Barack-Star Obama

If Bono's ability to move Americans to action through arena rock is any indication, Barack Obama may be the best thing to happen to American politics in a long time.

You guessed it. Here's my UPI article featuring Bono and Barack.

Bono for President (U2 3D)

Oh hell, while we're at it: Larry, Adam and the Edge for cabinet.


After a long afternoon of negotiating tall orange cones in preparation for Jacob's driving exam (which he passed! Second time's the charm), followed by the usual rush to figure out dinner and then post meal clean-up, I felt I deserved a little excursion beyond these four lime green walls. So at 9:07, I hopped in my ever-so-soccer-mom van and headed to the local cinemaplex with IMAX screen to worship, I mean, watch the concert I had already seen live twice (once from the floor this close to Bono's spit and sweat).

Ticket bought, I entered the huge theater with assigned seat... to find the auditorium utterly empty. I felt about as subtle as a guy in a trench coat. I ignored my assigned location and picked the middlest velvety fold-down chair available. I donned the conspicuous black and green glasses, scooched cozily and got ready to weep. I always weep when U2 plays.

Without commercials or fanfare, the big screen lit up and the introductory credits to National Geographic (producers of the 3D event) popped out at me. My private, intimate, sentimental journey to two concerts past had begun. And I'd get a lot of face time with Bono.

Suddenly on the right: "Oh my God! Oh my God! This is sooooo AWESOME guys! Oh my God, oh my God!" Thunk, trip, stumble, giggle, smack each other on the shoulder.

"Hey!" one of them called to me. "Come party with us. Come party with us!"

A blonde and a brunette stumbled into the row in front of me, slopping beer, waving arms, followed by three dudes, one of whom sincerely thrust his can of Bud in my direction, "Have some."

"That's okay," I said waving him off.

The girls turned around. "Seriously, come party with us! You have to. Oh my God! Look at him. Bono is gorgeous. Is he gorgeous? Stop it! I swear he is."

The brunette wheeled around at me, "He is so gorgeous! Isn't he? Isn't he?" She wanted support because her boyfriend was laughing. Then her blonde friend agreed and they went back to screaming and howling and woo-hooing and waving their arms and dancing with their beers... followed by more urgings for me to party with them, "seeeeeriously."

"Vertigo" was well under way by then and I was seeeeeeeriously worried. My private church service had been ambushed by drunks who apparently didn't know much of U2's catalog as they barely recognized "Vertigo," and didn't know "Some Times You Can't Make It on Your Own" as evidenced by the question Brunette threw at me. "Is this a make-out song? It sounds like a make-out song. I want to make out!" she shouted to no one in particular.

The three guys directly in front of me stayed seated. The one who offered me beer seemed concerned that my movie viewing experience might get doused by screams. Uh, yeah. So he invited me to sit with him. Ha! "That's okay, bud. I'll stay here."

That didn't stop him from creating a conspiratorial friendship with me. He high-fived me at several key fist-pumping moments, offered me his beer several more times, and finally told me, "I like you."

The girls continued (I'm not kidding) to yell at me to "party with them, you know you want to" for half the movie. I finally told them that I "party in my own way."

Friendly Dude twisted in his seat to get a good look at me. "That's cool. I do too. You know I was smoking a joint before I came in and a cop saw me. I was like, 'Oh dude.' So I tossed my joint before he could see it. Then I was like 'Damn, where is it?' once he left. But I found it. So it was all good. You know what I mean."

One of the girls interrupted again, telling me that having already been to concerts, I had to stand up and party with her. Friendly Dude intervened: "She parties in her own way. Leave her alone. She's stoned." Then he high-fived me. Rock on!

That's the first time in my life I've ever been accused of or gotten credit for being stoned... and I'm 46 years old. Rock on!

He asked me, "You married?"

"With five kids."

That cooled his jets.

He still knuckled me when we both knew that Bono had been extra cool, but the invitations to sit with him vanished.

Now you're probably wondering if I ever saw or could even hear the movie. I panicked initially. I wanted to focus on things I don't get to in concerts - like the purity of the sound, the close ups, the way the Edge struts when he plays, Larry's flying sticks and Adam's craggy face. I wanted to let Bono cast his spell. Would I get that soaring sense of YES that I love so much when I listen to U2, or merely wind up with fodder for my blog?

I had to make a decision. Did I want to be the snob who moved to the back of the theater to be alone? Did I want to come back another night? Suddenly, in an instant, I yielded to the whole experience. Their urgings to join them made me laugh. We talked about the band while they played. I hushed them to silence for "Miss Sarajevo" (my hands-down favorite song from that tour). When Bono finished his operatic virtuoso performance of the Pavarotti part, Other Friendly Dude turned to me to say, "He's money." Damn if he isn't!

