As if Dr. King’s LIFE wasn’t enough for the Inspirational Insanity Department, this video was created by The Gregory Brothers.
And for those of you who still think history is dead, check out John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill throwing down some beats.
Patty Griffin Up to the Mountain
I went up to the mountain
Because you asked me to
Up over the clouds
To where the sky was blue
I could see all around me
Everywhere
I could see all around me
EverywhereSometimes I feel like
I’ve never been nothing but tired
And I’ll be walking
Till the day I expire
Sometimes I lay down
No more can I do
But then I go on again
Because you ask me toSome days I look down
Afraid I will fall
And though the sun shines
I see nothing at all
Then I hear your sweet voice, oh
Oh, come and then go, come and then go
Telling me softly
You love me soThe peaceful valley
Just over the mountain
The peaceful valley
Few come to know
I may never get there
Ever in this lifetime
But sooner or later
It’s there I will go
Sooner or later
It’s there I will go
Happy birthday Dr. King. Thank you. Thank you for going to the mountain. That mountain is still there, but it is considerably smaller than when you last saw it. For those of us dedicated to climbing mountains of injustice, you remain a source of incredible strength and inspiration. I hope you’re enjoying the Peaceful Valley.
One Day by Matisyahu
Sometimes I lay under the moon
And thank God I’m breathing
Then I pray don’t take me soon
Cause I am here for a reason
Sometimes in my tears I drown
But I never let it get me down
So when negativity surrounds
I know someday
It’ll all turn around because…
All my life I’ve been waiting for
I’ve been praying for
For the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more
There’ll be no more war
And our children will play…
One day, One day, One day, ohhhh
One day, One day, One day, ohhhh
it’s not about
win or lose
because we all lose
when they feed on the souls of the innocent
blood drenched pavement
keep on moving though the waters stay raging
in this maze you can lose your way (your way)
it might drive you crazy but dont let it faze you no way (no way)
sometimes in my tears I drown
but I never let it get me down
so my negativity surrounds
I know some day it’ll all turn around
because
All my life I’ve been waiting for
I’ve been praying for
For the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more
There’ll be no more war
And our children will play…
One day, One day, One day, ohhhh
One day, One day, One day, ohhhh
one day this all will change
stop with the violence, down with the hate
one day we’ll all be free,
and brought to be
under the same sun, singing songs of freedom
like
One day, one day, ohhhh
One day, one day, ohhhh
All my life I’ve been waiting for
I’ve been praying for
For the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more
There’ll be no more war
And our children will play…
One day, One day, One day, ohhhh
One day, One day, One day, ohhhh
…you spend the cold, dark hours of Black Friday morning waiting to score the best deals at a bookstore. A used bookstore no less. One handing out free giftcards to the first 100 people inside. And subsequently get excited when you only have to pay ten cents for your book.
Well, I mean, that’s what I hear people do if they’re nerds. Ahem.
If you celebrated Thanksgiving, I hope it was enjoyable.
When I saw the song title, “Stronger than Jesus” I couldn’t make it play fast enough. Right now, I’m loving songs about Jesus from those who lay no claim to belief, and so there was never a moment of deciding whether or not to listen to this song. Stronger than Jesus? What could that mean? What is stronger than Jesus? I’d been taught to believe that nothing could ever be stronger than Jesus!
(Sorry for the poor video quality; I chose this video because the sound quality is good and the lyrics are clear. The official music video for this song is here, but I was afraid that the campy-ness would distract from the lyrics.)
A Camp (Yes, that is the girl from The Cardigans. Oh hi, 1996!)
Stronger Than Jesus
Who told you love is the Alpha and Omega? And that your heart will lead you to the only one? It’s a curse, it’s the hammer that will break you. It’s a poison hidden in a bon bon.
Don’t you know love is stronger than Jesus? Don’t you know love can kill anyone? Bring it on; wars and diseases. You know that love can do you like a shotgun.
Can’t resist them, the sailors and the soldiers. Taking aim, a rabbit on a rifle range. Pay no mind to what your momma told you. You’re the fool who’s chasing down the candy cane.
It’s a riddle how lovers can stay alive, but we bloom and breathe in all decline.
