Walking around the house and bouncing his 8lb person on my shoulder, I found myself making up songs on the spot that were at least sharing with you.

This is the first and catchiest of the songs I’ve been singing to Asa. Written for changing time, I present to you… “You Make The Poops”

Lyrics:
You make the poops, I clean them up (4x)
Everybody poops sometimes. You poop on yourself, though.

Up to now, what I have known of fatherhood I have only known as a son; a son who lost his father at that. May 2010 represents the end of that era and the beginning one in which I have the privilege of being a father. So, I’m releasing a special collection of songs through Noisetrade (see the widget below). I’ve re-arranged four songs from the album “Father”, which I wrote about my dad and the experience of losing him.  

Recorded mostly at my home, the collection is entitled “Father Revisited” and it will be available for  limited time as a way to celebrate this new era and the passing of the last. As a bonus, if you use the Twitter feature to tell your friends about the project, we’ll send you a coupon code good for $3 off my covers project, Through Songs I Was First Undone.

Thanks for your support over the years, I hope you enjoy this special project.

That’s me on the right.

It was 1979. I was 5.

I was barely in kindergarten…

… but I was in the KISS Army.

While “The Green Arrow” is right in some aspects, I still responded a bit more viscerally than I normally do to tweets when I wrote back.

Read the whole entry at Soul-Audio.com.

Perhaps it was inevitable despite its being entirely unnecessary.. .but it did happen..

the “Christian alternative to Twitter.” It’s called ChristianChirp.

Within minutes of its launch, ChristianChirp featured profiles by both @Jesus and @Satan as well as the likes of @ImholierthanU and @WTF.  It wasn’t long before monitors began deleting posts by certain users and then blocking those users altogether…

I echo the sentiment of many who collectively wondered aloud what the point was of creating such a thing in the first place.  Most of the answers to this line of questioning generally ran along the lines of “it’s good to have a place where our values are accepted and celebrated instead of rejected” (as opposed to Twitter, where christian values are very clearly monitored and excluded) Or “thanks for making a social network for christians” (as opposed to the way Facebook is targeted at Janists and Sufis).

The misled and misleading idea underlying all of this is that God is present to and in only the places His people have prepared for Him. Places christians feel safe gathering and talking about Him.  Of course, in light of the smallness of the ‘christian marketplace’ this paints a picture of a god who is not in or present to very much of the world in which we live or at least finds most of our environments too unsavory to dwell in; in case you haven’t noticed, Christ has not been active on his Friendster profile for about 2 years.

“It’s not that big a deal; Just let it go, man.”

I disagree (with the imaginary detractor.. funny how quickly straw horses fall over).  I believe that this is another symptom of the very sickness that is rotting christianity from the inside.

The desire among the christian faithful for products and services like ChristianChip stands in direct opposition to the Incarnation (a relatively important concept in christian thought) and the life of Jesus in general; both of which propose that God is pleased to dwell among His people and that “His people” are seldom those whom religious power-centers identify as His people.  But maybe there is something about the lack of such a belief that is revealed in the creation of these controlled environments…

It seems to me that it ends up being about control: so long as our environment is safe, we don’t have to risk finding out if all this stuff about the power of God and the resurrection is real… Nothing of what we believe about life has to come into contact with or be tested by the larger culture.  The belief (or the hope) that Jesus can change/transform the world around me comes at the risk of being exposed to that larger culture; the avoidance of agendas or values contrary or other than those representative of Christ and His Kingdom belies a fear that Christ and His Kingdom can’t handle the pressure.

This is not a matter of simply disassociating myself from a distasteful or embarrassing part of my family.. This is saying that what I know of Jesus is not represented (much less encapsulated) by what the christian marketplace finds sellable.  And before someone else says it.. I know these aren’t new thoughts or novel; they are, as I see them, important enough to repeat ad nauseum until the din of chaos produced by the multitude of false gods the christian market produces has some counterbalance… because the bottom line for me is this:

-I believe “the heavens proclaim the Glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His Hands” (psalm 19)
-I believe “the earth is the LORD’s and everything in it” (psalm 24)
-I believe in the power of God to change lives and I believe that power extends far beyond the confines of christianity
-I believe the beauty of God is revealed in the larger culture (see: The Beatles, Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Rothko, Picasso, Dostoevsky)  which is why culture is not optional and must be engaged by those who seek the face of God rather than avoided.
-I believe these things because my life has been changed by the power of God through Jesus when He connected with me outside the boundary lines drawn by religious culture which is where He continues to meet me.

