So Saint Patrick’s Day got a little weird at the end. Not so much for me since I just went to bed, but for acoustic punk rockers in San Francisco. “Acoustic punk rockers” might ought to be used to things getting weird, yet there are always new ways to make things strange. And if anyone can make an acoustic set strange in a skinny minute, it’s Michelle Shocked.
Maybe you know the story already, but if you don’t, allow me to elucidate. Last Sunday night, Michelle Shocked was playing a show at a club called Yoshi’s in San Francisco. Things went off the rails when Shocked began to describe the vantage point of some of the folks in her prayer group. An audience member was recording a bootleg and you can hear the audio here:
It would be awesome if I could say that Michelle Shocked was being sarcastic the whole time. Clearly she was not. It would also helpful if she were clearly siding with her prayer group friends the whole time. That doesn’t seem to be the case either. I would hazard to guess that no one, Michelle perhaps least of all, is really clear about what she is trying to say. She released an open letter a couple of days later, but from her continued erratic behavior (as evidenced on the Nicole Sandler show) it’s still not clear what’s going on.
Again, I suspect it might be most opaque to Michelle herself. She is not the first person to find herself pulled between a Christian community which she loves and a secular community which has formed who she is. Many of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s experienced an increasing sense of isolation as we witnessed the dehumanization of a culture ever more fixated on materialism. Punk rock expressed our frustrations and drew us together under the belief that there was more to the experience of living than what was available at the mall. This fundamental understanding broke into the popular consciousness with Kurt Cobain’s full throated “We’re alive now!” scream.
Which is, of course, the message of evangelical Christianity. The good news of the Gospels is that death is no longer the end of the story, and while I know that many folks look at that in terms of what happens after our bodies die, there is no denying that many evangelical worship services are alive in the here and now. It’s this sense of vitality and a willingness to acknowledge a need deeper than the stock room of an Abercrombie and Fitch that can make evangelical Christianity essential in people’s lives.
Whether we experience an authentic community in CBGB’
s
or COGICs, the question is where we go from there. Some people (and I’d put the Apostle Paul in this category) want to make sure that the integrity of the community is maintained. In order to do that, they will want to draw distinctions between who is and who is not in the group. There are others who are so filled with the life of the community that they want to draw everyone in. I think that’s what Michelle Shocked was trying to do, and I think it made her a little bit nuts.
It makes me a little bit nuts too. I want my brothers and sisters in Christ to understand why the punk rockers are so enraged. I want my brothers and sisters in the Ramones to understand that the Jesus cleared the Temple out of many of the same frustrations they feel. Trying to get that message out means making ourselves vulnerable to each group by reaching out to both. It’s not easy, and we might not do it well. I think Michelle Shocked’s biggest mistake may have been to try before she was really ready.
I’m also not sure how one gets ready to share a message about radical inclusiveness. How do you explain, in a world of 20 second sound bites and 140 characters that you love gay people and the people who hate them? That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know how, with integrity, I can accept people who preach the damnation of my gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters. I don’t how, as a Christian, I can refuse to love them. I know for damn sure that I can’t explain that on talk radio or from the stage at Yoshi’s.