Defiant Imagination, Part 3: Other Songs of When They See Us

Having written a lengthy analysis of the song "Moon River" and its pivotal significance as part of the soundtrack of When They See Us, the remainder of my comments on the songs and soundtrack will take more of the form of vignettes, or glimpses into the artistic synergy of song and film in conveying a powerful story of injustice, defiance, and solidarity in the stories of Raymond Santana, 14; Kevin Richardson, 14; Antron McCray, 15; Yusef Salaam, 15; Korey Wise, 16; and their families.   It's not so much full of academic language and theory.  Much of this is an attempt to reflect on the story of the Central Park 5, the Exonerated 5, while becoming acquainted with music that has not been on my playlist.  The general sense of a prophetic or defiant imagination has been crucial to my own work, yet I have not taken much opportunity to hear the way such imagination permeates and interacts with popular culture.  What follows are some forays into that sort of reflection.

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Another song like "Moon River," displaying a similar kind of defiance as seen in the Louis Armstrong example, is "Hope," by Pete Josef.  Different from most songs that are part of the soundtrack, this is a verbatim musical setting of a beloved poem by Emily Dickenson.  One of the U.S.'s most popular poets, Dickenson wrote usually short poems of only a few lines.



Dickenson's brief "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers," is a poetic reflection on the power of hope in the image of a songbird.  It "perches in the soul," implying that it resides at great depth within a person's thoughts and feelings.  In any time and place there remains a steady voice, singing "without words" and not stopping.  Even strong storms cannot stop the bird's voice from coming through, giving strength to the soul, burning and warming like a fire.  No matter how cold, no matter how far and foreign a place, hope holds forth with a vigorous, yet undemanding presence.

This song plays over the scene when Yusuf returns home from prison, as viewers peer into his inner drive to make a life although still feeling out of place among his family and friends.  A steady voice of song within Yusuf is not silent, but defiantly rises up in him to achieve what none would expect of him.  The scene then turns to the family of Kevin visiting the prison.  Kevin is feeling lost there.  His sister proceeds to talk to him about identifying "something to look forward to." It is a strategy of hope that gains strength from his inner power, bolstered by the truth that no matter how far away they are from him, he is never alone.  What she sees deep in him "perches in the soul," and from that place will give him the strength to endure.  The song reveals the young men's tenacity in the face of forces working to crush them.  Though they are young and tender, like the delicate image of a songbird, they persist in their vision of a world that is not what others would claim it to be.

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In the earlier post, I also identified a kind of defiance in the story of Ruby Bridges--readiness to place one's body over against the oppressive forces that would seek to destroy a people.  It is a mode of living in an alternate narrative and reality, already before it is fully visible, that provides courage to take steps to change things.  Mos Def's song "Umi Says" passes on the wisdom of generations, received by son from mother, to "shine your light on the world." Life offers no promises or guarantees.  The song plays briefly in the film, as if from the car radio when Kevin is ridingwith his sister Angie.  He is struggling with all that he has missed in life and with the many barriers he still faces after release from prison.

She says, with the wisdom of "Umi," that he has what it takes to rise in his life.

You got time. A lot's changed, but you know what ain't changed.  You.  That was my biggest prayer for you--that you'd stay safe, and you'd stay your sweet self.  I know you've seen things, maybe had to do things, defend yourself, survive, whatever might have happened.  But in the end you have the same heart.  You gotta carry that with you outta here, okay?

With that strength of identity, she believes he can overcome.  His life can matter for something greater.  She can see in his eyes and hear in his voice that he longs to redeem the lost time, the damaged life, even the park where he was beaten and falsely accused.  Mos Def's lyrics speak of the struggle and emotion, the desire to give up, to shrink back.  Yet Umi keeps pressing him to know that his life has to count for more than just surviving with me and mine.  He needs to be in the fight for freedom.  He needs to be part of building a united front in the work of liberation.  There is a path to take, and only when we place our full selves, our emotions, our hopes, our dreams, and our bodies on the line will we begin to see the change that we are becoming.

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Another song that feeds into the Ruby Bridges kind of defiance is by Andreya Triana, "Song for a Friend."  This song plays over a series of scenes with parents and family talking on the phone to their children in prison.  Next the film shows how the families worked hard to be able to visit the young men while they were locked away.  The song lyrics bring attention to the aspect of Ruby's story of spending a year as the only pupil in her class, facing so much hatred and attack for taking a stand.  Yet she did not feel alone.  She knew that her parents and their larger circle of friends were with her in the struggle.  Her body was on the line each day, and yet their bodies were in line with her to embrace and uphold her.  The very body of Jesus stood with her as she prayed for the forgiveness of her persecutors, using his own words toward those who had condemned him.



In the same way, Ray's father and abuela put their bodies through the regular phone calls, the work to support him, the travel, the security searches, and in every way possible demonstrated their presence to him.  He did not have to doubt that his bodily struggle found solidarity in them, and their embrace in the visiting room gave flesh and blood to the defiance of solidarity.  Abuela reaches to touch Ray's arm under the voice of Antron's mother saying to her own son, "I'm walking through this with you."

Antron expresses regret that his mother has to work so hard to come see him, but she says she would come every day if allowed.  "You're not too much trouble," she says.  Digging deeper, she gets him to tell about what's troubling him.  It's a dream that feels like a nightmare.  It is so real he isn't sure whether he is awake or sleeping.  He hears the sound of steps drawing closer.  Each night, it seems they get even nearer.  His mother soaks in that story, then flips the script on him.  She tells him to keep on listening, because those steps are her feet getting closer every day to picking him up and taking him home. 

Antron says, "I feel like everybody in the world hate me, Ma."  But she replies that she loves him "enough to make up for everybody.  All I do all day is love you."  She goes through a litany of ways in which she will always be with him, describing the interconnection between his body and hers in the struggle of fear, pain, and joy as his life progresses.

The song's lyrics repeatedly focus on the love expressed through bodily presence:  resting one's head on a shoulder, being held close, being brought into the arms of love, and having someone by one's side.  These are given as evidence of never being alone, of support when it seems hard to breathe or to move, and of having a faithful friend to the very end.  The family support of these young men is not merely an abstraction, but a defiance demonstrated through bodily presence.

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The first post in this series on the defiant imagination brought together my experience of viewing When They See Us with scholarly work of Robert M. Franklin on the life and thought of Malcolm X.  Malcolm's defiance, his refusal to be who the world had tried to make him to be, becomes a vocal type of defiance, a public challenge in word and agenda.  Malcolm brought critical insight into the structures and systems of white supremacy and the cultural accommodation to racism.  He demanded that things change, and if not by transformation of the whole society, then at least by construction of alternate patterns and structures that would insure justice for those who have suffered long under oppression.

The opening songs of the first episode demonstrate a kind of confidence and brash self-acknowledgement that could represent the mindset of these young men.  In the post-Civil Rights Movement era, recognition that many things had changed for the better, normalization of some levels of integration in housing, employment, education, and public facilities might provide a level of encouragement about the future of race relations.  Yet the genius of white supremacy as an ideology is that it continues to remake itself in new forms.  The end of the 1980s marks a dramatic shift toward a new encoding of racism which centers around rewriting the criminal codes to increase lengths of sentences, multiply criminal charges, and expand incarceration of minorities exponentially.  The 1989 case of these five young men takes on an iconic role in shaping the demonization of young black men as "superpredators" who must be locked away from the rest of society.

Opening scenes include the songs "I Got It Made," by Special Ed, and "Microphone Fiend," by Erik B. and Rakim.  Both celebrate the giftedness and freedom of young men expressing their power and striving for success in the world.  A kind of defiant attitude is built into the tone of these pieces, and it gains intensity when the young men join the large crowd that goes into the park on the night that the violent rape occurred.  "Fight the Power," by Rage Against the Machine, redirects the gifts and freedom of black youth toward continuing the struggle for structural change.  The point of rhyming should be to strengthen a sharp mind and embolden a brave heart.  Intellectual and emotional growth feed into analytical capacity to understand social structures and systems and remake them for justice, not merely letting the powerful recreate their domination systems while young people enjoy life without cares.  This tone of defiance is interrupted by the scenes of criminal violence that lead to massive police action in rounding up anyone "fitting the description," including the young men who were initially charged and browbeaten to be witnesses against one another for crimes none of them saw, much less participated in.



The overwhelming power of the domination system becomes apparent when its technologies of repression get applied to the young men who have not skills or understanding to defend themselves against police rush to judgment, imagery of monstrous black youth, forced confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, and fearmongering public media.  The defiance of the song remains relevant, but the persistent power of oppression is no small opponent to defeat.

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"Love and Hate," by Michael Kiwanuka plays in the second episode as the trial is beginning.  It begins playing over interviews with community leaders who are challenging law enforcement, the court system, and the media for failing to listen to the truth, failing to investigate and uncover the flaws in the case, and failing to see the young men as human beings.  It continues and builds as the young men, their families, and their lawyers make their way into the courtroom.



