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Taking Communion With Over the Rhine Beneath the Streets of Philadelphia

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Maile and I stood on the Philadelphia sidewalk in the rain, waiting for the doors to open. We crept a little closer to the couple in front of us, the couple holding the massive, multicolored umbrella. It was December, and a cold, city wind swept down the boulevards, peeked into the alleys, raced the drizzle around corners.

At 8pm the doors opened and we followed the slow trail of people up a steep set of steps flanked by two burly, neckless men checking photo IDs. Then the line of people went inside and down steps that led into an industrial basement. Bare pipes and cement walls were covered in old concert posters and artistic graffiti. The tickets had said no smoking, but decades of cigarette smoke escaped the walls and wandered the dark stairwell.

The crowd, all these slowly walking people, descended together, and they felt like family to me because we all loved Over the Rhine, and most of us had been following them, their story, their music, for many years. Decades even. We were in this adventure together, even if it led into the bowels of Philadelphia. Some people, like Over the Rhine, create things of such beauty that you would follow them anywhere, and if you’ve never seen a movie or read a book or heard music that made you feel that way, then you need to open your eyes, my friend, and look around.

Maile and I waited at the bottom of the steps as people showed their tickets, had their wrists stamped, and vanished into the next room. That’s when “our people” arrived.

* * * * *

Another Christmas is drifting in softly
like the ghost of my innocence lost
and the tree in the corner burns brightly
I turned all the other lights off

I look back on my life in its stillness
I consider the days of my youth
and the moments I find myself willing
to surrender and just tell the truth

Cause I’ve committed every sin
and each one leaves a different scar
it’s just the world I’m living in
I could use a guiding star

I hope that I can still believe
the Christ child holds a gift for me
Am I able to receive
peace on Earth this Christmas?

– Over the Rhine, “Another Christmas”

* * * * *

For the last five years we’ve had dinner with this group just about every month. I barely knew most of them before we started sharing food together. There are five of us couples (six including the couple who moved to Florida a year ago and can’t join us very often anymore). When you spend five years with people, you break through the surfacey shit. When you walk with people through miscarriages and stillbirths and children born healthy (we have over 20 children between the six couples), business failures and successes, family stuff, and moving from state to state, well, it’s like a small grove of trees planted so close that their trunks literally start to grow together, their rings shared, their roots and branches entangled.

We haven’t officially taken communion together, but there’s something Eucharistic about those dinners, something holy. Which sounds funny because we’ve had plenty of conversations that push the boundaries of “holy,” but I think that when you start to give your life to other people, it’s the bread and the cup, the Body and the Blood.

* * * * *

Seeing their eight faces come through that dark door brightened that entire venue, and we laughed and hugged and went inside, found our seats.

I’ve been listening to Over the Rhine ever since 1996, when one of my roommates had an unhealthy obsession with them. But from the moment I heard their song “Poughkeepsie,” I got it. I fell in love with the way Karen Bergquist and Linford Detweiler’s voices swirled together and took me away.

And that’s what happened in that industrial basement on Saturday evening, way later than this 37 year old is used to staying up. I felt transported to another dimension, a place where nothing existed except that moment, that chord, that harmony. That mandolin solo. That aching lyric. That moment of silence in between notes.

Cause rain and leaves and snow and stars
and that’s not all my friend
they all fall with confidence and grace
so let it fall
let it fall

– Over the Rhine, “Let it Fall”

* * * * *

The next morning, my friend Janelle wrote a letter to Over the Rhine, and they featured it on their Tour Diary. Here’s a small part of what she wrote:

We drove down there together, just a bunch of regular salt-of-the-earth folks. The ten of us, (“The Dinner Club”) have been meeting once a month for several years. We’re all in our mid 30’s, early 40’s and some of us have been listening to you for 20 years. What a DIVINE time we had. Thank you for being so inclusive in your performing. We could feel the trials and pain, the joys raining down from that stage last night, balm to our weary souls. We truly felt that in that dark, dingy basement in the middle of that bustling city, we met with God. I loved the imperfections, (and perhaps tacky) nature of the venue, it was an outward display of our inner workings….kinda hidden, a little messy, but lovely nonetheless.