Halloween, of course being a holiday rooted in Celtic tradition, which brings to mind other great Celtic celebrations such as PaulPierceMass and Larry Bird Tuesday.  It is an evil, evil day filled with the most horrendous darkness:

Evil Exhibit A:

Fear this evil.  It is unchristian.

Unlike the celebrations of Thanksgiving and, of course Christmas which are considerably more christian holidays.

Thanksgiving, a holiday whose current formation finds its history (partially) in Plymouth in the early 1600’s where religious outcasts from across the Atlantic were educated in the ways of sustainable agriculture by the people native to that land, thereby allowing them to eat healthily and grow strong enough to eventually eradicate those native people.  We celebrate this by gorging ourselves with too much food and drink.  

Christmas, of course, is the celebration of Jesus birth; savior of mankind from sin and self; friend to the poor and downtrodden, enemy of unjust power systems, whether they be religious of economic.  We celebrate His birth by increasing our credit card debt.

“Now, Justin, these are over-reaching generalities.”

Yes, you’re right. Let’ get back to the original point… Halloween is evil.

Evil Exhibit B:

I mean, advertising religion with a billboard will likely attract a certain kind of person to your religion, much as shouting from the sunroof of ones car at the opposite sex will attract a certain kind of date (I’d suggest that, in the latter case, it’d likely not be the kind of person you’d want to spend the rest of your life with… though that might not be what you’re after) So, in either case, perhaps it all depends on the kind of audience or clientele or follower you’re after..

Then again,..

part of what I’d like the Christian advertisers to tell the Muslim advertisers is that the seats of our churches are often filled with the butts of folks who responded to our advertising but, unfortunately, could never move past it.  People who saw the ads, intentional and subliminal, for a faith that was comfortable and safe, driven by God’s deep, deep like of us and His faithful commitment to preserve our way of life and have been reeling ever since at the divergence between the sales pitch and the Person of Jesus they run into periodically at these meetings. And now we can’t seem to get the most of them to help so much as stack chairs after our services, much less commit to a life of service reflective of the life we were hoping to see grow in them once we’d suckered them in.

We’re trying to re-work our communication to avoid such things in the future and it’s proving to be a rather difficult process. As it turns out, the reality of the thing we’re advertising is what is known as a “crappy product.”  It seldom seems to work the way we tell folks it’s going to and generally ends up costing quite a bit more than most folks are normally willing to pay.  If we were being honest, our billboards would read something like:

“Join us on Sunday (plus every other day besides) and prepare to give your time/energy/money/life to people you don’t understand for the sake of a God you can’t really grasp very well either.”

See? That’s just not gonna bring the masses… but.. maybe the masses aren’t what we’re looking to gather after all?

I wrote that to myself in a moment of clarity so that, whenever I was temped to simply lean on what “works” as a songwriter, I’d remember to wait.  This comes up again as I arrange the songs for this covers project. I am continually struck by the depth of creativity writers like Aimee Mann, Trent Reznor and Tom Waits bring to their craft.  Much of the reason these songs have rested so long in my soul is that they have given life and shape to thoughts, feelings, concepts.. realities.. that had either been shapeless or non-existent before my listening.  The word was sung and new things were formed in me; grief, healing, peace… old things were revived or reshaped; friendship, trust, courage..

I long for my work to do that.

In “Hopeful Imagination,” Walter Brueggemann writes: “I suspect that we lose vitality… when our language of God is domesticated and our relation with God is made narrow and predictable.”  I take this to mean that the pervasive use of cliche images and words to communicate, examine or celebrate ones relationship to or experience of God is much more serious than being simply a songwriting problem; It is reflective of a disconnect between artist and subject.  Quoting Bruggemann again: “Predictable language is a measure of a deadened relationship in which address is reduced to slogan.”

Cliche, at its worst, is the evidence of a compromise having been made in order to accommodate the Market’s desire to appeal to what is safe, unchallenging and strictly sellable.  Certainly, marketability is not an evil in and of itself; but should it become the driving force behind my creative choices, I am no longer making art, I am only making a product,.. a slogan; that it is, in fact, more important to make something sellable than to make something beautiful.

My experience of life has been varied.  My understanding of God has been characterized by passion, imagination and vitality.  I want my art to reflect this.