Don’t you know love is stronger than Jesus? Don’t you know love can kill anyone? Bring it on; wars and diseases. You know that love can do you like a shotgun.
O, oh no
O, oh no
See the people heading for disaster, standing in line just looking for a little fun, love is a fire, a hot hot blaster, and we’re the Belgians burning in the Congo sun.
We’ll believe there’s trust in strangers. Any monkey looking like a savior. It’s a riddle how we’re all still living now. Oh, how little we know, oh.
Don’t you know love is stronger than Jesus? Don’t you know love can kill anyone? Bring it on; wars and diseases. You know that love can do you like a shotgun.
What if she’s got a point? What if love is stronger than Jesus? What does that mean? What could that mean? Is it pure heresy or is there some truth there?
What if love is stronger than Jesus, and that’s why he isn’t still hanging around here physically. What if he came to show us how to radically love and then took off because he knew we could handle it? What if Jesus thinks that a giant group of people who radically love each other IS a bigger and better solution than just him down here telling us what to do all the time? What if that is what I could actually believe instead of fighting with the old images of Anglo J.C. who exists only to fix my problems and help me prosper?
Or what if Jesus is something we’ve constructed to hide behind because it’s too scary to love radically, so we make the difficult things his problem?
Or maybe it’s all just heresy?
Please feel free to add your questions or comments in the comment section.
The Fun Theory. Sounds good, right? Unless you’re me, and you’re immediately skeptical when someone tells you that they promise it will be fun. So it was a good thing I came across the videos first, and had no idea that they were in connection with a corporately sponsored contest. (This is a great example of how much I must miss about the world by prejudging it all before I have any idea what is actually going on!)
The Fun Theory, as it says on the website, “is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.” These three videos were made by Volkswagen to get the creative juices flowing for the contest they are holding to see how many other great ideas can be generated for the betterment of behavior everywhere.
I absolutely LOVE this idea. I am TERRIBLE at thinking like this. And I don’t just mean that I don’t have the wherewithal to build a piano staircase, or a bottle bank arcade. I get busy, and everything feels like work, and I get tired of the seeming endlessness of it all. But what would happen if I applied this “theory” to every day life? How would that change doing the dishes, or sweeping the floor, or even getting out of bed?
I love that the contest is open to all ideas, and the only rule is that it “changes people’s behavior for the better.”The payoffs aren’t bribes, but pure joy. Then what exactly doesn’t this apply to? I may not be officially entering the contest, but I have definitely unofficially entered. Which is great, because it means I don’t have to have my answers turned in by Dec 15th!
What if this Fun Theory wasn’t just a theory, but became a mindset that turned into a lifestyle?
What if I applied this “theory” to God, theology, and church?
Check out the website to see some of the entries. I’m a big fan of the Cycle Bus, Handwashing Art, and the Plate-Jukebox.
This might be old news in some circles, but only today did I discover the Crazy Christian Clips site. I’ve lost several hours of an already highly productive day watching crazy clip after crazy clip and have now run through the entirety of my emotional range, however limited it might be. While I have no desire to stunt myself or anyone else in the areas of graciousness and openness towards Evangelical sub-cultures, I thought it a worthwhile topic to bring up, especially in the midst of the Inspirational Insanity posts. As I watched these clips, I laughed, I cried, I was stunned, I was angry, I was weepy, I was self-righteous, I was grateful, I was frightened, I was speechless. So I decided to write a post about it. Naturally.
It was while I was watching the video entitled, “How to fit in at almost any church” when all the turbulence I was feeling emotionally finally hit me as sentences. Look! Look at all the creative energy being spent here! Look at us spending it on ourselves. Look at us with our inside jokes. Look at us stealing things from popular culture and instead of using them to showcase all of the different ways we seek something outside of and greater than ourselves, we make them “family friendly.” Look at us thinking we’re giving people viable alternatives comedically, creatively, or musically. (See, I warned you I got all self-righteous.)