* * * * *

A little messy, but lovely nonetheless.

And so after all of that, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hope you have a good Christmas season, even amidst the dreariness of so many things lost, the seemingly impossible waiting, the sense that this world will never quite be enough. I hope you find a star to follow, and I hope it leads you to what you’re looking for.

* * * * *

Over the Rhine recently released a beautiful Christmas album, “Blood Oranges in the Snow.” Check it out HERE.

If you’d like to hear the story of how Over the Rhine gave me permission to use the lyrics from “Poughkeepsie” as front matter for my upcoming novel, check that out HERE.

The venue where we saw Over the Rhine was Underground Arts.

 

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Why There is a Tooth On My Desk (or, For When the World is Taking Pieces of You)

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There is a tiny tooth in a plastic sandwich bag on my desk. It’s strange what you will accept as normal, once you are a parent. Saving a bloody tooth? In a sandwich bag? Beside my books and on top of a binder? It’s the size of a small pea, the color of a not-quite-white seashell. It’s shaped like a broad, flat shovel. I guess it’s about six years old.

It is the remains of Abra’s toothy, childhood grin. This was the one that stuck out, the one we affectionately referred to as “the fang.” It’s been replaced by a gaping black hole, the kind that sucks in time and matter and space and leaves you wondering where a childhood has gone, where it’s going. Black holes are ruthless. None of us can escape them.

Her grandmother convinced her to pull it out. At first Abra wanted to do it herself, so she vanished into the bathroom with Sam as support, and I heard them talking, conspiring, strategizing. Sam got bored and came out. Abra emerged a few minutes later, nearly crying, blood on her chin, the tooth pointing out at an awkward angle, like a broken bone.

She sat on her grandmother’s lap and her grandma said, “Tell me if it hurts,” and before she knew what was happening, she was sitting there with a tiny pearl in the palm of her hand and an empty space in her mouth, six years of her life pulled right out.

This world just keeps taking pieces of us, doesn’t it? There’s no way around it. It just keeps yanking and tugging and leaving us bloody and hurting with gaping holes. Things don’t work out the way we had hoped they would, and our writing gets rejected yet again, and we have to find another job, and relationships crumble. People we love get really, really sick. Sometimes they die before we do, which seems a terrible injustice because while none of us want to die, even fewer of us want to be the last one standing.

Little pieces of us, big pieces of us. Gone. Chunks of years. Vanished.

The only thing we can really hope for is that someone will be there when it happens, that someone can help us take the piece out when it gets stuck, that they can clean the blood off our chin and lay the piece in our palm so that we can study it before moving on.

If we’re lucky, we have people who will help us bury these pieces under, way under the pillow so that it doesn’t hurt us anymore. So we can sleep easy again. But if we’re really, really lucky one day we’ll wake up and realize that thing that was taken somehow transformed into something beautiful.

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How Friends Who Are Told They Are Dying Will Ruin Everything For You

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The worst possible thing you can do when you’re down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you.

First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors’ reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as they can, as well as they can, for as long as they can.

– Anne Lamott, Small Victories

I have very little to add to that except to say how challenged and encouraged I am by the people in my life who refuse to let a bad diagnosis confine them. You know who you are. Whether or not you realize it, we, your friends, are watching and continue to be in awe at the way you LIVE.

A few weeks ago my aunt Linda wrote this:

Good morning, friends. October 28 I put the top down on my T-bird and headed to Penn to meet Dr. Fox. I wanted a new opinion. After sharing the past several years of medical [history] with his kindhearted assistant, Dr. Fox came in the room. He greeted me and began repeating my medical information and made reference to my wish for a clinical trial or some type of new radical treatment.

Then he said, ‘Help me to understand. You were in a wheelchair for most of the spring, you had many surgeries and were told you may always need that chair. The first chemo you were on, failed. The current one is working beautifully. You have almost zero side effects from treatment, you traveled last week, you work hard every day and do what you need to do, for the most part. Now you’re here to ask me to make you really sick and take away your quality of life.’

