Relationships

The Soul of Hip-Hop

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I’m making my way through Daniel White Hodge’s book, The Soul of Hip Hop: Rims, Timbs and a Cultural Theology.  Hodge declares with Russell Potter that Hip Hop is the voice of post-moderns.  Its definitely the defining sound on the edges of the last twenty five years of my life.  He identifies four key postmodern elements.  The following is directly from the book, pages 67-68.

1.  Restoration.  The goal of Hip Hop culture, especially in many spoken word venues, is that the authentic self be restored and built up from its broken state.

2.  Self-awareness.  For Hip Hoppers, to be self-aware simply means to go deeper into who you are as a person while continually being transparent and open to new ideas.  This is nothing new for Christians either.  Jesus challenges us to probe deeper and ask the hard questions by giving us multifaceted parables and complex statements about his gospel message.

3.  Power, control and institutions.  Most of the people I interviewed who agreed that no matter the type of rap genre, “questioning authority” still remains widespread.  Hip Hop continues to ask the question, “Whose authority/power/institution should we follow?  And what makes them right?

4.  Recovering empty answers.  Hip Hop is about making some “right” in a world that is not “right.”  Rap artists such as Tupac, Ice Cube, Church D. Eminem and David Branner challenge the broken promises given by politicians, church officials and other people in control.  A crucial scene in the film Freedom Writers (2007) takes place when students ask why they should “respect” the teacher.  Was it simply because she was a teacher–in charge, having institutional authority?  The students then proceeded to break down their life and struggles and how so many “adults” had let them down.

Hip Hop culture speaks for those who need a voice in the public sphere.  Many urban youth do not have this “voice.”  Rap music and Hip Hop culture provide that outlet and medium in which to argue, love, hate, yell, whisper, chill, eat, sleep, walk, talk, confide and build community in a postmodern world.  This function of Hip Hop culture is not articulated by many living in the ‘hood; it is more felt than talked about.  But suburban youth are looking for that transcendence too.  The postmodernism of Hip Hop gives meaning, voice and connection to a widespread community–Black, Brown and White, urban and suburban, wealthy and poor alike.

 

Eat More Garlic Bread

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Today in the preparation for our lunch with friends we ran out of time to prepare our own garlic bread so I sent one of the kids out to Buy Low on Fraser St.  In reading the directions for heating from the packaging I read this:

Origin of Garlic

Garlic has been a prized ingredient for thousands of years.  Ancient cultures valued garlic for many reasons including its ability to ward off vampires.

A study found that serving garlic bread at dinner enhanced the quality of family interactions.  Researchers at an American Psychosomatic Society meeting reported that when 50 test families were served garlic bread, they enjoyed 8% more positive interactions and 22% less negative ones.  That means garlic bread can help promote and maintain shared family experiences around the dinner table.

Source:  Smell and Taste ____ Research Foundation, 58th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society, March 2000.

Everyone at our table agreed: more garlic bread at family meals would be good.  However, there must be adequate provisions of garlic bread!  We had tears and gnashing of teeth when some members of the family were confronted with a two-piece limit.

Try it yourself.  Improve your family life!  Eat more garlic bread–together–at dinners–sans the vampires.

 

Media & Being “Proximate”

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If you turn your ear and eyes to media today it will be difficult to miss that this is the one year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti.  I still find the images painful to watch and the ensuing devastation in the lives of people feels like a weight even though I am thousands of miles away.

I’m now 100 pages into Tony Blair’s biography, “A Journey, My Political Life.”  In his chapter, The Apprentice Leader” he reflects on the impact Steven Spielberg had on him through the movie Schindler’s List.  He writes,

“There was a scene in it I kept coming back to.  The commandant, played by Ralph Fiennes, is in his bedroom arguing and she is mocking him, just like any girlfriend might do.  While in the bathroom, he spies an inmate of the camp.  He take up his rifle and shoots him.  They carry on their argument.  It’s her I think of.  She didn’t shoot anyone; she was a bystander.

Except she wasn’t.  There were no bystanders in that situation.  You participate, like it or not.  You take sides by inaction as much as by action.  Why were the Nazis able to do these things?  Because of people like him?  No because of people like her.

She was in the next room.  She was proximate.  The responsibility seems therefore more proximate too.  But what of the situations we know about, but we are not proximate to?  What of the murder distant from us the injustice we cannot see, the pain we cannot witness but from which we nonetheless know is out there?  We know what is happening, proximate or not.  In that case, we are not bystanders either.  If we know and we fail to act, we are responsible.

A few months later, Rwanda erupted in genocide.  We knew.  We failed to act.  We were responsible.

Not very practical, is it, as a reaction?  The trouble is its’ how I fell.  Whether such reactions are wise in someone charged with a leading a country is another matter.”  A Journey, p. 63.

