please do not let me go

I survived a cultural bubble.

I need a T-shirt that says that. For those of you who don't know me, which is probably the one person being directed here from George W. Bush's blog, my family attended an ultra-legalistic Baptist church back in the day; for those of you who aren't up to speed on your evangelical jargon, "ultra-legalistic" basically means we wore some pretty serious culottes, heard a lot of sermons on hell, and oh, yeah. DIDN'T LISTEN TO "MUSIC." What do I mean by "music," you ask? According to the ultra-legalistic thinking of the day, true music was never syncopated, did not involve drums, and had all been written either before 1945 or by Patch the Pirate. (Claim to Fame Number 8,367: my mom once finagled her way into having Patch the Pirate over for breakfast with us, and yeah...we were pretty much the coolest kids in Sunday School from Palm Sunday to Christmas that year. I can still sing every song from "The Calliope Caper.") "Music," on the other hand, had a serious beat that conjured up the devil himself, made teenagers want to rub up against each other, and -- I wish I could pretend I didn't hear this in an actual sermon -- made your heart skip a beat in a manner that was unnatural and unhealthy. That's right, folks; you can become seriously ill with just one listen to Mingus's "Ah, Um."

Still, I think there's something to be said for reckoning with the power of music. My sister, riding in the car with me on the way home from Boston a few weekends ago, heard the first few lines of Howie Day's "Collide" and asked me whether I ever felt my mood affected by the music I listened to in such a way that made it more difficult to function. I threw out one of my favorite lines from High Fidelity: "Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" Answer: it cuts both ways sometimes, and baby, ya just gotta roll with it. So believe me when I say that it's a total coincidence that I'm currently enjoying Ryan Adams' Love Is Hell, Part 2, lifted from the Greenwich Library (Which. Is. AWESOME. Greenwich, just when I thought you couldn't be any poncier, you go and do something like open a library replete with a cafe, a direct link to Best Buy, and self-checkout stations...and totally redeem yourself), well-known for keeping close to the more maudlin, everyday theme that life is lonely sometimes. And I'm digging it. I'm feeling strangely like I've narrowly escaped something, and I think I like the thought of being lonely right now. I think...well. Here's what I think:

I've had three heart-stopping conversations with as many people in the past two weeks, all dealing with three very different forms of love in three very different contexts, and in the aftermath of each of them I've come to the same conclusion: we are so, so often wrong. But this is only dangerous if we don't acknowledge that fact, if we don't accept another point of view...if every once and again we refuse to let reality break us, to let the reality we've taken such care to create slip from our hands and shatter. Sometimes we need to throw it down ourselves and offer ourselves up anew, recognizing that we've become slaves to our own creations.

In my case, this surfaced most recently in a conversation with my mother in which I realized that my insisting she be the perfect, infallible creature of my childhood makes it impossible for us to grow closer. Saying this to her and acknowledging that she felt its impact made it what it was: farcical, unrealistic, and ridiculous. We conquered it because we named it and said goodbye to something that, while undeniably precious, was what it was and no more.

This is what God is, I believe: the Thing That Breaks, but breaks to mend; that helps reshape the pieces into something that more closely mirrors Truth. TBC.

........................................................................
don't waste your breath, don't waste your heart
don't blister your heels running in the dark
I walked to the river, and I walked to the rim
I walked through the teeth of the reaper's grin
I walked to you rolled up in wire
to the other side of desire