Slowly, like spinning a web, I got sucked into the U2 vortex. On that huge screen, with close-up lips and crinkled brow, Bono brought his lyrics to life.

You give me something I can feel

I want to be with you, be with you night and day

See the bird with a leaf in her mouth, after the flood all the colors came out

Sometimes you can't make it on your own

Lay down your guns
All your daughters of Zion
All your Abraham sons
I don't know if I can make it
I'm not easy on my knees... Love and Peace

How long must we sing this song? How long? how long... cause tonight...we can be as one

Across the field you see the sky ripped open
See the rain come through the gaping wound
Pounding on the women and children who run into the arms of America

Is there a time for tying ribbons?
A time for Christmas trees?
Is there a time for laying tables
When the night is set to freeze?

What more in the name of love?

And when I go there, I go there with you (it's all I can do)

We're one
But we're not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other
One

Look, I gotta go, yeah I'm running outta change
There's a lot of things if I could I'd rearrange

I can't live with or without you

Take this soul, stranded in some skin and bones; take this soul and make it sing... This love is like a drop in the ocean.

The overarching theme from 30 years of writing songs is that we can't live with or without each other, so we'd better figure out a way to get along. It really is love and peace, or else. The colors do come out after the flood, if we'll pay attention, if we'll recognize that there's a time for everything under the sun. Life is not about making it on your own. Survival means we aren't the same but we get to carry each other. There's so much we'd like to change, to rearrange, but we're stuck with what we've got. So we sing: How long? How long must we sing this song?

Even the plaintive psalm at the end ("Yahweh"): Please make this soul sing... the love I've got is like a drop in the ocean... but it's still love and I'll sing it anyway.

By the end, I was a wreck of emotion. This strange political battle we're in where lines are drawn, convictions are Stood For as proof of some impenetrable value system, where attacks on the opposition prove your inflexibility and credibility... Something has to change! We have to carry each other. We have to have love and peace, or else.

Strangely, I had just lived through love and peace, or else, with my beer drinking stoned movie-viewing mates.

The original final line of "Yahweh" is "Take this heart, and make it break." Last night, as Bono crooned through the 3D credits, a giant heart beat on the jumbo marquis lights screen behind him. It grew in size, thumping and pumping. I expected to see it shatter into a million pieces as he let out the last lyric.

This time, suspended on the final note before, Bono switched the words and ended the song:

Take this heart, and make it safe.

The heart continued to beat.

Bono and his bandmates have been urging us for 30 years to do just that—we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers. It's up to us to keep each other safe.

--

For a review of the actual movie, you can't do better than this one:

Out of Frame: U2 3D

Missional.... Those emergents and their lingo

Missional, when I first heard it, sounded like mis-speak. It's not a word according to the dictionary and my newly downloaded Firefox upgrade spell checker (thank you, thank you, thank you Mozilla). But it's certainly a buzz word in emergent circles so I toss it out here for consideration.

Do you know what it means? What do you think its definition is? What should it be? If you were to guess its meaning, what ideas does it conjure?

The word mission has clearly been a big part of my biographical lexicon. The whole idea of missions appealed to nearly everything about me as a young twenty-something: to be a blessing to the nations as God has blessed me (us); to do the most noble, rightest, goodest, truest act, not for money or even for this-world's glory, but for God, for eternity, for truth (and to keep decent human beings out of eternal flames and gnashing of teeth) - well how could you beat that as an ENFP? The only better combo is mission and Irish rock star. (Freaking gorgeous....)

The point is (where were we again?) that the ideals of "mission" appeal to an innate desire to be of good use to others. Today's missional Christians have expanded the mission of God to global warming, the environment, voting for the occasional democrat, serving the poor, building homes for Habitat for Humanity, giving away groceries to the poor, free ESL lessons, day-care for single mothers and more. They've added a social justice vision to the idea of missions, but the heart beats the same blood.

The insidious side of the missions appeal is the need to be the one bringing the help, ergo, the one who is doing the glorious work. When the task is combined with an unwitting sense of superiority (no matter how humbly cloaked) the experience of mission Dei (I can use Latin too) can lapse into dangerous territory: the land of "I know more than you, what you need for you."

Keren, in the comments in the previous post on the "pursuit of happiness" pointed to an article by John Barlow where he states:

Having a sense of mission has served me extremely well, even better than I thought it would when I wrote Adult Principle Number 15 and bound myself to purpose rather than its by-product. Often I would have been hard-pressed to define mine and it has certainly taken on many different manifestations in the course of my careers, but I have taken a lot of happiness from a sense - often grandiose and sometimes illusory - that I am, by my various actions, helping create a future that will be more free, more tolerant, more open, and more just.

