MERRY CHRISTMAS, I'M AN ATHEIST

Many of you have emailed me to check on how I've been these last few, quiet months. Rather than call via satellite or fiber optics, stop by your home for a visit, meet you for breakfast, run a tin can with twine from your treehouse to mine, get a gig at a major venue and send out a sensitive ballad just for you, make a personal documentary for viewing at your local cinema, send a singing telegram or a message in a bottle, pass notes in class, mail a Christmas card, offer an interpretive dance (or, "choreographed movement" we called it in the Baptist church), write an autobiographical novel (don't get me started), YouTube you, Facebook you, MySpace you, or otherwise assault you with personal messages from me to you, I thought I would objectify and dehumanize our relationship by catching all of you in this world wide net.

How have I been? Okay, I suppose. It has been a year of Sturm und Drang. I've questioned who I am as a father and a son. I haven't always been the best husband or friend. My faith has been tested, confirmed, and tested again. People who matter a great deal to me have taken hits. It would be easy to sit and pout as I pick the shrapnel of collateral damage out, but it hasn't all been lateral. Some of it has been internal, self-inflicted. When you walk stumble-drunk in a minefield, you're bound to lose a limb. But, hey, we go to war with who we are, not who we want to be.

I have had trouble finding joy. It has to find me. And it does from time to time. It finds me in the classroom and in the middle of a song. It finds me in the swing of a hammer and in the middle of a tight, tight hug. It finds me when we cut through the bullshit and tell each other the truth. Not the partisan, scriptural, or certified truth; just those moments when we get humble and honest and connect in those transcendent ways that can only happen when pretense is outlawed and self-preservation is replaced by love.

I haven't written much. Of anything. It's like I've run out of things to say. Cause for disappointment from few and celebration by many. I'm not exactly sure why I have been absent from the blog. I suppose some of it is the rancor. I know I dish it out as much as it is served to me, but consistent with my strong belief that the WAY we talk is more important than WHAT we say, I took the measure of you and me and found us wanting. That is not to say there aren't still plenty of people in high (and low ) places who need an occasional boot in their ass, me being chief among them, I just don't want to worship the gods we create and serve in our kicking. One of my favorite songwriters, David Wilcox, would say I'm becoming an "Atheist."*

Merry Christmas. And, as the old year gives way to caucus and taxes, classroom and faxes, theory and praxis, grinding and axes--the pitch and yaw of all that awaits us in 2008--may we all be atheists.

*Apparently this song is an adaptation from the original by Brian McLaren.

DAN FOGELBERG 1951-2007

I know. I've been absent for a long time. You might expect me to come back to you with a reaction to Barack's surge in the early primary states, or with a comment on faith and politics via Romney and Huckabee, or with my take on Oprahlooza. Sadly, I return with the news that a great songwriter has left us. I have to admit I haven't followed Fogelberg's career enough lately to know that he was suffering from prostate cancer, or that he had dropped out of live performing three years ago, due to his illness.

Few people will step up and anoint him the songwriter of a generation, or point to him as a trailblazing musician; but most of us who love music can point to his influence in our lives. Even if it is nothing more than the top-40 hits from his 1981 album The Innocent Age ("Run for the Roses," "Leader of the Band," "Same Old Lang Syne"), all of us have probably been affected by this extraordinary artist.

It is a little more personal for me. I only saw the man in concert once, but there was one performance of his I'll never forget. It was a wet night in the summer of 1985. I was sitting on a screened-in porch with my girlfriend, watching it rain. The old Pioneer turntable playing in the background had this really cool repeat function that allowed you to play the same side of an album multiple times. Side A of Fogelberg's "High Country Snows" played over and over and over again, for probably an hour or so, while I screwed up the courage to ask this lovely woman to be my wife. She said yes. I have always given Dan some credit for the grace shed on me that night.

It's only fitting that I mention his death here, since--some of you may remember--Dan Fogelberg was the first songwriter I ever quoted on this blog...my very first post.

I have to leave you with the lyrics from his song, "The Reach:"


It's Maine, and it's Autumn, the birches have just begun turning
It's life and it's dying
The lobstermen's boats come returning with the catch of the day in their holds
And the young boy is cold and complaining
The fog meets the beaches and out on the Reach it is raining
It's father and son, it's the way it's been done since the old days
It's hauling by hand ten miles out from the land where their chow waits
And the days are all lonely and long and the seas grow so stormy and strong but...
The Reach will sing welcome as homeward they hurry along

(Chorus)

And the morning will blow away as the waves crash and fall
And the Reach like a siren sings as she beckons and calls
As the coastline recedes from view and the seas swell and roll
I will take from the Reach all that she has to teach to the depths of my soul
The wind brings a chill, there's a frost on the sill in the morning
It creeps through the door
On the edge of the shore ice is forming
Soon the northers will bluster and blow
And the woods will be whitened with snowfall
And the Reach will lie frozen for the lost and unchosen to row

(Chorus)


Dan Fogelberg, may you reach no more.
May you discover what a heaven is for.