One is relatively new to fame, just a decade in.
One is at the height of his career.
One is a now mellowed legend.
The thing that connects them is a love affair with the electric guitar,
a love that's led them to master the instruments’ nuances
and pushed them in new, unexpected directions.
Each of them loves where the guitar leads them enough to give their life to it,
their time, energy, thoughts, even relationships,
in a transcendent, soul forming embrace.
None of them planned to go there.
Jack White, of White Stripes, remembers growing up in a Detroit neighborhood fascinated with hip-hop's mix music. He “never wanted to pay guitar, ever. What was the point?” No one played an actual instrument.
For U2’s guitar genius, called simply, the Edge, growing up in Dublin’s “economic toilet” of the 1970s, bombarded with the violence that tore day after day at Ireland and the United Kingdom meant “We just didn’t believe that any thing could change. There has to be more than this. This can’t be the only thing that’s on offer here.”
He and his band mates picked up instruments looking for a way to express
what was being pushed down,
bottled up inside them,
looking for an opening to something more.
We see a grainy black and white interview with then teenaged Jimmy Page, best known for his studio work and his years with the band, Led Zeppelin. He planned to go into biological research.
Have you ever found yourself drawn where you never thought you’d go?
Have you ever looked around and realized that you were doing something you said you never would? Have you ever known that longing for an opening to something more?
The movie shows these music masters reliving moments of discovery
White haired, wrinkled Jimmy Page remembering that one day, when his family “moved house” a guitar was there, left behind, “a weird intervention.”Before our eyes he turns into an impish kid
ready to bust out in air guitar riffs,
listening to Link Wray’s “Bumble,”
re-experiencing the wonder of hearing a guitar “rumble” for the first time, the “profound attitude” of an artist and a sensual instrument.
Sheer joy bursts out in a belly laugh.
The more intellectual artist called “The Edge,”
painstakingly building a guitar with his brother,
out of scraps they scrounged. Learning to listen to the infinite array of sounds it could make.
What if we plugged this in…..
what if we dropped this note, used this slide, held it this way, moved it that way. Utter absorption in the symbiotic process of discovery and creation.
Learning to know, intimately know, something.
Jack White’s raw battle, like a coal miner traveling down to wrest raw materials from the bowels of the earth,
Perhaps finding himself walking out of the tomb's open mouth
was a moment of discovery for Jesus Christ.
Jesus did not have to come out of that tomb.
Jesus came out because he was utterly in love,
in love with and committed to his work
-to us.
These musical masters offer a fist full of teachings.
*Passion is the starting place, the spirit that starts our flight.
Jack White remembers cramming 2 drum sets into his 7’x7’ bedroom, in a house with 10 kids. No room for a bed. My favorite scene in the movie is when he remembers someone giving him a recording of Son House’s “Grinning in Your Face.” (Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face.” It is a song and a moment of soul baring depth of clarity
expressed by one gravelly voice with oddly clapping, off beat hands for an instrument.
“That was it for me,” White says.
*Discipline creates endurance, makes what we imagine real and carries the process further than we could ever have imagined. Just when you get really good at something, master it,
when it becomes second nature, that is the moment you need discipline most if you want to stay alive.
Jack White tosses off that it's “the disease you have to fight in any creative field, ease of use.”
*Risk taking authenticity. "It" will only happen if you take the chance and let it.
*Relationships: Jimmy Page, remembering Led Zeppelin, “We were so comfortable with each other that we could take it in any direction….it was musical heaven.”
Watching these three masters bring their lives together,
Trusting each other’s skill,
insight,
integrity,
trusting the music
and where it might take them as they improvise,
is a glimpse of why we Christ followers imagine God as three in one,
with a dynamism that can only happens when there's
more than one (what I say goes),
more than two (you and me against the world),
that happens with a community playing, inventing, riffing, embracing creation.
The great reformer, Martin Luther, said that each of us has an inner call, to be consciously cultivated. And each of us has an outward call, one’s work, one’s way of serving the community. “When people contribute to society according to their God-given talents, they become what Luther calls a “mask of God.” God works through them. (thanks for the thought, rockandtheology.com).
Masters are those whose tools become extensions of themselves,
of their bodies, minds, and souls.
What would happen if church,
the body of Christ, were willing to take its instruments apart,
to learn what they can really do,
and in the new intimate knowing,
put the pieces back together?
What would it be like to allow Christ to re-think church with us?
If Jesus is really master of the world, even of death,
If Jesus is really master of sin, reconciling, claiming it,
incorporating it into God’s holy creative process.
If Jesus is master of our lives,
Then we truly are the stuff of Christ’s active creation,
his body.
We are Christ’s creative process
multiplied across millions of partners able to know passion,
discipline,
risk taking authenticity,
to know the kinds of relationship that mirror God’s own inner partnership:
creator-sustainer, redeemer, renewer.
Maybe we are millions of strings
made to be played.
May God’s fingers,
the hands that drew Jesus from the tomb of death
play through your life,
and through ours
together,
this day.
Amen.
