interview

I was updating my Author page on this site tonight, and I was reminded once more of this quote that struck me so powerfully by poet Joe Weil. It’s from a great interview posted on Patrol Magazine a while back. I wrote about it when I originally first found it almost exactly a year ago. It’s incredible and describes the nature and substance of my faith like no other set of words I have encountered before or since–coarse language and all. I hope it speaks to you as well:

“I once described faith as something I got on my shoe and can’t kick or wash off. I’m stuck with it. My poems are the trespasses and blasphemies of a malpracticing Christian, one who can’t stop ogling an attractive leg, or wanting to be first, who is venial, foolish, seldom at peace, horny and lonely, and so far from the kingdom of God that his whole life becomes the theme of that distance, someone knowing he is in deep shit. It’s the perfect place to be, where you can’t fool yourself into thinking you’re on the right track… The only thing I have to offer God is my sins. I am interested in mercy when it appears in places where you would never expect it. I am interested in love that shovels shit against the tide. I am interested in grace… It is better to be annihilated and crushed by God, if you are in love with God, then it is to have no relationship at all. Better God smite you then merely be absent. God does not ‘tolerate’ me. God loves me.”

How do these words strike you?

Here you can read a really informative interview with Derek Webb concerning the Church, culture, his creative process, and of course, his new album “Stockholm Syndrome”.

Patrol Magazine is perhaps my favorite site I read, and this interview furthers secures its place in my affections. A favorite and very enlightening paragraph in the interview reads:

Stockholm Syndrome is the sound of me using the resources I have to create a barricade between my own community and the people I love more than anybody else in my life, who don’t understand (nor do I) the major disconnect between the way that Jesus loved people, and the way that Jesus’ followers love people. People have no problem with Jesus, this man who loved others so radically that he was killed for it. But many who now follow Jesus love others so poorly, and they seem more like those in the Biblical account who Jesus reserved the harshest language for. I’m as confused about that as my friends are. But it was time for me, personally, to draw a line and try to absorb for them, to join them on the line, absorbing this hatred that seems directed at them. I just couldn’t go another year in my personal life and not make some of these statements, simply because some of my best friends have been on the receiving end of that hatred.

A commenter on a previous post I wrote on this album let me know from a personal conversation he had with Webb that he does not in fact see himself as a prophet. Just an artist making art about what the world looks like to him. Derek says:

Ultimately, my job is to look at the world and tell people what I see—and I literally see it as part of my job, to agitate people. I’m good at it . . . Controversy—it’s not something that I’ve intentionally manufactured. I don’t look for opportunities to make it happen. As a communicator, though, I would be stupid to not take advantage of every opportunity.

I must say, after this interview, I really do have a much more understanding picture of Derek Webb in my head. I see more of his heart, and as I’ve really worn out the album, I’m starting to “get it” more.

So, read the interview, buy the album, and begin to see the world through the eyes of Derek Webb. Let me know what you think.