Trip Album

LSD was the catalyst of a very creative moment in music history, and particularly rock history. You can read in Jack Kerouac's On The Road how the Beatniks liked to get stoned and listen to jazz. Pot had a way of making music sound sensational. And it could produce a kind of visionary experience, like watching a technicolor movie.

The Beats passed their torch of counterculture exploration on to the hippies in the '60s. For the hippies, the music of choice was not instrumental jazz but rock. In about 1965 an explosion took place. The British Invasion in rock was becoming purloined with psychedelia. I remember when I first started hearing this stuff I was about 15, and I picked up an album by Bob Dylan called Highway 61 Revisited. This record seemed to have arrived from some other planet.

It was the Beatles, though, that fired the shot heard round the world with a brilliant record that is still a classic: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. History has it that Dylan turned the mop-tops onto acid and the mops began to grow out. So did the music.

What happened here? Did LSD do this?

At the time, LSD was still a legal drug (not for long). It's dangerous properties were still not fully understood. But it was known that it could mimic psychosis. What it did was to sort of cause the synapses in the brain to misfire, creating a wondrous world in the user's brain that could either be like heaven or turn into hell. It also seemed to be a kind of catalyst for creativity.

Dylan opened up a new kind of fantasy-fueled lyric which, when put to rock music, was tailor-made for psychedelic excursions on drugs. Along came fantasy albums of all stripes, and colors, and spots, and flowers that grew so incredibly high. These albums became the prize of hungry hippy kids with the mad munchies.

I don't know if the Beatles actually created the single most amazing psychedelic album with Sgt. Pepper's: the Rolling Stones were not going to be left out of the phenomenon, and, with the help of eclectic pioneer Brian Jones, they produced Their Satanic Majesties Request. This album is still fantastic, and the most bizarre creation the Stones ever made. It was their only contribution to psychedelic rock. They went back to making the best rock they ever devised during the Beggar's Banquet period, saying the genre they tried, in competing with the Beatles, was just not their thing. The Beatles didn't stop the psychedelic stuff until they later split up.

TSMR is still amazing. It is so highly textured, so original, one does not need acid to have one's mind completely dismantled and reassembled (i.e. "blown"). It holds up superbly. It should be among the best rock albums of all time, in my opinion. But I may be slightly addled.

Videotape by Radiohead

Videotape
When I'm at the pearly gates

This will be on my videotape, my videotape

Mephistopheles is just beneath

and he's reaching up to grab me
This is one for the good days

and i have it all here

In red, blue, greenRed, blue, green
You are my center

When i spin away

Out of control on videotape

On videotape

On videotape

On videotape

This is my way of saying goodbye

Because I can't do it face to face

I'm talking to you after it's too late

From my videotape
No matter what happens now

You shouldn't be afraid

Because I know today has been the most perfect day I've ever seen.

This Radiohead lyric is from the album that is right at the top of all charts as the best rock album of 2007. They also had the number one album of the '90's, OK Computer. The group is not only phenomenally good, but their style is unique. They actually have an approach to melody that I have never heard anywhere: a kind of haunting, ethereal, slow jazziness to it. Get the picture? You won't waste your bucks buying this album, In Rainbows.

Valentine Thinking

Love
Romans 12: 9 Love must be honest and true. Hate what is evil. Hold on to what is good. 10 Love each other deeply. Honor others more than yourselves. 11 Never let the fire in your heart go out. Keep it alive. Serve the Lord.
12 When you hope, be joyful. When you suffer, be patient. When you pray, be faithful. 13 Share with God's people who are in need. Welcome others into your homes.
14 Bless those who hurt you. Bless them, and do not call down curses on them. 15 Be joyful with those who are joyful. Be sad with those who are sad. 16 Agree with each other. Don't be proud. Be willing to be a friend of people who aren't considered important. Don't think that you are better than others.
17 Don't pay back evil with evil. Be careful to do what everyone thinks is right. 18 If possible, live in peace with everyone. Do that as much as you can.
19 My friends, don't try to get even. Leave room for God to show his anger. It is written, "I am the One who judges people. I will pay them back,"—(Deuteronomy 32:35) says the Lord. 20 Do just the opposite. Scripture says, "If your enemies are hungry, give them food to eat. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. By doing those things, you will pile up burning coals on their heads." —(Proverbs 25:21,22) 21 Don't let evil overcome you. Overcome evil by doing good.

