Greg Proffit Writing

Tag: God

  • Listening To The Grateful Dead Will Teach You Everything You Need To Know — But You Must Also Dance

    Listening To The Grateful Dead Will Teach You Everything You Need To Know — But You Must Also Dance

    listening to the Grateful Dead
    Photo by Jay Blakesberg

    # 99 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: You can learn everything you need to know in life from listening to the Grateful Dead — but you must also dance.

    The Godfather is the i-Ching, I beg to differ

    My tip is a derivative of this Godfather scene in You’ve Got Mail, the 1998 rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. In the classic scene, Hanks answers Ryans questions with references to the Godfather, assuring her it is the “answer to every question,” the “i-Ching,” and “the sum of all wisdom.” It is a brilliant scene Hanks pulls off with aplomb, throwing in some impromptu Brando imitations for emphasis.

    I love the scene, but beg to differ. My go-to source is the Grateful Dead. Within their musical catalogue is everything you need to know. Non DeadHeads don’t understand (and don’t want to know) how their music infiltrates, penetrates, and saturates a Dead fan’s mindset to the last brain cell. 

    “For the truly Deadicated, theMusic Never Stops” 

    My someday book

    I plan to write a book in which every chapter will be a life-topic with related song titles — like this sampler:

    • Love — They Love Each Other, Sugar Magnolia, Not Fade Away, Comes A Time
    • God — Hell in A Bucket, Lay Down My Brother, Wharf Rat
    • Family — Me & My Uncle, Brother Esau, Mama Tried
    • Relationships — Row Jimmy, He’s Gone, Cold Rain & Snow
    • Politics — Throwing Stones, Standing On The Moon
    • Philosophy — Terrapin Station, St. Stephen, Eyes of the World, Box of Rain
    • Justice — Dupree’s Diamond Blues, Stagger Lee, Viola Lee Blues
    • Economics — Deal, Loser, Easy Wind, Big Boss Man
    • Psychology— China Cat Sunflower, Brown-Eyed Women, The Other One
    • Death— Death Don’t Have No Mercy, To Lay Me Down, Brokedown Palace, Black Peter

    This partial, non-exhaustive listing is exemplary of how songs in their extensive repertoire have application to every aspect of life. Like I said above, you can learn everything you need to know from listening to the Grateful Dead.

    Discovering all these connections made the music the soundtrack of my life; and one of my favorite lyrics serves up advice for all life’s uncertainties:

    “If you get confused, listen to the music play”

    ~Grateful Dead: Franklin’s Tower

    One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

    As a young adult, I got lost for several years in the hippy lifestyle (including the drug use part). I travelled cross-country following the band from show to show. The community was like none I’ve experienced since. The traveling kaleidoscope of clowns was family — a home on the road. 

    On my journey in 1985, I met Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, himself instrumental in the hey-day of what is known as the 60’s movement, and equally pivotal in the Dead’s beginnings as the house band for the infamous San Francisco Acid Tests so marvelously chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s seminal volume, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

    I went to dozens and dozens of shows became more and more lost in the mysticism and mythology and mis-application of truths and nearly lost my physical and mental health in the melee. 

    A year later, I met someone even more famous than Kesey. At a show in March of 1986, I met Jesus. My life forever changed, though the music has remained the soundtrack of it. The accoutrements of drugs and touring, I left behind. They aren’t necessary. They really never were. The music itself is a healing gift. One I’m Grateful to God to still enjoy. 

    Dance as if your life depends on it

    So many Grateful Dead songs are about impending mortality. The idea is in their very name. A fellow writer on Medium wrote this beautiful essay Accepting Your Mortality is the Beginning of Living Well. I heartily concur. The Grateful Dead’s music helps remind me. And it reminds me that the only effective antidote against an encroaching death is to live, to sing, and by God, to dance.

    Is there anything more celebratory, more filled with life and joy, the kind of life-celebration powerful enough to mock death — than dancing in the face of it?

    I think often of the story in the Old Testamanet, when the Ark of The Covenant was restored to Israel and Jerusalem after spending months and years outside the city, a young King David danced in such ecstatic jubilation, he danced right out of his clothes. 

    I still dance that way — celebrating life — warding off death. Now, I spin and whirl and shake my bones in the privacy of my home. Almighty God is the recipient of my Gratitude as He watches the overflow of my pent-up life. Nothing expresses exultation for the joy of living the way dancing does. As I dance before my God, the band playing is “Jehovah’s favorite choir“, the Grateful Dead.

    Everything you need to know—Just remember to dance

    So yes, I’m quite convinced, you can learn everything you need to know in life from listening to the Grateful Dead… but you must also dance.

    “Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own.”

