Coincidence is often confused with irony.

As far as I understand it, irony is laced with a historical foundation whether in the context of a story or simply in the sense of history behind a given outcome, as indicated in the images below (though they would probably have more impact without the explanatory notes underneath). 

It is an awareness of the history and its outcome that reveals the irony and in so doing yields a higher truth.

Don’t let the terrorists win.

Don’t let the government win.

Don’t believe the hype.

It isn’t strange that this is what I’ve been doing as music has been a vital part of my life since a very young age.  Nor is it strange that I have a 1TB hard drive filling up rapidly.  Nor is it strange that my musical taste varies, from gospel to techno to post-rock to ambient and anything and everything in between.  I appreciate (almost) all forms of musical expression even though I may not enjoy some of them.

I used to listen to harder rock and the obligatory classic rock when younger and grew out of it as I grew older.  This isn’t a judgment of the music, just an acknowledgment of how I changed.  I suppose if I listened to classic rock ’til the day I dropped dead I’d wonder if I plateaued and stayed there.

Anyhow, in my travels I stumbled across a box set called “Goodbye Babylon” several years ago issued by Dust To Digital.  I sat on this for years and, at best, dabbled in it.  Lately I’ve revisited it.  Perhaps it was the timing but I sat mesmerized.

The album is filled with old gospel/church songs.  These aren’t the traditional hymns everyone knows.  My wife, who knows every church song ever written, didn’t know any of them.  We’re talking seriously old and, I’m guessing, obscure.  The static crackle of old 78s resonates.  There are a few “big” names many people known, Mahalia Jackson perhaps the most famous, but this is definitely not a best of compilation.

Though I devour many, many forms of music – dub and dub techno my latest obsession – it does not generally captivate me as it did in my youth.  It doesn’t move the soul and it is only occasional when music actually stirs my emotions.  For the most part music is meditative, tranquilizing.  Perhaps I have hardened, perhaps I don’t expect as much from music, I’m not sure. 

But I do know that the only music that really grips me and stirs my soul is “religious” music.  I’ve sat captivated by the recital of the Qur’an, have found myself in trancelike stupor listening to Buddhist chanting, find Qawwali music hypnotic and can listen to Native American spirituals anytime.  But I feel I lack proper context to truly appreciate the music.

My “context” is Christian.  Not all “Christian” music, mind you.  Much of it is just simply not so good, just as in other style of music.  Just because it is Christian doesn’t mean I am obligated to somehow think it good.

Much of today’s “religious” (especially Christian) music is no different from the “world” music it so (often cheaply) imitates.  It is often just worldly music with a Christian stamp, maybe a Jesus thrown in here and there to authenticate it.

But this box set is basically Jesus straight, no chaser. It is very reminiscent of the music from Searching For The Wrong Eyed Jesus in its uncompromising simplicity and occasional weirdness. Surprisingly, I found my spirit being lifted as I listened to the entirety of the first disc. I could feel the presence of God resonate through this music. I look forward to devouring more.

Sure it is a slice of Americana, culturally significant and historically interesting in a Bob Dylan, Neil Young, roots music kind of way.  You can listen to it and be curious and explore it and yet not be touched by its spirit at all. 

But I think it was the simplicity that caught me off guard, not as a novelty, not as one sitting in judgment of the music or the musicians, but as one who understood.  There is power in it.

In revisiting my past, mostly through music, I stumbled across an article I had published in the Seattle Times on October 2, 1994. It was my first published piece. Here it is in full:

Soaring Spirits — A Brief Lesson In Kite-Flying Offered Pure Cleansing Energy

I read the letters to the editor daily and find myself wondering where the good is in the world. But sometimes, amidst the muck and the mire of the daily grind, there bursts a ray of shimmering hope. Spending a cathartic Sunday afternoon at Magnuson Park, I sat watching in fascination as a colorful array of sport kites, poetry in motion if you’ve never really watched them, circled in the crystal clear blue sky above, Mount Rainier in full splendor dwarfing the background.


After following one particular kite for a while, the man controlling it so gracefully sensed my awe and said hello. I commented on his kite and before I knew it he was teaching me to fly it using his own kite, a child’s excitement in his voice as he performed this completely unselfish act. The beauty lies in the bond formed with the kite and the wind. If I took my eyes off the kite for two seconds it came crashing to the ground. When my focus was on the kite, not only did it fly smoothly but all other things were washed from my mind, there was simply no room. An act as simple as flying a kite was pure cleansing energy; one could say it was spiritual.


This man also introduced me to several gentlemen from Prism, a local company that crafts these high-tech, high-quality kites. They had volunteered their time and kites to show a local church group how to fly them. To see the joy in their faces as they learned; to feel it in the enthusiasm of the man who taught me; and to feel it in the pride of the guys at Prism, their dream, a perfect union of man and nature, soaring above their heads, made me realize there is hope in the world. And it felt good.