A Valentine for the church, with a message of love.
Verse 9 says, "Hate what is evil." The problem here is that we love to hate what we think is evil, without actually identifying evil or knowing what it really is. Hate is the opposite of love and evil is the opposite of love: so we should hate hate. Osama binLaden "hates" evil, and yet employs it to please God. You can't use any kind of evil or hatred to please God. God is love.

Hatred doesn't belong in Christianity. The minute we hate anybody we have joined sides with evil. Jesus even said we are guilty of murder. But what many Christians think is "hating evil" is really being hyper-conscious of sin. What this tends to do is cause us to focus on sin as our cause. Our cause is not exposing sin: our cause is to love as He loves, which is total. When we love, we overcome sin. Sin is dismantled by love.

We often preach a message of strife, both in the church and to those outside. Why? Because we are focused on being right: we are trying to prove something. We are trying to "get even." But that isn't God's justice: getting even. God is patient, kind, putting up with evil in order to bring redemption to those destroyed by it. His whole operation is based on pulling people up not putting them down.

Verse 10 says, "Love each other deeply." "Each other" is those who believe and those who don't. But this is not what we often see. We often see favoritism for those who are like us and exclusion of those who aren't. It is because we don't really understand what God is like. He doesn't have any favorites.

We should look deep into our hearts and see what festers in there: see if we feel superior to others, see if we are peacemakers or dividers, see if we, in the name of resisting evil, actually promote it.

Happy Valentine's Day.

End Obsessions

The apocalypse is an epic tragedy, but it's also a fantasy of cleansing and regeneration wherein everything inessential and inauthentic is swept away so that we can build afresh among the ruins. It's a convenient untruth. "I've been struck by the number of New Yorkers who have actually said to me, 'God, it was so much fun watching the city fall apart like that,'" says Weisman. "There is on some level a secret longing that people have, saying 'Let's just give it up. What a mess we've made just by being alive.' We all have this footprint now. We've redefined original sin." TIME magazine, Jan. 17, 2008, "Apocalypse New"

There seems to be, in us, an appetite for the sum of all fears, for judgment day. I realize that I have been a bit obsessive about it through my life. Musing about it has taken up a great deal of my mental space (which is vast and empty).

When I was six, I saw Godzilla (at the movies, not in reality) and was flooded with pleasure with the thought of a gargantuan beast tearing up the world. Also, when I went to school, we would practice "duck and cover" down in the basement, with the teacher telling us that the sirens meant the A-bomb was coming.

We were an "apocalyptic" generation, the baby boomers. Perhaps the hippy thing was the attempt to shed the mad dash of civilization toward self-annihilation. Drop out before it's too late. Do something! Turn on! Blow your mind! Make the world anew with a new mind-set. Hail the Aquarian Age!

Thus, when I entered the strange new world of Christianity, I found this same dynamic there: the fascinating apocalyptic clues and images of incredible cataclysm. Godzilla was alive and well in the Bible.

I haven't seen Cloverfield yet, but I probably will. As the producer, Weismann (quoted above) was saying, there is something perhaps cathartic about it all. We feel helpless in the face of a psychotic universe, a world seemingly drunk on evil and injustice. We all die. The end floods our existence on every level. Life is fragile. And yet we endure, and sometimes even do good things.

In a movie, we view the raging monster from a safe distance. The heroes in the movie generally become the masters of their situation or else the final tombstone of mankind is erected: Rest In Peace. In the end, they are all alike. How many times have we seen a Batman or Superman save the world? It is a kind of Messianic hope in all of us.

The word "apocalypse" does not actually mean "the end of the world." Apokalupsis (Gr.) is actually more like an "epiphany" than the usual visualization of incredible holocaust. Jesus himself is the apocalypse: he is the disclosure of something unbelievably grand in scope. It is he that dissolves the hopelessness, the existential despair, the absurdity, and the lonely fear of a universe gone nuts. It is he that brings justice into the wild injustice of life.

Perhaps it has been wrong for so many in the church to concentrate on the "end of the world." For one thing, the scriptures say also that this is "world without end."

Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen. Ephesians 3: 21

We do seem to live in a fragile world today: a world with incredible potential for a massive rupture of all things seemingly secure. Yet we cannot live with that constant sword of Damocles over our heads: the looming blade of annihilation. Jesus said, "The worst that can happen to anyone is they can die", and all of us do that sooner or later. So what if the world ended today?

In a vibrant way, this old world ended almost 2,000 years ago at the cross. The sting of death was removed by the final offering of the Lamb of God. At that moment, all was made aright. All vengeance was satisfied. Ultimate justice was procured. Hardly the end of the world. This is only the beginning.