August 15th, 2016
10 years ago this morning,
the collected shards of a 10-year journey were sealed into the iconic mosaic
mug plastered on our final record, final
breath as LAST TUESDAY: Become What
You Believe. I knew then, as I know even more so now, that the finish line we didn’t reach with our
2006 release was merely the baton passed on in the life-long relay race in
which I still run on the promise that somehow,
someway…we’ll make it.
But lets go back a bit
in time for it is only in hind sight that we can recognize the depths of life
and the sanctity all things have always had. I know now that when we penned Become What You Believe we were but
putting into words what had always been. As a missionary-kid, born in Costa
Rica/raised in Chile, I grew up fully immersed in the “heart to God and hand to
man” work of The Salvation Army. In our younger years we never reflect much, we
just do as we see done. My single-handedly all time favorite songwriter, David
Bazan, seems to have had something in common with my experience. In his song
PEOPLE he writes,
“When I was young
I saw people helping
people all the time
…I thought people loving
people were the norm”
There
was no becoming then, just being; being human and that meant loving/helping
people.
In my teens, I started
muscling out my own approach to this BEING HUMAN nature through music. I was in
terrible bands playing live performances long before my first fingertip
calloused. Those were transformative years, however, that both empowered and
impassioned me towards people. I always loved LIVE MUSIC for it was on stage or
in the crowd that I saw and felt what music did for me and those around me. I
believed that as created beings, in the image of our creator, we were to be
creative beings. I wanted to be an oar, dipped into mother-ocean’s swelling
waters, rowing alongside my fellow men-of-oars with rhythm and song through the
stormy and glass-like seas life would have for us. With youthful rage and drive,
the 10-year journey had begun, with a splashy paddling of my 4-string bass to
BECOME WHAT I BELIEVE.
Unaware, I was paddling in the ancient
wisdom of speaking our dreams into existence which Paulo Coehlo trademarked for
modernity when he wrote of the little boy Santiago and his mentors helping him
understand that,
“…when
you want something,
the whole Universe conspires in helping you achieve it.”
Undoubtedly such was the case with me towards my final years of high school in
Santiago, Chile where I was able to enlist amongst my first band of thieves
called: The Despreciados y Desechados, a movement of young Christian metal-heads
set on revamping the Jesus Movement and reaching out to the outcasts by
blasting Jesus into every neighborhood that allowed us to bring in our youthful-angst-and-impassioned-head-banging
riffs and ruckus. I spent every weekend of my last 2 years in High School
loading up an ‘ole pick up truck with our band gear, including my rocking 100-watt
Crate Bass amp, and spent my weekday afternoons between practice time, street
preaching and bringing bread and coffee to the local punks that were sitting in
on abandoned downtown Santiago houses turning them into crack-houses before
being scurried out by local police and forced to seek shelter elsewhere. No
doubt this time in my life was one of extreme peripheral learning, mentorship
and increased awareness. I was the young buck then and to this date fondly
admire the zeal and relentless intention of living of those a few years ahead
of me, with one foot in the Village and one foot in the Wild.
My time with the
Despreciados and Desechados came to a climactic ending upon our organizing and
hosting one of Chile’s first mega-festival called CRISTOCK. Magically we drew
in over 3000 people for +24 hours straight of music, stirring major media attention
which made for an even broader audience to become aware of the work we were
undertaking. Again, these were years where I was mostly taking note on what
others believed and how they fought
to become. The learning I underwent
became the walking stick for my own wild journey that lied ahead, in which the
making things happen would be more on me as the doer than the viewer.
I left the movement with
a myopic-linear-promise of returning after 4 years of Christian Liberal Arts
indoctrination. My parents, like all baby boomers, were unquestionably convinced
that a college education would assure a career and a Christian would usher
further my cliff-hanging salvation. But I too was convinced, and enough so, to
leave “the harvest fields” we were neck deep in, reaping souls for the kingdom,
to professionalize and certify my ministry as a BS (quite literally) in
Christian Ministry.
Thankfully such never
took place. After 2 years stateside, a good friend bought be a ticket back to
Chile, where I came face to face with what Isabel Allende seemed to have penned
specially for me in “My Invented Country”. The Chile of my nostalgia was
shattered in under 2 weeks by the baseball present of mine taking cheap blows
on what felt like a time, people unchanged. I swept the shards into a pouch as
tokens of good faith to carry with me through the next chapters. This time
around, I uttered a solid goodbye and flew back stateside knee-deep in the
uncertainty of what I would BECOME but clear that it wasn’t what I had thought.
It’s easy to see now
that the shook up I went through in Chile would make it really tricky for me to
finish off something like a BS in Christian Ministry. One thing about
uncertainty is that it opens up possibilities making for a broader world.
