$ha or Katy Perry,
Nor sung by Toby Keith, Keb Mo, Kanye West, Kelly Clarkson, or the Killers.
The Revelation will not be televised.

The Revelation will not return to your video shortly
After a message about whiter teeth, whiter sheets, or whiter people.
You will not have to worry about performing in your bedroom,
drying your eyes, or mastering your thighs.
The Revelation will not go better with Coke.
The Revelation will not save you fifteen percent or more on your car insurance.
The Revelation will, however, get you off your high horse.

The Revelation will not be televised, will not be digitized,
will not be sanitized, will not be compromised.
The Revelation will be no ho-hum re-run, sisters;
The Revelation will be live.

We're Just Entertainers

I used to have this standing argument with a friend of mine. He always initiated it, probably because he's better at initiating arguments (I'm conflict-avoidant) and because he found my exasperation entertaining. The argument was, which is the true universal language: music or sports?

I know, right? It's a no-brainer. Music is a universal language. Sports is just people running around, occasionally knocking into stuff or one another or both. But not so fast: much to my dismay, he actually made a compelling argument. You find sports in all cultures, and sports always attracts a crowd. Whatever the manifestation, sports invites both participation and witness, and as transportable as it is (consider as only one example the "sports evangelism" groups that travel from America to foreign lands to beat the locals at basketball and then brain them with Bibles), it's also a cultural marker. Baseball is a "national pastime"; "football" is not merely football but soccer or American or Australian or some other domestic derivation. Sumo wrestling is known the world over, but it's known as inherently Japanese.

Not so fast, though, sporties. Music is likewise both universal and contextual. You can tell the geographical origins of a music even as you enjoy it from afar. You hear it everywhere you go, either ambiently or in some intentional broadcast. It's appended to the news and the weather and our driving and our working and in some cases even our sleeping. It almost by definition demands both a performer and an audience, and the lines between the two are easily and regularly blurred. I, for example, surely annoyed all the people around me as much as they annoyed me as we all sang along, as loudly as we could, with U2 or Paul McCartney or the various other artists I've seen perform this summer.

We'd go back and forth, my friend and I, in our ritual dance/sparring match. He would observe that thousands of people pile into stadiums every week to watch the same group of people run back and forth for a few hours. I would observe that all of them would be listening to marching bands and electric organs and AC/DC riffs while they did so. He would note that evening news programs had blocks of time dedicated to sports; I would counter by pointing out the music that played at the beginning and end (and sometimes the middle) of the block. I don't think I ever lost, at least by my estimation, because I could always close with the acknowledgment that you often saw trumpet players run across a football field, but you never saw football players run across a symphony stage.

Anyway, today I read a portion of A Cure for Gravity by Joe Jackson (the musician who performed "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" and "Breaking Us in Two" and countless other great new wave songs of the late twentieth century) in which Jackson argued that musicians and athletes "actually have a lot in common." I was scandalized, but he makes some good points.

From a coldly rational point of view, what we [athletes and musicians] do is useless, unnecessary. Yet we pour years of dedication into it, training our bodies and minds, striving to transcend human limitations. We work in teams, we take solos, we go on tour. We're heroes and role models, and then again--as someone is always on hand to point out--we're just entertainers, and we should all be bloody well grateful if we can make a living doing something we like.

Well, that pretty much says it, I guess. Cue the music. (Ha! I win again!)

What I Would Have Said: The Vocational Life, Part Three

This is the third and final entry in a series of posts taken from a talk I wound up not giving at a men's retreat last weekend. The other two can be found below. Enjoy!

***

That means that when we're at work, we're actually on mission. The life of a disciple is not removed from the context of a disciple. Where we live, move and have our being is the fertile ground in which our God has planted us, and what will emerge is what God has for us to do. A watching world, observing the discipleship lived out in its presence, will be inclined to say “Surely the presence of the Lord was in this place, and I was not aware of it.” We do our work as unto the Lord, because we seek the righteousness of the Lord, and God’s righteousness applies to the way we apply ourselves to the work given us. We relate to our coworkers (and our neighbors, and the people we encounter when we’re shopping or dining out) in ways that honor the image of God in them and that inspire them, by our words but also by how we conduct ourselves, to give glory to God. We strive, whether we’re in a worship service or in a meeting, whether we’re on session or on the golf course, to see God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And we do all this with confidence that the God who spoke to Peter in a vision and who visited the household of Cornelius when no one thought God would ever do such a scandalous thing—that God has a mission for us in whatever place we find ourselves.

