I thought about this again as I read Jon Pareles’ recent review, in the New York Times, of a concert by the British band Spiritualized at Terminal 5 in New York City.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The final two paragraphs of Pareles’ review sparkle with theological gems:

“It was a performance akin to ritual music, with the musicians somberly doing their jobs to send the

congregation into ecstasy. Many of the songs began, as ritual music often does, with a sustained drone (usually Tom Edwards on keyboards, including churchy organ tones); the early verses were incantations, the later ones — with the women cooing above — were exhortations. And the band’s crescendos were goads toward rapture, gloom dissolved by sensation.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

” ‘So Long You Pretty Thing,’ from the new album, started with hymnlike descending piano chords, as Mr. Pierce prayed to Jesus about loneliness, about hurting inside, about failed rock ‘n’ roll dreams, about having ‘no reason to believe in anything.’ But the music surged higher and higher, up to flat-out Rolling Stones rock ‘n’ roll, euphoria in three chords. It was wastrel gospel, redemption no matter how undeserved.”

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

(“Recovering Catholic” is a term in the Catholic world for someone who had a negative experience being Catholic and describes themselves as trying to recover from it, used most often (if the vernacular I’ve heard over the years is any indication) by people who have moved on from Catholicism.)

Perhaps it’s a meaningless gesture; more committed Zeppelin fans may know.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By the way, this interview has pride of place in Zeppelin arcana because toward the end of the interview (just past the eleven-minute mark), someone from the crowd yells out to ask what the “symbols” mean. This is presumably a question about the meaning of the famous and famously cryptic “ZOSO” symbols on the Led Zeppelin IV album. (In fact, the fellow who barked the query wrote about it here.)

In the interview, some confusion about the question ensues, as Page displays his “Recovering Catholic”

shirt, and Plant replies, with a mischievous look, “Frying tonight.” Two minutes of Internet searches make me wonder if this is an English reference to fish and chips (cf. Gerald Priestland, Frying Tonight: The Saga of Fish and Chips (London, Gentry, 1972 — surely a book with a winning title and an even smarter subtitle).

And just like that, the Zeppelin hermeneutics begin: Was this a jokey reference to Catholics eating fish on Fridays? An indication of a desire to get “fried” after the show? A Pythonesque non sequitur? An exceedingly oblique reference to the stone in the present day recovered Catholic Church in Israel on which Jesus is said to have fried fish for his friends?

No doubt others have an interpretation of this Sacra Page-ina.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

The post soul intelligentsia is a generation of urban youth who “see” life differently and engage with it in the post-industrial, post-civil rights conditions they grew up in and now live with. Mark Anthony Neal tells us that the post soul intelligentsia youth are, “…a generation of urban-bred Black intellectuals born during the waning moments of the civil rights/Black Power movements, raised on the rhythms and harmonies of 1970’s soul but having come to maturity during the mid-to late 1980’s and embracing the oppositional possibilities or urban and Hip Hop aesthetics, mass media, and popular culture as vehicles for mass social praxis” (Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic pp. 102-104). Moreover, the post soul youth see life through a critical lens and continue to engage it that way as a result of the numerous failed promises from politicians, pastors, churches, schools, parents, and society. Trust is a hard earned commodity for this generation.

Once again, Neal reminds us that, “The post soul intelligentsia is a generation of Black thinkers in large part distanced from the nostalgia that pervades the civil rights generation, but who as young adults and teens experienced the terror of the Reagan and Bush (Sr.) years armed with distinct social and cultural memories of the traditional Black public sphere” (p. 106).

You hear this ethos, worldview, and social perception from both David Banner and Jasiri X. Trayvon Martin was not an isolated case—especially for Black Americans. Both Banner and Jasiri challenge us to look deeper and beyond the marches, sit-ins, and rallies; to who we are at the core and how we ourselves see life. Both are valid and present some very interesting concepts to the current state of racism we find ourselves in.

Notice that Jasiri is in a “church” setting and utilizes the social context of “The Black Church” to make his point and part of his connection to the crowd. While Banner clutches an iPhone and reminds us that technology is part of this generation’s mode of ideology.

I invite you to listen to and view their message below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have watched it dozens of times, as if it were the passage to some reality I can only have by undergoing this video again and again until I get it. Recently, I began to get a sense for why.

