I’m reading in The Advocate that another Jesus Music star has come out…Jennifer Knapp…who was apparently a “…million-record-selling, multiple-Dove-award winning Christian singer-songwriter.” when she walked away from it all amid rumors that she is a lesbian.     And as I read her story, I read this…

Knapp no longer feels like being gay and being Christian are in opposition, even if others do. “I’m quite comfortable to live with parts of myself that don’t make sense to you,” she says.

Emphasis mine.   She had to basically leave music and her country for a period of time in order to find this comfort, and more to the point, in order to have it knowing that some of what he was comfortable with would not make sense to some people, sometimes.   She had to get away from practically everyone and everything to, as the saying goes, to find herself.   But if the individual person is their own unique song, that song is not so much a Thing as a performance of many different instruments…some of which are older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone we humans let alone you.

We are amazing creations, each of us not only bearing our own history, but also the history of life on earth in our blood and bones, and sometimes in our deepest thoughts and feelings whether we’re aware of them or not.   That we struggle sometimes to understand ourselves is probably the most understandable thing about is.   One of the biggest ugliest crimes certain organized religions…and political movements…perpetrate is to set the parts of us that make us a whole human against themselves, so we end up tearing ourselves apart, after which they, the church or the party, offer to come inside and clean the mess up for us.

How convenient.   And how convenient that they have to keep on doing it, because left to ourselves we mess everything up again.   If there is such a thing as Sin, capital ‘S’, in this life, then to teach a kid to fear themselves, to hate themselves, to regard themselves as innately untrustworthy, must be a big one.

But it isn’t just organized religion and politics.   It can start in childhood with the taunts about anything from being left-handed to having a strange accent or red hair or a favorite book or a particular skill at something.   Anything about you can be a target for bullies, well meaning adults who just don’t get you, or uncomprehending friends who think this or that little thing about you is just…you know…Weird…

So you grow up mistrusting a part or parts of yourself.   You hide them from view lest you get taunted again and the hurt returns.   It isn’t just sexual orientation.   I was a little bookworm in school and for years I got taunted as That Kid Who Uses Big Words.   I loved to draw and paint and for a brief period I remember turning Everything I did in school into an art project, until the grief I caught for drawing on my test papers finally made me stop.   One teacher wrote in my files (which I later saw) that Bruce “…takes excessive interest in personal art projects.” Probably she was trying to warn the other teachers down the road that they were dealing with a little fay boy who needed some toughening.   I was good at figuring things out, especially technical things, and I was always wanting to share what I’d discovered with others, discovering in the process that others didn’t necessarily get it or even care.     I was the Weird one.

The blessing in disguise was I had a personality that would have suffocated had I tried to conform anyway and that kept me from trying too hard.   But over the years I have hidden things about myself in order to make friends and that’s always self defeating in the end.     To make friends who accept you as you are, you need to be…well…As you Are.

As Knapp sings on “Inside,” the track from Letting Go that “I play when I get angry,” what Knapp fears the most is that “I know they’ll bury me / Before they hear the whole story.”

A lot of us come out of adolescence with parts of ourselves deeply buried.   You eventually start reclaiming your inner self, stop being ashamed or embarrassed of things you really never needed to be ashamed or embarrassed about in the first place.   But that’s the easy part.   The hard part is being comfortable with those parts of yourself not making sense to others.

That’s what can take years.   Decades even.   Ask me how I know.   I had an old and dear friend once lecture me when we were alone that being crazy is okay so long as I   concealed it from the rest of the world.   But I’m not crazy, I don’t think I even qualify as eccentric.   Not by gay community standards at any rate.     But crazy or not, I can’t be anything else but me.   Well…I could pretend…but I won’t.   Not anymore.

I’m quite comfortable to live with parts of myself that don’t make sense to you.

My sexual orientation, my geeky techno babble, my ability to just disappear into my head for hours at a time, my odd fascination with seemingly random objects in the world around me.   All that Weird Stuff inside of me, is also part of   all this…

Maybe this image says something to you.   It did to me when I was standing in front of it with my camera.   Now you have it too.

And…this…

I do this.   And also…this…

“…takes excessive interest in personal art projects.” Whatever.   She may just as well have written that I take excessive interest in electronics, in books, in the other boys.

It’s a struggle familiar to most gay people, even those who haven’t had to make room for sex and God, often uncomfortable bedfellows. Choosing to come out can still mean choosing away from family and friends who just can’t accept us as well as making institutions like marriage and parenthood exponentially more difficult to access. For Knapp, the process of bringing faith and sexuality into a coherent self required her to step away from her life and career in the U.S. The music that had spoken through her voice and hands became completely alienating. “I would think, I don’t even have a right to sing a song I wrote, because I am a hypocrite,” she says. Knapp spent her first three years as “a PlayStation guru,” and, when she tired of that, spent four years working at everything but music. She didn’t even pick up a guitar until her last year in Sydney. “I was building something new, starting something fresh,” she says. “I had to go someplace that would completely redefine my perspective of who I was in the universe.”

Coming out is, I have come to realize in my middle ages, not only an issue for gay people.   A good slice of the human race have issues with being told they’re weird for various reasons.   We’re encouraged to bury those parts of ourselves so that our neighbors in this life don’t have to deal with things that don’t make sense to them.   And yet, all that weirdness inside of us is sometimes considered useful.   Beautiful even…

Later that night Knapp plays a set to a full house at Manhattan’s City Winery.

I read this on Andrew Sullivan’s site just as I was composing this blog post last night.   And serendipity it was…

Jonah Lehrer passes along some research:

Eric Barker recently referred me to this interesting study, which looked at how elementary school teachers perceived creativity in their students. While the teachers said they wanted creative kids in their classroom, they actually didn’t. In fact, when they were asked to rate their students on a variety of personality measures – the list included everything from “individualistic” to “risk-seeking” to “accepting of authority” – the traits mostly closely aligned with creative thinking were also closely associated with their “least favorite” students. As the researchers note, “Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity.”

This shouldn’t be too surprising: Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? How about a baby Gertrude Stein? Or a teenage Eminem?

Perfect!     The little dears wouldn’t draw inside the lines and that makes teacher frown.   But sometimes we make people smile too…

She follows old friend Derek Webb, a straight and happily married Christian artist, who plays “What Matters More,” a track off his recent album that is explicitly critical of antigay Christians. Knapp is less blunt, playing a mix of her Christian favorites and new songs that hew to themes of love and loss. She does include “Inside,” the song that broadcasts the fears and frustrations that lick around the edges of what is otherwise an exciting and joyful return to what Knapp does best. But as she closes the set, graciously telling the applauding crowd that the night’s schedule doesn’t allow an encore, it’s clear that no matter what happens next, Jennifer Knapp will be playing music

You have to let people be weirded out.   You have to let them put you into whatever little box they have handy, that lets them quickly dismiss you, categorize you, calculate, number, index and catalog   you.     Some people just have to have their boxes.   Just so long as you don’t put yourself into one.   All those things that make you different from the others.   It doesn’t matter they don’t understand.   Just so long as you do.     Or even if you don’t, that you’re comfortable with it.   Better you don’t make sense to people sometimes, then you don’t make sense to yourself.   Creativity and oddness just go hand in hand and you don’t want to wake up one day and realize you’ve buried everything inside of you that could have been grown wings and soared, that could have been beautiful, and now you can’t find it anymore.