One of the most difficult things I am having to relearn on this road out of Fundamentalism is how to cultivate is my redemptive imagination. Instead of using my imagination to redeem Top 40 hits into WWJD lyrics, I’m learning to find the good that already exists around us. Which is surprisingly difficult once you’ve been trained to identify the bad so that you can arm yourself against it. When not in a church setting, out with the people who supposedly have no idea that it’s not okay to give cigarettes to children, I found that not much of what I’d been told was the truth actually made much sense. Not to mention that those who don’t know it isn’t okay to breed ferrets in public are some of the most hospitable, unselfish, open people I’d ever met. The scripts I was prepared with were useless and flimsy at best. If we truly believe that faith is worth sharing, then why don’t we share it in ways that make sense to everyone, not just those of us who think we know the rules?
Joel Stein wrote a piece that ran in Time magazine this summer called Christian Improv: What’s Funny at Warren’s Church where he articulates some of the same, but from an “outsider’s” perspective.
Clearly, I still have some healing left to do. As I reread this, I see how judgemental I can still be – especially towards those people I think should know better. I find myself with a shortage of grace or openness towards them. Clinging to being right instead of critique by creation. Using my own creative energy to lecture about what is wrong and bad instead of channeling the energy towards the creation of something showcasing the good around me. It’s so high up here on my horse. And a bit drafty too.
Have you ever been working through something for a really long time and you can’t seem to find any answers that stick? You ever find things that seem like answers, so you try them on for awhile only to find that they don’t quite fit the way you need them to fit? Or maybe you’ve lived through a drought, and there’s nothing that seems even close to an answer or solution and the only thing you hear back is your own question bouncing off the dry canyon walls? I am convinced that there are not answers for every question, and that sometimes the only thing that matters is that the question itself exists and not whatever the answer to it might be. Sometimes answers are pretty definitive (1 + 1 = 2). But sometimes you find that answers come in a form which isn’t so concrete, more like suggestions or inspirations than actual definitive answers (1 + 1 = maybe usually 2, but what if it also could be 1 + 1 = PURPLE?!). These types of answers usually show up in the craziest places during times when you least expect them and feel the least able to handle them. This time has been no exception, remember the Pong Sheep?
Second, in what is now a series I’m calling Inspirational Insanity, is this video of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture played by 1000 cell phone text alert sounds from a Vodaphone commercial.
I’m not just a junkie for Inspirational Insanity themed videos, but I’m a huge junkie for all the behind-the-scenes stuff. I want to know where the ideas come from, and how they go about implementing them. In case you are too, here you go:
Inspirational Insanity is described perfectly at around the 2:25 mark in the second ‘Making Of…” video when the guy says,”The network is designed to do one thing, and we constantly try to push it, and ask them to do other things with it.” So basically, pushing the network of 1 + 1 = 1 by asking it to try and equal PURPLE! I love this idea, and I always have, even before I could articulate it. I remember being in my high school’s drama program and constantly asking why, why, why, why do we do it this way? Does it have to be this? Can it be bigger? Can it be different? But what if it does equal PURPLE!? One day my instructor told me that I wasn’t happy if I wasn’t complaining. I remember being surprised by his comment though I have no doubt that I needed some work on my approach (still do, in fact) and that I have a tendency to come at things negatively, but inside it doesn’t feel that way. Most of the time the negativity is a reaction to the sameness of these systems or networks that once were probably radical improvements upon something else, but now keep most us from going beyond them. I can think of lots of other times in other situations feeling those same questions about the way things are and either being immediately shut down or expected to come up with an airtight solution on my own, when what I meant to do was open an invitation to push the network and ask it to do other things. (I’m looking at YOU, Fundamental Christianity!) There are several big areas of my life that need me to draw upon Inspirational Insanity not only for them to survive, but more importantly for me to survive within them. I need these reminders, these antidotes, to keep me from suffocating under feelings of futility or resistance.
When I began this post today, I had in mind one other Inspirationally Insane post, making it a series of three (or four if I count this one too), but two other ideas have surfaced so we’ll just have to see where this thing takes us blog-wise. Though it will be more interesting to see where it takes us life-wise. To add to the conversation leave your Inspirational Insanity examples, either from your own life or from another source, in the comment section. Or the URL and a short description of your own blog post about one.