The video captures quite well the heady and paradoxically “publicly private” atmosphere of being on stage in a rock show. As a musician, I have never come close to playing a venue of that size, but even the most modest bar band understands the force field created among the players that both connects and separates them from the audience. That dynamic of live performance is powerfully shown in “Cars,” as the camera wanders around to feature each musician and finds them intent in their business, each a world of energy unto themselves captured in their own immediately characteristic poses and glances, each immersed in their instrument and listening with intent and feeling to the others.

But theologically, “Cars” also shows something of the experience of what could be called sacred space, a demarcated zone in which liminal or socially unusual behaviors are permitted for the sake of conducting the assembled into another collective consciousness, simultaneously “lower” (abandoned more deeply to emotion, flesh, earth, sound) and “higher” (abandoned more deeply to the beyond in the midst of life).

Here, in “Cars,” is Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, rocking the tambourine. (Yes, the tambourine). That tambourine, in this song, becomes an essential part of the gateway to another experience. And then there is Numan, wiggling his fingers, shaking them out, in anticipation of pressing just one key on the synthesizer. One key on which he will lean with his forward weight, turning his body over that one key, as if that will make a difference to that synthesizer. But in some way, it will: that one key, and Numan’s rehearsal for it, and his total commitment to it, will be a key to the door of ecstasis, catapulting-beyond. Only when I saw Numan hulking over the synth in this video did I for the first time, after seeing

synthesizers in rock bands for over thirty years, think of the synth as an altar, a table, a workbench, for rehearsal of cosmic drama that re-places us in relation to each other and to all beings, from humans to stars and beyond. (The next step will be for me to think of an altar as a synthesizer.)

“Cars” shows a little of what it is like for extra-human (which some name divine) powers to be drawn down in service of a goal that those on stage did not invent and cannot control, but can consent to.

That is how the first observation about the video, that it shows a little of what it’s like to be in the force field of live rock performance, is connected to the second observation, that this force field exemplifies sacred space: These embodied displays of energetic connectedness, shone through intense musical presence and self-abandonment, are the very experiential frame in which communal access to the more in the midst of life happens.

Musicians, ritualists, liturgists, and fans all understand at some level that consenting to be more deeply available is more than a pious wish. It involves more than a little discipline, of the kind whose fruit is joy.

Tommy Beaudoin, New York City

Halfway through the show, with dozens of yachts from Marin County moored along the outside of the baseball diamond and the thundering crowd on its feet, “Bruuuuce” hoots left and right, my spiritual priorities changed. From then on, whenever I have wanted to understand history and art, or longed to feel the weight of generations and the universal power of story, I have left it up to places of worship. When I’ve wanted a soul-charging, life-affirming experience in which I can feel part of something greater than myself, I’ve gone to see the Boss.

Author Téa Obreht, recounting her first rock concert when she was a teenager and recent immigrant from Yugoslavia via Cairo. Vogue, May 2012, p. 128

I first listened to the Beastie Boys around 1986 or so, when a high school friend played his Licensed to Ill cassette over and over, and our group of Risk-playing ne’er-do-wells quickly memorized the whole album. Thus began the peppering of everyday speech with Beastie Boys lyrics, many decanted from the mouth of Yauch, whose scratchy throat always made him sound like the scruffiest of the three. Well into the 90s, part of the bond I had with that group of men from high school had to do with the ability to drop Beastie lyrics into ordinary scenarios like ordering fast food at the drive-through, playing basketball, or competing in video games.

Yauch and the other Beastie Boys, just a few years older than me and my friends, seemed to grow through their 20s, 30s, and 40s in ways that kept making sense, while never letting go of their adolescent insouciance. Licensed to Ill is a ready-made soundtrack for a punk rock frat party – or suburban fantasies of same. But Yauch was instrumental in shaping the band’s later lyrical maturity and public presence in the direction of political and spiritual engagement. Yauch took up Buddhism, and penned a song for the Beastie Boys, “Bodhisattva Vow.” Here are the lyrics, followed by the song (lyrics courtesy of lyricsdepot.com, with some of my editing):