That also means that our mission doesn’t end with our retirement, and we don’t cease to serve God when we’re laid off. The work of the church extends to whatever we’re doing and brings us into all kinds of odd encounters. Retirement or layoffs aren’t the termination of our identity; they are the introduction of a new context. We may be being called to a new kind of work. We may be being called to advocate for people for whom retirement or joblessness have been like a kind of death; they need the good news that only a resurrected Messiah can offer, and they need the kind of justice that is characteristic of a kingdom ruled over by a merciful, loving God. We may be called to relationships with people whom our careers have blinded us to—the neighbor we’ve never had time to get to know, the staff at the restaurant or coffee shop we frequent. We aren’t lawyers or doctors or businessmen or teachers or retirees or anything like that, any more than Peter was a fisherman. We’re disciples who practice law or medicine or who teach or have retired. We capture people with a vision of the kingdom of God, where every tear is wiped dry and every suffering brought to an end.

You can’t do that sort of thing in a church; you have to be the church and go do it wherever the Lord calls you. That’s what Peter did with Cornelius, and when the church heard about it, they couldn’t say anything other than Wow, so that’s what God is up to.

We end our day in the life of a disciple where we started, with an encouragement from Jesus to dispense with the illusions we’ve inherited and embraced, and instead pursue the path that God invites us onto, a path that is as restful as it is expectant:

Do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor to your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? . . . Do not worry, then, saying “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear for clothing?” For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matthew 6:25, 31-33)

This is the calling of a disciple. It starts with our disillusionment—when we sometimes painfully but always redemptively part with the illusions that distract us from God. It ends with our fulfillment, as we experience the joy of the Lord giving us strength, and at the time of our death when we hear the most fulfilling words we’ll ever hear: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of my kingdom.”

What I Would Have Said: The Vocational Life, Part Two

This past weekend I spoke three times at a men's retreat about discipleship, disillusionment and the things that make up a disciple's day. I junked my third talk in favor of talking further about some stuff that had come up with the guys, so I'm posting it in chunks here instead. Part one can be found below; here's part two. Part three is coming.

***

We return to Peter, who’s been a helpful guide this weekend through a day in the life of a disciple. Peter, who told Jesus to go away but who was then invited by Jesus to stop catching fish and start catching people. Peter, who struggled to embrace the label “rock” in a way that accepted both its limitations and the full redemptive possibilities of it, to the point where he could invite all of us to be rocks like him. Peter, who returned again and again to the waters of chaos because at least he understood them, but who was called again and again by God to leave the waters, even to walk on the water, as an act of discipleship. Peter’s path to his vocation was filled with fits and starts, but if I were to characterize it I would call it an invitation out of his limited vision into a much fuller vision of the world God has created and his place in it.

The best example of this, I think, is found in Acts 10. Peter, now the de facto leader of the apostles and, by extension, the early church, is in one corner. In the other corner stands Cornelius, a God-fearing centurion in the Italian regiment. God-fearers were a special category of gentiles, but they were one degree removed from the covenant community to whom Peter and the apostles belonged. Peter and Cornelius could be neighbors, but according to the understanding of the early church, they couldn’t be brothers in Christ.

And yet Cornelius had this vision, and a message from an angel of the Lord directing him to Peter. Was Cornelius one of the men that Jesus had called on Peter to catch?

Peter had his own vision, challenging his understanding of what it meant to be devout. Staying within the boundaries and prescriptions of the faith Peter was raised in was, in Peter’s mind, an act of piety, of worship. To serve God was to stay safely within the confines of his religious practice. But the word of the Lord came to Peter: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” I’d like to suggest that we have failed to acknowledge the “cleanness” of the work that God has called us to, work that takes place outside the ordained offices of the church, and so have had obstructed vision about what God would have us do in the world.

The clean jobs we recognize in the church community are too often those that are ordained and funded, and so the work attended to by those who are ordained and funded, from the preaching of the Word to the teaching of children’s Sunday school to the maintaining of the physical plant of the church, float near the top of our lists when we think of serving God and following Jesus. And these are all important and significant contributions to the vitality of the contemporary church and its sustainability into the future. But these are only a small part of the totality that God has in mind for his church.

