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I don’t know the story behind this song by The Velvet Underground, but then, oddly, I do, and so do you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the famous line “”In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning”. True One lays awake…wondering not about Jesus or God so much as about the life one has, doesn’t have, wishes to have, or has destroyed.
This is where the “dark night of the soul” of mystics like St John of the Cross and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux differ, for they ended in mystical union with the Divine.
Most of us just wish to reach morning.
A friend of mine was detoxing from heroin and had agonizing nights. To make matters worse, his friends and family had written him off as hopeless and his ex-girlfriend, who he still loved, lived in the next room and as he was writhing in pain (with the words of John Lennon’s Cold Turkey churning in his brain over and over and reverberating through his body), she was having loud sex with some guy she had never met over the phone.
[Um...note that "Jesus" is playing bass...ahhh life]
Inconsolable and unable to form any thought that did not lead back into a hopeless loop he remembered that a pastor had suggested that he simply say the name of Jesus over and over again in his head when he was sleepless and in pain. The man had suggested that the name of Jesus was one both to focus on (whether one believed or not) simply because it was inherently and utterly GOOD. (There was other advice, like find a rehab facility and get some support, but this is all my friend remembered as he shook violently in bed hearing the ecstatic screams from the next room).
He told me later that this “Jesus thing worked” for him. He was not interested in Church (said he wasn’t “good enough”) but he said “It’s the one name that isn’t messed up…it’s pure and makes me feel safe.”
I use to be an insomniac…mostly born from worry, anxiety and no small amount of legitimate fears and questions. I thanked him for the insight, which he felt was odd.
“But you are a Christian” he said “I would think that a given.”
“No, it really isn’t. And as horrendous as your story is I have had a lot of sleepless nights where that would have come in handy.”
“Well what do you think about?” he asked.
“Mostly girls…”
After we stopped laughing he said “doesn’t work does it?”
“It works a little, but certainly not when they are in the next room..you know…”
He slumped back and took a long drag of his cigarette and was quiet. “I do ask a lot of questions though,” I said “. “I mean, it’s quiet, I think God is a good listener, though God probably gets real tired of the whining…”
“What do you ask?”
“Mostly what the Eff I am doing here? Is this all there is (working for an ad agency trying to get people to buy stuff they don’t need).
“I thought you Christians had all the answers” he said leaning back smugly.
“Do I look like I have all the answers?”
He laughed. “But I like that old ‘Jesus’ song Lou Reed did with the Velvet Underground.” I said. “It’s a sweet heart-filled simple song where he just asks Jesus to help him find his ‘proper place’. I don’t have the answers, but I think that’s a core question for me.”
We parted with a hug and for the rest of the day I couldn’t get it the “Jesus” song out of my head..but I didn’t mind. It’s not like that stupid
“Free Credit Report” song that makes me want to shoot my TV or hunt Canadians.
My only beef with the song is the slight self-flagellation of “cuz I’ve fallen out of grace”. You cannot fall out of grace. By it’s very nature is holds and protects and secures. You’d have an easier time of falling off the Salt flats in Utah.
But I love the song, and the question. Now that the grace of Jesus has found me, can I find my “proper place”?
Palms up.
From Brueggemann’s 19 Theses:
“7. It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us [note: see prior posts]. That is, to o (sic) enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.”
Given that “naming” is such a core gift, for good and ill, it should not surprise us that the world is about “scripting”. The schizophrenia of the Modern and Postmodern ages is that there are just too many scripts in competition.
The depiction of the world as a stage and we as actors (Pascal, Shakespeare, William Law and others) who enter and then fall one by one is fairly straight-forward as are the simple ways in which inculturation takes place if not like a riot then at least often like organized chaos.
The problematic part is the illusion of real clothing our various social fabrics bring. Naming and human language used creatively in so many ways is also our greatest way of evading and co-opting God and the spiritual. In fact, when people say we have “created God in our image” this is exactly the point and why real rationale behind Nietzsche’s famous edict that “God is Dead.” Few know the next line…”and we have killed him.”
The scripting then is to create a world and gods in our own image rather than allowing that we are created in God’s image and need de-scripting and then to be immersed in the alternative script rooted in the Old and New Testament texts.
As I have “Johnny-one-noted” before, the these texts are inherently “sub-versive”. They are the true “verses” that are like the “stone levels” that William Everson says lay beneath the “blind surf of events.”
Events interpreted by a “world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.”
For the world’s texts are an utter fiction and madness. As Ernest Becker points out, this madness is “agreed madness, shared madness…but madness all the same.”
So while living in the world we are not to become of it. In the past, this has often been interpreted in shallow fashion in a modern “Christianized” Epicurean/Stoic dialectic, both of which miss the point every bit as much as their ancient predecessors did.
In other words, not being “of the world” is not an invitation to become either a money-grubbing televangelist or Amish, In both vases “mammon” is the primary concern with God ’s self-revelation as secondary.
Sheesh.
To be “of the world” is simply to reject all other scripts as secondary at best when presented with the Living Christ and his subversive ways and words.