As I Develop The Awakening Mind I Praise The Buddha As They Shine
I Bow Before You As I Travel My Path To Join Your Ranks,
I Make My Full Time Task
For The Sake Of All Beings I Seek
The Enlightened Mind That I Know I’ll Reap
Respect To Shantideva And All The Others
Who Brought Down The Dharma For Sisters And Brothers
I Give Thanks For This World As A Place To Learn
And For This Human Body That I’m Glad To Have Earned
And My Deepest Thanks To All Sentient Beings
For Without Them There Would Be No Place To Learn What I’m Seeing
There’s Nothing Here That’s Not Been Said Before
But I Put It Down Now So I’ll Be Sure
To Solidify My Own Views And I’ll Be Glad If It Helps
Anyone Else Out Too
If Others Disrespect Me Or Give Me Flack
I’ll Stop And Think Before I React
Knowing That They’re Going Through Insecure Stages
I’ll Take The Opportunity To Exercise Patience
I’ll See It As A Chance To Help The Other Person
Nip It In The Bud Before It Can Worsen
A Change For Me To Be Strong And Sure
As I Think On The Buddhas Who Have Come Before
As I Praise And Respect The Good They’ve Done
Knowing Only Love Can Conquer In Every Situation
We Need Other People In Order To Create
The Circumstances For The Learning That We’re Here To Generate
Situations That Bring Up Our Deepest Fears
So We Can Work To Release Them Until They’re Cleared
Therefore, It Only Makes Sense
To Thank Our Enemies Despite Their Intent
The Bodhisattva Path Is One Of Power And Strength
A Strength From Within To Go The Length
Seeing Others Are As Important As Myself
I Strive For A Happiness Of Mental Wealth
With The Interconnectedness That We Share As One
Every Action That We Take Affects Everyone
So In Deciding For What A Situation Calls
There Is A Path For The Good For All
I Try To Make My Every Action For That Highest Good
With The Altruistic Wish To Achive Buddhahood
So I Pledge Here Before Everyone Who’s Listening
To Try To Make My Every Action For The Good Of All Beings
For The Rest Of My Lifetimes And Even Beyond
I Vow To Do My Best To Do No Harm
And In Times Of Doubt I Can Think On The Dharma
And The Enlightened Ones Who’ve Graduated Samsara

Click here to view the embedded video.

Down from such luminous heights, my favorite Beastie Boys video and one of my favorite of their songs is “Sabotage,” in which Yauch’s fat bass and phat ‘stache compete for most grandiose performance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thank you, Adam Yauch.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

There were apparently a few dozen arrests, though I did not personally see any over the course of seven hours. (Nor could I afford to get too close if things got too hot, because I needed to be free to teach the next day.) I arrived in the early afternoon at Bryant Park to find a thousand or so people getting warmed up with teach-ins, leafletting, conversations, sign-making, and picture-taking. There were also dozens of people carrying guitars (and a few basses and banjos), rehearsing for the Occupy Guitarmy, an all-volunteer guitar ensemble led by renowned rock guitarist Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine and now The Nightwatchman.

I was concerned because I thought that a thousand or so people would be a poor turnout for such a hyped-up event as this General Strike. But things changed quickly.

Around 2:00, we began marching to Union Square Park, and arrived there about 75 minutes later. As we marched, more people began joining in, and by the time we go to Union Square, there were many thousands more waiting for us. And people kept streaming in from all sides for the next couple hours. Tom Morello and a contingent from the Occupy Guitarmy played a few songs…

(Note: video contains a few obscenities, heartily sung)

Click here to view the embedded video.

…there were brief speeches about solidarity and economic justice from people representing different labor organizations, and there was plenty of Latin music to aerate everyone’s spirits in preparation for the long march to Wall Street.

A couple dozen members of Occupy Faith NYC gathered near the Gandhi statue in the park, where I joined them, and around 5:30 we began to move in a march with some 30,000+ people down Broadway all the way to lower Manhattan, a slow journey that took some three hours.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As the thousands of different banners, placards, signs, tattoos, shirts, headgear, songs and chants avowed, there was no single reason for being there, but I think it is fair to say that a great many of those gathered could endorse two basic theological statements: negatively, the market is not God; positively,

humans are created to share.

Amidst this notably relaxed atmosphere, there were occasional moments of tension, such as when the police would march with their batons out right next to protesters, or would suddenly move to clear part of a street or a sidewalk. And I saw one incident in which counter-protesters with an aggressively anti-immigration banner, who were shouting at the marchers, and were then met by the attempts of a handful of marchers to shout them down. Soon, a few marchers jumped at the counter-protesters and tore their sign in half and carried it away. I thought that was a negative mark on the day, and wished that folks could have taken an indifferent and nonviolent approach to that provocation. Getting aggressive (or repaying vocal aggression with physical aggression) only brought more attention to the anti-immigration “send them back to Mexico” counter-protesters, and facilitated the uncorking of aggressive, personal yelling on the part of some Mayday marchers. That said, I would be amazed if nothing like that happened the whole day, given how many people took part in the protest, and how various provocateurs on the sidelines try to incite just such a scuffle.

