Dear Anne,

I am sure that this post is one among many responding to your announcement that you are disassociating yourself from Christianity.  You wrote that your disgust with “this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group” has led you to the conclusion that you “simply cannot belong” to us.

I feel you,  Anne. I really do.  I’ve had similar thoughts and even expressed them publicly. I don’t mind at all the desire or even the need to stand at some distance from the label of christianity.  It may well have been worn through.  But I take issue with the notion that you must disassociate  yourself from ‘christian’ people.  I mean sure, we’re a motley lot.  Belonging to this family can often feel like you’ve adopted a few thousand drunk uncles.  It’s incredibly embarrassing at times and frustrating at least as often. I get it.  But I also read that you’re making your move “in the name of Christ” and that presents a rather perplexing dilemma for someone who wants to quit on people.  You see, Christ hasn’t quit on us and if you choose to align yourself with Him, then neither can you.

Aligning yourself with Christ means aligning yourself with Someone who not only declared his love for all God’s children (believer or not), but suffered and died in order to establish and maintain a relationship with those children.  It is this redemptive sacrifice that defines His love as characteristically His.  Having chosen to follow His example, it seems that at least part of the redemptive sacrifice you are being challenged to make is to associate and identify yourself with this shabby batch of miscreants who are often quite bad at practicing the religion you love.  It comes at the cost of your ego and likely some book sales.  But that’s the nature of sacrifice; it costs you.  It will cost you if people see you as being family to those “anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth, anti-Democrat, anti-secular humanism, anti-science” types among us.  Just as it costs Jesus to be seen as their Savior and Lord. Just as it cost him to be seen with prostitutes and whatnot.  It is the same social role-play with a different set of cultural lenses on. All your statement does is trade in “bigots” for “whores” when the heart of Christ is that they’re both beloved of the Father.

It’s simply reasonable that if you set yourself against people who set themselves against people you are only adding to the friction. If part of your issue with christianity is it’s exclusivity, you aren’t helping by only including those who “get it” the way you do.  True christian inclusivity means embracing the homosexual and the gay-basher in the same embrace; working for the release of the oppressed while praying and working for the redemption of their oppressor; loving the beautiful game of baseball and yet, somehow, also loving the Yankees.  It means loving the Lord with all of yourself and also loving those who grossly misrepresent Him.

I think you’re a smart cookie, Anne. I think you’ll hear some thoughtful feedback and realize you stepped across a line and might have to retract your statement.  You will also likely have to speak directly with Christ about the way you roughly labeled and dismissed the ones He’s drawn to himself and suffered to love.  Lucky for you, lucky for all of us, He’s incredibly forgiving and eternally patient.

In the name of Christ,
Justin McRoberts

The odd thing about this understanding of “being saved” is that, since I’ve followed Jesus, it has all the more grated against my experience of life and faith.  My ‘conversion’ didn’t take place all in a moment and certainly has been a happy experience at times but never consistently.  My being “saved” never felt like something snapped into place after which I was then on my way.  I’ve experienced the waxing and waning of actual change in my life and the same waxing and waning of faith that my life’s change is authentic and lasting.  Less than a one-time agreement, it’s been more like fits and starts, in all honesty.

Sara Miles, in her book “Take This Bread” writes: “Conversion isn’t a moment: it’s process and it keeps happening, with cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt.”

A process of cycles and seasons.  That sounds like it.  Something more like the growing of a branch connected to a vine.. born invisibly, growing in shoots and perhaps too quickly… needing to be pruned.. growing again and bearing fruit.. but then.. Fall.. Winter and the long, dark hope that Spring will come again, bringing a greater abundance of fruit.  The work of a good gardener, salvation is not the magic and surgically sterile removal of my life from “this world” or even the mystical transcendence of my own base humanness.  It is the strange, messy and (dare I say) unfinished business of becoming a complete human being… one like Jesus.

How does a FEJMILRS work? It works in 3 easy steps…

1. SUBMIT: your questions and requests over Twitter before Friday, Aug 13. The top 10 questions will be answered in no specific order.

2. WATCH: live via Twitcam Wednesday night August 18 6pm PST. The stream will be accessible through Justin’s Twitter page. Or watch the session when it re-airs on FOX this Fall.**

3. RECEIVE: If your question is answered during the session, you will receive a $2-Off coupon for any digital album at the McStore.  Keep posted at Twitter or Facebook for further details.

