Rapture

I’ve been looping "Rapture" by Pedro the Lion lately.

The lyrics aren’t all that earth shattering, but I’m definitely drawn to the music/notes. And because it’s song, I give the words/rhymes/phrasing more leeway than I would a poem.

Overall, I like it a great deal. When I was in grad school, I was asked (during my "final" review where my poems were evaluated) whether I thought of myself as a Christian poet. It was an odd question to me, but interesting in that it made me step back and reevaluate my writing.

Maybe I’m thinking of this now because of Pedro the Lion, and the spiritual references in their lyrics. I don’t know this band’s history all that well, and it’s something I think I want to talk to Ben about more (since he’s the one who introduced me to them).

I’ve never been very good about classifications and groupings. I suck as far as knowing what particular denominations (Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians) believe – it’s all this big blur to me, and the disctinctions are one huge mystery.

Let me tell you a story. As a kid, my parents believed, strongly, that my sister and I should go to Sunday school. A nearby church (St. Luke’s) is where we attended. A few friends were able to tell me what particular denomiation it was (given the saint’s name), but I have no friggin’ clue. Church was church.

At an early age, I read a lot of mythology, so any god was every god to me.

I remember getting my own copy of the Good News Bible. And I remember liking the stories. But Sunday mornings consisted of me waking up with my sister, the two of us getting dressed, and my father or mother driving us to the nearby church. Now… they didn’t attend service while we were in school or anything. They woke up, dropped us off at Sunday school, and drove back home to return to sleep. A bit later on, they’d pick us up when Sunday school was over.

I’m trying to say this without judgement, as much as I can. Because my parents worked their asses off seven days a week, and deserved to sleep in as much as they wanted to on the weekends. For me, at an early age, the idea of religion was more of a formality than anything personal/spiritual. The impulse my mother and father had was right, and the fact that I did attend Sunday school at an early age did, I’m sure, shape a lot of my moral and ethical beliefs.

But as far as shaping my faith, that’s where it fell short.

All in all, I think this is becoming a rant/lament about writing. It wasn’t until I started writing poems (and more in graduate school) that I began to question purpose. You know – the big questions: why am I here, for what reason, how do I draw meaning from the life I’m living.

Lately, I’ve been content to avoid those serious questions and just float along. I guess a part of me is starting to miss writing (as an art/hobby), but another part of me is also getting itchy. I’m not questioning enough, asking enough. It’s not the answer that’s appealing, but the search for the answer. And that’s something I haven’t involved myself with for a long, long while now.

And going back to the "Rapture" song, there’s a sense of wonderment that I used to focus on, through writing. I still have that some days, when I try to take random pictures of shit that makes me happy. But writing made that sense of wonderment, of luck and uniqueness, come to light. It’s not so much that I’ve lost that feeling, but it feels like I’ve stopped thanking the powers that be for that feeling.