The song's lyrics are not uniformly defiant.  They also contain cries for help:  "I need something; give me something wonderful."  At moments they express doubt and anticipate setbacks: "Now I feel some days of trouble."  The defiance of this message recognizes that it is not a simple fight.  It is a long fight, and there will still be casualties along the way.  Yet there is no concession, no giving in.  There is resolve to continue the struggle and achieve without surrender.

How much more are we supposed to tolerate?
Can't you see there's more to me than my mistakes?
Sometimes I get this feeling makes me hesitate...

I believe
She won't take me somewhere I'm not supposed to be.
You can't steal the things that god has given me!
No more pain and no more shame and misery--

You can't take me down!
You can't break me down!
You can't take me down!

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The lyrics of "U Don't Know," by Jay-Z, describe the conflicting narratives of black youth caught up in gangs, drug trade, and crime, versus the creative capacity of those young people to make another kind of life through intelligence, art, business, and hard work.  The defiant narrative acknowledges that at times the less desirable path of high risk and potential showdowns with police may seem like the only option a young black person may have.  Whatever elements of character that went into the ability to succeed in music and entrepreneurial life also contributed to survival and advancement outside the law.  Jay-Z celebrates his emergence as a powerful economic force having done the work necessary to go above and beyond all expectations.  In contrast, this song plays near the end of the third episode, over the visual depiction of Ray's turning to selling drugs as his only solution to being out on the streets without opportunities for more legitimate employment.



"Who We Be" by DMX again reflects this contrast of life possibilities, emphasizing the inability of the normative gaze to look upon the lives of young black men with any clear sense of their humanity.  Describing the harsh conditions, the stereotypes, the compromised choices that affect poor urban young people, the lyrics intermix the human struggles, the aspirations, and the possibilities of faith.  With detailed references to the experience of arrest, the courts, remote imprisonment, solitary confinement, and mental fragility, this song plays over the story of Korey as he strives to keep himself together, hundreds of miles away from his family, targeted by other inmates so that his only refuge is in solitary confinement.  Having been taken under wing by a sympathetic prison guard, he begins to hope for something better, but faces a parole board intent on forcing another false confession out of him in order to consider releasing him from jail.  Korey continues to languish in prison, holding himself together with visions of his family and friends, of his past experiences and choices, thought of as someone other than who he really is both inside and outside the prison.



After the movie, after "Moon River" and the images of the actual five men, the credits begin as still shots from scenes from the four-part movie flash in the background.  "Picture Me Rollin'," by Nipsey Hussle plays with its promise to "make it home."  Acknowledging the ever-present threat of racial profiling, false accusation, unwarranted arrest, and further consequences of a broken criminal justice system, the song still urges the listener to believe that rather than stopped, beaten, and arrested, the protagonist is still in the car and rolling forward to get home.  It may still seem that life is offering odds like "a dice game," but the singer's hope in God's care and drive to press forward, betting against those odds.



In all these songs, the defiance to stand up against an unjust world appears, at the same time as they recognize the struggle will be long and hard.  Just as we viewers of this film and listeners to the music must recognize, the path to overcome white supremacy continues as an uphill battle.  Frustration is rampant, and patience wears thin.  Many will not tolerate such a wait.  Others remain in denial that there is even a battle to fight.  And those in the midst of the struggle must with the late Nipsey, be

Tryna to stay focused, kinda like Moses,
Like somebody chose us.  This weight on my shoulders--
I feel these emotions, but still I keep going.

Defiant Imagination, Part 2: Frank Ocean's "Moon River" and Seeing Possible Worlds

As the final episode of When They See Us was coming to a close a song began to play that grabbed my attention.  It was a new arrangement and performance of an old standard.  It had been foreshadowed earlier in the episode by a recurring appearance of an unknown prison inmate ("Singing Inmate") who took every opportunity to sing "Moon River" as loudly as he could.  In those scenes, he was singing it with the powerful intonations of a golden-throated crooner.

I should include a comment on the type of writing I am doing.  I do not intend in offering my interpretation of a song's lyrics and music to be telling you what I think is in the mind of the composer.  I am not even claiming to know why the song was included as part of the movie soundtrack.  I am writing about possible meanings of the lyrics and musical structure, intertwined with the scenes of the film, and filtered through the interpretive context of my own viewing.  I'm not saying that it is arbitrarily subjective, but I am saying that interpretation of texts and films is multivalent.  The song's performer and the soundtrack composer may have different perspectives.  Yet I am analyzing musical lines, harmonic relationships, and actual words and sentences which do guide the interpretation.  So, don't take me as saying that I am offering the authoritative meaning of this song or soundtrack.  I am offering a reasonable and reasoned set of insights into a powerful creative composition of music, lyric, and film.  Now back to the song discussion.

Lena Horne, Barbara Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Pat Boone, and especially Andy Williams had made this song part of their performance repertoire.  Some artists like Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, and Eric Clapton with Beck, gave it their own twists.  "Moon River" is one of those songs that was pervasive in popular entertainment throughout my childhood, but I did not really learn the song or know much about it.  Vague memories of watching the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's suggest that I must have once known that Aubrey Hepburn sang it in the movie.  I mainly remembered the song as a standard sung by Andy Williams who was on television all the time in those days.  Beyond the opening line, I couldn't have told you the lyrics.

I think I listened carefully to the song for the first time after hearing the Frank Ocean version during the epilogue of the final episode of When They See Us.  This new cover of "Moon River" played as images of the actors faded into the actual exonerated men, with text overlays describing the current life situation of each of them.  Looking upon the bodies and faces of these boys who became men while wrongly imprisoned presses the viewer's consciousness into recounting specific events and relationships portrayed in the four-episode film, linking the visual narrative to flesh and blood.  In the context of these men's experiences of interrupted youth, injustice, and eventual exoneration to face a life so different from their plans, the song's lyrics opened up a wide space for imagination.



The song's lyrical images portray looking across a river toward what may be on the other side.  Getting across a mile-wide river is a daunting challenge, at the end of which one cannot be sure what she or he will find.  Then, the image shifts to traveling on the river, representing moving toward dreams of one's future.  The dreams are accompanied by heartbreak and the narrator's uncertainty about what's around the next bend.  As poetic imagery often does, the song starts mixing metaphors: the words speak of chasing the end of the rainbow as equivalent to flowing with the river's direction around bend after bend.  The narrator is pursuing what he or she longs for, not fully knowing what that is.

Thus the river is portrayed first as a barrier between the protagonist and the future.  Is it even possible to get across to the other side?  What will the other side bring?  Second, the river is a path upon which to journey.  The journey finds a sojourner facing an uncertain future, hoping, longing for what could be, but without assurance of what actually may appear.  And finally, the river is also the companion.  The narrator describes "two drifters off to see the world" who are "chasing after the same...rainbow's end."  The caring companions, the fellow-travelers, equally facing the unknown, sharing and bearing their hope and burden together--this may be the deepest message of the song.  If I step out into this river, it will bear me along toward its destination.  We will travel the same direction and meet the same obstacles and vistas, whatever they may be.

Ocean adapted the lyrics to his own version of the song.  It's a "crazy world" that they will see, not just "such a lot of" world.  Things won't always make sense how they turn out, but even the nonsensical is something we may find and see and experience.  With reference to the end of the rainbow, Ocean adds the phrase "chasing after" to give an even stronger sense of desire and longing.  Believing that there is something good to find, the protagonist passionately chases a dream yet not clearly formed.

He doesn't use the word "huckleberry," but says simply "my friend."  He omits there a reference in part to Mark Twain's famous character, for any number of reasons that could include the often racist language of that story from another era.

A final major lyrical change is the addition of more concrete lyrical descriptions of the formation process of one's life.  "What I see, who I become" echoes behind the lines about traveling on the river journey.  Ocean is making explicit that by joining this river journey, his life is taking a particular form through the experiences and growth specific to the river's path.  He says "Life's just around the bend."  It's not only the figment of imagination, the rainbow's end, that is around the bend.  With or without the rainbow's end, the protagonist's life will emerge from the contingent circumstances, the unanticipated relationships, and the mystery of the world encountered on the journey.  This practical language presses the viewer's mind toward the unexpected world unfolding for the exonerated men, filled with challenges and also possibilities.

The performance itself brings intellectual and emotional challenges to the listener.  The surprising opening stanza sung by a child's voice drills into the emotion of how the tragedy of this story explodes into the lives of children who went to the park one afternoon.  It's not an untrained voice, but neither is it a smoothly polished voice.  Quickly, another voice joins with harmony for a phrase--but the harmony turns out to be another melodic line in a different key, a beautiful dissonance of open harmonics.  Soon a kind of improvisational polyphony emerges as the mode in which the song progresses.  Going from solo line, to rich harmonies, to echoed motifs and improvised riffs, the performance partly deconstructs the traditional crooning ballad.

