Embracing the Silence

Silence is frightening. It’s frightening when it reveals how unsettled I am when I’m surrounded by it. Like a crack fiend’s craving, I’m looking for my fix of lyrics and music. Withdrawal is difficult. LSD users have flashbacks. Musicholics have earworms… an auditory itch that yearns to be scratched in the form of sound waves. But instead, there is silence.

I decided that for some people music is just a pastime. It’s something fun to move to, something you belt out with friends when you’re cruising down the highway with your windows down. For others though, it’s like psychological cutting… the emotions that are squeezed out of the blank spaces between the black dots on lined paper and the insinuation of experiences in the lyrics are the razors that remind us of our existence. The bleeding that ensues confirms that we can still feel, for better or worse. We breathe a sigh of relief after our depths are stirred, even if we know nothing has changed after having the last three minutes and fifty three seconds light up our auditory cortex.

For the last five days, I haven’t listened to music. Like an addict, all I’ve wanted to do is to take an injection of iTunes. I cooked and I cleaned without the normal hiphop. I walked around in my boxers, while the gravity of the piano called to me like a black hole. “Just a few chords,” I thought. “Just one or two times through the Damien Rice and Over the Rhine songs I’ve been learning.” Being forced under the lulling non-noise of the ceiling fan and air conditioner, I realized that the frightening roar I heard was my own emptiness.

This is the very emptiness I sought to inundate with music. From Scr-pture, I get the vague sense that G-d isn’t a fan of artificial opiates. When I sat there in silence and kept the professionally recorded melancholy from using my heart as a treadmill, I could no longer ride over this chasm on the borrowed wings of someone else’s talent.

The process of addiction is often perpetuated by the fear of facing reality on the road to sobering up. A temporary escape becomes a desire to remain in a state of ignorance. (Insert Homer Simpson here, toasting, “Here’s to alcohol: The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems!”) I’ve always prided myself in being a realist. And I’m too proud to turn my back on that claim now. So here I am, simultaneously acknowledging my idolatry and confessing the unexpected emptiness left by a masked but shriveling spirituality.

I take great comfort that J-sus is “G-d with us.” I’m relieved that we are indwelt by the Holy Sp-rit. I’m grateful for a love that casts our fear and grounds my identity as a child of the Father. I think sometimes, we can worsh-p in silence. I look forward to when this naked emptiness will be filled again.

But not with music or lyrics.

Clear as a Distortion Pedal

We spent the blackness of our pens and ivory of keys
Trying to pierce the shell of the reluctant masks
So we hear a snare but the heart shakes with the bass
No blade sits deeper than four strings and a bow.
Those dancing harmonies trampled over my composure
And the harp shred through my Kinkade, spilled my ghosts.
Who knew that the muse moonlit as a janitor.
But no one told me that he couldn’t mop up the fog.

Cleanse me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.

"... While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." -Romans 5:8

Here is a truth that I am grateful for. In our self-absorbed state of rebellion and callousness, Christ died for us. It is the Lord who knows us intimately (Psalm 139), and the Lord who hunts us down when we have strayed. His love is not incumbent on our obedience (or lack thereof). In love, He reminds us of all that we were meant to be, and our obedience becomes our response. All while we were still sinners.

"Oh to grace how great a debtor,
Daily I'm consigned to be.
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love.
Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above."

Hope does not disappoint..?

Broken relationships are so difficult.

From parents to friends… from one minute-long international phone calls where both parties end on a sour click to unresolved silences that stretch from days to months, they leave a feeling of, “All is not right here…”

Something is not right, and if we have fought to resist callousness, we notice that it makes everything else wrong. It makes so much sense to just do what everyone else does. It sounds so reasonable when a friend tells you that enough is enough because he’s just as tired of watching you thrash as you are of drowning. But as much sense as it makes, it doesn’t feel… right.

Cost-benefit asks, “Is it worth it? Is it worth it to keep going? Is it worth it to keep trying to make things ‘right’?” And I have to say, “Well, that depends on if I really believe that J-sus is about making things right between people.” “Is it worth it to make things right when you know you might be setting yourself up again?” I don’t know man. If I knew the answer I wouldn’t be having this damn conversation.

Love is an ideal. One that puts my realities to shame. But when I strive for it, I carry the feelings and thoughts that drag that ideal through dirt. I wonder if I’m just being a fool in the name of “faithfulness.” I try not to lie to myself. But that just makes my motives all the messier.

Tit for tat.

The Harry Potter books 1-6 in our NGO library are gone.

The staff hypothesized that some zealous brother or sister has deemed them heretical, and thus has taken it upon themselves to prevent the further pollution of innocent Chr-stian minds from witchcraft and sorcery.

I say we take the Left Behind books as hostage until the Harry Potters are returned.