on this difficult anniversary, <\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n i wanted to share something i wrote <\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n about that september morning a decade ago\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n below is a chapter from my second book, <\/em>sin boldly, <\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n a memoir (and field guide) about grace.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n may you feel the closeness of the Spirit <\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n and the staggering grace of God <\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n in a powerful way today and always.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n blessings and big love,<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n cathleen<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n DRIVING AND CRYING<\/span> from SIN BOLDLY: A FIELD GUIDE FOR GRACE<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n After being in the newsroom around the clock for a couple of days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I came home exhausted and broken \u2014 spiritually, emotionally, mentally. I collapsed on the futon and turned on the TV just as U2 began to play live from London during the international 9\/11 telethon.<\/span><\/p>\n And if the darkness is to keep us apart <\/span><\/p>\n And if the daylight feels like it\u2019s a long way off <\/span><\/p>\n And if your glass heart should crack <\/span><\/p>\n And for a second you turn back <\/span><\/p>\n Oh no, be strong <\/span><\/p>\n Walk on, walk on<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It was precisely what I needed to hear. Not from a rock band, not from any other human being. It\u2019s what I needed to hear the Creator of the Universe say.<\/span><\/p>\n That moment of grace in the guise of a song reminds me of something I once heard the author Frederick Buechner say: \u201cPay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n One perfect summer night a few years ago, the holy, as it does, snuck up on me in the most random of places. A peachy gloaming lit the western skyline as I drove home, top down on my ancient Miata, through the quiet rough-and-tumble streets of Chicago\u2019s west side. Blaring from the tinny speakers I\u2019d cranked up to almost 11 was one of those songs that makes me sing at the top of my voice (even in a convertible) and throw my hands in the air \u2014 \u201cYou Can\u2019t Always Get What You Want,\u201d by the Rolling Stones.<\/span><\/p>\n Driving while listening to music is one of life\u2019s great pleasures. It\u2019s a spiritual practice I learned from my father. When I was a little girl and he was working on his doctorate at Columbia University in New York City, sometimes I would accompany Daddy on the ride from our home in Connecticut into Manhattan. Many of my fondest memories from early childhood are of those regular road trips in his Karmann Ghia, whizzing along the Henry Hudson Parkway, listening to his favorite traditional jazz station on the AM-only radio, talking about nothing in particular, and eating Cracker Jacks from the box he always kept in a hidden compartment behind the cushions of the backseat.<\/span><\/p>\n Years later, when I got my driver\u2019s license, I would spend hours driving back roads, singing along to cassette tapes of my favorite bands or the alternative radio station out of Long Island that I could tune into in the car but not in my bedroom at home. I do my best thinking in the car, taking the scenic route and the long way home to stretch even a quick run to the supermarket into a contemplative journey, alone with my thoughts and some righteous tunes. There\u2019s something about the insulated solitude of a car that gives me permission to sing with abandon while working on various existential conundrums.<\/span><\/p>\n As I rolled up to a stoplight near the United Center (home of the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks) that summer night, the Stones song ended and a familiar voice took to the airways, hitting me upside the head with some unexpected spiritual wisdom, leaving me gobsmacked (or, more accurately, God-smacked). It was Lin Brehmer, the radio station\u2019s most popular disc jockey, reading one of his \u201cLin\u2019s Bin\u201d essays, this one an answer to some listener mail \u2014 a letter from a fellow in Indiana who asked, \u201cI\u2019m not getting any younger. Should I start going to church? If so, which one?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The DJ\u2019s answer, in part, was this:<\/span><\/p>\n As we get older, we begin to consider our mortality. The godless man might ask himself at the end of his life, \u201cHave I miscalculated? Should I have communed with my maker?\u201d Even W.C. Fields, a man known more for his hatred of kids than his love of religion, was discovered late in life with a Bible on his hospital bed. \u201cBill,\u201d a friend, asked, \u201cwhat are you doing reading the Bible?\u201d and Fields replied, \u201cLooking for loopholes.