I dreamed last night that I heard Steve Taylor died, so I Googled him to find out if it was true, and to my horror -- surprise twist! -- there was no mention of Roland Steven Taylor on the Internet at all.
Now that I'm up, I don't know why that was horrific, but in dreamworld, this was like taking the final exam for the class you forgot you signed up for. OMG serious.
On awaking, I immediately went downstairs and let the dog out and checked my email. Sometime later in the morning, I checked on Steve. Nobody panic.
If you knew me well in college, you knew I was pretty into Steve Taylor. He was funny, clever, pro-Jesus, and he could do it all in song. My personal ambition sleepwalked through college... I couldn't say I wanted to do what he did. But Steve Taylor was a noise the direction of wakefulness.
Around the time I graduated, he released his best album, Squint, and then traded performing for producing. It was the mid-90s, we were all becoming different people at that point. I started working on Dungeons & Dragons for a living then. We've all been there.
In the mid-aughts I checked in on Steve again, and found he'd gone to movie making. He made a flick starring Michael W. Smith of all people, called The Second Chance. It's a buddy movie about a white suburban pastor and a black inner-city pastor. It's in my Netflix queue now, I'll let you know what I think at the end of the month after I watch it.
And today? Now? He's in Portland working on a Blue Like Jazz
BLJ's author, Donald Miller, is someone else I would have wanted to emulate if his books had been around in college. I'm sort of glad they weren't. They could have misled a sleepwalker.
These days, I get a prickly feeling on my neck when I consider trying to create some piece of art for an explicitly Christian audience. It seems as though it would be easy for me. And financially rewarding. I could do funny, touching memoir for the saved set. I could do a passable Don Miller.
But as I start down that road, I think of Jesus talking:If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?
A whole chunk of text there, Matthew 5:43-48, has kept me up nights. That bite's got a lot of hard-to-swallow. Jesus tells you to be "perfect" in there. He tells you the rough truth that God makes the rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. And to me, he says that writing books for my brothers and sisters is not particularly what I'm called to do.
Look, God has a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people to be doing. I still love Steve Taylor's music and wit, and Don Miller is a decent writer. Don't hear me saying that what they've chosen to do is wrong or subpar or Not In God's Will.
But as my personal ambition rubs away eye boogers and stares into the bathroom mirror wondering when it shaved last, those noises... they're not for me to follow. I don't want to greet my brothers for a living. There's too many other people out there who need introductions.
I am glad Steve is alive, though. Check out his movie blog.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The continued work of awakening
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4 comments:
I've often had issues with those who do their art exclusively in religious circles. This is especially the case with performing and plastic arts. Steve Taylor tried to get out with Chagall Guevara, but that didn't go over so well. At least he has tried to engage those outside the Evangelical ghetto. Squint was a great album specifically because he was calling on that cultural enclave to get out into the wider culture (another unsung voice crying the wilderness).
Donald Miller feels different to me. His book is more or less devotional lit, so I expect it to cater to that certain niche. It gets sloppy and schmaltzy about half way through, but the first half has Taylor's prophetic quality before Miller lapses back into the tired tropes of Fundacostalism.
I still have no idea how they are going to make this into a movie, but Taylor's work (especially his art films during college) is edgy enough to make it enjoyable and provocative.
But surely Jesus wasn't telling us NOT to love those that love us and NOT to greet our brother. He was just telling us not to stop there.
I think the saved set would benefit from your funny, touching memoir. Just don't let that be the only thing you do...
Jim: Well, you know, there is a ghetto, but I'm trying to avoid aspersions. Some Xian artists do good work, and say meaningful things to the brothers and sisters. It doesn't have to be bad just because it's aimed at the home team.
But we've got plenty of them already. I don't see so many people trying to say true things to the away team. That's where I want to be.
Radagast: I see what you're saying, but I guess I'm comfortable with my idiosyncratic hermeneutics here. In fact, what I'm pulling out of this passage is not quite the message of it. But it's still valid.
Thanks for the encouragement. The saved set can read it while it's happening right here. ;)
I'm glad Steve Taylor's not dead. I wish he was still making music every now and then. :) Sadly, I recall showing up for Chagall Guevara at Birmingham, Alabama's big music festival, City Stages, with a very small crowd. More sad, my copy of "Squint" is only on cassette. It's time to fix that.
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