Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, March 10, 2009

One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don't
know what's going to happen next. Do you?

- Bix Beiderbecke, cornetist, jazzman,
born on this day, 1903

None of us know “what’s going to happen next”, do we!? I’m certainly not a big fan of all “jazz”. But there are certain styles that I like. When I was in university, we used to go down to the “village” in Toronto, and some of the jazz clubs (free then) were great. Drinking bottles of Portuguese Mateus Rose – neat!

I am utterly convinced that the Inner Journey (as opposed to “religion”) is supposed to be an adventure, on which you never “know what’s going to happen next”. Cultivating a stance of openness and welcoming to this unknown adventure is crucial to getting anywhere. Unfortunately, though most people who talk about or follow “religions” talk a good line about adventure and transformation, most of them avoid it like the plague – and build that avoidance into their structure. That’s why “religion” is most often in opposition to things like protecting the poor, or to accepting and advocating for any new understandings about “God” or Human Beings. “Established Religion” is almost always co-opted by the status quo and by the preservation of its own power.

My experience is that, if you really get involved with “God”, you had better be ready for what our Vicar calls “the Wild Side” (what our worship aimed at the young is called). My 15 years in a monastic community sure taught me this! Talking with the parents of a dying baby in Nicaragua just before baptism; meeting with village folk to be the “judge” of their communal squabbles; dealing with people convinced they were “devil possessed” in Liberia; engaging in a heated debate on a call-in show in Vancouver with people who wanted to murder or castrate all Gay men. Countless other eye-and-heart-opening situations, seeing “God” trying to break into human lives.

“God” drags you into battlefields of Compassion, Justice, Understanding - where every tendency to self-preservation, selfishness, arrogance, bigotry, prejudice, judgmentalism, must be confronted and let go of if we want to know freedom and joy and what it really is to be human and “divine”.

They say that jazz is particularly American. Wouldn’t it be terrific if we Americans, as a people, could apply its principles of openness to new “revelation” in our religions?

Brian+