\u201d . . . Finding your faith later in life brings a different perspective to religion. Still, watching a child you know grow up and solemnify their belief in front of family and friends will move you in mysterious ways. Is this the same baby in a stroller now chanting in Hebrew? A sweet three-year-old girl I know was once at Mass, and as the bewildering experience wore on, she became impatient and beganto squirm. Her mother tried to placate her by pointing out a picture of the Christ child. In a voice that reverberated to every chamber of the stone cathedral, the innocent shouted, \u201cI HATE THE BABY JESUS!\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, here comes the part that got to me, taking me by surprise and bringing tears to my eyes. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cBefore you wonder at the consequences,\u201d Lin said, \u201cremember what Jesus himself said: \u2018Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come unto me,\u2019 because I can take it.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Whoa. That\u2019s about as profound a religious statement as I\u2019ve ever heard. And it\u2019s not exactly what you might expect to hear between rock anthems on Chicago\u2019s premiere rock \u2019n\u2019 roll radio station. But WXRT is not your average radio station and Lin Brehmer is not your average disc jockey. <\/span><\/p>\n He is known, in fact, as \u201cThe Reverend of Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll.\u201d It\u2019s a moniker Lin earned in the early 1970s when he was a young DJ in Albany, New York, where he hosted a show on Sunday mornings. It\u2019s a nickname fellow jocks bestowed on him because of his proclivity for reading from \u201cBook Nine\u201d of John Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost, particularly the line that says, \u201cShall that be shut to Man, which to the Beast is open?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cOK, mister, I think it\u2019s time you and I had a chat about this \u2018Godstuff,\u2019 \u201d I told \u201cthe Rev.\u201d in an email after I heard him read the essay titled \u201cChoosing Faith,\u201d the one that had moved me so deeply. Never one to flee from a dare, Lin gamely acquiesced to a thorough grilling in his office at the radio station, and, as is often the case when I go looking for God in the places some people would say God isn\u2019t supposed to be, what I discovered was much more intriguing than I could have imagined.<\/span><\/p>\n I have a favorite T-shirt that reads, \u201cJesus is my mixtape.\u201d When I bought it, I thought its slogan was charmingly quirky, but over time it has acquired this transcendent quality, a motto that sums up my belief that everything \u2014 everything \u2014 is spiritual. At the center of that everythingness, as a pastor friend of mine likes to describe it, is a universal rhythm, a song we all play, like a giant, motley orchestra. Sometimes in tune, sometimes off-key. We call it by different names. Still, it remains \u2014 if only we have ears to hear it \u2014 the eternal soundtrack that plays in the background of our lives.<\/span><\/p>\n For the nearly twenty years that I\u2019ve called Chicago home, WXRT has provided the (literal) soundtrack to my life. It was the first radio station I tuned to when I arrived in Illinois in the fall of 1988 to start my freshman year at Wheaton College, and it\u2019s still the station I\u2019m tuned to while driving or cooking in the kitchen or just puttering around the house. Since 1991, except for the days when I oversleep, Lin has been the morning mixtape master, spinning the music that starts my day. In 2002, Lin began reading on the air his thrice-weekly \u201cLin\u2019s Bin\u201d essays, running the gamut from the silly (\u201cThe Hokey Pokey: Is That What It\u2019s All About?\u201d for instance) to the blatantly spiritual.<\/span><\/p>\n The morning I turned up at the radio station to grill Lin about God, he had just finished his morning broadcast and was reaching for an ancient, bedraggled copy of Norton\u2019s Anthology of English Literature (in two pieces with no cover) as I walked through the door of his office. \u201cI\u2019ve always been fascinated by religion and man\u2019s relation to the divine,\u201d Lin told me flipping pages in the book to find Paradise Lost so he could read from his favorite passage. \u201cI\u2019m a mystical expressionist,\u201d he says. \u201cI take the idea of mysticism very seriously, but I sort of paint it my own way. I think the idea that there is something within each and every one of us that can take us to a place we\u2019ve never been before is what makes it great to be alive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Music is a vehicle that propels Lin \u2014 and me and so many other people \u2014 toward a place we might call Grace. Music is part of our cultural conversation, and in nervous times like these, it has a lot to say. The idea that music has the power to move people in a way nothing else does seems never to be far from Lin\u2019s mind. \u201cPeople ask me why I got into radio,\u201d he says, \u201cand for me, it was almost always a musical thing, almost as if I wanted to preach by playing songs that said something.