On Twenty One Pilots and the Point of it All

"What's the point?"
"What are you looking for?"
"What did you come here to find?"

Last Wednesday, I saw Twenty One Pilots play a sold-out show at Cleveland's House of Blues, and frontman Tyler Joseph peppered their high-energy, electrifying performance with questions like these, questions which are echoed throughout his lyrics. For a long time I've been meaning to write a post about the band's lyrics, and I've used a number of their songs for discussion in my Morality classes, but being a terrible procrastinator, I've let that thought sit for about a year. Instead, I'd like to say a few brief words about their performance.
The concert itself was built around the song "Trees," the second-to-last track on their sophomore album Vessels. As they took the stage in hoodies and ski masks, a remix of "Trees" was playing in the background. A few songs later, after a number of wardrobe changes and a succession of masks had finally been shed, Tyler played just the first verse of the song on ukulele before launching into "House of Gold." Again, a number of songs later, he sat down a the piano and played just the first verse, before going immediately into another song. Finally, they finished the concert using "Trees" as their encore. Towards the end of the song, the stage hands brought out sheets of plywood with bass drums fixed to them, and Joseph and Josh Dun (the drummer) came out onto the crowd and played them over our heads.

Given the prominence they gave this song, I think it bears looking at:

                                                                          "Trees"

I know where you stand
Silent in the trees
And that's where I am
Silent in the trees.
Why won't you speak
Where I happen to be?
Silent in the trees
Standing cowardly.

I can feel your breath.
I can feel my death.
I want to know you.
I want to see.
I want to say, hello.

The song itself is fairly simple, repeating these two verses several times as the music builds. At the climax of the song, Tyler repeats the "hello," moving from wanting to say hello to actually saying hello. But to whom?

The first time I heard this song, I was struck by how much it reflected my own spiritual state as one who stands silently among the trees. This song is probably the best example of Twenty One Pilots' overall project, which seems to be a constant sitting with mystery in order to encourage their listeners to think (but don't take my word for it, take theirs, under "band name meaning").

This song is clear evidence of a deep personal struggle, the struggle with one of the most fundamental questions surrounding God's existence: if God exists, why is he silent? The interesting thing that Tyler does here is to recognize that he is also silent in the trees. While he sits with and suffers God's silence, he also sees that his own silence is that of a coward. At the same time, he recognizes that the place where he is, the silence, isn't permanent; it's only where he "happens" to be.

In fact, there may be an implied connection between the fact that God is silent and that the speaker is "standing cowardly." Standing is static, a refusal to move. In some cases, this can be a sign of strength, a refusal to be swayed or led astray. Here, though, the speaker is standing out of cowardice, hiding in the trees, refusing to be led at all. Even in his cowardice, even in God's silence, though, he still feels God's presence, and his own death looming. In light of the fact that he will die, he realizes his own mortality, the fact that he is not God, and because of this, he longs to encounter God.

The song reaches its climax and conclusion at the end, as Tyler chants the last hello's, moving from wanting to say to saying: he is no longer silent in the trees, but is reaching out, seeking relationship with the God whose presence he already knows, because when we know there is a God, we long to know that God.

While they never mentioned God once in the concert or very often in their lyrics, what Twenty One Pilots do is a very subtle form of evangelization. By constantly confronting the culture with the aspect of mystery ("What's the point? I promise you there is one, but I'm not going to tell you what it is. When you find it, though, it is beautiful"), Twenty One Pilots are ultimately confronting the culture with God, who is the Mystery, the entirely Other, the One from whom our meaning and purpose come.

Why is it that they are able to get rooms packed full of people to sing along about things that they may or may not believe or even understand? I think that it's because their sense of mystery touches a deep longing in our hearts, a longing for meaning, for intimacy, and for belonging, all of which are answered and fulfilled in God.

By reaching the culture and holding on to mystery, Twenty One Pilots is already participating in building up a culture of life and hope, and one in which they can softly plant the seeds of an awareness of God's presence. This isn't secret knowledge (they're not gnostics, after all), but their listeners have to think in order to pick up their message, which is, after all, their whole point, calling people out of complacency and into new relationship, especially with God.

Verse From "Car Radio"

There are things we can do
But from the things that work there are only two
And from the two that we choose to do
Peace will win
And fear will lose
There's faith and there's sleep
We need to pick one please because
Faith is to be awake
And to be awake is for us to think
And for us to think is to be alive
And I will try with every rhyme
To come across like I am dying
To let you know you need to try to think

On What I Did On My Last Weekend Before School Kicked in Again, Or, The Giftedness of Being

Last weekend, after sitting around for about a week and a half and, predictably, having done little to no preparation for the coming school year, I took four days out and drove the six hours from Clevetown out to Scranton, PA for a retreat with Msgr. John Esseff, a retired priest of the Diocese of Scranton who has spent much of his ministry in giving retreats to priests, seminarians, and religious. Back in the 80's he met Mother Teresa, who sent him all over the world to give retreats to her sisters. He also served as her spiritual director and confessor for a time. Here they are, back around the time when I was born:

Msgr. Esseff is the one on the right.