I laughed out loud! I told him I no longer thought that was a great idea! Everyone laughed with me. Dr. Fox informed me that in his world, the oncology cancer world, I am a success story. I’m what they rarely see. He gave me much hope for a long term treatment plan and complimented my dear friend and oncologist, Dr. Sivendran. The two of them will work together to plan my life.

I went to Penn for a second opinion, but I drove home with a new one of my own. I must be so very thankful every single day and I must embrace the notion that cancer and I share space…until we don’t. Unless I get hit by a bus, I’m here to stay [for] a while. I get to live life to its fullest-with or without hair! Perhaps I have already received my miracle!

We may not all be sharing space with cancer, but we are all sharing space with death, aren’t we? Some of us are marked more profoundly by this sharing than others. Some of us have diagnoses that remind us more specifically of our mortality. But, as John Irving wrote, “we are all terminal cases.”

What will we do with life in the mean time?

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If You Constantly Think There Must Be Something More to Life…Maybe There Is

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It’s the great tension. Comfort versus adventure. We crave both. Comfort usually wins, but it doesn’t like to share, so we let it lull us to sleep. Before we know it we’ve organized our entire life around that small god, making every decision based on the perception of stability. We lay our dreams on the altar, pretending that someday we can retrieve them, or that Comfort will give them back to us when we are old and gray.

In the last fifteen months, two of my friends died, both in their mid-30s. The future will wait for some of us, but not all.

I know it might sound irresponsible, or breathtaking, or maddeningly idealistic, but just consider it for one moment. Forget what you should do, what you feel pressured to do, what you’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on a degree to do. What if you were designed for more than entering data into a spreadsheet? Or constantly trying to crest the waves of email that threaten to drown you every day? What if your mind-numbing commute is actually that…numbing your brain to the things you would love to do?

Dream big. And I don’t mean big financially. Dream bigger than that. What if your personality, your skill set, your strengths and passions and loves, make you the perfect fit to serve refugee communities spilling into Lebanon from Syria? Or to adopt multiple children? What if your ability to think on your feet would make you one of the most successful fighters against human trafficking the world has ever seen? What if your ability to form relationships in hostile environments lines you up perfectly to serve in the more difficult places of the earth, places where others are currently trying and failing?

Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe you have close friends who desperately need you once a week, and you simply need to make time for them. Maybe you’re an organizer and can help the local food pantry go to the next level. Maybe you have one or two or three or more littles in your house who need forming. Imagine a world where children are protected and not exploited, nurtured and not abused. You can be part of that. You can participate in that.

Maybe you have a book you need to write.

Maybe you need to paint a picture.

I’m not saying that what you’re doing now isn’t important. I’m not saying a paycheck isn’t worth anything. But if you live your life with that constant nagging in the back of your mind that there must be something more, well, maybe there is.

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When the Question is “Do you want to get well?” and the Answer is “No”

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If you’re trying to figure out if you’re an alcoholic, well, I personally think you are. I don’t really know any non-alcoholics who ask themselves if they might be alcoholics. – Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott had the crowd laughing one minute and on the verge of tears the next, and this quote from her (which is especially poignant considering her former life as an alcoholic) really resonated with me. Not because I’m an alcoholic, but because I have my own addictions, and I think that whenever we take the time to ask ourselves whether or not we’re addicted to something, we probably are. Am I addicted to my phone? Facebook? Jealousy? Candy? Feeling sorry for myself?

How then will we heal ourselves of these addictions?

It reminds me of something Jesus said.

A man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had already been a long time in that condition, He said to him, “Do you wish to get well?”

What a stupid question, right? I know a man who is in his 60s and he suffers from so many maladies – strokes, cancer, alcoholism. Can you imagine if I walked into his trailer park home and asked him if he wanted to get well? If he wanted to be restored fully to health?

What kind of a question is that?

Yet I think there are still many areas of my life where I don’t want to get well. Seemingly petty sicknesses I have like that bad attitude towards certain people or those small stabs of jealousy that I think I’ll hang on to for now, thank you very much, Jesus. And then maybe things that aren’t so petty, things that my anger uncovers, things that trigger my white-knuckled grasping on to unforgiveness, things that discharge my cynicism and underlying (but very well hid) prejudices.