At times staggered entrances to melodic lines, fractions of beats apart, give a sense of fragmentation, a center that cannot hold, a whole that is invisible and out of reach.  These stuttering entrances and rhythms especially appear in relation to the lyrics about the uncertainty of the river's direction and destination, through heartbreak and uncertainty.  This performance itself touches a deep consciousness of the injustice and unreasonable path the young men's lives have taken.  

Yet the repeated motifs, the sense of a hopeful if uncertain destiny, are powerful themes and echoes throughout.  The polyphonic structures feed toward longer homophonic phrases of multiple layered harmonies.  Ultimately the richest, most intense harmonies and elaborate ornamentational riffs occur on the lyrics about chasing what is around the bend.  These unproven hopes, the deeply held conviction that even in a world that has been snatched away, where hopes are crushed, there is yet something worth finding up ahead.  It is a liberative theme, a recognition that the world as it is is not the world as it should be.  That better world, even if only partial and fragmented, still calls us forward.

This particular song drew me into recognizing how much a role the soundtrack had played for interpreting the film.  So I went back to review the soundtrack, making note of other songs that had projected an interpretation of the story.  In the process, I realized the way that the defiant imagination was at work in the music and the story.  "Moon River," like "What a Wonderful World," challenges the realities of a world dictated by white supremacy and white vision.  The river, always a potentially dangerous realm of currents, darkness, and hidden dangers, also represents the flow of life, the structures of how land and sea flow one into the other, the constancy of change and possibility of the new.  Ocean's interpretation recognizes both meanings, yet casts its lot with the someday, the dream, the chasing after what may and must be there for us.   Rivers have been a fruitful image to narrate the experiences of African Americans resisting oppression in the U.S.

Mavis Staples sang about lynched black bodies floating in the Mississippi River, that harsh and hateful world in which no black person is safe.  The song of lament was itself an act of defiance for putting into words and music the truth about life and death under a system of racist oppression.  Dissonant tones emphasized the incomprehensibility of such hate.  The lament ends with a call to action to "stop them from going in the river."

Other traditional songs such as "Roll, Jordan, Roll" and "Deep River" recognized the danger of a great river's treacherous current and deep waters.  Yet they also saw also great promise in the power of a river that can carry one from harsh circumstances to beauty and joy, even overwhelm an army of enemies.  They sang of a river deep and wide that marked the passageway toward relief from suffering and fulfillment in a land of peace, a true home, a welcome table, a banquet at which they were honored guests.  As we know, all such songs point not only to an afterlife, but also to a promise of goodness toward which the defiant person can strive in this lifetime.  Not only eschatological Jordan, but the Ohio River or the Detroit River as markers of emancipatory power, are part of such songs.

One of my favorite songs and another river song, Kate Campbell's "Lanterns on the Levee" has much in common with this version of "Moon River."  The coming together of two people, by Kate described as the falling rain which enters the river's flow, is again a central message.  Hardships, falls, failures, disappointments, heartbreaks, can be isolating.  They can feel as if one's very life is dissipating, dissolving.  But joined with the strength of the river's strength, that life takes on new possibilities.

You can fall like the rain
And I will be a river, winding forever,
Strong and true.
I'll carry you away to the peaceful waters...

Perhaps Campbell's lyrics possess a different degree of optimism about what may be around the bend, that it will be peaceful.  Yet the offer of shelter recognizes more storms will come, even from beyond the horizon.  The path is winding, and goes on and on toward new horizons.  What it will bring is unknown, but whatever comes will be better through solidarity among those on the journey.

"Moon River" reflects a kind of defiance which looks beyond the so-called realism of the world and sees a truth much deeper.  In a recent conversation with local artist and community leader Pierce Freelon, we discussed something he had said about "creating black spaces without asking permission."  This is part of the defiance I see in this work of art.  Recognizing that the young men who were falsely accused and wrongly incarcerated found themselves at the mercy of a world which saw them as evil, the film and song also help open one's consciousness of building possible worlds that differ from the world that powerful people seek to impose on the rest of us.

A world made for everyone cannot ultimately be hoarded and controlled by a few.  In the midst of the horrors of a world with its designs on breaking, throwing away, and killing young black men, there is yet a remainder of truth, beauty, and goodness which one can glimpse and place one's hope on, just around the bend.  Look around at all those on the journey with you.  Chase the dream with all you've got.

Defiant Imaginations, Part 1: Thoughts on Malcolm, Ruby, and Louis

Absorbing and responding to the Ava DuVernay film event, When They See Us, will take some time and more than one post here.  As I thought through what I might want to write, I found myself thinking back over some previous learning that seems to be relevant to what I have seen in this film.  So this first post goes back over a series of insights initially spurred by a textbook I used in the Shaw University undergraduate course, Foundations of Knowledge and Ethics.  It was an introduction offered to first-year students on the European and African American traditions of philosophical and religious ethics.  One of the thematic claims of the book has become an important part of my understanding of how persons and communities must respond to systems of injustice, and it continues to stir my moral imagination as years go by.

Robert Franklin's book Liberating Visions examines the lives and words of four important African American leaders who offer powerful moral visions for humanity.  He assigns each one a thematic adjective for the kind of life a person should live:  Booker T. Washington, the adaptive person; W. E. B. DuBois, the strenuous person; Martin Luther King, Jr., the integrative person; and Malcolm X, the defiant person.  Analyzing their views in light of character ethics, Franklin helps the reader see a social vision of the virtuous life, human fulfillment, and the good society through their eyes.  All are powerful social insights worth examining, but Franklin's interpretation of Malcolm X is the one that the music of  When They See Us has brought to the forefront of my thinking.

In theological studies, the term "prophetic imagination" has become a popular term.  Walter Brueggemann writes in The Prophetic Imagination that the tradition of prophetic ministry from Moses to Jeremiah to Jesus engages God's people in dismantling oppression and reconstructing a world built on justice in loving communities.  J. Deotis Roberts plays on the popular Protestant and Baptist theme of the "priesthood of all believers" in his ecclesiological book The Prophethood of Black Believers to emphasize how the black churches have contributed to a richer understanding of the task of the church than mere comfort and religious observance, extending into challenging injustice and working for the common good.  This prophetic calling finds a particular expression in Franklin's use of "defiant" to describe the imagination.  Defiance is a crucial element and a helpful descriptor of certain ways that the prophetic calling may find expression and embodiment.

Over twenty years ago, I was invited to participate in a conference on moral education sponsored by  Shaw's Program in Ethics and Values and Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics.  I had anticipated following a keynote address by Robert Coles--no small task.  I was doing some research into his work in preparation, and it led me to reflect further on Franklin's interpretation of Malcolm. Eventually I presented my paper under the title "Political Realism and the Defiant Imagination." 

Realism is that school of thought in politics and theology which tends to fall back on the balance of powers mode of reasoning.  Keeping all the existing powers in a condition of balance or detente--not at one another's throats, but also not stirring much change toward better justice--is considered the best one can do in the real world.  Hence, realism offers little beyond incremental change for those who suffer under the crushing weight of oppression.  The very idea that someone might challenge the existing powers is considered both ludicrous and dangerous by the realist.  As Franklin realized, Malcolm ultimately did not let his imagination be captured by political realism.

Malcolm had been a budding, intelligent, and hopeful child, doing well in school until his early adolescent years.  Despite his giftedness, one of the teachers he had respected and trusted most advised him that he should not have ambitions to be a lawyer, to take up a profession of intellect and prestige.  He should be realistic and aim to take up a trade, a solid way to make money that would not require him to transgress into the realms of power and status in which he would not be welcome.

The story of Malcolm's life which follows that period shows his dissolution from the prior ambition to achieve into a life that accommodates itself to the world's worst expectations of him.  The white world, the world of powerful people, would expect Malcolm not to amount to much.  They would look at him and see something dangerous, something damaged, something likely to be trouble, and not someone.  They would not see him.  They would see a phantasm, a stereotype, an inevitability.  To some extent, one can look at his life and conclude that Malcolm walked down a path that fulfilled what the world saw in him.  They remade him in their image of his destiny.

Franklin recognizes, however, that Malcolm does not ultimately remain what society had expected him to be.  After being imprisoned for breaking and entering and larceny, Malcolm's original intellectual curiosity and drive began to resurface, largely because of the nurturing friendship of members of the Nation of Islam.  Malcolm reports that he began to copy the dictionary, line by line, page by page, to improve his reading and facility of the English language.  He began to read extensively in history, philosophy, and political thought.  He was instructed in the teachings of the Nation of Islam and trained in their discipline of a life in submission to Allah.  He saw that to accomplish greater things, he had to set aside impulsiveness and raging emotion.  He learned that the limits that had been placed on his life were artificial and externally imposed.  He learned to defy the expectations of society and aim for something greater and more in tune with his true nature.

Malcolm's defiance drove him to gain the education he had missed before.  He became a powerful speaker and capable leader.  He applied his practical knowledge to become a strategic thinker and incisive analyst of the political scene.  And when he was confronted with the inadequacy of the orthodoxies that he had previously accepted, he pursued with relentless critical effort the truth of historic Islam.  Malcolm represented a defiance courageous enough to challenge the existing power relations, to say what must be said, and to be persistent in the face of powerful forces aligned against him.  His radical critique conceded nothing in his effort to dismantle the dominant cultural systems which oppressed African Americans.

