My first professional concert felt like a rite of passage. No longer was I to be contented by listening to the sweet tones emanating from my mom’s Maxima’s stereo. No, I was going to see it live and in person, in the real. It was a spectacle and an adventure. It started with dinner out, then arriving early, then waiting patiently until the lights went down. There were pyrotechnics, booming bass, and even an exploding dress.
The whole night, I was abask in the glow of transition to adulthood as I watched Reba McEntire explode my juvenile mind with her country prowess.
My grandma also thought the show was pretty good.
Brandon Hudson
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So maybe that experience wasn’t seemingly as awe inspiring as my friends who were taken to see the Dead by Deadhead parents, or who met Jimmy Buffett backstage and learned at an early age how to properly identify the smell of herbal medication. But to me, it has been a moment in time stuck in my head that has taught me many lessons. First, Reba McEntire is awesome. Let’s just get that out of the way. But lately, that experience has gotten me to thinking about the larger culture and the striving for a greater understanding of one another.
While many are busy bemoaning the purported loss of moral values in our society, I’m more concerned about the loss of empathy. The rise of ideologues as purported representations of the fragmented state of our people fills me with a sense of dread regarding our general human condition. I’m more concerned about losing our humanity than losing our war with culture, because we have forgotten that in the end we are all human, before we belong to any other smaller group or faction. In the season of Advent and Christmas, I think we should pause to examine the impact of God’s blessing of humanity by coming alongside us as one of us before we return to our vicious dismantling and demonizing of those with whom we disagree.
Reba McEntire helps me think about this.
My grandmother probably has no idea who Tupac Shakur was, but I know she understands the difficult relationships between parents and children. At the time we went to the concert, I’m sure she could have sung every line of “Fancy” as performed by Reba (written by Bobbie Gentry), a song about the struggles of poverty and the difficult choices presented in a culture where money doesn’t flow and there seem no roads to betterment. The tone of that song is not far from Tupac’s “Dear Mama,” a song in which he explores his own beautifully difficult relationship with his mother. Two drastically different genres of music exploring a common human theme.
Most times, we would be more likely to sit in our small camps of musical preference and discuss how country music is too manipulative and twangy and rap is too vile and violent. Or we might pose in pious indifference and point out that both songs can be seen as horribly “unchristian” and morally problematic. We would rather point out the differences than explore the possibilities of commonality. We are more interested in being right than being empathetic.
This is exactly the kind of world into which Jesus was born. There were polarized groups, oppression, differences of opinion and violence. But into that mess, God placed Godself, choosing to seek commonality — incarnation, instead of difference — as the means by which we might all find peace.
We say that you don’t talk about sex, religion and politics in public because they can be so polarizing (and music really belongs in that category as well), but in reality everything is polarizing when we are busy looking for differences and ignoring any possibilities of commonalities. Music is a great reminder that what seems incongruent can actually be powerfully similar. When Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) wrote “Hurt,” no one could imagine it as sung by Johnny Cash. But the Man in Black felt something powerful in that song and went on to record it to critical acclaim. So much more binds us than separates us, but we must be willing to imagine that possibility and redevelop our empathetic selves.
Tupac is gone, and might never have dueted with Reba anyway, but we are all still here, waiting to connect to one another as God connected to us. We don’t have to lose our individuality to belong together, but we might want to start with caring more for others than being right ourselves. Here’s our one chance, Fancy, don’t let God down.
Brandon Hudson ([email protected]) is senior pastor of Northwest Baptist Church in Winston-Salem. He blogs at www.re-imago.com.