The Passion of David Bazan

I came across this great arti­cle on the life and faith(?) of David Bazan.  Here is a post I wrote for my old blog on my own expe­ri­ence with this great per­former in rela­tion to my own min­istry expe­ri­ence.  The post was orig­i­nally titled ‘Min­is­ters of Death’

I sus­pect you can guess who I am (with my star struck eyes) and who Bazan is (appar­ently chew­ing tobacco or something).

I have been lis­ten­ing to Bazan’s music for some ten years now. His music has always rep­re­sented a brave and engaged crit­i­cism of Chris­t­ian reli­gion. What sets his approach apart from more reac­tionary crit­i­cism is how hon­est he remains in his own sense of hope­ful­ness to the spirit of faith. After the show I talked with him and asked if he kept any per­sonal ties to the church. He said that his wife and daugh­ter attend church but that he had ‘made his exit’ (adding a com­ment of it being a hope­ful exit; I think is how he put it). Hav­ing grown up as a pastor’s kid he has tried to dis­tance him­self from the insti­tu­tion with an attempt to sus­pend his received assump­tions. What remains is still a sense of God’s exis­tence, which in his words has cre­ated a strong dis­so­nance to where he thought he was going (athe­ism). He admits that this could sim­ply be the result of such an entrenched world view that he received grow­ing up. I would have liked to talk longer.
David Bazan remains for me a of min­is­ter of death. A min­is­ter in the truest sense (though prophet may be a more appro­pri­ate term) in that his engage­ment with the social impli­ca­tions of faith and reli­gion remain sig­nif­i­cant in his work. The role of death func­tions promi­nently in much of his lyrics whether it is phys­i­cal death, the death of a rela­tion­ship or the death cer­tain beliefs. To those in the church who will lis­ten this min­istry of death injects needed per­spec­tive and the pos­si­bil­ity of change and move­ment.  I believe it was Flan­nery O’Connor (or some­one speak­ing about her work) who said that the rea­son an artist focuses on death is because death is ‘gett­gin some­where’.  In tran­si­tion to the sec­ond sig­nif­i­cant event of the week (when this post was writ­ten) here are his lyrics to “Priest and Para­medics” (see below for video).

Para­medics brave and strong
Up before the break of dawn
Putting poker faces on
Bro­ken bod­ies all day long
The neigh­bors heard a fight
Some­one had a knife
It must have have been the wife
Husband’s lost a lot of blood
He wakes up scream­ing, “Oh my God
Am I going to die?
Am I going to die?“
As they strapped his arms down to his sides
At times like these they’d been taught to lie
“Buddy, just calm down, you’ll be all right”

Sev­eral friends came to his grave
His chil­dren were so well-behaved
As the priest got up to speak
The assem­bly craved relief
But he him­self had given up
So instead he offered them this bit­ter cup
“You’re going to die
We’re all going to die
Could be twenty years, could be tonight
Lately I have been won­der­ing why
We go to so much trou­ble
To post­pone the unavoid­able
And pro­long the pain of being alive”

I per­formed my sec­ond funeral yes­ter­day and the first on my own. I had never met the man who passed away. He was 48 and died of a heart attack in his sleep with no warn­ing (a hus­band and father of two). As a min­is­ter of death who works firmly within the insti­tu­tional church my work stands in some con­trast to David Bazan’s. I hope to make death a lit­tle more palat­able so that its hem­or­rhag­ing force move through the sys­tem with less resis­tance. In rela­tion to death I often recall the words at the close of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness. Mar­low is try­ing to recount the words of judg­ment at Kurtz’s death to Kurtz’s wife. He fails in trans­mit­ting this mes­sage of death, instead he says that Kurtz uttered her name at his death. Mar­low says this in response to his action,

It seemed to me that the house would col­lapse before I could escape, that the heav­ens would fall on my head. But noth­ing hap­pened. The heav­ens do not fall for such a tri­fle. Would they have fallen I won­der, if I had ren­dered Kurtz that jus­tice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he only wanted jus­tice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark — too dark altogether …

David Bazan appears lib­er­ated to speak some of those dark words, but what is his com­mu­nity that needs to hear the dark words of faith if he remains largely unheard out­side the church walls? My speech is mod­i­fied within these walls and not all for bad. Some things are too crush­ing and need medi­at­ing, but the right medi­a­tor is cru­cial. I wres­tle between the min­istries of death. I hope to con­tinue in both, in some way.