    ~ Grateful Dead: Eyes Of The World
  • Don’t Let The Love Of God Hit You In The Back

    Don’t Let The Love Of God Hit You In The Back

    don't let the love of God hit you in the back
    Photo by Eleni Bellou on Unsplash

    # 34 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: The love of God is like light from the Sun. If you turn your back on the Sun, the light will hit you in the back.

    I’m writing so you don’t let the Love of God hit you in the back. In the Bible, or Christian scriptures, there are many references to the love of God. Here is a listing of some of the more well know of them. Leaving aside very thorny, legitimate questions about the existence of evil and pain in the world for now, I will focus on one verse:

    Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

    ~ 1 John 4:8, NKJV

    This verse, pregnant with meaning, tells the reader all they need to know about the essential nature of God. God is love. Love is not an attribute, feature, or property God has or sometimes flexes. Love is God’s essence.

    Does the Sun HAVE light and heat or IS it light and heat?

    We could say, speaking about the star at the center of our solar system, the sun has light, or the sun has heat. But when we think about the sun, it is most accurate to think about what the sun IS than what it has or what it does. For us, the sun is light and heat, therefore energy and life. It is the energy source of all living things on the planet. Every calorie consumed (a measure of thermal units) is stored, portable energy from the sun.

    Now we may imagine a person living in isolation, closed off in a room with heavy light blocking shades drawn, pulled closed against the intrusion of all sunlight. We may imagine duct tape at the edges to create an atmosphere devoid of even the leakage of light. But we know that all those efforts to avoid sunlight won’t make the sun itself stop shining. It will shine on the exterior of that building. It will shine on the back of those shades. Yes, those inside can ignore that and shut themselves off from it, but the sun will shine on undeterred.

    The Love of God is the same

    I see the God who is Love the same way. Since God is Love, there is nothing any of us can do to create love in God. And since God is Love, there is nothing any can do to shut it off, either. For God to stop loving would be to cease being God. The ode to Love and the God who is Love in the fourth chapter of 1 John in the New Testament is so compelling, one might almost invert the words to Love is God and still be just as true.

    Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; 

    and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

    ~ 1 John 4:7, NKJV

    Love needs a recipient

    I decided a long time ago. If God is love, then the one thing an essential Love of that magnitude needs is a recipient, a “beloved” if you will. I decided God doesn’t have to look past me. I will absorb all the Love God wants to shine my way. For over 35 years, I have kept my face turned in the posture of recipient, the beloved. You can do the same. Turn towards that love. Don’t let the love of God hit you in the back. If you wake each day to the simple truth that God is Love, and you are still here, therefore you are loved, it will change your life.

    I recognize that I’m not loved for my perfections, nor unloved for my sins. Nor am I loved for anything other than existence. I’m loved in spite of myself. I am loved because I’m here, and just like light from the sun, God’s love is shining upon me whether I face it or turn my back on it. Best to throw my arms and heart wide and give that God who is Love, what that Love is after… a home.

    “And we have known and believed the love that God has for us.

    God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”

    ~ 1 John 4:16, NKJV

    Yes, perplexing questions remain. They are above my pay-grade. Most are beyond my capacity to understand at all. Doubtless you and I both have unanswered, bothersome, and painful questions, but they don’t negate the answers I have. And the single greatest answer is God is Love… not has, or shows, or gives Love, but IS Love. Don’t let the Love of God hit you in the back.

  • What Do You Like & Why Do You Like It?

    What Do You Like & Why Do You Like It?

    What Do You Like, Why Do You Like It?
    Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

    # 85 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Know why you like what you like. Learn to identify the feeling of liking something before you have the words to tell yourself you like it. That resonance, that connection, that is your home.

    This one has been staring at me for a couple of days. I know what I mean by the tip I offered months ago when I created my list and posted it, but this one captures so much.

    What you like defines you

    Why do you like that? Why don’t you like this? Can your likes change—become weaker (?), or stronger? If they can change, did the thing formerly liked change? Or did the former “Like-er” change? Important stuff.

    We all start in infancy as blank slates. Yes, I know, the argument of nature vs. nurture. Sure, sure. Still… I have no Grateful Dead genes that make me resonate to that frequency, nor any Russian genes I’m aware of that make the slow, deliberated, painstakingly detailed accounts of Dostoevsky so appealing and full of life and truth to me.

    So, as for the accumulation of culture—which is really a fancy word for group or social liking of a thing—I’m on the nurture side of that debate. We like what we like because we get exposed to it by someone who convinces us that people like us like stuff like this. There’s a kind of peer pressure to like most of the things we choose. 

    [That, and the size of the menu in proportion to the size of our appetites, and whether we find good entrements (palate cleansers) between samplings.] 