Remembering this account of Malcolm's life and his emergence as a leading intellectual of his time, I found myself drawn to Robert Coles's account of the remarkable young Ruby Bridges as another example of defiant imagination.  At age 6, her parents guided her to be one of the first four children to integrate the New Orleans public school system.  She was the only black student enrolling in her particular elementary school.  The white parents took their children out of the school.  Only one teacher agreed to teach in a school with a black child.  So Ruby's teacher taught the class with only one student. 

Federal Marshalls escorted Ruby to and from school because of the rowdy, violent protests that surrounded the school and the streets leading up to it.  Ruby was not particularly scared by the crowds.  She said they looked and sounded like Mardi Gras parties, with shouting and throwing things.  So she bravely walked in and out of the school each day.  Eventually, some white parents brought their children back to the school and the protests subsided.  Still, Ruby remained alone in her classroom.  In the next school year, the actual integrated classrooms began to come about in New Orleans.

Robert Coles became very involved with Ruby and her family, offering psychological care as much as was needed.  He learned a great deal in the process.  One of the central stories that he tells concerns an observation by her classroom teacher.  As Ruby was approaching the school, the teacher observed the little girl stopping, turning to face the yelling crowd, and saying something to them.  When Ruby got to class, the teacher asked about what she had seen.  Ruby explained that she had not been talking to the people, but to God.  Coles asked later for a fuller explanation.  Ruby told him that every day she stopped, usually before getting to the school, and prayed to God for the people.  That day she had forgotten until she was at the school steps.  Cole was shocked that her feelings toward this hateful crowd were leading to her have concern for them and pray for them.  She went on to explain that the prayer she said every day was to ask God to forgive them because they did not know what they were doing.

Her family and church had already instilled in Ruby a way of living in the world that was shocking to Coles and to many others.  They had joined a long procession of courageous defiers unwilling to let conditions of injustice stand.  They defied the barriers placed against the education she and other black children deserved, putting bodies in action to challenge the social order. 

Moreover, her family and community was already embedded in an alternative moral narrative.  She had understood the loving response of Jesus toward those who had done him wrong, and in defiance of the expectation that she should be afraid or should return hatred for hatred, she was seeking the good of those who wanted to do her harm.  She hoped against hope that her opponents could be changed, and she and her community imagined a better world could come about in which enemies become allies, even friends.  As an adult, Ruby Bridges still affirms that we must go against the grain of the world if we want to see change come for the better.

I became aware of a third example of defiant imagination during the period of Everly's illness.  A friend had given her a recording of "What a Wonderful World," made famous by Louis Armstrong.  Everly's first reaction was irritation.  She has never been a person who wanted to paint a rosy picture when things were not rosy.  No romanticizing and no pretending--she liked to simply say what she saw, what she felt.  So she could see no reason to play "What a Wonderful World" when she felt awful and the prognosis was not promising.  In what world could one call it wonderful to know that a person is dying of cancer at the peak of her life?  I understood her point.

It occurred to me that I had never given that song much thought.  I also wondered why someone might think it an appropriate recording for a friend who was fighting through cancer and chemotherapy.  But I knew that the friend was also not one to sugar-coat life's struggles or try to positive think oneself out of real problems.  I bought a Louis Armstrong album and took some time to listen to him sing the song.  I read a little about its themes and its popularity.  I began to understand that this kind of song represents a particular kind of defiance when sung by people who have been dealt every injustice and disadvantage by those with privilege and power.

There is a stance to take to the world when it treats you as if you are inferior, outcast, and unworthy, that defies those treatments.  It is a way of knowing the good, the true, and the beautiful that disavows the knowledge projected by the powerful.  Refusing to accept the world as it is offered, the defiant imagination of the oppressed recognizes that the good things in the world also belong to them.  They know the truth of the world, that it is not what the lies of the powerful would assert to be true.  They know that the beauty of the world, perhaps always mixed with ugliness, yet remains beauty.  In defiance, Armstrong can sing about the particular sights of natural beauty that he passes, the kindness of heart and soul experienced in community, and the hope of a better life as the struggle for liberation presses from one generation to the next.  Living in a world overshadowed by injustice, he can recognize that world as false, as the great lie.  In contrast, the truth remains that it is a wonderful world.

This is not the same as positive thinking.  It is a way of thumbing the nose at the oppressor.  It is a stone-faced challenge to the world's claim on one's life.  It's the laughter of one who knows that the joke is not on her.  It's not pollyannish blindness, but clear sight which sees both the wrong and the right.  It's not pretending, but a kind of honesty that knows tragedy as well as beauty.

I've been motivated to develop this discussion of the defiant imagination after having watched the powerful miniseries, When They See Us.  The title itself focuses on vision.  Presuppositions about the nature of the world and the people in it operate as filters on what human beings see.  The term "normative gaze" identifies a biased perspective shared by those who hold power in society and culture--their way of seeing things defines reality because it is assumed to be the normative way to see.

Yet the words and actions of those who are not in power can challenge the assumed truth.  Seeing beyond the current busyness, they may glimpse a truth not polluted or distorted by the interests of the oppressor.  Taken as part of a declaration, the film title names the way that white people see black people, one which automatically puts black people in jeopardy.  Taken as part of an interrogatory, the title asks whether the black young men have been truly seen at all.  In this case, the young men are waiting to be seen for who they really are, not for what the fantasies of white culture imagine them to be.  A defiant imagination gives its holder the possibility of challenging and overcoming the normative gaze of the oppressor.

The film project itself is an exercise of defiant imagination.  It challenges the dominant narrative, the way that the young men and their families were "seen" by the newspaper reporters, the police, the prosecutors, and by many of their neighbors.  In the next posting, I will discuss how various songs in the soundtrack of When They See Us help to feed a defiant imagination.

Hermeneutics, Imagination, Grief, and Change

I was late to Sunday School yesterday.  I had gotten up plenty early, and I was about to finish getting dressed for church.  Then I looked at some photos from six years ago, when our five Broadways went on a family cruise together.  I read some words I wrote in 2014 about how I was not looking forward to the next two months of memories.  In those moments a shadow descended on me, my mind started racing, tears welled up, my body shook, and I was suddenly caught up in the grief of Everly's absence again.

Let me quickly finish this part of the story. I did some thinking, some reading, some crying, and then I debated what to do next.  One impulse when sad is to stay alone and deal with it without having to explain oneself to anyone else.  Another is to turn to people who care for you.  I decided on the latter, since I expected to see the loving eyes of some of my best friends in Sunday School when I arrived.  Just last Sunday, another member of the class was sharing with us about her intermittent and surprising intrusions of grief over the loss of her mother.  I knew that going to my people was better, so I went to be in the company of wounded healers, even if I was 15 minutes late.  It was the right choice, and I got the loving care we hope anyone would receive.

You won't be surprised to know that with me there is a longer story to tell.  So we've had the summary of events, and now the more detailed analysis.

On Saturday morning, I was dressing to go out to one of the big festivals Durham throws each year.  I put on a shirt, one of my usual guayaberas, and stepped away from the closet only to realize that the date was May 18.  For those who used to read my blog when I was writing more often, you may remember that I call every 18th of the month an "Everly Day," because she died on July 18, 2013.  It's one of my ways of honoring the blessing of her life with me for 30+ years.  Most months on the 18th I take some time for remembering.  And when I remember while getting dressed, I almost always wear a purple shirt for Everly Day.  So I changed shirts and got a purple guayabera before heading out.

Another thing I usually do on the 18th, is count the passage of time.  We are approaching six years since her death on that July 18th.  Being in a math family, I seldom settle for just one way of counting.  This month was five years and ten months, and it was also 70 months.  Now for those of you who, like me, have lived your lives immersed in the texts and symbols of the Bible, it is probably no surprise to you where my mind immediately jumped.  No matter how much sophisticated theoretical work I do on biblical hermeneutics, that still does not keep me from imagining relationships of numbers and symbols and language that is not directly part of what Dr. McClendon would call "the plain sense" of scripture.  Seventy months made me think of seventy years, the rounded-off figure in scripture to represent the length of the exile.  Seventy, a multiple of seven but ten times over, conveys a message of completion as well as of long duration.  Above all, the seventy year mark in this instance represents an end to a period of suffering, despair, and seemingly endless waiting.

I recognize that seventy years is not the same as seventy months.  I recognize that my 70 months is not somehow predicted or conjured in the biblical text.  But what did happen in the aftermath of noticing the similarity of number still seems to me to be worthy of the scriptural imagination.  From that recognition, I was propelled into a reflection on the passage of time in my life by analogy to the longer passage of time in the life of Israel.  What did the 70 years mean for God's people so many centuries ago?  Were there ways that their recorded experience might shed light on my situation, 70 months after the devastating loss of my beloved?