Overall, the day was festive, joyful, diverse, and for me anyway, energizing, realizing just how many people were willing to give up their day to join their cause to the causes of others in quest of a society more worthy of all of us. “We are unstoppable,” as the chants recounted, “another world is possible.”

I met my Theology of Ministry class at Fordham the next day, on Wednesday, and it seemed fitting that our topic for the day was theologies of poverty, as if the class was providing some theological language for much of what had been on display in New York City and around the world the day before. We read parts of Ricardo Antoncich’s Christians in the Face of Injustice: A Latin American Reading of Catholic Social Teaching (Orbis, 1987), and Keith Hebden’s Dalit Theology and Christian Anarchism (Ashgate, 2011).

We discussed Antoncich’s argument that according to Catholic social teaching, no one has an ultimate and unassailable natural absolute right to property, and certainly not beyond what serves their human needs. Any natural right to private property is “subordinate to the universal ordination, by the Creator’s will, of all material goods to all human beings” (p. 97). Under this divine relativization of the goods that people need to make and keep life human, access to both consumer goods as well as the means of production of goods are “rights” of all persons, and preferentially so for poor persons. With such an understanding, the church, Antoncich shows, in Latin America (and elsewhere) has a responsibility to help workers organize themselves so that they can experience agency in their lives in the name of their divine calling to experience themselves as worthy beings.

Hebden, working from Indian theologies, argues for a Christian anarchism modeled on the anarchist practices of Jesus: decentralized, non-statist, anti-imperialistic, justice-seeking, incarnated-from-below networks of disobedience in the name of the assertion of free and honorable humanity, especially and preferentially for low caste Dalit persons (in the Indian context). Starting with Jesus the Dalit (pp. 149-150), a christology from Dalit theology, I wondered how non-Indians might retranslate that christology into their own contexts, and how especially in the USA Jesus the Dalit can be translated into resolutely local terms that can inform preaching, teaching, prayer, worship.

Forty-eight hours after the conclusion of the General Strike, I have renewed hope that Occupy and the coalition of labor/activist groups that took part in Mayday will retain their energy as a social force through the summer. Occupy participants disagree about whether a physical site for occupation is still necessary — whether we need a new Zuccotti Park. I would argue that it is crucial for the future of the movement that Occupy cannot exist only as an activist social network on the Internet, as essential as that network is for every single social action and service that Occupy has undertaken. It is essential to have a physical/symbolic place where people meet face to face, strangers can be welcomed, and the “more” in life experienced, however unevenly, in an ongoing manifestation of the motivating, revolutionary and, with Hebden (and Jesus of Nazareth), anarchic idea that social resources are for sharing.

I learned how all of this can play out on the home front when my daughter announced tonight that she was going to occupy her bedroom until she got what she wanted from her parents. We held out for a full 60 seconds, and then negotiated with the Occupier about her modest demands. I should have known that all of this would come back to haunt us. I hope we’ll all continue to be so willing to meet at the (collective) bargaining table.

As I think back about what the General Strike was like, and as each reader of this blog ponders what relation we take up to the injustices in which we participate, and what spaces we take up in the spaces that have been designated for us to live, work, and love, maybe we are led to something like what the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called the state of “musement.” It is an essential condition for deeper action in life, a playful and freeform wonderment about why things are the way they are, and is a way, he wrote, to experience an “agreeable occupation of mind.” And, I would add, of space.

Here are some pictures I took at the General Strike:

From Bryant Park to Union Square

Members of the Occupy Guitarmy Playing on the Way to Union Square

More Guitarmy... It's more fun to march with music!

