![\"Lauryn](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/721\/2016\/12\/LaurynHill2014.jpg\")
I write this on this day that the Latin Church celebrates the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe because it was because my theologian friends shared that article that I started really getting to know Ms Lauryn Hill\u2019s work.<\/strong> This was around the time that I also started participating in earnest at the local Eastern Catholic temple in Richmond<\/a>. Because of this, my subjective experiences of Eastern Catholicism and\u00a0The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill <\/em>are\u00a0all jumbled up together like good stir fry, and because of this, I have taken to referring to Ms Lauryn Hill as\u00a0the greatest theologian of our generation<\/span><\/em>. I am not saying this to be cheeky, and I am also not claiming Hill for Eastern Catholicism, even though it is so tempting given the Internet rumors that she was baptized Ethiopian Orthodox and has this whole connection with Rastafarian practice (cue the hyperdox trolls). What I am saying is that\u00a0my\u00a0<\/em>practice of Eastern Catholicism would not be possible without reference to Hill.<\/p>\n I might need to give some background about why this is possibly important only to me and therefore to no one else<\/strong>, especially my fellow Eastern Catholic sisters and brothers (which, again, is why it would be preposterous for me to claim to \u2018represent\u2019 Eastern Catholicism on Patheos Catholic \u2013 I most certainly do not!<\/a>). I am supposed to have been part of the generation that came of age when the\u00a0Miseducation\u00a0<\/em>was first released. However, the only real meaningful encounter that I had with Hill\u2019s work was in a limo with a bunch of other high school seniors coming home from senior ball. Some music came on through the radio, and I remarked to my senior ball date that the music sounded like gospel. She told me that it was Lauryn Hill. She may as well have been speaking Greek.<\/p>\n My musical ignorance cannot be explained based on my racialized community (\u2018you see, I was one of those Asian Americans who thought that being the \u201cmodel minority\u201d was a good thing\u2019) or my class background (\u2018I grew up in the suburbs\u2019) or my gender (\u2018I am a straight Asian man\u2019) or my religion (\u2018I was attending a non-denominational Bible church\u2019). This is because Hill\u2019s popularity at the time transcended all of those categories such that\u00a0everyone\u00a0<\/em>except for me was into\u00a0The Miseducation<\/em> \u2013 at church, at school, in the cities, in the suburbs, and especially among Asian Americans trying to use education for upward social mobility if they felt that they needed to climb the ladder or to maintain their class status if their highly-educated, tech entrepreneur parents felt like they had already made it. I also grew up in the Bay Area<\/a>, and my dad was ordained in the black church in Oakland<\/a>. There is no excuse for me not to have taken Hill as my muse, and yet I did not. That I hung with homeschooled kids who listened to Mahler and took BART out to San Francisco to get the choir seats behind the San Francisco Symphony to hear Michael Tilson Thomas conduct Mahler live does not make for any excuse; the truth is, my homeschooled friends all grew up, moved out, and probably discovered Hill way before me \u2013 and I went to school with people for whom Hill was the soundtrack of their lives. That we were listening to Mahler, of course, means that you cannot describe us as elitist; Mahler is a cacophony of folk music whose sheer primal power defies the respectability of the bourgeois class. But I should also have been listening to Hill; after all,\u00a0every ghetto, every city, and suburban place I\u2019ve been make me recall my days in the New Jerusalem<\/em>. If only\u2026<\/p>\n All that is to say that perhaps I should be classed as a late-blooming adultlescent who discovered\u00a0The Miseducation\u00a0<\/em>at the same time that my theologian friends\u2019 actual adolescent children started listening to it. Because of this, I try to listen to this album once a day as part of my prayer life<\/strong> (and also to make up for lost time), and I am starting to do the same to the follow-up acoustic album\u00a0MTV Unplugged 2.0<\/a><\/em>. I can also be found late in the night immersed in the new album\u00a0Nina Revisited<\/a><\/em>, on which Hill has six tracks covering some of Nina Simone\u2019s classics. I do not think any of this makes me qualified to write on Ms Lauryn Hill; what it means is that I continue to struggle with her stuff even as I have been immersed in it.<\/p>\n My first encounter with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill\u00a0<\/em>was like being yanked in head-first into reality.\u00a0I almost spit out my coffee when the classroom roll-call receded and Hill announces:\u00a0It\u2019s funny how money change a situation<\/em>. I had done a little bit of homework because I read that article on the Fugees, and I surmised that she was talking about her former bandmates, especially her ex-lover Wyclef Jean, who as a matter I had actually heard because a) his music is all over one of my favourite movies,\u00a0Love Actually<\/a><\/em>, and b) he has a dubious connection to Sun Ho<\/a>, a Singaporean megachurch pastor\u2019s wife who got their whole megachurch in trouble and its top brass jailed for using money set aside for evangelism to fund her not-so-hot cross-over musical career in Los Angeles (I even blogged about this as Chinglican<\/a>).\u00a0You might win some, but you really lost one; when it\u2019s all done. You just lost one, it\u2019s so silly how come. When it\u2019s all done did you really gain from. What you done done, it\u2019s so silly how come. You just lost one.\u00a0<\/em>Fade back into the classroom.\u00a0The teacher writes on the board: L. O. V. E.\u00a0How many people know any songs about love?<\/em><\/p>\n School. Money. Love.\u00a0It could all be so simple. But you\u2019d rather make it hard<\/em>.<\/p>\n There are two real worlds in\u00a0The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill<\/em>. There is the real world of the music industry, which is not closed in on itself but is run by the same capital, institutional conformity, and erotic lusts for authoritarian power and bodily possession as any other contemporary sector with its requisite institutions. But there is another world that doesn\u2019t map well onto this first one:\u00a0Look at your career they said. Lauryn baby use your head. But instead I chose to use my heart.<\/em><\/p>\n Now the joy of my world is in Zion<\/em>: that is the parallel world. I did not know on first listen that Hill had named her first son \u2013 the child who inspired the conception of the whole album \u2013 \u2018Zion,\u2019 and I think that\u2019s partly intentional, though not in the nefarious \u2018Mr. Intentional\u2019 way she denounces on a later album (one where everything is strategic). In an anthem that the New Pro-Life Movement should probably adopt (because the old one doesn\u2019t seem to have), \u2018To Zion\u2019 describes a world where the person from womb to tomb takes centre stage, instead of capital, strategy, institution, and all of their requisite lusts. It takes a journey to get to the joy of this new world, which is why we are\u00a0marchin marchin marchin marchin to Zion Zion marchin marchin<\/em>.<\/p>\n For me, what makes Ms Lauryn Hill the greatest theologian of our generation is that she asks the question of what it means to speak of G-d, the self, and the world when these two worlds are constantly getting in each other\u2019s way.\u00a0Girls you know you better watch out. Some guys, some guys are only about that thing, that thing, that thing.<\/em> Or:\u00a0hip hop started out in the heart<\/em>. Or:\u00a0When it hurts so bad, why\u2019s it feel so good?<\/em> Or:\u00a0Beware the false motives of others, beware of those who pretend to be brothers<\/em>. What does it mean to speak of G-d when you know that you want to build a world centered around the person while dominated by the lustful flow of capital, where\u00a0everything is everything<\/em>?\u00a0This:<\/span><\/strong>
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