When he was younger, Msgr. also had the great fortune of having St. Padre Pio as his own spiritual director. All I'm saying is, the guy's got chops, and I feel deeply blessed to have been able to spend a few days praying under his direction.
There were really a number of important things that I learned on this retreat, and I will spend a long time with my notes from the retreat, unpacking it all and letting God's grace continue to unfold. For now, I just want to offer one image from prayer, even though it may seem quite obvious to most people who stumble across this blog.
Msgr.'s direction was to spend 4 hours a day in prayer and then meet with him for an hour to reflect on the prayer. During those 4 hours, he gave me 3 scripture passages (the 4th hour was to revisit the previous 3) and instructed me to pray to the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and Mary, in that order. I took him literally, and spent about 15 minutes an hour with each of them, looking at the passage, and just talking back and forth. This was a new experience of prayer for me & one which I will no doubt write a future post on, but for now I'll stick to just the one image.
On the last day of the retreat, I was praying with Mary and I asked her why I have desires for good things which seem to be unfulfillable. Specifically, I wondered why I have a deep longing for family and intimacy with another person when my experiences often seem to direct me more toward single or ordained life. In response, Mary reminded me of when I was a little kid, sitting in the pew at church, and my dad would give each of us a dollar to put into the collection plate as it came around. A couple of things here: 1) it wasn't my money. 2) I had no way of earning my own money to put in - I was too young. 3) It would have been insulting to my dad if I'd put the money in my pocket and refused to donate it.
My dad gave us each that dollar so that we could participate, so that we had something to give. This is an image of how God works: everything we are and have is gift from God, even those things that we give back to God. Mary was reminding me that even those things which I think are mine, as if they were fundamental to my being & could somehow offer me some fulfillment are in fact just further evidence of God's grace active in my life. In other words, we come before God completely and totally naked, with nothing to offer, so God gives us great and beautiful things in order that we might have something to give back, so that we can participate.

I know that I have heard it said over and over again that God gives us gifts in order that we might give them away, but this was a new experience, a new realization of that truth for me. To realize that even my desires are gift and can be offered back to God to allow him to have even more of my heart was something that gave me new eyes to look at myself with. What do I hold on to, believing it to be my own? What do I keep closer to my heart than God? What do I say "without this, I would not be myself" about? If it is anything beyond Christ, then I am wrong, and sadly so, and even Christ is complete gift to us from himself and from the Father, through the Holy Spirit. Everything about our being, even that most fundamental ground of Belovedness is complete gift. The deeper implication of this is that even the great and beautiful things about ourselves are given to us so that we can participate in the great economy of God's love, so that we can imitate the Father and the Son in giving ourselves away until each and every part of ourselves if aligned to the Spirit, who is love. This is means living in true honesty, because seeing ourselves as naked as babes before God is the true state of our being, which is complete gift.
A last & final thought: the other day, I was sitting with a friend of mine who was lamenting that he has 2 more years of grad school, before he can "start his life." There is something deep within each of us that longs to do great things, and perhaps the most difficult thing to realize in our short lives is that the only great thing is to love, which doesn't start tomorrow or next week or next year, but now, right now. God gives us these great & bursting hearts so that we may pour ourselves out for each other and for him.

Let us live by love so we may die of love and glorify the God who is all love! - Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity

On Being Challenged, Follicly

I spent a good deal of time this summer travelling around, seeing people I hadn't seen in a while, some of them not for years. Over and over again, I got feedback on the state of my head hair (or lack thereof). "Whoa, what happened to your hair?" Well, I'll tell you: it went the way of all good things - away from me.
At one point, I was visiting my sister at her college & as we walked out of the building to go to dinner, a pickup truck rolled by & a teenager of some sort yelled out the window, "Hey you old baldy!" I can only assume that he was yelling at me, since my sister still possesses her full head of hair.

I wanted to put a picture here of a kid yelling out the window of a car, but instead I found this picture of a meat mug, full of gravy. Mmmmm, greasy gravy glopping down my gullet. 

This reminded me of a bible story which is no doubt already intimately familiar to most balding Christians: 2 Kings 2:23-24, which is as follows -

            From there Elisha went up to Bethel. While he was on the way, some small boys 

            came out of the city and jeered at him. “Go up, baldhead,” they shouted, “go up, 

            baldhead!” 24 The prophet turned and saw them, and he cursed them in the name 

            of the LORD. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the 

            children to pieces.

I related this story to my sister and we laughed and waited expectantly for the bears to come, but the pickup just drove around the decidedly and remarkably bear-less corner. Maybe the bears were waiting back at their house.

I did find some riculawesome art for this incident, but I think this one is my favorite. Just look at how cuddly those bears are! And how terribly, terribly eviscerated all of those children are.

Anyways, on to the moral meat (for the mug meat, refer back to the picture at the top of this post): Prematurely balding is an issue when it comes to our culture of youth and vanity. Way back when I was in the seminary and my balding was beginning to become evident, a friend of mine asked why I didn't start using Propecia or the like. "After all," he remarked, "your lack of hair could become a barrier between you and your future parishioners." Luckily, I eventually withdrew from formation, so I've never had to test his hypothesis, but as absurd as it was, there is some resonance to it, though perhaps the other way around.