And herein lies the rub. We do take a lot of pleasure in being of use (grandiose and illusory even). Bono knows that absurdity better than the rest of us (which is why he is so cuddly and adorable).

Still, for recovering mission-aholics like myself, the danger of "seeing" self in a role of Significant Helpfulness is that I mistake my happiness in helping for real help. In other words, I don't know how to be content when others lead the way, shape the future, change the course of their lives nearly as well as when I have a hand in doing it for/with/to them.

For me, the Gospel and postmodernism have flipped all that on its head. The addiction to being of use, to being in a role that changes lives, that brings love, that serves, that acts as change-agent, that "embodies the heart of God for all peoples".... all of that feeds a dangerous self-concept that says "my life has meaning insofar as I impact yours for the better." That means I have to determine the better for your life and be about impacting it.

Grad school showed me how addicted I've been to mattering, to being important in someone's universe. I recognized what a truly lousy listener I've been in a "global" way, in a specific way. I show little interest, for instance, in what Muslims are doing to make the world a better place and think about them in terms of their deficiencies, what they do wrong. I thought my role in racial reconciliation was to be a leader, to figure out how to fix race problems in my city. Then I found out that blacks would like me to shut up and listen for a change... and let them take the lead. What a notion!

Here's a thought. Instead of white churches attempting to create churches that "welcome blacks," what if those whites closed up shop and attended black churches? They could be members and let black pastors and congregation members lead. That would be a whole lot different than having a mission of "racial reconciliation... over at my white church led by my white pastor."

Postmodernism requires us to see that our angle of vision cannot be the only and right one for everyone. The formerly silenced get to lead, speak, take the initiative. We deliberately make space for that to happen in our own lives, if we are to be true to the values of tolerance, openness, generosity. I don't know how to do that and be a change agent in other people's lives at the same time. Postmodernism encourages us to stop teaching and start learning.

So I ask: What if serving and loving and giving meant giving up my right to have a mission? What if the detox program for junkies like me (in order to get a glimpse of what Jesus might have been about) is to give up my right to matter, to make a difference? Maybe letting someone else be in charge and figuring out how to fit in is more "missional" than planting a church or starting a dialog group or leading someone to Christ? Wouldn't it be a total flip if we let someone lead us to yoga.... really lead us not so we could find its errors and use those as opportunities to pounce with the 'good news' but so we might grow and be benefited by that person's gifts? Period.

I don't trust the word "missional" in the hands of Christians because Christians are hooked on power. Power makes mission into a drug that feeds self-importance, no matter how many toilets you scrub to show God's love in a practical way.

The Gospel is about divesting oneself of power. If we give up our right to change the world and instead find those nooks and crannies where we can shut up and listen, learn and be changed, support and admire the good works of others, we might not only find happiness, but get the heart of the Gospel tossed into the bargain.

Performatism

Read the post from yesterday first ("Fundamentalist Postmodernist").

So back on that pomoxian loop, a guy named John pointed me to an article by generative anthropologist Raoul Eshleman (do you love that name or what?). He's a UCLA professor (go Bruins!) whose article appears in the online journal Anthopoetics. If you wade through the very academic language of the writing, you'll recognize some of the ideas I wrote about yesterday.

There are loads of articles on this topic in back issues of the journal and I discovered years ago in my googlizing that "performatism" as a term is originally taken from an architectural style found in Berlin. I spent a whole week once looking at performatist architecture on the Internet just to get a feel for what it looks like and feels like.

Summarizing with a hack saw, performatism moves us from parts to whole. Whereas postmodernism teaches us to stand back from the context, taking apart the pieces, examining them, exercising judgment or exposing the undersides, identifying ironies, missteps, power moves and error as though from a position outside/above/beyond the message (object), performance puts us in contact with a subject who is a complex whole, that is, a person whose meaning and message cannot be teased apart. "The medium is the messenger, and no longer the message: it is the extension of a paradoxical authorial subject pointing out his (or her) own materiality and fallibility."

Put another way, a performatist subject is aware of limitations yet acts anyway. A postmodernist may also be aware of limitations, but the approach to life is much more likely to be suspicious and ironic. The performatist is unhindered by those fallibilities (limits of knowledge, lack of appropriate skills or debilitating attributes) because he or she chooses to act because the act itself is identical in meaning with the person acting (the act is no longer a sign that creates or generates meaning - the meaning is in the act).

Let me unpack this further. When I was a "share my faith with anyone living and breathing" kind of evangelist, I was not acting in a performatist way. My evangelism was a sign of what I believed. It was an act based on my desire to coordinate my life with my beliefs. It was as much for the sake of my identity as an evangelist as it was driven by a real concern for the souls of the lost. I operated from a place of deliberate superiority as well.