The numerical similarity had occurred to me on Saturday, but with the coming of a wave of grief on Sunday morning, I turned back to that thought and opened my Bible to the Prophet Isaiah, starting in the 40th chapter, and began to read about that prophet's theological reflections on the end of the exile, the end of the 70 years of waiting.  I read quickly through four or five chapters, not stopping very long at any text, and letting it wash over me.  Then I realized that if I were going to make it to Sunday School, I had better finish getting dressed and get in the car to head over to the church.

The verses were very familiar.  The prophet's words of comfort offer a message from the infinite and unchanging God that resonates in the Bible reader's ears.  The first of the Servant Songs describes the humility and compassion of the people that God is calling to serve in the world.  When I reached the 43rd chapter, I was brought to a text I read with Everly often during her suffering toward death.  It speaks of God's presence in the most dangerous and fearful situations.  It proclaims God's concern for humanity in creation, a precious relationship, in which God has known and given us our names even before we have known ourselves.  And of course, as I have written before, John Claypool's reflections on the the end of chapter 40 spoke with power into my life during days of most intense grief years ago.  God will hold us up through the most difficult times, so that we can walk and not faint, taking one more step in the strength of knowing that God will never leave us to suffer alone.

And what I had already begun to think on Saturday when I first connected the number seventy between my life and the scriptural allusion, also was there.

Sing to the Lord a new song!

I will turn the darkness before them into light,
  the rough places into level ground.
These are the things I will do,
  and I will not forsake them.

Do not remember the former things,
  or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
  now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
  and rivers in the desert.

From this time forward I will make you hear new things,
  hidden things that you have not known.
They are created now, not long ago;
  before today you have never heard of them,
  so that you could not say, "I already knew them."

Again, to be clear, I am not advocating a type of interpretation which personalizes the prophetic oracles as if they are not linked to the history of Israel and the coming of the Messiah, revealing the meaning of history and the nature of the One in whom history resides and finds its meaning and purpose.  These verses are not about me.  The exile is not a convenient turn of events meant to make me feel better or even to rethink my life.  On the other hand, the pattern of divine work and character that the prophet speaks of has ongoing relevance for persons and communities who seek to turn to God for guidance and insight on the meaning and purpose of their personal and collective lives, even in our day.

Thus, the coinciding of the number 70 in the biblical story and my personal story becomes a seed of potentiality as I reflect on this season of my life in the aftermath of my greatest grief.  Has a time of pilgrimage through wilderness reached a point of fullness? Are there signs in my work, my ministry, my family life, my friendships, my study, and all aspects of my existence that point to the possibility of something new?  Should there be some things that I set aside in these days?  Should there be readiness to take a decisive turn toward something new and unexpected, something not even created before now?  What is the new song that I should sing to the Lord?  What darkness will be lifted, and where will light begin to shine?  I can't say that I know answers, but these questions continue to fill in the gaps of restlessness, and sometimes discontent, that arise in the life I'm now living.

This month of May marks seven years since Everly emerged from near death caused by her first dose of chemotherapy.  She began to articulate to us the new vision she had of the life ahead of her.  Seventy months have passed since her death.  Soon that anniversary of six years will come.  None of these are magic numbers.  There are no rules for grief and its duration, no time limits that can be set and enforced.  We have no capacity to know what the future brings, nor to be sure what choices we must make in each moment.  Yet this imaginitive foray into the grand narrative of scripture as a way to recognize the continuing work of God will, I believe, bear fruit for my journey in this world.  May God go with me and with you in each step, that we may walk and not faint.

Listening with Patience and Letting Music Do Its Work

I've not put much stock in the theory of art as purely the artist's expression of an inward state.  Art, no matter how personal, remains a public act with communal significance.  Not to belabor the point, but why use a canvas?  Why this paint or that clay?  Why this instrument and this tempo?  There are numerous potential reasons why an artist struggles to get work into public view.  Even the desire to have one's art recognized is something more than just wanting personal validation.  It is better understood as a form of communication, of connecting with others.

Thus, when I claim in the title that music has work to do, it is a work of communication.  Music's communication may operate at many levels.  These ramblings about art and music arise out of spending an evening listening to Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo play saxophone and piano as a jazz duet.  Interviewed about their collaboration, Marsalis argues that the jazz duet is not merely a mini-quartet or a truncated ensemble.  It is itself a distinct kind of performance able to display its own communicative style of close collaboration, sensitivity, and balance.  Marsalis says, "The object is not to play in the same way that you play in other situations.  You have to change the conversation as well as the setting.  Once you know the form, you can just react to each other." 

Their further reflections on their engagement with the music as a duo help the reader, and listener, to understand there is a kind of work going on with musicians that is at least part of what I mean when I say that music is doing work.  It is the musicians, of course, who drive and make the music live.  This is why at a jazz concert, one learns it is appropriate to give applause when one musician in the ensemble completes a "solo" or highlighted portion of a longer musical composition.  People don't do that during a harpsichord concerto at the end of the harpsichord section, but in a jazz performance, when the pianist has carried the lead for some time and then recedes back into the balanced ensemble playing, clapping is appropriate and expected.  Jazz audiences, in a less formal relationship with the performers than in classical performances, immediately recognize and acknowledge the virtuosity and the effort it takes by communicating their appreciation.  At classical concerts, the audience struggles to demonstrate patience when moved by the musicians' art and waits until the end of a lengthy composition.

To take an aside, I did not grow up in a family which schooled me in the appreciation of jazz or classical music.  My introductions to these was slow, through the music education programs of public school and college.  Our music came more from folk traditions, church hymnals, and popular gospel and secular radio.  If my mom used the word "jazzy" to describe music, it was not a compliment.  Beyond that home training, in high school I sang and listened to music of various eras of Western culture, from Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Neo-Classical, and Modern eras.  We learned the discipline of remaining silent until an entire piece was finished before offering applause.  In college, my exposure grew through public performances of chamber music, orchestras, string and woodwind quartets, and occasional jazz. But learning about jazz really came later from listening to the public radio station in Dallas during my two years working there. Even now, I have attended few live jazz performances, and when I do I appreciate the chance to go with a friend from whom I can learn, by observing, the skills of listening and appreciating what I see and hear.

The work of music is partly understood as the work of the musicians, but there is in music as in all art a surplus of work that is greater than the particular agents of its production and performance.  Scientific study confirms many anecdotal links between music and the brain, affecting emotion, reasoning, creativity, exercise, memory, and personality.  I won't try to report on all these scientific studies.  A quick internet search will uncover popular and scientific resources about the complex relationship between music and the brain and body.  Play around with the search terms and you may, like me, find yourself reading all kinds of research and commentary rather than this blog post.  Rather than be comprehensive or even particularly scientific, I will comment briefly on a few aspects of the work music does for human flourishing.

Perhaps most obvious to many people is the emotional and formational link one retains to the music one listens to during formative periods and significant moments.  Music marketers have developed business models around stratifying the various niches in which people become attached to musical styles and artists during adolescence and early adulthood.  Music of the 60s, of the 70s, of the 80s, etc., become the organizational structure for attracting a certain type of listener to whom advertisers can target messages to match the demographics.  This business use of music taps into something many of us have known personally--that tunes, rhythms, instruments, and songs of a certain era propel us into memories or emotional states relevant to deeply formative parts of our history. Certain beats and tunes stir the confusion and rebellion of teens frustrated by the struggle between independence and parental authority.  Songs and lyrical hooks may evoke early attempts to understand feelings of attraction, infatuation, and one's bodily awakening as a sexual being.  Longings, hopes, and decisions about life direction may have close ties to a personal "musical score." The work of music clearly includes an interplay with crucial emotional and formational eras and mileposts in one's personal narrative.

The mention of a musical score points to another aspect of music's work.  Music taps deep structures of the brain to arouse emotion: anxiety and fear, sadness, anger, attraction, happiness, excitement and more.  While not all people respond to the same music with the same emotion, there are widely accepted patterns of "happy" and "sad" music, shaped by harmonies, rhythm, tempo, volume, timbre, and other complex aspects of music.  I tend to be skeptical of overgeneralizations about happy and sad music, but scientific study tends to support links between emotional perceptions of music and emotional reactions to other sensory perceptions.  Listening to a "happy" or "sad" musical clip will likely influence a person's perception about facial expressions as more happy or sad. Some theorize an ancient link between music and the sound of active human living as influencing this reaction in the brain.  Even without needing the hard science, the use of sound tracks to shape the mood of a movie is a widely tested and effective sign of the work music does. Many people regularly choose music to play at home or in their headphones at work or out in public with an idea of influencing a mood toward happiness, energy, melancholic remembrance, or meditation.  Music works in our brains and bodies to reinforce or redirect our moods, even without our conscious planning.