Sometimes the big picture that so terrifies us just needs a little fine tuning. So, to Pack and the guys at Prism, a heartfelt thanks.

The funny thing about the story, the subtext if you will, was that I had just taken a hit of acid. 

I own a Prism stunt kite and have flown it a few times since then.  A friend of mine fixed me up on a blind date because she had asked her if she liked flying kites.  Tough to build a relationship on that (well, that and smoking pot).  I vaguely remember driving about an hour from my home to look at new kites.  Seemed like kite flying could have been a big thing but I live in Ohio and the kites were sold out of some guy’s basement.  Guess it wasn’t a big thing.  Maybe somewhere other than Ohio… 

My family thought I was bizarre when, in more recent memory, I brought it to the Outer Banks on a family vacation.  Loved the reaction from one of the guys in the beach shop when I showed him my now “vintage” kite.  There was a moment where I thought it was kinda cool.

It was a joy to fly it on the beach but for some reason it just never lived up to that brief, fleeting moment written about for all the world to see.

From a high profile position in the community, a brief moment in the media sun, and an opportunity to schmooze with celebrities to running a stamping press in a factory within a period of six months. From a sizeable five figure salary to punching a clock at $7.50 an hour.

Here, five years later, I am being given the opportunity to travel to Mexico on businses.

I am excited, but in a mellow, humbled kind of way. I see it for what it is and recognize God’s hand in it, not that I am privileged to go to Mexico but that God has done such a work in my life that I have earned the trust of my company to be sent to representat them. This is not small deal.

So it isn’t the going to Mexico thing that is so amazing to me (though it is way cool), it’s the fact that when I first started as a temp at $7.50 an hour and the bills began piling up, the credit record became marred and my greatest fear had come upon me, I prayed to God to not let us out of that situation until we learned the lesson He needed us to learn.

I’m still learning. However, though money still continues to be a source of stress, it does not have the binding hold it once did. I’ve learned, and still continue to learn, to place my trust in Him and not what is comfortable and familiar.

The other lesson in this is that I’ve spoken this opportunity into existence. I’ve continually spoken of my desire to go on a trip to represent the company, to meet the customers I deal with as a quality engineer and now I am going. Rather than allow fear to rule me I just spoke my desire. Had I not spoken it, it’s quite likely I never would have been given the opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s been a long, often rocky, five years. But, in looking back, I stand in awe of exactly where I am at this moment. I have lived a full life so far but as I mature, those things I considered to be “living life” have changed.

I am now placing focus on living a life of significance, not in chalking up experiences and tales of glorification to tell but in impacting and being impacted by people. My wife and I, a multi-cultural couple, long to travel the world. Hopefully this will be the beginning of the opportunities to make that happen.

I happened to stumble across articles on two controversial figures in the Christian world, Juanita Bynum and Paula White. I run in circles where they are quite popular; in fact, Ms. Bynum was featured at a recent conference at our former church.

The troubling thing is that the “Jesus” she represents seems to have taken a back seat to her claims of being a prophetess, actress and motivational speaker. Ditto Paula White. Now I can’t speak for their personal lives (and from what I can tell their lives, like all of our lives, have faced turmoil, moreso being in the public eye) but I can tell you that folks in the “outside” world, if they pay any attention at all, would not be able to distinguish them too much from other motivational speakers with a religious, even Christianized, slant.

It used to really bother me. Now I really don’t care so much.

I feel this way about a lot of things that used to trouble me. Doctrine. Biblical criticism. Celebrity preachers. Prosperity preachers. Creation scientists. Christian enclaves. Megachurches. Christian-y entertainment that is just imitation of the “world” with a Christian stamp.

I’m not better than any of that. Not at all. But I’ve reached a place where it just isn’t my focus. Perhaps it has to do with the responsibilities of life and the realization that all of these things come with the luxury of time. In other words, all of the above manifest in societies of privilege.

I suppose that many significant changes start from the “top” down so this isn’t to say these are bad things. It’s just important to keep them in perspective. It’s a luxury to be able to sit here – at work – and write down thoughts that most people will never see.

From where I sit, listening to John Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil” on a pair of Bose Quietcomfort 15 headphones while at work, contemplating, googling, researching, I am one of those privileged souls. I don’t want to be ungrateful. I just need help in keeping it in perspective because sometimes it can be difficult to see outside the cocoon in which we live.

All that really matters is seeking the presence, the very realy presence, of Jesus in and through me. If the above can help me in this regard they are beneficial. But if these things become idols to which I bow, they need to go.

I am terrestrial, tasting of the things of the world, enjoying them, longing to find the divine through them. Absent are those days of soaring lyrical words, of soaring intellectual revelations, of soaring spiritual highs. However, this is not a dark night of the soul either. This is the middle ground: this is life, no future, no past, just right now.

