(cross-posted from my private blog, sent to my friends in North Carolina)
So, this is my return to blogging after a few years in the lurch. I think this is worth writing about.
As I was going through High School, some of my most profound experiences (in music and life) came with the wonderful people at The Cathedral of All Souls in Biltmore Village. I worked with most of the people who turned me into a serious musician there, but more than that, I found a home, a family outside my (loving, caring) nuclear family. I will freely admit that there are plenty of things about mainstream Christianity that frustrate, confuse, and discourage me. And yet, at All Souls, I found a group of people who were Christians with a strong sense of social justice and a strong commitment to praxis (a term that gained this context in the social justice movements in the Latin American Catholic Church, and can be briefly summed up as meaning a commitment to doing good works in the world, not just preaching them).
Nowhere was this more evident than the loving relationship between two folks at my church. They had come through the Vietnam War together as military doctors and had lived for the past fifty years in Asheville. I met one of the two near the end of his life, although I didn’t know it yet. I was a young kid, and so the words “carcinogen” and “hospice” didn’t mean a whole lot to me until one day, at choir practice, the person next to me simply wasn’t there, and I had to come to terms with the fact that the baritone sitting next to me was no longer there.
(past the jump for more)
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