Finally, there are many directions of research on the relation of music to strengthening reasoning ability, to helping focus mental activity, and to opening up creativity in thought.  I am particularly interested in the work of music to spark creativity and reflection.  "Brain science," a term of growing popularity, is apparently something different from psychology or physiology or philosophy.  I take it to be a specialization related to each of those fields, using newly available knowledge to offer insights that could be valuable to all of those older disciplines.  Brain science offers explanations rooted in the activity or reduction of activity in various parts of the brain under certain circumstances.  One such explanation says that just the right volume and type of music can create enough disturbance in brain activity that a person's most routine reasoning and memory patterns become interrupted, requiring the brain to work a little harder, to work around interrupted routines, and seek creative solutions to problems.  I don't really know how to evaluate how credible that explanation may be. Yet, it offers one kind of reasonable explanation, rooted in basic brain function and in growing knowledge about  the complex process of memory and reasoning. Regardless of how accurate the theory may be, the actual work of music to stir creativity has wide anecdotal support.

To wrap up my ruminations on letting music do its work, I will go back to my seat in Baldwin Auditorium, listening to the jazz duet.  Not really a novice any longer, but far from a connoisseur, I listened with eagerness to the various ways the two musicians intertwined their roles, sometimes stepping back or forward as accompanist and lead, and other times mingling two lines into one.  I was listening with a friend with much longer experience of attending live jazz performances, so at times my learning included watching her responses to the music to help me understand what might be going on in the room.  In a fancy auditorium at an academic institution, I gathered that the crowd was somewhat stiffer, with less bodily movement of the head, legs, and feet, than one might see in a different venue.  There were times when it seemed I ought to be standing and moving my body, but not on this night.  Different styles and melodies took my thinking in different directions--sometimes into issues of work and intellect, and other times into relationships, social life, and politics.

There is an interesting relationship between the listener's thoughts and feelings about a piece of music and her or his desire to know a "back story" of how a piece came to be written, or when it emerged during the life of the composer.  This is not essential, and in fact may function to limit the creative reverie that music may incite.  Yet, it also can be part of the complexity of how music works. In one case, Joey Calderazzo told a story about a piece before he played it.  He does not always tell it, but the performance fell on an important anniversary relevant to this particular composition in which he was engaging his thoughts and feelings about a dear friend who was struggling with cancer. He mentioned being on tour, performing in many different places, yet looking regularly at the postings about his friend on the CaringBridge website, where people dealing with terminal illness (usually cancer) and their loved ones can provide regular updates about the progress, or regress, of their health as they deal with various treatments, symptoms, improvements, and setbacks.

Some of you readers know that I spent about a year and a half writing on CaringBridge during Everly's illness and after her death.  So the mention of CaringBridge immediately set my thoughts and feelings on a trajectory.  As the duo began to play the piece, named "Hope," I was already on track for a tour of memories.  A few years ago, I may not have been able to listen to the music because of the intensity of grief.  I'm not completely sure how to describe this particular moment which is the primary reason I am writing about the music.  The music went to work.  I was listening and being drawn along by the melody and rhythm. 

At the same time my imagination took me to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.  I saw the waiting rooms in various clinics.  I recalled the hospital rooms where we waited for and through treatments.  I saw the pharmacy, the doctor's examination rooms, the hallways, the pre-op and recovery rooms. And there were so many waiting rooms.  I remembered Everly's moments of impatience during the tedious waiting for CT scans, having to drink barium shakes to get ready.  There were times when she was anxious and needed me in sight.  There were procedures that lasted hours and left me wandering the halls.  Sometimes I even taught my classes through video and audio conferencing in the lobby of the hospital.  Mostly, it was a chain of memories of the two of us doing our work to live a little longer and share time with our kids, our families, and one another.

I did shed some tears, but the interaction between the music and my thoughts and feelings was more complicated than a mere trigger for sadness.  I'm not sure sadness accurately describes the emotions that accompanied the work this music was doing.  It was an opening to creative possibilities.  It was not only a memory of loss, but also a memory of effort, of unified struggle, and of hope for what might still await us. I'm inclined to think that what was going on between me and the music is partly described as creative thinking. It was not merely a catalog of memories, nor a sinking into a blue mood.  It was also a process engendering the love, the hope, and the good that went on between us, and even among us in relation to the medical staff, as we lived that struggle toward what we did not yet know would come to pass. I'm not trying to make this sound like a mystical vision, because it wasn't.  Yet I found myself in that evening in a concert hall in a kind of creative simultaneity with the remembered time in Houston, when the future was not known and the possibilities awaited.  Thus, there was a mixture of grief and hope, tied together in the beauty of having lived alongside Everly during those events, as well as in her presence in memory now amidst all that my life can and may yet be.

I don't want to overdramatize or idealize a song at a concert.  I'm trying to describe through self-report and reflection what I think appears as a possibility in the way music works and can work in many occasions.  I did not take a flight of ecstasy.  It was not one of the highlight events of my life.  Still, it was a moment of power, a glimpse of glory, a flash of soaring that opens the eye to possibilities that may not seem obvious in most of the mundane hours of work and routine. I think that the right kind of listening, with patience, can let music do some amazing work. 

What Are We Imagining We Will Find When We Seek the Will of God?

Any professor knows that when students are doing their job, they press us to articulate things that we have not said clearly before.  If we have not said them clearly, it probably also means we have not understood them clearly.  Moreover, what these classroom discussions will often do is require us to pull together things we have said on various discrete topics in order to discern new insights and construct new frames for reflection.  This week in class, my students and I have been talking about how we discern the will of God for our lives.

I have thought of this past year, the year since Everly's death, as my year of discernment.  Although I am fifty-six years old with grown children, I have had to reboot my future.  I've written about this before.  Having lost access to the future with Everly that I was expecting, all the roads ahead seemed strange and uncharted.  I'm struggling for the right word here.  My dean talks about "renorming" of his life, having lost the "normal" he knew when his wife passed away.  That get's at a big part of it.

It's not exactly like going back to the beginning, not a Da Capo al Fine.  I don't have to repeat all the misdirections, achievements, and learning of youth.  In that way it's more like continuing with a great absence and all the confusion and uncertainty that brings (which, realistically, is actually a different set of confusions and uncertainties than the ones that Everly and I shared).  It's continuing, but things don't feel the same, don't taste the same, don't smell the same.  It's like walking on a path on a hillside, with everything tilted, with challenges for the footholds.

My having recently moved to a different house, one that has been gutted, rebuilt, and remodeled, puts me into a kind of spacial, structural model for what is happening.  It is a kind of rebuilding after a storm.  Parts of the structure are missing.  As things get into place, I have to figure out how to reorganize.  What used to take my time does not any more, but new things beg for my attention that I could previously ignore.  I'm not doing a very good job of maintaining a single metaphor here, so I guess I'm back to my earlier point of struggling for the right word.

So in the year of discernment, I was asking a question that in common church-speak could be called "seeking the will of God."  Now that things have changed, what should I be doing?  Now that I'm not Everly's cheerleading director, where should my energy go?  I talked with people I see often.  I mulled things over with family.  I made efforts to visit with people I see less often.  I pulled everyone who gave me some time into my conversation about what kind of life I should have.

Part of it, the part that swam in a deep pool of grief, was about recovering.  I'm not saying grief is something you get over.   I'm saying that making a life required time and reflection and learning and growth that acknowledges that for me everything is changed.  It means trying to remember those strengths that made Everly my chief admirer, an honest and plainspoken admirer, but an admirer no less.  It means trying to resurface from the deep pool breathing big gulps of a life that I have always believed God is offering to me as a gift.  It means believing again in the reasons I have been driven to be somebody and make a difference in my world.

As it has turned out so far, I continue to teach in the same esteemed seminary where I have taught for two decades.  It made sense to relocate back to that vicinity.  I had to grapple with my learning about John Perkins and his teaching about "relocation" to live among people with whom one ministers.  Puzzling about where that relocation should be, I looked at several different neighborhoods where I have relationships with church people who care about their communities.  I had to overlay those neighborhoods with the available housing, to find a place I could live and be healthy, provide space for my scattered family, and, of course, that I could afford.  Affordability and livability do not always align.  So I have ended up living near the church where I have served as a minister for the past seventeen years, Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church.

What will come of all this discernment and seeking?  That is something to wait and see.  Saturday I led devotional for people who had come to Mt. Level for Community Day.  We had health personnel for blood pressure checks, information about chronic conditions, community programs for children's safety, and even flu shots available.  There was a cookout fired up in the parking lot.  People who needed it got food to take home and help make ends meet.  Throughout the day, our ministers led short devotional services for the people who were there.

I talked about the times we are motivated to seek out God's guidance as seasons in our lives change.  From the seasons of the year, to seasons of school and work, to seasonal change from major life events, people may be motivated to inquire after God concerning their futures.   In those short comments, I tried out a couple of analogies.  First, we sometimes go asking for the wrong kind of guidance.  We are looking for the GPS god.  We want an exact destination, every road and turn preselected, a voice telling us what's about to come next, and no more having to think about it.  Anyone who got bad directions from a GPS device knows that's not even a good way to think about using one of those things.  But I am convinced that it also misunderstands the way that a life unfolds in relation to God.