Jesus told his disciples, before his ascension to heaven, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” This is a worldwide commission, one that simply can’t be accomplished by the special few ordained or funded by the church. Neither can it be accomplished solely from the pulpit or on the campus of any given church. The great commission—a challenge to introduce the whole world to the kingdom of God and his righteousness—is a mandate to everyone who has entered into a discipleship relationship.

Peter was challenged to set aside the parameters he had been enculturated into and invited to see the Spirit at work in the lives of people historically outside the reach of the kingdom of God. The scandal of this encounter was such that Peter had to go back to Jerusalem and explain himself. And explain himself he does, such that Acts 11 is almost a mirror of Acts 10. Reading Acts 11 feels like a redundancy until you consider that everyone, even Peter himself, was awestruck by the grace of God demonstrated in the lives of Cornelius and his household.

This is the invitation that God extends to us as his disciples. It begins with disillusionment; we cast aside the illusion that the particularities of our faith experience exempt us from a real encounter with people God loves who live outside the walls of our faith experience—that the special status we’ve afforded to a clerical class grants us dispensation from the commission Jesus laid out for his church, that the magical power we’ve assigned to a church building gives us permission to not bear witness to the work of Christ when we’re in our neighborhoods or among our friends and coworkers. Peter’s encounter of the Holy Spirit at work in the household of Cornelius radically changed the focus of the church; we are reminded by this encounter that the earth (not just the church) is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof (not just the parts that fit comfortably alongside church culture).

What I Would Have Said: The Vocational Life, Part One

I spoke at a men's retreat this weekend. It was a small group of guys from a local church; I was at least their second choice for a speaker, but that didn't scare me off. I spoke about "a day in the life of a disciple" and focused on disllusionment as a portal to discipleship in the interior life, the intimate fellowship and the vocational life. Except that at the last minute I decided to junk my prepared talk on vocation and went another way. I'm glad I did, both because the group needed to cover some different ground than my talk covered and because now I have two or three blog posts for Loud Time. You're welcome, America.

***

The vocational life—what we make of the world we find ourselves in—can be immensely rewarding, both materially and emotionally. We are coached and trained and encouraged toward a particular career throughout our childhood. Kids get asked all the time, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (Note: not what do you want to do, but what do you want to be.) Kids’ most important decisions are tailored toward their vocation: good grades and a good mix of extracurriculars are critical if you want to get into a good college so you can be set up for a good life. More risky interests such as the arts or academia or athletics are fine for our kids, so long as they have a good backup plan in place. We want our kids to be happy, and we associate their happiness with the kind of security and fulfillment that we expect a job can offer them.

Once we enter the workforce we spend the lion’s share of our week, over the course of our professional lives, at work—as much time as (and perhaps more time than) we spend sleeping or looking after our kids. We get judged for what we do at work and rewarded with paychecks and raises and job promotions and notoriety. Sometimes we get penalized but we know what we did wrong. Except when we don’t.

For all the rewards and security that our worklife purports to offer us, the facts on the ground tell us something different. Nine percent unemployment, with millions of people long-unemployed. The financial crisis that fed the unemployment rate is only one piece of the puzzle. I work in publishing, an industry that is in dramatic transition on a variety of fronts—from its delivery systems to its aesthetics and even the possibility of its obsolescence. New technologies subvert whole industries, and new cultural trends send whole professions reeling. Economic realities send jobs overseas. Suddenly the thing we spent our whole childhood preparing ourselves for, the thing we’ve given a full third or more of our everyday lives to, abandons us.

Even if we manage to survive the turbulence of a professional life, eventually it ends dramatically—if not with our death, then with our retirement. Honestly, my boss is praying that he’ll die at his desk, mainly because he’s afraid of the jokes we’d make at a retirement party. Retirement is stark. There’s a commercial right now, for some financial planning company, that consists of a series of photographs of the sun coming up on a person’s first day of retirement. It’s very inspiring, except that for so many freshly retired people it’s the first day in decades that they have no idea what lies in front of them. Retirement, beyond the mere financial vulnerability of it, can be something of an existential crisis. Here’s a little bit of a song that Ben Folds wrote about the phenomenon of retirement, its impact on a person’s self-assurance:

Fred sits alone at his desk in the dark. There’s an awkward young shadow that waits in the hall. He’s cleared all his things and he’s put them in boxes—things that remind him: “Life has been good.” Twenty-five years he’s worked at the paper. A man’s here to take him downstairs. And I’m sorry, Mr. Jones, it’s time.