Following suit I switched majors into the broad spans of Cultural Anthropology
and World Religions curious to understand how creed and culture breed, but more
so due to what would become an unquenchable thirst to understand how others
experience and make sense of the world. This exploration took me into my first
mosque, and the opening of sacred texts that were taboo in the fundamentalist
home that gave me a solid nugget to go on. Hungry for a visceral experience I
signed up for a 6 month study abroad course in Israel but it was closed down
last minute due to an outbreak of the endless violence of the region. Make
plans, live well but be ready for when the Universe steers you in an unforeseen
direction.
Right around that same
time, in the spring of 2002, I had jumped in the LT van for the first time, and
was granted shotgun next to Steve Gee. We talked from Harrisburg PA to
Nashville TN and somewhere in between I knew I had found my next ship to row
from. But it wasn’t the music that hooked me. Back then, I was still rocking
the late-nineties-hard-core-baggie-pants-with-a-pocket-to-pocket-chain while
rocking out to anything within an arm reach of Korn, Smashing Pumpkins, Jimmy
Eat World or even Dispatch. But Punk Rock? It wasn’t in the picture. I was one
of those who didn’t understand the beauty of a nice melodic hook surfing over
the raging waves of a driving 3 chord progression. More than Steve’s catchy
hooks from Dear Jessica and Composition, it was his Resolve and Conviction ‘gainst all Distractions
to be a voice and ear to disenfranchised youth. I wanted in on that and not as
a hobby but as a life-path. First I felt I had some learning to do though so
with the Gaza gates closed off not only to the Palestinians but also to my
youthful-anthropological-mining-intentions-dressed-in-faux-open-mindedness I
signed up for a newly opened, 30-credit-program called the Contemporary Music
Center (CMC) taking place on Martha’s Vineyard.
Little did I know that I
would be landlocked not only by the Atlantic waters that wash against Martha’s
cold shorelines but also by an eye-opening flock of Christian inclined young
artists who shared dreams of stardom yet no desire for the faith, fellowship or
liturgy they were writing, recording and signing about, let alone did they seem
to have the balls I knew from my time in Chile that it would take to Become what you believe. Many a mornings
I found myself trudging alone through one of the 2 full readings of the Bible I
would undergo that semester as an attempt to find clues on what I believed and what I would become. I felt a burdensome
responsibility to learn what I could regarding the ropes of the music business,
while polishing my craft as a musician, performer and songwriting
notwithstanding prepping my heart with the convictions and resolve that would
be needed when done the program and on my way back to PA set on quitting school
and ready to sell everything and leave
our friends to become what we believed. And the good lord knows, I would never change anything.
And that’s
what we did, for 4 years, 3 records, +800 shows in all 48 continental states
and the dream shows we got to play in Ireland, Scotland and Germany: play and
play and play to BECOME WHAT WE BELIEVED.
Upon the
release of BWYB we were finally bought on to a quasi-major-christian tour which
was something we had always hoped and worked for. The days of backyard shows or
dive bars, playing for the bouncer and bartender were gone. Our record sales
were up. There were roadies to help unload the gear. We didn’t have to book our
own shows anymore. Merch was moving. And that is where everything went rancid.
It all became too mechanical. It was quickly clear that we would need to live
out this new rung of the musical ladder for another year or 2 of playing
opening sets of 15 minutes at best for crowds of fans, not friends. That was
not what we believed nor what we wanted to become. We quick booked the 2 cents
tour and said goodbye: This house is not
our home”
Last Tuesday’s final show was @ The Championship in
Harrisburg PA somewhere close to March 24th, 2007. The next morning
I was in a bathroom stall of the BWI airport shaving off my foot long lazy
hawk, pulling out piercings and plugs and trying to smooth out (no iron yet) my
shirt and tie in preparation for the teaching gig I’d be starting upon arrival
in Esparza, Costa Rica. I would spend the next 7 years there trying to find my
umbilical cord and then bringing in to the world 2 more umbilici alongside my
beautiful bride.
During my years on the
road with LAST TUESDAY I had taken on the personal plight of waking up early on
Sunday mornings and hoofing my way to the first church I saw. This made for an
incredibly rich experience of a multitude of Christian denominations and
expressions of faith and worship. As this wandering went on I grew fond of the
more liturgical services, secretly finger-crossing for the good lord to guide
me to a sanctuary where the “priests were gone, but the doors were open”. The
Catholic church began to really meet me where I was at. No drums, bright lights
or distracting arrangements. Ironically, all aspects of worship I had advocated
and protested for in my younger years. But with 6 shows through the week, all I
wanted was a quiet, dark and dank place to be with my God and occasionally some
of his less-task-oriented followers.