Maybe that imagined map of God's will holds on from an age when Christians more widely believed in theological determinism and predestination.  In popular Christian talk and thinking, it remains a commonly expressed idea that God's control of the world means that every step our our lives is planned and coming to fruition moment by moment.  Most would not spin from their comments about specific events a full-blown theory of predestination, but would instead offer assertions in defense of human free will or even radical freedom and autonomy.  So in that way, it does seem more like a holdover, a convention in religious speech passed on through generations, even as worldviews and theological constructions have changed in ways that would contradict it.  The continuing presence of this kind of thinking is a partial explanation of why people would go to God looking for a GPS answer.

Before mentioning the alternative that I offered in the Saturday devotional, let me interrupt with the conversations I had with my students over the past week.  A big part of the Introduction to Theology course at Shaw Divinity School pertains to theological hermeneutics.  Along with the hermeneutical study that students get in Bible classes and in preaching classes, we spend some time on theological aspects of hermeneutics to help students understand that there are critical theological judgments and ecclesiological practices that shape faithful reading of the scriptures.  As I conclude this part of the course, I spend a large part of a class meeting in theological autobiography.  I tell the story of my upbringing as a white Southern Baptist, a Texan, a minister-in-training, a theologian, a church leader, a white person learning to make black friends, and a member of a black Baptist church.

Having told this story, with illustrations about Bible interpretation at relevant points, and especially to discuss my journey into reading the Bible with people whose lives have not been the same as mine and whose faith sensibilities have been shaped in a very different social and cultural context, students had more questions.  Learning to read the Bible in a black church and teaching black ministers has burst open dividing walls, pushed away opaque glass to allow me to see what my isolation in white privilege did not let me see.  I try to tell this story truthfully without letting it be a form of heroic tale of the honorable white man bearing his burden.  Telling it over and over, with the conversations that ensue, keeps helping me to understand my own pilgrimage better.

This time, a student asked me how I understood what had happened to me in relation to the will of God.  Since the most recent chapter of my life includes the death of my wife, that was the first thing that came to my mind.  I explained that I do not believe it is God's will that people die of cancer, and that there was much more good that Everly could have done in this world had she not been taken from us by this disease.  Thus, I don't think it is God's will that she and I had only thirty-three years of marriage, or that my children will progress through their adult lives without having their mother to encourage and direct them.  Some people may feel the need to believe that "it was her time."  I would say this time or another could have been her time.  Such things are not set in stone nor predetermined.  But whatever time her death came, whether she lived or died, she lived or died unto the Lord.

Everly's dying was a great loss to our family and to many other people in this world.  But I also told my students that I don't think that her untimely death means an end to all good possibilities for us.  It's not a failure of God's love and providence, but a tragic circumstance in which God's love and providence remain and surround our lives.  By implication, I am saying that I don't imagine a divine being flipping switches, waving a scepter, or pushing buttons to make every event around me happen.  God is active and present, but not necessarily in those kinds of ways.

The great challenge for me, mentioned above, has been rethinking what kind of life God has for me even though for almost four decades it was and would be a life lived with Everly.  The year of discernment was partly a year of looking at who I have been with and without Everly.  It was remembering what has mattered to me about living with her and wondering what that looks like if she is not by my side.  I wondered if, after this devastating loss, I would be able to invigorate, even resuscitate, some of my passion for making a difference in the world.  As our pastor, Dr. William C. Turner, Jr, said in her eulogy, she has finished her part of the race and has handed me the baton to keep on running.  In her view of me and my own self-understanding, God has not cast me aside and is not finished with me yet.

So as the will of God unfolds for me, I don't think of it as a single road to a single destination.  That brings me to Christian Ethics class a few days before that hermeneutics discussion.  We examined the Christian understandings of love and marriage and the contrast between those theologically shaped ideas and the popular thinking that permeates our culture.  One of the popular ideas is a fatalism of romantic love.  It is widespread popular thought that there is a single perfect mate for each person.  These two people of shared destiny must find one another and make their fate come into fruition.  It's a highly problematic way of thinking that has little room for grace, for redemption, and for growth.

To "fall" in love implies a complete lack of control.  But that is to conflate a biologically driven instinct toward pairing and mating with a virtue of love.  Attraction and infatuation are not the same as love.  Love is an orientation toward the good of the other, not a giddy feeling in the stomach and a fog in the brain.  Rather than the fatalistic falling in love, a Christian understanding of love and marriage should be about "growing in love."  The contemporary moment in which we live, a blip on the longer history of human flourishing, is all about self-chosen mates based on love as fate based on a self-perceived and self-reported giddiness.

I'm not arguing against people making their own judgments about whom they will marry, but I am arguing for a different kind of discernment process based on a sober evaluation of how deep a friendship is possible with the other person and whether we are pursuing goals that will take us in the same direction, or in Christian language, whether we are sharing a calling we can live out together.  For that reason, as a young man I came to imagine different ways of describing the will of God as comparable to maps of two different states of the U.S.

Having spent a summer in Washington, mainly around Wenatchee and Spokane, I had learned that the prominent geographical feature of the Cascade Mountains makes getting from one side of the state to the other a bigger challenge than I had experienced growing up in Texas.  There are very few roads that cross the Cascades because of the difficulty of traversing such high peaks and their steep slopes.  A few mountain passes allow hikers, skiers, or drivers to safely travel.  In winter, the choices for driving become more limited.  So if I am in Wenatchee and want to get to Seattle, I can either go this way, or that way, and there are not many other options.

The fatalistic view of finding a mate, when imported into Christian thinking, is operating in an imagined world not unlike the road map of the State of Washington.  To break it down, if I am in Wenatchee and if God's will is for me to get to Seattle, then I have to get the exact road right, or I have no hope of fulfilling God's plan for my life.  If I have only one perfect mate out there in the world, and I can't keep myself on the path toward God's perfect will, I will forever miss God's plan for my marriage.  When I put this in such stark terms, I wonder how such thinking would ever pass careful theological muster.  Yet the anxiety of believing in only one path and the risk of missing a turn because of a mistake, a sinful choice, or ignorance, makes out God to be a kind of heartless dictator of sorts.

Once when I was about to drive from one small town in Texas to another, I got out a road map of Texas.  Because of legislation in the 1940s to support secondary roads in farming and ranching areas, there are thousands of roads that crisscross every county in Texas.  A road map of Texas is a jumble of roads forming triangles and quadrilaterals of varied sizes and turned all directions.  Getting from point A to point B in Texas often has dozens of possible routes.  There are longer and shorter routes.  There are straight, curved, and zigzagged routes.  There are scenic routes and efficient routes.  When I ask a computer map system how to get somewhere in Texas, if it suggests three routes, it usually tells me they will all take about the same amount of time.  Getting around in Texas leaves lots of room for missing a turn or for changing your mind.

It struck me that seeking the will of God was more like this map.  (I confess my birth and upbringing in Texas does make me biased toward believing it could be God's country, but I think that is irrelevant to this analogy.)  If God has a direction for me to go, it is not necessarily dependent on an exact route.  If God has a destination at which I should arrive, there may be many possibilities and ways by which I could get there.  God is not so much trying to harness me onto a single set of ruts on a road that runs through the only mountain pass as God is calling me to be a certain sort of person whose impact in the world is a certain sort of impact.  There are all kinds of flexibility about how that will play out.  I don't have to be in a panic about accidentally missing a road sign or misunderstanding an instruction.  God is making the journey with me, and we will work it out as we go.

A week later, in Christian Ethics class again a student followed up on our conversation about the will of God.  That gave me opportunity to elaborate further on the idea that our calling is first of all to a relation to God and one another.  Jesus called the disciples to "Follow me."  He sent them out to go to every village and town, stay a while, accomplish some things, then go on to another place.  What mattered was the people they met and what they did as they carried out their mission.  The calling of God, following Jesus, and living in the Spirit has its roots in the life of the Trinity and the pouring out of the divine love and goodness in creation.  The divine life of mutual love, submission, and sharing is the pattern sewn into the fabric of creation.  Humanity's destiny is to love one another, seek the good of one another, and share the bounty of creation with one another.

The will of God for all humanity is a life lived in justice, kindness, and humility.  This is what the Prophet Micah proclaimed about the essentials of the divine will.  Do justice.  Love kindness.  Walk humbly with God.  To generalize, the will of God for humanity, for me, for us, is a life of virtue.  Living in the Spirit means loving, being joyful, making peace, being patient, showing kindness, living gently, doing good, remaining faithful, and having self-control.  Following Jesus entails poverty of spirit, meekness, mourning, mercy, peacemaking, purity of heart, hunger for justice, and endurance even in hardship.