So, to end with an example, the word “ministry” is packed with all manner of pork-barrel add-ons, diversions and expectations. It simple means “service”. The biblical role of minster is one who equips others to do the actual work…not a professional who is hired to do it for others.
Imagine if part of our ministry was to first de-script the “ministry” as belonging largely to “a world that does not exist and never did exist”. Then what if we allow ourselves to be re-scripted by the alternative script via the Word.
It would be a nice start.
Imagine a society where, instead of baking bread for hungry people, they produced mass quantities of pictures of bread and posted ads for them at every corner, and handbills were given out with pictures of different types of bread, hundreds of different types of bread. Pictures of wheat bread, pumpernickel, Jewish rye, banana bread, croissants, sheepherders bread, bread sticks, garlic bread…heck, even melba toast.
Now imagine that these images of bread not only became the dominant mode of exchange (some hoarding these pictures, others spending them as fast as they could get them), but were actually consumed on a daily basis despite the fact that they had no nutritional value whatsoever.
Imagine that, besides the handbills, posters and billboards which depicted the pictures of bread, the evening television news consisted of discussions and international debates over which of these pictures of bread were worth the most, and which were declining in value or had become disreputable as a true picture of bread. Imagine witnessing special interest groups arguing and protesting the advantages and disadvantages of consuming their particular type of bread-pictures. And, of course, in such a world, litigation would be intense over who had the actual rights to each type of bread picture, and there would often be disputes over counterfeit pictures or poor foreign copies had infiltrated the market.
And the entire time that men and women were viewing these billboards, wheat was growing up around the posts. And wherever they stapled posters, streams gurgled by with yeast cultures forming in the shallows and the sun.
What would you make of such a society?
*******
Have you noticed that despite the boom in communications technology, people are less and less likely to talk with each other? They talk at each other. They posture, hold their opinions, do their business, but people no longer meet at the city gate and talk with each other. They stay in their darkened apartments and houses and stare at one of the 63 channels on their viewscreen. Their real needs for life are appeased and deflected as they are vicariously run through basic emotional experiences by what they view. And all the while, as they attempt to feed on these empty images, the wheat grows up around the posts, and the streams gurgle by with yeast cultures forming in the shallows and the sun. 
*******
Much of the modern church would feed us pictures of bread instead of inviting us to meet the Bread of Life Himself.
Let’s disappoint them, shall we?
Unleavened bread. Image courtesy of the Cook Almost Anything blog.
Bread is both the most ordinary substance and sustenance; and the most sublime symbol and sign of the ineffable. As God’s own heart and way is perfectly revealed in His Son there is no separation between the sacred and the secular. All is sacred, from the worship of high church, to the eating of simple bread.
It was after traveling with Jesus along the road to Emmaus, and not recognizing him, that two men discussed with Him the days events including all matters concerning one Jesus of Nazareth. After careful explanation (there would be no talk of “that’s just your interpretation…”) of how the Moses and the Prophets pointed to this Messiah, the two men urged Jesus to stay with them.
In the blessing of the simple bread their “eyes were opened and they recognized Him.”
“Recognizing” is literally “re-cognition”…a “re-knowing”. They already knew Jesus but were unable to see that it was Him until the bread was broken. Then they spoke after he left them about how their hearts burned inside of them as “He was speaking to us on the road.”
So it can be in the breaking of Bread. Far from our once-monthly and even weekly communion services, it seems Jesus had something more organic and daily in mind when He promised to be our Bread, laid the only request for provison in His prayer for bread, used it as the symbol for His body and fed the crowd on Passover with five barley loaves and two small fish.
More instructive was the fact that St. John makes note that they are made of barley, the “meanest” of all breads, often used to feed animals or used as an offering for the sins of prostitutes.
As it was the Passover, the bread would be unleaven (made without yeast to make it rise and multiply in it’s simple fashion). Such bread was eaten for seven days and was called the “bread of affliction” because it was a tangible reminder of the Jews fleeing the slavery of Egypt into the desert because they had not had the time to grab the leaven (yeast). They had only so much time to plunder the Egyptians. In the wilderness they ate unleavened bread for 40 years, and also manna, a daily bread provided from God that could not be stored.
It was with these notions of bread that 5,000 Jews came to Jesus during the Passover and where He broke the bread, gave thanks and began to distribute it. More than any leaven, this miracle not only fed the 5,000, there were twelve baskets of leftovers from the original five barley loaves.
Jesus leaves after the people get excited and wish to make Him the Bread King.
Once on the other side of the Sea of Galilee (in Capernaum) Jesus finds that many have races around the rim of the Sea to meet him.
Is it because they have realized He is their Passover lamb? Is it because they realize He is their Manna come down from heaven?
No. They want more bread.
Like the woman who wanted the living water so she would not have to come daily and draw from Jacob’s Well, they want bread on demand…not the One to Whom the sign points to as the “the bread of life” Himself.
I doubt we would have done any better, or do.
The key issue is believing in Him. That is the invitation of John 6 and also the promise that all can “do with the works of God” because the worlk of God is simply to believe.
Part 2 to come.
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