Today

So yea, today was most New York day yet. I saw liberals, activist, Chinese, and Italians.

Liberals:
This morning I was going to the Kimmel Center (aka the Student Union), for a tour of the “campus.” Of course if you know anything about NYU, you know that there is not really a campus. It is just a bunch of buildings in NY. Anyway I was on my way to the tour and what do I hear? Are those drums? Is that a chant? What is going on? I began to think that maybe they were having a parade. When I finally got to Washington Square I realized very quickly that it was not a parade and there were no marching bands. Instead, it was a band of marchers. The band was made up of graduate students and faculty. They were marching in response to NYU’s refusal to allow them to unionize. It was kind of annoying and pointless. The only people who actually were affected by the event were other students and I really doubt their catchy chants rang through the twenty floor office window of the president.

Activist:
After my tour I ran a few errands and ended up back in Washington Square to read my David Sedaris book (Thanks Ashley!!!). Well in the middle of my reading, this band started playing on the recently erected stage. Over the course of an hour or so I heard several local bands and some other local “celebrates.” What was the point of this free concert? Glad you asked. They are trying to save a local bar/club called CBGBs. It is a club on the end of Bleecker in the East Village. The club’s stage has been home to such band as the Ramones. Anyway some guy wants to evict them and tear down the club to build some chain story or something. As a result everyone is in an uproar. They did make a sad point. They were talking about how such “historic” places were disappearing. They mentioned Preservation Hall being lost in the New Orleans flood. It was kinda sad because I thought of all the cool places in NO that I am sure are gone or ruined. I know they can rebuild, but there are some places that I know were not able to get everything out. I mean imagine all those used bookstores in the Quarter. There is no way the owners were able to get all their books off the bottom floors. And think about that cool little junk shop on Royal! It is so sad.

Chinese and Italians:
This afternoon we went to China Town and Little Italy. I think I will probably go back to this Chinese place to eat when I get some cash. When I get lots of cash, I am going back to Little Italy and gorge myself!!

Any way that was day in NY. Later we are going to see Rocky Horror Picture Show!

here I am

So yea, here I am!

Last night I heard what I thought was thunder and I was sort of upset because I was about to set out for the grocery store to buy some much needed food. However, when I went out on my balcony, I realized that it was not about to rain. I headed out for the grocery store to buy some essentials like poptarts and ham. On the way I heard a man ask another, "What are they doing?" The response came, "They are celebrating." I could not hear the answer because I was out of ear shot, but someone was celebrating something with fireworks. I started thinking about the sound and it sounded like explosions. Of course they were explosions because fireworks explode. But in my mind they were not fireworks. I began to think about what it must have been like to be a young woman or a child in the countryside far away from London. In my scene, the child lived in a house in the middle of the woods and could not actually see London. She could hear it though. She could hear the explosions; she could hear, only in her mind-or was it for real-she could hear the sound of a city burning. The explosions caused by the falling German bombs were deep and they sank into her bones. The explosions are still there today, oh so many years later. The explosions are there.


This is where my mind was last night while I walked the streets of New York. You would think that I would be thinking about my present and what effect it will have my future, but no I was imagining the effects of WWII on a young child--Yea I am odd.

hmmm.....

“My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country. It lies flat, like a badly drawn half oval, with Memphis at its northern and Vicksburg at its southern tip. Its western boundary is the Mississippi river, which coils and returns on itself in great hooks and crescents, though from the map you would think it ran in a straight line north and south. Every few years it rises like a monster from its bed and pushed over it banks to vex and sweeten the land it has made. For our soil , very bark brown, creamy and sweet-smelling, without substrata of rock of shale, was built slowly, century after century, by the sediment gathered by the river in its solemn task of cleansing the continent and deposited in annual layers of silt on what must once have been a vast depression between itself and the hills. This ancient depression, now filled in and level, is what we call the Delta. Some say it was the floor of the sea itself. Now it seems still to be a floor, being smooth from one end to the other, without rise or dip or hill, unless the mysterious scattered monument of the mound-builders may be called hills. The land does not drain into the river as most riparian lands do, but tilts back from it towards the hills of the south and east. Across this wide flat alluvial stretch—north and south it measures one hundred and ninety-six miles, east and west at the widest point fifty miles—run, slowly and circuitously other rivers and creeks also high-banked, with names pleasant to remember—Rattlesnake Bayou, Quiver River, the Bogue Phalia, the Tallahatchie, the Sunflower—pouring their tawny waters finally into the Yazoo, which in turn loses itself just above Vicksburg in the river. With us when you speak of “the river,” though there are many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved, the Mississippi.”

These are the opening words of William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee.

I am leaving tomorrow. By the time most of you read this will already be in New York. I have left home before, but this time just has the feeling of finality. It is as if I am leaving this house this town this land this river for the last time. Oh yes, I will return and check up on the old man, Old Man River that is, but I do not suspect I will call him my neighbor again. I will miss him. I will miss the way he glides like a piece of satin beneath the bridge. I will, in some morbid way, miss the stories of those he takes from us. They go to him like a young virgin might go to the edge of the ancient volcano and fall in. They are our sacrifices, and they appease him.