Sand Art: "Occupy Your Mind With Creating a Better World: Focus 100%"

At Union Square, a Maypole Symbolizing "All of Our Grievances Are Connected"

"Occupy University," where free classes are given for all

At Union Square: "Free Store: Take What You Need, Need What You Take" - food, clothing, supplies

Pilar (photo with permission), doing some reading at Union Square Park during the General Strike

NYU Students, Staff and Faculty Protesting at Union Square Park

Union Square Park: A table with materials for General Strike participants, including a poster of Trayvon Martin and a copy of _The New Jim Crow_ by Michelle Alexander

Crowd at Union Square Park

Crowd at Union Square Park

Tom Morello takes the stage at Union Square Park

Morello with the Occupy Guitarmy

Morello, Closer Picture

Union Square Park Crowd

Occupy Wall Street Meditation Space at Union Square Park

Captain America Got Major Cheers from the Crowd When He Greeted Us

Sister Susan Wilcox of Occupy Catholics on the March from Union Square to Wall Street

My sign: "Theologians for Occupy: Build a Divine Economy"

If none of this interests you, then please do shake the virtual dust from your sandals and move on, but if you want to learn more: InterOccupy is here and here; Occupy Wall Street is here and here; Occupy Faith NYC is here and here. Thanks for re-walking the General Strike with me.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

My friend Mark, who was my roommate in graduate school at Iowa State, is the one who “got me into” King’s X.  I had heard the band on Detroit rock radio, and I even knew two of their songs.  I found them interesting, but I was not anywhere near the King’s X fanatic that I am today!  Mark, however, was crazy about them!  I think back, 20 years ago, to our first discussions about music.  What was it that won me over to this music?  I think Mark’s passion about the band had something to do with my own eventual interest.  He smiled broadly everytime he talked about King’s X, whether the topic was a live show or a particular song, or meeting the musicians for the first time after waiting by their tour bus after a show.  Another aspect that won me over was Mark’s willingness to part with his beloved King’s X CDs for a few days and allow me to be initiated into their music.  I would not have been able to purchase these albums on my frugal graduate student stipend, especially if I did not know whether or not I liked them.  Finally, Mark was able to guide me through my listening experience.  He helped raise my awareness to some of the more subtle aspects of the music that I would never have heard on my own at first, and he told me which songs were, in his opinion, more powerful than others.  These insights were very helpful and, I believe, they aided my “getting into” King’s X.

This dynamic of “getting into” a band fascinates me.  It is definitely not always a “conversion” experience like St. Paul’s, although there’s no reason why it couldn’t be!  But it is powerful and, certainly, spiritually edifying.

In case anyone is open to “getting into” King’s X, you might want to start here!

Dave Nantais, Detroit, MI

Death brings with it a certain social protection for most individuals. For example, my grandfather never really had a good relationship with people. However, at his funeral an overwhelming majority of the people talking about him remembered the “positive” memories. Death tends to give the individual a shield posthumous for their name and character. Yet, with Tupac, there is a certain hallowedness that fans have when his image is misused or defamed. In comparison, the Mexican American pop-star Selena has the same social status among her followers—slander her name, and you are liable to, at worse, be killed yourself. Tupac, it would appear, is at the same level as that (although to my knowledge no one has been killed recently over slander of Tupac’s name).

Partly because of what Tupac represented to and for so many people. He was their voice, their theological reference, their place of examining pain, meaning creator in times of need. Therefore, it should be of no surprise that Tupac is as protected as he is and that some of the reactions received regarding this hologram are that of frustration and anger.

What I find equally as interesting is the technology used to create this image of Tupac. In some scenes

with the correct angle, it is as if he was there on stage with Dre and Snoop. It is equally important to remember the manufacturing of religion within Hip Hop as well. Dre and Snoop were not completely innocent in this event. They both knew that 1) the crowd would be amazed by their resurrection of Tupac, 2) it would generate, at some levels, revenue for the artists, and 3) Tupac is a “go to” artists that almost any Hip Hop fan—including many other musical genre’s and cultures—can relate to instantly. Building on this, a sort of intimacy is created to the point of audience members tearing up as they see Shakur rapping. And one cannot get away from the entrance of Shakur to and from the stage. The adorning blinged out crucifix, the shirtless body, and the animated personality all aided in this manufacturing of a social deity.

Is C-Bo right? Did Dre and Snoop act as “vultures?” I am not one to say. I will say, however, that it is important to remember the social significance of Tupac even in death. I remember a few years back, an ignorant editor to a publishing house I was pitching a book idea to, told me that Tupac was no longer relevant and that no one who had been dead so long could ever command a reader audience. As you can probably imagine, I did not get the book contract (and thankful I did not), but the point in all of that is that Tupac does in fact, almost sixteen years  after his death, have sainthood status near to that of Saint Paul, Saint Thomas, Saint Mary, Mother Theresa, and in some cases even Jesus. We cannot afford to miss out on the entourage of meanings.

See for yourself…

Click here to view the embedded video.