From my balcony in
Esparza, the cupola of the domineering Catholic Church seemed to beckon me towards
what I would learn was more of a deep inside desire for identity within a
spiritual community rather than a genuine external welcome home into the
Institutional Religion. Over the next 2 years, I settled to sell my rights of
faith to the Catholic tradition by undergoing all of the adult-pre-baptismal
requisits only to then be shocked by the denial of 2 baptismal attempts which
felt like some sort of purgatorial postponement of the community experience I
craved for of “heaven here on earth”. Still stunned and recovering from a
spiritual post-tramautic-stress I awoke right back where I had been for the
past 8 years since hitting the road with LT: spiritually homeless yet with a
strong community that lived scattered around the world filling up pockets of
beauty in nooks hard to frequent yet even more so to forget. On the road my
vagrant home were the books layered with rhetoric void of practice. And so I
slipped once again into the endless pages yet never losing the hope or the
intention to “become what I believed”, a part of vibrant village in which to
feed and be fed.
When 2010 came around, I
was doing my best at fulfilling the vows of marriage, getting started with
fatherhood and trying to grab hold of the reigns thrust at me in regards to a
career in education. I was quite found in all of this but lost regarding my
spiritual journey, community fellowship and mission field. My faith in the
divine was strong but I was clueless as to how to become part of any of god’s work here on earth. More and more so I
wanted less to do with Christians, especially those caught up in what seemed
like an ageless feud dating back to the theses Luther spiked to the
Wittenberburg door. I knew of spiritual communities that I could possibly
relate to but they were thousands of miles from where I was beginning to make
my home.
Thankfully, midst our
planning and running about succeeding and failing, the Divine always has a
construct of her own. As a young boy, growing up in the desert of Atacama, I
had learned that unseen seeds could lay dormant, seemingly dead, beneath the
most unfertile and menacing soils for years awaiting the due dew that could
bring them to germination and a subsequent unparalleled flowering. I’ve come to
understand that so were the seeds of my beliefs and desires to become what I believed. Of all places, the divine chose Esparza to be a place for
me to begin a new manifestation, expression and understanding of the divine and
our participation in the work of the divine.
And
just like that ORIGINATEVE was born, a non-profit I co-founded alongside my
brother and partner Ronald Green.
Over the past 6 years we
have been dreaming and working far outside the reach of the confined institutional
church but nevertheless under the church’s mandated work: to love ALL people.
Where back in my college days I related to the Moravian missionaries and their
creed of “becoming all things to all people” my belief was now growing into a
more holistic understanding of my interplay not only with Gods created people,
but also ALL the divine’s creation. A profound transformation hence begun: TO
LOVE ALL not just all people.
So what does BECOME YOU
BELIEVE mean to me today?
Today I believe that I
am a child of amnesia-the great forgetfulness inherited at birth. In the womb
we all knew why we were here and who to become but we have forgotten everything.
In as much as I have spent my life re-membering my spiritual pursuits, at a
physical/organic level I struggled to help even a small papaya tree grow in the
rich fertile soils of Costa Rica. I had learned much of the soul but forgotten
the soil. This was unsettling. Religion, in its hierarchy of what matters to
tend to first, has a track record of leaving mother Earth at best as a hobby to
lure in green-inclined-sinners. In my younger days I learned of the need to
tend the soul but now I have remembered the soil of the earth and I want to become her steward.
En el vientre de mi
madre, the great forgetfulness was woven into my bones and sinews. In her
warmth, I knew who I was and why I was here. But all that was lost upon the
traumatic c-section that brought me into the cold. Praise be to my mother who
endured. What was not lost was the grief passed down from the violence,
amnesia, pain and loss of the ghosts of those who came before me. I want to
become one in a village fixed on learning how to carry this grief alongside
peers, elders, mentors and those I’m lucky enough to tuck under my wing from
time to time. I want to be part of regenerating an intact Village in care of
each other and the earth we eat and drink from. In other words, a village that
knows how to dance.
How bout it?
Today, we set flight to South China. There we hope to do our part, as farmers, sowing seeds in the fertile soils of the kindergartners of the Blue House in Jinjiang alongside our very own 2 apples. The old stories say that the least of these are the ones that will teach us how to dance again.
All love and blessings.
Carl.Brengle.Emmons
“Come, come, whoever you are
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving
It doesn't matter
Ours is not a caravan of despair, come
Even if you've broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again , come , come.”
(Rumi)
The slightly more wildish ones in the bunch quickly made it for what became their gross motor skill developing balancing act. The sheepish followed suit, as expected and desired. Once their own system of play and order was installed with the organic praise and peer assistance that is born to any preschooler before school desensitizes them, it was time to up the ante and turn the broken old ladder, now propioception-triggering-device into a briding unit of math and literacy by lining up to count out her rungs. What better way to count to 25 for your first time in your second language, (for many probably even in their first)! 1-10 started off at a college-football-final-scream but by 13 it was a soft murmur from those in the group that probably go home to be flash-carded by multimedia devices of paranoia that seem to put a faux sense of satisfaction in parents freaking out that 1st grade is just around the corner (2 years away for most of mine). Numbers 22 through 25 were all on me, but by the second time through we were all chanting together. 13 of our kids walked the plank. 13 sets of 25 and the kids were having a ball with our busted up ladder.
