1) Mitchell bought me a blood orange. I am a happy girl.
2) I can't believe I haven't posted in over a month. Craziness. Life has been intense and my emotions haven't been swirling as much as normal, so those factors probably have something to do with it.
3) I am more or less addicted to Michael Gungor right now. If you don't know who he is, drop whatever you are doing and go to youtube and listen to Beautiful Things and then anything else from that album.
I first heard about Michael Gungor the year he wrote Friend of God, way back when - I probably wasn't even in my teens yet. It was also the first year I went to the Christian Musicians Summit, where he was doing one of the concerts. By November (when CMS takes place), Friend of God (which is actually really a good song) had been so overplayed both on the radio and in my church, that I was completely sick of it. Plus I didn't like Michael Gungor's name. Anyway, I didn't like the guy.
That's all I remember about him before this past November.
I went back to CMS this year and he was one of the artists again. Through the total abstinence principle I managed to get over my animosity, and just felt overall neutrality toward him. While picking out which workshops I wanted to attend, one called the Theology of Creativity caught my eye. When I realized that he was the speaker, I almost didn't go, but decided to go anyway. And I'm super glad I did, because he is a phenomenal speaker and his lecture that day has changed the way I perceive God, and still is a little at a time the more I think about it. I put some of my notes up from it once, and maybe I'll put more of them up late. I've processed a bit more now.
At the end of the workshop, someone asked him to sing his new(ish) song Beautiful Things. It's a completely lovely song, which I ended up singing to myself the whole day. They played it again at their concert that night.
Which is another funny thing - they had some major sound issues at their concert, and honestly it didn't really go that well. And some of their music is...well...quirky. Not remotely mainstream Christian music. A little out there and obscure. The audience really wasn't getting into it, so it was a little awkward. But I was intrigued and since then have come to really love their stuff.
And as a random side-note, I realized yesterday that Gungor also played at Acquire the Fire the year I went, when I was like 14. And I REALLY liked them that time (for some strange reason I guess they didn't play Friend of God) but I didn't know who they were and I couldn't figure it out. They were still a fairly obscure little band....youth conference and all that. I just remember really liking their song I Will Never Stop, and not being able to find out later on who did it. Four years later, mystery solved. :P
Today I was poking around on Michael Gungor's website and stumbled across his blog, which is pretty fantastic (and reminded me that I probably should revive this thing too). I just wanted to share an excerpt from a post I was reading, which is about some realizations Michael came to on a spiritual retreat in Italy.
"Christianity is supposed to be this beautiful experience of Word becoming flesh. It's not simply about believing certain doctrines. Our doctrine, which is beautiful and good, is that somehow that ultimate Reality took on skin and was nailed to a cross and rose from the dead. That Reality is Love, and it is bigger and stonger than death and entropy. This is all beautiful and it is all mystery, but we experience this Reality primarily in a relational knowing rather than simply in a cognitive or philosophical one. This sort of relational understanding of Reality lets us experience our faith on a different level than a system of thoughts over and against someone else's system of thoughts. It actually changes the way we live and move and have our being in the world.
"I think that this is what true faith should be like. I believe that this is why James says that pure religion is to look after widows and orphans and to keep ourselves from being polluted by the world. Faith in God is not supposed to be primarily cognitive, it's supposed to be an entirely different way of living.
"Most people don't primarily 'understand' music. You listen to it. You play it. You dance to it. You sing. I've studied a lot of music theory, but I don't fully experience music when I think about scales and modes and 12 tone rows...I experience music most fully when I engage with it. What I experienced in Assisi was that God is not something primarily to be believed in or not believed in. Instead, He is the Reality of the universe that is to be experienced.
"Lesson 1: Taste and see that the Lord is good."
Hmm, I'll have to look up that song!
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