(**FOX airing pending FEJMILRS being picked up by a production company and inking a contract with FOX… so.. you should probably just watch it on Wed, Aug 18.)

Magnolia is one of the only movies I have ever gone back to the theater to see.  Cast with the likes of Julianne Moore, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and WIlliam H. Macy, there really isn’t a weak performance anywhere in the movie (unless you hate Tom Cruize instinctively,… which is really more about you than the movies you see).

I watched Magnolia the first time with my wife and some friends.  Our friends didn’t care much for the film, commenting that it was “bizarre,” “pathetic,” and “unlikely.”  We agreed that those were accurate descriptions but, to the contrary, Amy and I both thought those were exactly the elements we enjoyed most about it; it was so much like life as we knew it.

Along loving the story, the cinematography and the performances, I also fell in love with the movies soundtrack and in doing so, discovered Aimee Mann.  (little did I know she was the vocalist for the band Til Tuesday, whose single “Voices Carry” echoed through my head through much of the late eighties).  My understanding is that much of the Magnolia’s motivation and theme is derived from Aimee Mann’s music.  In fact, a few of the character Claudia’s lines are directly lifted from Aimee Mann lyrics.  In one case, she turns to Officer Jim Kurring, who is desperately in love with her and says

“Now that I’ve met you
Would you object to
Never seeing each other again.”

…which is the opening line to the song “Deathly”; a song I seriously considered covering for Undone. Instead, I chose the “Save Me.” which was written specifically for the film and is one of the the most pivotal songs in my musical history.

Much of its importance to me is strictly musi-technical.  Its darker tone, melancholy mood and seemingly-too-slow tempo don’t add up to “Save Me” being a downer song at all.  In fact, Save Me is incredibly catchy and has plenty of the energy one would want in a pop song.  What was revelatory for me was that It’s life and energy are not fabricated by bright, shimmery guitar tones or an uplifting, major-chord-driven chorus.  The song is alive because of the tension within it; a tension that never resolves but keeps the song trudging from verse to chorus to bridge and and and on.  This element was liberating for me as a writer.  I could leave a song “in the dark” as it were and let go of the temptation to force a feeling of resolution in lyric or in tone.

Until I let “Save Me” sink into my skin a bit, I didn’t quite recognize how strong the temptation to “resolve” a song actually was. I believed, as do most young artists, that I was being entirely authentic and transparent in my work.  But even looking at my 2000 release “Father,” an album ostensibly about wrestling with my father’s suicide, I could see very clearly where a few of the songs were somewhat forced; at least in the way I finished them… as if I was tying together broken limbs with pretty bows and wrapping paper.   Mann’s work guided me to see that art’s job was seldom to resolve.  More often, a great work affirms the mysterious nature of the human experience just as it is, which is a form of redemption in and of itself.  In this light, I would even go so far as to say that to force a resolution is to give in to the fear that a true resolution might not be there at all; that I must create or even fake it.  It strikes me that this is what is most disappointing about much art in the christian marketplace.  Not that it’s cheesy or even that it’s particularly bad; what is most disappointing is that it is insincere.  I wanted to distance myself from that temptation and the machinery that is angled toward giving in to it.

My 2002 release “Trust” was, as a whole, inspired and fueled by the musical revelation I found in Aimee Mann’s work.  From guitar and drum tones to chord progressions and even lyric choices, Trust was shaped by the freedom to leave songs in the dark; to create a tension and allow that tension to sustain the life of a song and even an entire album.

You can listen to a full length video preview of my “Save Me” at the top of this blog.
You can pick it up at iTunes or at my Online Store.

That is, I suppose, the thing I have come to believe is at the heart of America’s strength as a Nation. As the philosopher Bernard Henri-Levi notes, America…

“…never was  and never will be founded on the continuity of a race,..  the solidity of a soil, or on an intrinsic autochthony or even a shared history.. “

Instead, we are a nation…

“… forged by people of diverse origins who had nothing in common but this sharing …of a desire and an Idea.”

We are a people whose roots are tangled up in the Idea that a diversity of thought strengthens us just a diversity of culture enriches us.

If your celebration of America is peppered with the notion that certain opinions, certain philosophies and certain people must be silenced or defeated (or deported) in order to enjoy your America, your celebration is… well, unAmerican. It is a vast, complex and truly great conversation we have entered into and entertained for over 230 years; it’s energy is provided by the tension between cultures, opinions, theories and world-views. No, we do not always carry the conversation well; but we are exactly at our worst when we  react poorly; when we receive the differing political, religious and philosophical thoughts of another as ONLY a threat to our way of life and not, at least in some way, an enrichment of a diverse, growing and still young nation.