Why the need to do it? Why the need to share what I have been, over the past decade or so, hoarding? Attention? Love? Escape? Hope for a sponsor so I can be free of the drudgery of being slave to the wage?

I suppose I seek something transcendent in it, though those moments are few. Music, in my past, had always provided an escape, transcendence even. But I haven’t found this since the late 90s. I believe music is merely the universal expression from the soul of its longing toward Truth. Artists, from death metal to gospel and the gamut in between, merely represents everyone’s different point along that journey. Obviously, the continuum has expanded its boundaries.

So I find music that stirs me, that “moves” me in the sense that it expresses or taps into my emotional state. But transcendence? I get this on occasion through Christian music (though, for example, so too can the recitation of the Qur’an can elicit similar response). But often a Christian song that once stirred my soul will, years later, stir nothing at all but reminisce. Perhaps it is merely a trigger, as all music is, a memory machine of where we have been.

I find that rather than the longing for that surge of a rush, those moments I most appreciate are moments of peace, stillness, calm. I have found that it is this that I find in Christian music, mostly because it stirs up in my soul what has been deposited there through the Word.

I can find stillness of another kind through secular music though this seems to be fleeting; my expectations of what music should do limits the experience. But it does happen, often in strange ways. Most recently, I have stumbled onto what has been tagged “post rock”. Perhaps it hearkens back to my days of “hair metal” and the euphoria associated with such loudness but for some reason the mood created by some of these bands actually moves me, though it’s certainly an emotional response more than a spiritual one.

Eluvium’s epic “Zerthis Was a Shivering Human Image” carried me through a difficult state of mind not too long ago. With it’s basic structure of guitar washed in distortion channeling back and forth for fifteen minutes doesn’t seem like much for relaxing the mind, it would seem that the noise and my thoughts collapsed the wave function, so to speak, and I achieved a state of stillness.

But I long for that escape. I want to run (knowing of course, wherever I go I am still there…), to fly away, to wander and roam. In the end, however, I do realize that no matter the means, I still remain in the “stickiness” of the world and until I can embrace it, see through it, allow it to be resurrected, my longing to “escape” through music and give it all away, seeking connection in the comments, will be but a fleeting journey.

Unless, of course, I figure out a way to make money at it.

Anyhow, over the past several months I have learned, perhaps surprisingly, just how many “religious” people there are in the plant. I don’t mean loose reference to God or the Lord or Jesus Christ used as a cuss word. I mean people who truly have faith. This is deeply entrenched American spirituality and there is much ignorance in terms of faiths other than Christianity but these are people who have relationships with Jesus. I can think of five off the top of my head.

It is apparent, upon reflection, that their work ethics and overall attitude reflect this. It isn’t the only sign of their faith but it makes their talk of faith shine more brightly. I have lately found it difficult to go to church and I’m not sure why. While the word preached satisfies a hunger and I enjoy fellowship with people, for some reason the rest of it feels like a social event. Not a bad thing, I suppose, but I tend so often to be “private” about my faith. I prefer to walk the walk and am prepared to discuss it should anyone wonder.

My goal is to be a light, to speak life and be encouraging to those I work with because in that environment it can be very hard to find. But I see what an effect it has from the top down. Two in upper management are people of faith and it is apparent in the way they address people as people and focus all aspects on the human element.

So the “high” spirituality I am so accustomed to has been replaced, if you will, with a more “earthy” variety. With an addictive personality there is a longing for the high that often accompanies spiritual pursuit. But how much of that is created, a form of self-medication and, perhaps, self delusion?

There is something deeply spiritual about work, about working with the hands. I am more at home on the factory floor than I’ve ever been in an office. I can do the office and I currently have one on the factory floor, the “fishbowl” it’s called. It’s something about the activity, the interaction of the people, the physical medium of the equipment building, breaking, being repaired, all with human hands, the creative process unfolding.

I do wonder, however, why it is that lately everyone of faith I know is so focused on the end times whenever matters of faith arise in discussion. Is that the default category, the common denominator among Christians?

“Pathetic,” he said. “That’s what it is. Pathetic.”

He turned and walked slowly down the stream for twenty yards, splashed across it, and walked slowly back on the other side. Then he looked at himself in the water again.

“As I thought,” he said. “No better from this side. But nobody minds. Nobody cares. Pathetic, that’s what it is.”

“Pathetic,” he said. “That’s what it is. Pathetic.”

He turned and walked slowly down the stream for twenty yards, splashed across it, and walked slowly back on the other side. Then he looked at himself in the water again.

“As I thought,” he said. “No better from this side. But nobody minds. Nobody cares. Pathetic, that’s what it is.”