Depression spikes for men at retirement age. Lethargy can kick in; I know of a guy who spent the last fifteen years or so of his life sitting in a chair, despite his family’s best efforts to get him interested in something, anything. We’ve equated vocation with career, and once our career is over, what’s left for us?

To say nothing of the absurdity and frustration we encounter in the workplace. Bad decision making, political infighting and back biting, frustrating customers who are nonetheless always right, pet projects that go bad or delegated tasks that drag on our enthusiasm. In many ways our experience of vocation can be a prolonged, protracted experience of disillusionment.

But this weekend we’ve come to understand disillusionment as not a life sentence but as somehow life-giving, a dispersal of the illusions we’ve inherited from others and cultivated in ourselves about who we are and how life works, in order to invite us into a more fully real experience of the world God made and is in the process of bringing to its fulfillment. Vocation isn’t a manufactured word; it’s a word from God that suggests that we have been called into something bigger than ourselves, and when we’re called we’re simultaneously invited not to fear.

Shut Up, Dietrich Bonhoeffer!

I'm rereading Life Together by theologian, pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in anticipation of a men's retreat I'm facilitating later this month. (If you're interested in attending, I think there's still some space. Go here for more information.) I find myself wondering if I would like Bonhoeffer as much as I do if he were living and writing today, as opposed to his prophetic ministry in opposition to the rise of the Nazis in WWII-era Germany. There are contemporary writers and speakers who use similarly stark language to say arresting and provocative things, and when I read them (and when I hear them speak, as happened just a few days ago, quite frankly), more often than not I want to tell them to shut up. In my defense, I think that a person's words are judged and best understood by the times in which they were spoken or written, and by the means by which the were propagated and disseminated. In that respect, Bonhoeffer's open-secret subversive theology and spirituality in the face of historic evil gets more attention from me than, for example, a weeping prophet on a jumbo-tron. So, while I groan inwardly and smirk outwardly when I hear some flavor-of-the-month preacher telling a roomful of sycophants that we all just need to get over ourselves and start serving God better, I sit up and take notice when Bonhoeffer says something similarly straightforward and confrontational. Like this, from his chapter on "Ministry," under "The Ministry of Helpfulness":

Nobody is too good for the meanest service. One who worries about the loss of time that such petty, outward acts of helpfulness entail is usually taking the importance of his own career too solemnly. We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks, as the priest passed by the man who had fallen among thieves, perhaps--reading the Bible. . . . It is a strange fact that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they will allow nothing to disturb them. . . . But it is part of the discipline of humility that we must not spare our hand where it can perform a service and that we do not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God. . . . Only where hands are not too good for deeds of love and mercy in everyday helpfulness can the mouth joyfully and convincingly proclaim the message of God's love and mercy.

On my best days the spirit of this passage from Life Together, if not the text of it outright, crosses my mind in the moment I start to resent the occasional interruption or unexalted task. But most days are not my best days, I'm afraid, and if Dietrich Bonhoeffer were alive today, up on a stage with spotlights and PowerPoint and whatnot, throwing this kind of challenge in my face, I suspect I would groan inwardly and smirk outwardly, probably stifling the urge to shout "Shut up, Dietrich Bonhoeffer!" I'll try to remind myself of that next time I'm trapped in an arena with a jumbo-tron preacher in my face. God help me.

The Parable of the Unexpected Teaser

My friend Nate made this video promotion for my booklet. My friend Rachel Snavely acted in it. I stood around and watched. I hope you like it. The video is approximately one minute and forty-eight seconds long. For kicks try muting the video and playing a short song behind it. I particularly enjoyed "Being Around" by the Lemonheads, "That Someone Is You" by R.E.M., "Is That Your Zebra?" by Sam Phillips, and "Bus Stop" by Tin Machine. Let me know of you find a song that you think works particularly well.