    There are also degrees of liking a thing. You may wear the tee-shirt, but not kill bats on stage and drink their blood. (You can look up the old Ozzy Osbourne legend somewhere… Google it.)

    So, Greg, you’re 300 words in and haven’t told me a damn thing about why I like some stuff and not other stuff.

    True, dear reader, we are halfway down a proper electronic page and I cannot tell you what to like. I can, however, urge this—Don’t let anyone else tell you either!

    We all got our first likes because someone pushed sweet mashed pears into our baby mouths before they spooned in disgusting pureed lima beans. Someone played Mozart, or Miles Davis or Metallica before Beethoven, Benny Goodman, or Bad Company.

    We first gain likes and tastes from the people around us who expose us to them and usually because they like them too. (Maybe not with babyhood pears, but you catch my drift).

    Here’s the rub

    At some point, earlier or later, I don’t know, you will want to pay attention to whether or not you’d like Led Zeppelin at all if that delectable girl in the yellow overalls didn’t look so good wearing that logo emblazoned across her beautiful… t-shirt (what did you think I was going to type?)

    My mom was a member of the Columbia Records club. This was back when dinosaurs roamed North America and people still had turntables on which to extract sound from round plastic platters. She got several albums a month, and she used to sit dreamily and play one album called Go To Heaven by a band of long-haired men, standing in a cloud on the cover, wearing cheesy looking, white, polyester-velveteen Lawrence Welk suits. 

    Alabama Getaway and Don’t Ease Me In off that record sounded like countrified crapola to my 13-year-old ears. Hearing it made me gag and flee the premises, long before I got to hear Lost Sailor and Saint of Circumstance. 

    I couldn’t stand it! Yuck! 13-year-olds ought not be judged too harshly for underdeveloped anything. Puberty makes for a cloudy filter.

    But I did like her Fleetwood Mac, and Rickie Lee Jones, and Little Feat albums. I even liked Jimmy Buffett, and I wanted to like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young because they had the coolest album cover. (You know the antique looking, sepia-toned album where they’re posed with a dog, and Crosby cradles a shotgun, and Neil is draped with bandoleers and a pistol, and a guitar is lying on the ground — Deja Vu—and it looks like Matthew Brady took the photograph right after the battle of Antietam or something). 

    God, I loved the look of that album cover because I was crazy for all kinds of Civil War stuff. That picture was so cool! Who cared about hippies floating in white John Travolta suits in a cloud!?

    But the music, Jeez! My misanthropic mom would get drunk, put on Teach Your Children and slur, “Hunnneee, jusss lishen to theesh wordzz. Thish iss evertheeen I wanna  shay to you kidzz.”

    OMG!! Please No! — Likes can change

    I hated C,S,N,Y then. Association, ya know?

    Though, I LOVE their music now. Different association… ya know?

    The same reason I now love all things Grateful Dead. I had to grow into it. Then it grew into me.

    So, sometimes early exposure doesn’t take root. Germination takes longer. Circumstances change, and then, bam! You hear something, or see something, or taste it, and it’s like tasting and seeing and hearing home. Like gathering up fragments of self that complete you. I know, weird.

    But, they say there’s no accounting for taste. And truly there isn’t. If you will put on your Indiana Jones hat and do some personal archeology to dig up the reasons you’ve buried and kept your own personal treasures, you’ll learn a hella lot about yourself.

    Fact is, your likes and loves will tell you more about yourself than your dislikes.

    Shove over, I’ve invited God in

    Probably shouldn’t drag God into a story already crowded with Jimmy Buffett, my drunk mom, Rickie Lee Jones, and bandoleers, but I see [Him] as defined (bad word, I don’t think [He] can be defined adequately, else the whole God idea shrinks, but it’s the best word we’ve got) by what [He] likes, immeasurably more than by what [He] dislikes. Just like you and me are defined more by what we like and allow in than by what we hate and keep out.

    It’s the opposite of the way evangelical Christians think of God and themselves. These define themselves by what they oppose, what they’re against, what they resist and are afraid of. They never crack open Song of Songs, the most beautiful ode to physical, sexual love ever written (“kisses sweeter than wine”). It just sits there unread and unappreciated in their bibles. They conveniently forget Noah got drunk (after preserving humanity), David committed adultery—and murder (and was still called a man after God’s own heart), Jesus turned water into about a hundred gallons of wine at a wedding, and Peter denied Jesus (but Jesus restored him again over fish tacos on the beach).

    They forget God loved everybody, EVERYBODY so much, [He] paid the ultimate price to win us back. I don’t imagine [He’s] trying to keep anyone out on technicalities like who they love. [He’d] prefer to outfit us all in white suits, invite us to stand in a cloud, and Go To Heaven. Or maybe my God is just bigger and more full of Grace and Mercy than yours. I dunno. Or maybe I’m wrong. But I’d rather be wrong believing in God as revealed Love. Maybe you’re unflawed, and you’re loved for your perfection. That doesn’t apply to me. But because God loves flawed me as much as [He] does, my only response is to trust [Him.] That is what faith is all about, after all. The heart’s response to a God showing and proving [His] Love.