When I met Jon, my aim was to be a missionary to Muslim Berbers because they were one of the most unreached people groups on earth. I was motivated by beliefs. I asked Jon why he wanted to be a missionary and he replied: "Because I love Morocco. I'd want to live there even if I wasn't a missionary. And Moroccans are some of the kindest people I know." That's might be a pretty good word picture of the difference between beliefism and performatism, from the way I see it.

Performatists are less self-conscious, more humble, sometimes even appear to be idiotic or simple-minded, yet surprisingly in control. They act on behalf of others, they decenter themselves, yet they find themselves in the vortex of real choices that require them to risk. The act and the person match. Beliefs are subordinated to the act.

Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison kept returning me to Eshelman's article. To me, DB's letters and papers reveal him as a kind of performatist. We see not a theologian's theology, but a man who happens to excel at theology, acting on what he believes while taking stock of the limitations of those beliefs and of himself. His deconstruction of the faith, himself, the German church and his countrymen does not stop him from acting. The message and messenger are identical - we cannot study his theology from a location outside the outcome of his life. In fact, his incomplete work Ethics could be seen as an attempt to rationalize the acts he knows he must perform!

Even those who might bristle at his conclusions about the faith can't dismiss him. They are left with a "binding impression of the man" not theology. We encounter Bonhoeffer, not Bonhoefferianism. Bonhoeffer is every bit as deliberate about risking his life on behalf of others as I was about sharing my faith, however, his acts require him to reconsider all that he says he believes because the act became more real, more important, than belief itself.

Another performatist in our midst (who makes my Hall of Fame) is Bono. What do we really know of his theology? We know he thinks the Bible talks a lot about the poor and that he credits Jesus with being the source of his activism. But it isn't how well he constructs or deconstructs the faith that has put him in the public spotlight. It's that his life speaks congruently with what he says he's about. Ever since his six weeks in Ethiopia, he has been haunted by the need to "save Africa." He admits the incongruity of a celebrity philanthropist... and acts anyway. We have this complex, irreducible whole in Bono: a rock star saint (the very antithesis to godliness by most definitions).

Another performatist: Mother Teresa. You do not have to be Catholic to grasp that her life became identical with her message. The underlying values that drove her are less important than how she lived. In fact, she resists deconstruction because we encounter this whole person whose meaning and message are so tied up together that we must admire her in spite of all the Protestant criticism we might level at her theology.

Yet another performatist: Dave Batstone (a friend of Jon's from college). He's a University of San Francisco professor of ethics. He began his life of ethics not writing about ethical dilemmas but "guarding Salvadoran pastors and literacy teachers from death squads." Jon told me that the strategy his team used against the death squads was to circle the potential victim with their own bodies. The circle would grow and the death squads could not shoot that many people and would have to relent. His work now deals with the international slave trade, based on responding to what he learned in an Indian restaurant he frequents.

The common denominator in these individuals may appear to be heroics. But I say not. What unites them is their willingness to act on what they know when they know it and then to draw on the resources of faith, culture, personality, financial well-being, celebrity, education, personal and political connections to follow through. It doesn't matter if their theology is "right." What matters is that the values that shaped them drive them to act (not in a beliefist way, but in a self-giving way). I've featured Christians because that's the world I run in. But certainly performatists come from every faith and non-faith tradition.

Eshelman notes that "In spite of very different religious sources... all performatistic authors share an identical cultural-theological perspective: namely that Godliness is everywhere where wholes are created by individual subjects.(9)

In other words, what draws us to performatists is both their mixed-bag personalities combined with the way they see "God" (I deliberately use that semantically loaded term, but take it to mean whatever it needs to mean to you) all around them in spite of all the screaming reasons not to! They invest the whole self into what they believe requires them to act and it moves us. But they do not act for us, for a belief system. They act because they must, then we spend time trying to figure out why.

My feeling at the end of grad school is this... that to get beyond the anxiety of not knowing enough, of potentially being trapped by a false theology or a mistaken notion of truth, it's more important to act on what I "know" when I know it (self-deprecatingly to be sure, aware of my limits and fallibility, the problems of my ego and fundamentalist tendencies, yet from an authentic place - not attempting heroics). I can even "know" today and "not know" tomorrow, and still act.

Perhaps the biggest change in my thinking has been the awareness that the subject acts subjectively, but does so self-consciously, and in spite of that knowledge. I came from a place where an objective standard of truth was intended to create my behaviors. Yet on this side of deconstruction and the endless search for meaning that eludes me, I see that the people whose lives I admire have less to do with what statement of faith they sign and more to do with how they live in spite of all those limits.

God is with us if we are with them...

Chuck sent me this link. Bono won the NAACP's Chairman award. He preaches... you've got to hear him. Love that man.