Don’t get me wrong: I am no dualist. I believe in one, uniform, whole, encompassing Truth which pervades and permeates all life, space and time… I just don’t think we arrive at anything resembling that Truth by silencing, much less insulting the “other guy.”  I believe, in fact, that discovering that Truth or coming to an understanding of what is good for a people happens best in the context of a sincere and spirited conversation; one with the foundation of “a decent respect.”

Happy 4th of July.

My time with Re:Generation church on Sunday was such a time.  I was there to share a few songs and tell some stories about the work Compassion is doing in the lives of children living in poverty.  But in all honesty the best stories told on Sunday night in Oakland were not stories I told. They were stories folks shared with me or stories I was witness to that evening; stories that are part of that peoples’ larger story.

Here are 2 of them.

The first is was from a family whom I will refer to as the “Jetsons” in order to preserve their anonymity.  As their three children were growing up, the Jetsons sponsored three children through Compassion; one for each one of their children.  Among the three was a beautiful young girl from The Philippines with whom they really connected.  We will call her Judy Jetson. Judy wrote well in English which allowed the Jetson kids to really know her.  When she turned 18 years old, Judy graduated and moved on from the Compassion program.  The Jetsons hoped, as do all sponsors whose kids graduate, that her path would be made straight into a healthy and fruitful adulthood.

Years later… this year in fact,.. the youngest Jetson boy received a message over Facebook from Judy. She’s living in New Jersey and doing extremely well.  She had been searching for her Compassion family since arriving in the US and, thanks to Facebook, finally found them. She expressed her deep thanks for the years of faithfulness and wanted the Jetsons to know that her path was in fact made straight in great part because of their love and faithfullness.

The Jetsons sponsored another young girl from The Philippines Sunday night.

The second story  is about a young girl who grew up right there in Oakland.  A dancer and an athlete, this young lady (whom we will call Shakira) was struck by encephalitis just about a year and a half ago.  The past 18 months have been an emotional and physical challenge like none other for both her and for her family; grand mal seizures, loss of memory and on and on..

Sunday night was Shakira’s first evening out in a long while, since most of her seizures happen at night.  She stood at the table for a while and finally turned to her parents with a packet for a younger girl in hand, saying “I want to sponsor her.”

“You’ll have to use your allowance money” her mother warned, kindly.

“I know” Shakira said “but I’d just be spending that money on myself.”

Shakira receives $40 each month as an allowance.  Sunday night, on one of her her first nights out after months of suffering, she chose to invest $38 in the the Kingdom of God, supporting, encouraging and loving another young girl in her time of need.

These are the kinds of stories that sustain me.  Sure, I am moved by the fact that over 1 million kids have been rescued from poverty by the love and faithfulness of Compassion sponsors. But more and more, it is the new life I see in those sponsors themselves that inspires me.

If you would like to sponsor a child with Compassion International, the process is very easy, the organization is trustworthy and the sacrifice you make sincerely changes the life of a child as well as your own.  Click here to sponsor a child.

** (If you live near the SF Bay area or on the West Coast anywhere feel free to contact us here to book a show or speaking engagement.)

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.

She was leaning heavy on her driver side door and smoking so that the ashes would fall to the pavement instead of inside her car… I parked just behind her so that I could get a better look while putting my running shoes on and as I opened my door, I noticed she was listening to the radio quietly and writing. Pink pen. Lined notebook paper, frayed from being ripped out.  Despite the pink pen, the note or letter she was writing was comprised of at least 3 other pen styles and colors; as if it were a letter she’d started and stopped several times before.

I got my running shoes tied on and weaved the wire for my earbuds through my shirt before locking my car and walking her way: I’d have to pass her to get to the head of the running trail.  Before I reacher her car, I saw her jump slightly and say aloud “O, wow,.. Oh, God, Oh, God, Oh, God!”  I though she was noticing me approaching and awoken from some trance.. But no..

She leaned forward and turned up the radio, saying “Yeah, yeah, YEAH!” while pinching her cigarette in the corner of her mouth.

“I’m gonna make a change for once in my life
It’s gonna feel real good
I’m gonna make a difference, gonna make it rii-iiiiight..”