Fortunate for many people around the world, the global connections media and the internet have created for us make us proximate.  Unfortunate for us, I believe, is that we are being conditioned to violence, awfulness, tragedy in a way that makes us inactive though proximate.  Unfortunate is to retreat to self-righteousness as a form of reason for non-action.  Compassion for others moves us to participate in both relief and development.  What we do with others more proximate than us, i.e. in this instance with Haitians on the ground in Haiti is I believe an essential though difficult process.  Leaders whose hearts are moved will do it.

Looking to take share in the responsibility of “proximate” try these organizations out:

haitipartners.org

worldvision.ca

churcheshelpingchurches.org

baptistglobalresponse.com

The Origin of Love

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I have been reflecting on God ‘s love for us in Christ and am drawn steadily back to 1 John 4:10.  “This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”  These reflections on the Gospel truly show us the good news of Jesus’ kingdom.  To be governed, constrained, compelled by this great love is much greater than the self-loathing so easily generated by our efforts at being loveable.

I was delighted today to read in James Bryan Smith’s book, Embracing the Love of God” how God had moved him from self-loathing and earnest promises to “do better” to rest in the love of God shown us in Christ.  Smith quotes Soren Kierkegard’s prayer:

You have loved us first, O God, alas!  We speak of it in terms of history as if You loved us first but a single time, rather than that without ceasing.  You have loved us first many times and everyday and our whole life through.  When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul toward You–You are there first–You have loved us first; if I rise at dawn and at that same second turn my soul toward You in prayer, You are there ahead of me, You have loved me first.  When I withdraw from the distractions of the day and turn my soul toward You, You are there first and thus forever.  And we speak ungratefully as if You have loved us first only once.

May this truth of Jesus become our on-going reality and experience.

 

Building Trust by Building Connections

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We build trust in relationships in at least two ways.  I am most comfortable with “doing what I say I will do.”  However, it’s the second that is a growing edge in my life:  building trust by building connections.  A connection occurs when another person knows we understand their heart.

Henry Cloud writes about building trust through connection in his book Integrity.

“Fundamentally, what undergirds this component [building trust through connection] is involvement in the “other.”  Connection is the opposite of “detachment,” whereby a person is a kind of island unto him– or herself.  Now, don’t confuse that with being introverted or extroverted.  Those are styles that can be used in the service of either connectedness or detachment.  You can be very extroverted, and even nice to people, and never establish a deep bond.  In fact, an extrovert’s wordiness can even serve to keep people at bay and never allow them in.

Detachment is about not crossing the space to actually enter into another person’s world through curiosity and desire to know them, to understand them, to be “with” them, to be present with them, and ultimately to care for them.  Sadly, a lot of loving and nice people are detached in this way, and their relationships suffer for it.

People feel cared about, and trust is built, when they know that we have a genuine interest in knowing them, knowing about them, and having what we know matter.”  Dr. Henry Cloud, Integrity, p. 56.

Because I am an optimist I often fall into the trap of dismissing how my wife, children, or friends feel by saying something like, “Oh that’s not too bad.”  or “Oh that will surely work out.”  or the real connection killer, “You don’t really feel that way.”  Each of these statements dismiss or minimize not just the feelings of the other, but the connection opportunity that we had before us.

The Gospel presents us with Jesus who “sympathizes” with us through His incarnation and therefore is able to connect.  Most often my unwillingness to enter into the emotion of another is really a reflection of my own discomfort with emotionally realities in my own life.  The grace of God expressed through Jesus presents me with a saviour who gives me a new heart for Him and for people.  Now as a responder to grace I am looking to give this grace to others around me.

There is nothing like “being understood.”  It can be both a freeing and scary experience.  Understanding is one of the best gifts you can give to your spouse, children, friends, or coworkers.  Francis of Assisi asked God to help him so that he “would seek not so much to be understood as to understand.”  The writer of Proverbs identifies both elements of trust essential for healthy growing relationships.

The purposes of a man’s heart are deep waters,
but a man of understanding draws them out.

Many a man claims to have unfailing love,
but a faithful man who can find?  Proverbs 20:5-6 NIV

Drawing out what is in the heart of another person requires that we have an internal attitude like Christ, of having an interest in the other.  (Philippians 2:3-5)  But it is also a skill.  When we hear the emotive language of another acknowledging that we have heard and understood the feeling this person has is part of building trust.  For the “older brothers” among us saying, “Wow, you must feel really angry about that,” or “I can see how you might be very worried about this situation,”  sends fear down to our toenails, because we are afraid that acknowledging a feeling means that it is “right.”  Not so, acknowledging the emotion of another’s heart gives the gift of understanding and reduces anxiety so that you and the person across from you can grow.

Try it out with those close to you:  seek to connect to their hearts by hearing the emotion conveyed in their verbal and non-verbal cues.