So I explained to the students that while they should seek God's guidance on major life events and choices, such as whether to become the pastor of a specific church, those moments which seem so critical have to be seen within the bigger picture of God's calling.  Being at this church or that church will certainly have an impact on the pastor's life, the pastor's family's lives, and the lives of the people in the church.  Yet if a pastor is at church A or church B or church C may not be the most important aspect of knowing the will of God.  Is this pastor living in the beatitude that comes with being a follower of Jesus?  Do this pastor's life and this church's life bear the fruit of the Spirit?  Where there is injustice, are this pastor and church seeking justice?  Where people struggle, do the pastor and the church and bring kindness in word and deed?  Are this pastor and church walking with God and in humility?  The calling is first of all to be a certain kind of people, a peculiar people, a people whose living bears in it the image of Christ.

Finally, I can get to the second part of what I shared at the devotional.  Rather than a GPS version of the will of God, I suggested that it is a Jazz Band God whom we serve.  I will claim no originality for making this claim.  Writers such as Cornel West and Barry Harvey have preceded me in using musical metaphors to help describe the shape and possibilities of human living in this world where God is calling us together.  What I said in this case was that a jazz band does not have every note and beat predetermined.  It is not without any sort of plan or purpose, but it always remains open for improvisation.  It may start in one direction, then regroup and change its direction.  The key is that they listen and make the musical journey together.  Our God made us to walk this journey with one another, and even with God.  Walk humbly.  Walk faithfully.  Jesus said to take my yoke.  Let Jesus share the burden and be a partner in the tasks.  The Spirit will guide us into all truth.

God may have specific destinations and specific stretches of road for any of us along the way.  We can trust that if God has such specific plans for us, God will make them known if we are walking in the Spirit as we ought, if we are living a life of virtue, if we are following our Lord.  But there is no need for constant anxiety about whether in each step we are getting it right.  There is so much from scripture that is clear about what sort of persons God has called us to be.  If we keep that in the forefront of our living together as God's people, we will always be on the path to do the will of God.  For that will is that all creation live in love, doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God.  What else does the Lord require?

Having been pulled into these conversations by students who themselves are pursuing God's purpose for their lives with great enthusiasm, I was able to lay out in close proximity several decades of my reflections on what it means to pursue God's will in life.  It has been a fruitful time of reflection for me.  I hope some of it can help others make a little sense as well.  At least it may be an opportunity for me to gain insight from you and clarify some matters about which I need to learn more.

Jeremiah 29:11-14 

¹¹For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. ¹²Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. ¹³When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, ¹⁴I will let you find me, says the Lord.

Imagining Life Ahead

I've certainly posted often about having to re-imagine the direction and shape of my life.  I've preached on the subject.  I've conversed with Dr. David Forbes about it.  It's a major part of this season of my life, of grief work.

Recently the Brüderhof daily email (The Daily Dig) sent me a poem by Denise Levertov about the wonder and awe of looking upon the world.  Struck by its simplicity and power, I decided to find out more about this poet.  What I found intrigued me, including that she had written a series of poems about grief and loss after the death of her sister.  So I searched around the used book stores online and ordered a few of her books of poems.  Today is the first fruit of finding those books.  (Long ago I used to read poetry more often.  I always wonder why I don't now.)

What does one see when looking ahead at the next steps in life?  How different trees may look on a mountainside, depending on how we see.  How urgently we want see what is beyond a door, to remove impediments from letting us open upon the next vista.  How eager we may feel about trying on a new garment, projecting a changed image before ourselves and the world.  

And the eyes that see are guided as much by the imagination, an architect and a knitter, as they are by the orbital muscles and lenses that gaze forward.  Will there be a house behind the door, or not?  What will one find on the "mountain...echoing with hidden rivers, mountain of short grass and subtle shadows?"

Denise Levertov's poem has me thinking on these things.  I'm not surprised the critics say this poem launched her into wide recognition.

With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads
by Denise Levertov

With eyes at the back of our heads
we see a mountain
not obstructed with woods but laced
here and there with feathery groves.

The doors before us in a facade
that perhaps has no house in back of it
are too narrow, and one is set high
with no doorsill.  The architect sees

the imperfect proposition and
turns eagerly to the knitter.
Set it to rights!
The knitter begins to knit.

For we want
to enter the house, if there is a house,
to pass through the doors at least
into whatever lies beyond them,

we want to enter the arms
of the knitted garment.  As one
is re-formed, so the other,
in proportion.

When the doors widen
when the sleeves admit us
the way to the mountain will clear,
the mountain we see with
eyes at the back of our heads, mountain
green, mountain
cut of limestone, echoing
with hidden rivers, mountain
of short grass and subtle shadows.

From the Jubilee File--Hon. Rt. Rev. Dr. Willie James Jennings

I have a file buried several layers down in my Documents file on the laptop.  I have visited it often in the past two years to save or retrieve documents relating to community organizing work on the economy.  I named it when I was working on a theological reflection on the economic crisis with a group of colleagues.  Since so much of the biblical discussion of usury kept taking us back to the Jubilee practices of the Israelite society.  So I called the file "Jubilee."  A big part of my life and creative work for the past two years gets documented in the Jubilee file.

It's been a Jubilee year, and in the past few days I have been reminded to count my Jubilee blessings.  Willie James Jennings, my younger brother, turned 50 last Friday.  I was in Texas, fittingly grading papers, on the birthday of my brother in the professoriate.  I lift an analytical reading report in your honor, my brother, to toast your Jubilee Day.

Willie has worked as hard as anyone has to be my friend.  I take it that some of my professorial instincts and habits--absorption in private study, narrowly focused thinking, lack of awareness of the passing of time, occasional absent-mindedness (to put it lightly), aversion to being told what to do and when, being enamored by my own words--make it a bit harder to be my friend.  I hope I have other qualities that compensate.  But Willie thought it worth his time to keep a friendship going.

Although we met as students, it was after marching for graduation in 1994 that we stoked the fires of friendship.  Willie and I shared Saturday morning coffee for many weeks while our daughters (my youngest and his oldest) hopped and skipped and leaped with joy in the little kiddie's dance class.  We talked through some hard times and some good times.  He put a black man's mirror up for me to look at my white man's life in a racialized world.  I knew that something bigger than I could handle was happening to me.  I had no idea that he was finding in me some hope for the church's deliverance from its demons of malformed desire and imagination. 

I did not know this because as a scholar-friend, Willie kept his cards close to his chest.  I understand this a little better now that I've seen him in action recently on a panel to discuss his book, The Christian Imagination.  Some people in the gathering raised questions which begged for a polemical response.  They either did not understand his arguments from the book, or they just wanted to see if they could get a rise out of him. 

But Willie did not take the bait in his Jubilee year.  He generously referred to the antagonistic comments as "matters of deep importance," or something to that effect.  I was ready to pounce, but Willie gave his winning smile.   It may be that he was simply being political, having learned such skills as a faculty dean for so many years.  But I think it was also a commitment to listen and remain in a friendly conversation with people who are sure that he has gone off on a fool's errand.

This Jubilee year I was blessed to read The Christian Imagination with a class of Shaw students taking Systematic Theology.  As with J. Kameron Carter's Race, in reading Willie's book with my students I continuously found ways that it could challenge my previous theology lectures and supplement the textbooks with which I have become so familiar.  The Christian Imagination opened doors for me and for my students that made theology more alive. 

So often when we take theology to be the gleaned gems of a long [tired] tradition, we find it hard to get a lever on how Christian faith, its leaders, its institutions, and its social productions could become so corrupted and contrary to the ways of the one from whom they take their name.  Books like Willie's give us hope that theology does not have to be merely the crusty oozings from the cracked plaster walls lining the edifice of Euro-American World Domination.  Can there be life within those walls of ageless stone?  Could the academy have a heart of beating flesh?  Or are we destined to have hearts of stone?

So it is that in this Jubilee year, Willie opened the floodgates which had held back a deep lake of theological reflection, fed by mountain streams and woodland springs, flowing through the dark places of middle passage, bottom lands of enforced toil, and the hopeful self-direction of a Second Great Migration.  Along the way, a few droplets from the deeps had come my way, but the halls of Duke and Shaw, only thirty miles apart, are worlds away from one another.  If there were open conversations in Durham, I was out of that loop. 

Moreover, the fast scholarly pace of read, reduce, destroy that makes up hyperacademia is not on the menu at Shaw.  I don't mean to be "hatin' on" Duke, but they really are caught up in the university-military-industrial complex, on a high-speed train toward producing the next world, and the next, and the one after that.  Surely, Willie wisely let only a few droplets out so that when the flood arrived, it would be a season of reckoning.  Folks on the train would have to stop and get off if they were going to have a word to say about it.  He gave us far more in this Jubilee year than we could chew quickly, unless we want to choke on it.

So the back and forth clicking to the Jubilee folder was more than I realized.  In his year of Jubilee, my friend ripped open a place in my heart through which the Holy Spirit may shine to make me a better man than I was, burn away the malformations of desire, and kindle an imagination of another way of being Christian, of being a community that longs to know one another as God's bountiful creation and election.

Happy Jubilee, Willie.  Love that house full of women with all that you have in you.  And save a minute for me so we can plot the revolution.