She picked up singing along as the beat dropped…

“As I turn up the collar on my favorite winter coat,
The wind is blowing my mind”

It was quite a moment. I could see tears roll down her cheek beneath her Oakley sunglasses.

Now, this is exactly the kind of scenario I might just as easily make fun of: someone singing along with Michael Jackson in public, with a poorly groomed mohawk,..wearing Oakleys. And perhaps it’s because I just became a father so that everything has a touch more emotional punch to it (this is, of course, greatly aided by not sleeping through the night for a week).  But I was reminded once again of the place music takes us to.. the way a song can find us right where we are and in some way, complete the moment.

Before I hit the trail for my run, I paused at her door and asked “are you alright?”
She didn’t even look up.. she just kept her head moving to the beat and said “Yeah, honey.. I’m gonna be fine.”

Maybe you remember the video; a troupe of impossibly beautiful models in an unfurnished, dilapidated mansion, lip-syncing to George Michael’s newest single.  The video had many MTV viewers asking questions like “What on earth was that about?” and “Is there another room available in that house?”  MTV kept the “Freedom” video in heavy rotation for a long while and the song stuck around the Billboard top ten for a several weeks.  In some ways, it’s pop success makes all the sense in the world;  It was/is an incredibly well-written pop song with about as memorable a melody as any I can think of from that era.  Yet, there is another element of the song that resonated with me.

At a time when video was still king of the music marketplace, George Michael did not appear in the “Freedom 90″ video at all.  Now, It doesn’t hurt to be replaced in your video by the likes of Naomi Campbell but, nonetheless.. MTV rotation at the time directly correlated to record sales.  His previous hit “Faith” was seriously bolstered in its success by the video, which featured both George Michael and George Michael’s buttocks.  It was arguably the biggest song of 1988 and one can hardly think of the song without the image of GM’s glutes shifting to and fro.  It clearly worked to have GM in the video. He was, after all, a sex symbol as well as a musician.  So… go with what works.. do what sells.  But he refused to appear in the video at all.

George Michael’s sexual identity was directly tied to his marketability as an artist. Being a hunky dude was part of what made him sellable as a member of Wham! and as a solo artist.  Being a hunky, gay dude was not quite as marketable to pop-culture’s army of bubble-gum chewing 13-17 year old girls.  ”Freedom 90″ was, in many ways, an announcement that the artist was no longer willing to compromise his identity for the sake of marketability.  Or, as the song’s most revealing lyrics have it: “I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me”

The interplay between identity and possession in any system of relationships can be treacherous. Even in personal settings, a perverted sense of ownership/possession can destroy a relationship and bring great damage to one or both parties involved.  Nobody wants to be “owned.”  In fact, it is this very idea that one person possess/own another person like a product that is of the horror of human trafficking; possession of a person strips that person of their “personhood.”  Obviously (or at least I would hope) the nature of this interplay becomes even more delicate in the circus that is the entertainment world. An artist or performer can very easily become less of a person and more of a product sold by the marketplace; whose tastes, personality, language, behavior etc… are more a reflective of what the market finds valuable than what “true” to that person’s soul.

I know this is an old storyline; one that regular folks like you and I don’t have much sympathy for. We don’t have much room left for Lindsay Lohan or the like.. I get it.  But the truth is that something of the same possessive spirit that sets the stage for the sex-slave trade also sets the stage for celebrity culture; a culture in which we celebrate, support, judge and condemn people from a distance so far as they serve our purposes and our ideals.  We want our sports figures to be role models and are shocked when they act foolishly. We want our celebrities to honor their commitments and lament their decisions to live otherwise.  We need our public religious figures to uphold our moral ideals at a higher level than we even expect of ourselves and are crushed to learn of their very human failures.

These men and women cease to be men and women.. they become projections of our “ideal selves”… of they way we wish we lived, the power we wish we had, the body we wish we were in and on and on. We don’t want them to be complicated, fragile, unfinished, human… because if they are only human, then we must be “only human” too.  And it often disappoints us that we are complicated, fragile and unfinished; their relational, financial and moral failures temporarily justifies and then highlights our own…

George Michael’s sexuality, like the sexuality of most any celebrity, was/is subject to approval of the masses who claimed some sort of ownership or possession of him (*This takes a very interesting twist in the case of christian-culture celebs who are more often presented as nearly a-sexual).  He wanted freedom from that, which he sought by way of publicly announcement; this song was part of that process.

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.