The truth is that while I was embarrassed by being called bald by a complete stranger and any number of my friends and family, I was also thankful. This will sound ridiculous, of course, but here it is: after getting yelled at on the corner, it occurred to me that these small humiliations could be gathered up and offered to God. Once that thought was planted in my brain, I kept revisiting the memory to keep revisiting the shame & keep offering it up. Granted, this is really only a very small amount of shame, but it reminds me of my finitude, which is really the great project that God has before Him with each of us.

With most men, it's a waiting game, hoping to hold on to whatever hair they can until they reach a "dignified" age & can finally throw that old toupee away.

Huh. Evidently a brand new toupee is only around $90. Maybe I should stop writing and start ordering my dignity back.

The thing is that with God, there is no waiting game, not from His end, anyway. God is the eternal Now who sees our past, present, and future all at once. To God, our past blessings and future graces are all being given at once. Being in time allows us to revisit our past graces (like being made fun of in front of my sister) and anticipate in hope the future blessings God intends for us, while trying to allow the current evidences of God's presence & love to break our hearts of stone.

So what does all of that have to do with balding? Depending on the person, a whole lot. If I understand that it is God's purpose to form me into the image of His Son and I also understand that it is mainly my pride that gets in the way of participating in that salvation, I can embrace every little humiliation God graciously grants to me and live in the hope of the day when I will definitively live forth Christ's life, even if this is not fully accomplished until Heaven. A good friend of mine recently remarked that God's desire is bring us into union with Himself, and will therefore give us whatever sufferings and humiliations necessary to accomplish that. Whatever amount of suffering and humiliation we are not seeking on our own, God will graciously offer to us. So from that perspective, prematurely losing my hair is capable of being a humiliation which makes up for some of the suffering and self-death that I avoid in my pride and fear (and there is a whole lot that I avoid). In this sense, it is a great blessing, and one which is undoubtedly necessary for me and the breaking of my pride. In this sense, all of those little things that we hate about our own bodies may in fact be very very small avenues to the salvation that God longs for for each of us. 

That being said, I am no saint yet. I still like to imagine myself with considerably more hair than I have, or only from the forehead down.

Could our salvation in fact come through the physical? Are even our own bodies bound up in God's plan for our good, and not our woe? Undoubtedly.

On How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Well, after over a full year of silence, the day you've all been eagerly awaiting on the tenterhooks of rabid anticipation has finally arrived. Me, your favorite Inkler, has reemerged from utter anonymity to the relative anonymity of a blog read by about 3 people back when I was posting regularly. (yes, please do cue gratuitous picture of a cat. This is the Internet, right?)

On the other hand, that cat may be launching at a face, a very human face, with claws extended. Let that haunt your dreams.

Perhaps an explanation is in order: when I started this blog, I had very real intentions of updating it at least once a week, on issues of faith, art, and general human living, all the while trying to actually make it worth reading. That went on for a bit (maybe other than the "worth reading it" bit - the jury's still out on that) & the reason was very simple: I was working a rather mindless job in an office so low-level that the company had about 8 people working for it, only 1 of whom had his own office. Two others shared an office, and the rest of us were in a room with desks in various corners without any sort of dividers. I answered phones and did data entry. I did that for a year while I was finishing my MA in theology, and was then - fortuitously - able to get a job teaching Theology at a Catholic school.

Note: Not what I look like.

While I'd been sitting at the desk bleeding my eyes out and doing what certainly felt like something bordering on an invasion of privacy, it'd been fairly easy to keep this blog going. When the phone wasn't ringing & I had some down time between looking up & compiling personal (and yet nevertheless public, mind you) information about people all over the country, I'd write a bit & try to keep my brain from melting out of my head. 

Oh, no, please do go on about what you had for lunch, ma'am!

So yes, I wrote while on the clock, which isn't, strictly speaking, the right thing to do. But there it is. Once I started teaching, nearly all of my brainpower and energy was suddenly and un-apologetically sucked down the drain of the perils of high school.

Theeeeen I figured I'd start posting again this summer, once I had time to actually think like a human being again. I even wrote a list of topics to address when I finally got my fingers back on the keyboard. Instead, I went on a 9,000+ mile road trip!

Starting in the City of Dreams (Cleveland, obviously), I drove to Columbus to Pittsburgh to Cape Cod for a week and a half to Philadelphia to Gettysburg (totally awesome) to Andersonville (Confederate POW camp in GA where a relative of mine died) to Milledgeville (home of one of my favorite authors, Flannery O'Connor) to New Orleans to Austin to Alamosa, CO to Ouray, CO for a month to Lincoln to Minneapolis and on back to the City of Awesome. (side note: I just spent about 20 minutes trying to draw a map of my trip on Google Maps for a visual for you. Let's just say that I got bored and started throwing stuff at people).

The graphic would have gone here. Ehn... maybe if I was getting paid for this.

Okay, now I'm just boring myself. The point is, I am returning with a long list things to blog about, so I should have plenty of material for a while. Second year teaching is easier than first year, right? ... right?

Peace out.