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The musicians that shaped his consciousness as a teenager \u2014 Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, the Beatles \u2014 were more than just drug-addled rock stars. They were prophets, Lin says, warning us about the future, just like Jeremiah and Ezekiel did in the Hebrew Scriptures.<\/span><\/p>\n Modern musical prophecy didn\u2019t end when the Summer of Love drew to a close in 1968. Lin keeps on his desk at the radio station a framed picture of his teenage son, Wilson, playing a blue Fender Stratocaster guitar. It reminds him that music has the same effect on Wilson and his peers that it did on his father as a teenager.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI absolutely think that teenagers or young people are as much affected emotionally and spiritually by the music they hear as by any sermon they hear in a church,\u201d he told me without a hint of bitterness or sarcasm in his voice. \u201cPart of the reason I have trouble going to church and staying in church is feeling like the sermon some minister is espousing wasn\u2019t connecting with me in any way, whereas a good four lines from a John Hiatt song could mean so much more to me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n As someone who had her first spiritual epiphany at the age of twelve while listening to U2\u2019s \u201cGloria\u201d for the first time after school in a friend\u2019s living room, I can attest to this. The message can even be the same \u2014 sometimes, as was the case with \u201cGloria,\u201d the words themselves are the same \u2014 as what we hear in church or temple, mosque or shul. But there\u2019s something mightily powerful about hearing the words sung aloud with passion or pathos, as a guitar wails and a bass line thumps.<\/span><\/p>\n What brings a tear to the eye of one person is not the same thing that puts a lump in the throat of another, but for everyone there is some music that changes their life. Whether it\u2019s some pop cutie-pie on American Idol warbling a song written by committee or Tom Waits grunting through \u201cSwordfishtrombones,\u201d there is some music that gets inside of everyone. For Lin, it\u2019s music like \u201cGood Day for the Blues\u201d by Storyville, \u201cGimme Shelter\u201d by the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s Alright, Ma (I\u2019m Only Bleeding).\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n For me, it might be Jeff Buckley\u2019s \u201cHallelujah,\u201d \u201cNot While I\u2019m Around\u201d from the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd, or \u201cNessun Dorma\u201d from Puccini\u2019s opera Turandot. (The rousing, climactic verse, \u201cTramontate, stelle! All\u2019alba vincero\u0300! Vincero\u0300! Vincero\u0300<\/em>!\u201d reduces me to a puddle every time I hear it.)<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou talk about what your religious faith is supposed to do for you and what a minister or a rabbi is supposed to do for you, providing you with counsel and wisdom and sustenance and support \u2014 sometimes the quickest avenue to all of those things is a song that you love,\u201d Lin says. This reminds him of music he also associates with 9\/11. \u201cThe day after September 11, I opened my show with a song I never play just as a song. Now it\u2019s the first song I play on the anniversary of 9\/11 every year. It\u2019s called \u2018Sunflower River Blues\u2019 by John Fahey. It\u2019s a very simple acoustic guitar instrumental. But for me,\u201d he says, leaning forward in his chair, his voice dropping, \u201cit has that same feel as the second movement of Beethoven\u2019s Seventh Symphony.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cDunnnn dun dun dun, dunnn dunn, dunn dun dah dunn \u2014 it kind of plods along, but there\u2019s a kind of resolution in the musical phrasing, and it\u2019s the same thing in that John Fahey song. It\u2019s got a certain melancholy feel to it, but at the end it kind of resolves itself in a major chord that makes you think everything\u2019s gonna be OK,\u201d he said, smiling wistfully. \u201cIt\u2019s gonna be all right.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n That day at the radio station, as Lin expounded on music\u2019s more mystical qualities, I became aware of a song playing quietly on the radio receiver on his desk tuned to WXRT. It was U2\u2019s \u201cWalk On.\u201d When I mentioned it to Lin, he turned up the volume, and we were both struck still, as if an unexpected third party had just joined us.<\/span><\/p>\n [wpvideo G93TAOpn]<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was precisely what I needed to hear. Not from a rock band, not from any other human being. It\u2019s what I needed to hear the Creator of the Universe say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thru-my-eyes"],"yoast_head":"\n