I’m all good. Thanks, J. That healing thing? I’m not ready yet.

* * * * *

I had a long lunch with a good friend recently who has been asking himself very good questions about his own addiction. And I think he will get there, in time. He will know.

But I left that lunch with that same question resonating in my mind.

Do we want to get well? Does my friend want to get well? Do I?

And I think many times the answer is no. Maybe we find identity in the sickness. Maybe we can’t imagine the life we would lead if we were well. Maybe we’ve lost hope; I think that’s it most of the time – I don’t want to be well because I don’t think it’s even possible, so why would I put myself in the position to be so sorely disappointed when it all crumbles down around me?

Which brings me full circle, back to Anne Lamott, because if you know her story you know that she finally reached the point where she said, Yes, I want to be well, and with the help of a wonderful community she clawed her way up through the murky waters of drug and alcohol addiction and now she gives us such beauty, such hope, and I guess that’s the one thing that makes me want to answer yes, when I see those who have gone before. Those who have stood up and walked away from the Ground Zero of their pain. Those who can point to their own uncomfortable journey of transformation and say, It’s worth it. Get well.

Do you want to get well?

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“That’s Usually When We Experience God, When We Run Out of Good Ideas.”

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We followed the winding line of brake lights to the far side of the college campus, swinging into the first empty parking space we could find. We got out and walked quickly past dorms and large halls, and all around us there were people walking in the same direction, as if some irresistible force drew anyone within a one-mile radius. Most of the people were in groups of three or four, and they chattered in that excited way people do when they’re on their way to something they’ve looked forward to for a long time.

How did I feel? I felt like I was on the way to meet a long-lost friend, someone who knew me and had spoken life into me for the last twenty years.

* * * * *

I love to read, and I love beautiful books, but I’m not someone who becomes emotionally attached to particular versions of books. At least not very often. I have an 1864 version of Pilgrim’s Progress that I found in hole-in-the-wall bookstore in Windsor, England. My Prayer For Owen Meany is dog-eared and underlined and definitely the worse for wear. I have many books signed  by the friends who have written them, and I’d hate to lose those.

But of all of the books I own, there is only one that makes me feel panicky when I can’t find it right away. It’s my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. On the inside cover is a short note from the friend who bought it for me

To: Shawn
From: Jason
On your 21st birthday

It was a rather inauspicious gift at the time. Thoughtful, but not something that made me stop and say, “This moment will change my life.” But it did, actually. That book, throughout the years, has given me more joy, solace, and encouragement than any other book I’ve ever read. Anne’s (and yes, I refer to her as Anne because we’d obviously be great friends if we met in person) irreverent and sometimes crass humor took me by surprise. A Christian who drops the f-bomb? A Christian who is a Democrat? A Christian who has Buddhist friends? I had never met a Christian like that; I didn’t know Christians like that even existed.

The first reading of Bird By Bird blew me away. By the second reading, I knew it would be a book I would read many times in my life. By the 20th reading, I’m still taking away new things.

* * * * *

We got closer to the auditorium. Someone handed me a program as we walked through the glass doors: “A Night With Anne Lamott.” We found excellent seats in the balcony and settled in. Anne’s talk was beautiful and hilarious, encouraging and witty. She is everything in person that she projects through her writing. This is a rare quality, a writing voice that carries over into real life.

But of all the things she said, one sticks out in my mind:

“That’s usually when we experience God, when we run out of good ideas.”

And that’s where I’m at, in some ways. I’ve been a relatively successful freelance writer for the last five years, and I will finally get around to releasing my first novel later this month. I feel it in my spirit, that there’s change a-comin’, though I can’t put my finger on exactly what it will be. In some ways I feel like I’m all out of good ideas, but I’ve been here before, and I know it’s  the right place to be.

* * * * *

At the end of night they invited people to get in line and have Anne sign her new book. Maybe chat with her for a few seconds. I thought about it, but then Maile and I walked back into the night. We had a four-month-old at home. Besides, there was nothing more that Anne could give me, not even if I shook her hand, not even if we talked for a few minutes. I have my worn copy of Bird By Bird at home. That’s enough for me.