I heard a story once about a boy who wanted to stay in his home town and get married and have kids. He said that he wanted to grow roots. One day a circus came to town. He went to the fortune teller and she granted him a wish. He wished to grow roots in his home town. Before the young man reached his parents’ house he was stopped. He was bound to the soil and he began to grow roots. It was not long before this young man had become a tree. Of course we should all be careful what wish for because we just might get it. I have put out roots here. I love this place I love the magic in the air. Have you felt it? I do! I feel it all the time. I feel it most at night. It weighs down on me like the sticky, humid air. The magic is almost tangible. Sometimes I think I can bottle it and sell it. But of course the people would want to know what the magic does. I would not be able to tell them. I could only say, “It depends.” It depends on who you are. For some he causes words to flow onto the page like mint juleps flowing into a glass. For others it makes paint melt onto the canvas like the ice in my sweet tea. And for others, oh man, for others it causes black eyed peas and cornbread to taste like the finest food in the world. What will it do for you? All I can say is that the humid magic will cause you to put down roots, roots that stretch, but still roots that nourish the soul.

I am leaving tomorrow.

Buddy Nordan tells the story of a young man who caught the slow moving diesel train that ran through his town. Every day that summer the boy caught the train and every day he jumped off. “And then one day, for what reason I cannot say, something changed. I hooked the train, as I had done before. The Delta was what it had always been—endless blue sky, defoliated fields, small African villages peopled with princes and savages and their barebreasted sad women, washpots and collard greens. The train was what it had always been, so slow, so comfortable that it seemed to be stasis in motion. The poison heat of the diesel exhaust which swept back into my face was no different from the normal usual poisonous air that blew across Mowdown in the paddies or the DDT in the ditches and made up the staple air of my comfort and ease. Everything was the same. The train wagged its reluctant head and heaved itself up like an old man and set out with a wonted resignation toward the orchard where I usually jumped clear. Bark from the pulp wood on a flatcar was blowing in my face when I realized that I was not going to jump off. . . I didn’t jump off.” (Music of the Swamp)

I have ridden this train before, this C&G railroad, I have always jumped off at the orchard, but this time I think I might be in for the long haul. We’ll see….

Fishin'

My daddy and I went fishin' again yesterday. No we did not catch anything, but it got me thinking. I am reading Lauren Winner's book Girl Meets God (see her blog to the right), and just before we left to go fishing I read a section that mentions the art of fishing. This is a short quote:

I tell her that Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, said that people think they are coming to church for all sorts of reasons, but really the only reason they are coming, even if they don't know it yet, is that God has gotten them there. He wrote, "Perhaps some man among you has come because he wants to win the approval of his girl-friend. . . Perhaps a slave has wanted to please his master or someone has wanted to please a friend. I accept this as bait for my hook and let you in. . . Perhaps you didn't know where you were going or recognize the net waiting to catch you. You have swum into the Church's net. Allow yourself to be caught, don't try to escape."

I think it is interesting that we are drawn to God without out our knowing. He has baited the hook and we are like Nemo just swimming along with no clue. He may bait us with a "relevant" church or a groups of friend or just someone who will love us like we are. We don't understand until after we have been caught and thrown into the live well with the others. It is in the live well, it is in the church that we begin to understand that have not been caught in order to be supper. No we have been caught, we have been plucked from the lake, because it is polluted. We ruined it and the Holy God of the universe is taking us out, and when He takes us out he puts us into the a new community. A community of fish that are stained with sin but are no long infected with the disease. You see Cyril goes on to point out "Jesus is fishing for you, not to kill you but to give you life."

Eastside

So I am writing this on Sunday night at Andy and Dave’s apt. I will post it when I get home.

I went to Eastside Baptist Church is good ole Belzoni Mississippi this morning for church. Since Eastside is a traditional, fundamentalist, Southern Baptist Church I expected to use the hymnal. I was so looking forward to this. However, I was very upset that I was not able to do this. They were having a special “revival” service, so they pronounced that the “worship” was going to be different. This means that they were going to “sing five songs in a row.” Again, I was upset and disappointed that they projected the words onto a screen using what I assume was PowerPoint. You would think that I would be ok with this, since I was the one who started the whole multimedia craze at Emmanuel. However, it is the curse of a Frankenstein to hate and fear the monster he has created. You see I despise the death of the hymnal. The Hymnal does several important things:

1) It introduces the congregation to music. Here I don’t mean the passive act of singing along. Instead, I mean the active art of participating in the music. The congregation is introduced to music in its purest form. They are able to see the notes and understand the difference between chorus and verse. The absence of the hymnal in the church perpetuates what VH1 has been telling us for year. The American public is loosing its ability to appreciate music and musical-ness.

2) It intrudes the congregation to the basics of Christian doctrine. Take the second verse of Amazing Grace, for example. “Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And Grace my fears relieved…’ It was not our cognitive understanding that caused us to fear our wretchedness. No! It was the grace of God. I think music is a great way to teach people the doctrines to the church. Some may find it difficult to remember important passages of scripture but they may be able to recall the song of their youth.

3) It introduces the congregation to church history. During my years of hymn singing I spent verse two and maybe the beginning of verse four (because we never sang verse three!) looking at the bottom of the page to see who wrote the hymn and when. Even the Baptist Hymnal has twelve songs written by Charles Wesley. I think this serves as an introduction to the basic names and traditions of the Christian faith.

Please do not take this an indictment of “contemporary” worship services or the use of newer choruses. I think they can all play a part in the worship experience. However, being a transition period I still feel obliged to bemoan the death of something so important.