    If you’re curious about my brackets around masculine pronouns in reference to God, it’s because of my uncertainty of how to think of God and gender. I think of God as Father, the only real Father I’ve ever known. But God is called El Shaddai in the Hebrew scriptures, too, which means “the Breasted One”, or nurse. I love that image—of God being the source of life and growth and sustenance, of comfort, and warmth, and security, the way a nursing mother is to her infant child. You are welcome to your own images. I am convinced in my heart that my brackets aren’t offensive to [Him], or Him. End of disclaimer.

    Back to the topic at hand—Here’s an unlimited credit card

    Learn to identify what you like, on your own terms. Evaluate your preferences to see if you picked them up as the price of admission to some tribe or other, or thinking they’d be the key to some girl’s heart. 

    What do you like, the real you? Imagine you have an unlimited credit card. Your preferences and tastes are the only ones you need consult. You start with an empty iPod, empty media shelves, and an unfurnished home—no pictures on the walls, nothing in the pantry, fridge, wine cellar, or liquor cabinet. What’s parked in the driveway? What do you get? What do you like? Not—what does your wife, husband, lover like? No. What do you like?

    Go ahead, you have my full permission to fill your life with as many of those things you can. On the way, you’ll answer the question: Why do you like that? It may be this simple. You just do! It resonates. And it scratches the persistent itch, uncovers the empty spot, and fills up the void. Because it caresses your heart; and sings you, rocks you, swaddles you, envelops you, whispers you—home.

    It may as simple as the idea enshrined by Mick Jagger—

    “I know it’s only Rock n’ Roll, but I like it… yes I do!”

    ~ Rolling Stones: It’s Only Rock n’ Roll

    Mick likes Rock n’ Roll, and that like defines Mick. What defines you? What do you like?

    One day, I’ll invite you over to my own imaginary bare-floored, yoga-pillowed pad where we can have church listening for the whisper of God, blasting my collection of studio and live Dead performances on my megawatt stereo system, while we drink Napa Valley wine and Russel’’s Reserve and Grok out on all my Van Gogh and Monet and Mondrian paintings. Or maybe we’ll “ooh and aahhh” over my library of thousands of volumes of curated literature, housing everything from Brené Brown to Zane Grey.

    You’ll like it. Or at least I will.

    What did you ask? Oh, yeah, that Aerosmith you hear coming from the other room? Oh, that’s just my girlfriend rocking out on the sounds she likes. She calls mine alternately “Grandpa” or “Sleepy” music. If you prefer the Demon of Screamin’ to my sleepy tunes, you are welcome to plug in your headphones. To each his own. I can’t tell you what to like, I can only ask you to tell me, why do you like it?

  • Thirty-Five…still ALIVE!

    Hampton Coliseum: This Hell in a Bucket became my Altar of Remembrance.

    Like the Old Testament figures who faced a crisis, had an encounter with God, and erected a pillar of stones to commemorate the place, this day on the calendar is my altar of remembrance.

    Today marks 35 years since I was lost enough to let myself be led, to borrow words from my favorite Rich Mullins song, Hard to Get.

    Two questions and one answer forever changed the trajectory of my life and have given me these thirty-five years, quite literally, on the house.

    Question one: Are you having that much fun?

    Question two: How much are you worth?

    Answer: God thinks you’re worth the death of His Son.

    Thirty-five years in, and I’m as amazed today at how and where Jesus found me as in the hour I first believed.

    I’m certain many people are looking for God. They just don’t know they’re looking for Him. 

    Many, like my 21-yr-old self, think they’ve already found Him. He’s the all-inclusive, Grand Cosmic Guru running everything, hidden in everything, maintaining everything, right? He’s the One conducting the Acid Tests. He’s the One encouraging you to Be Here, Now. He’s the one that’s totally cool with you as long as you don’t hurt anyone else, right? Not considering that a life spent groping around in a dark room when there’s a light switch on the wall, hurt’s everyone else…right?

    And believing they already know Him at least as well if not better than the slick, well-dressed TV professionals; carnival hawkers pitching a snake-oil version of God, they aren’t looking in the traditionally right places. Because, face it, most of those places are oh-so-stuffy-and-judgmental, and frankly,…dead.

    They know instinctively God must be bigger than that. And so, rejecting the organizational part of religion, they feel themselves adrift, looking for something in the next port, the next experience, the next drug.

    Bobby Weir, 3-19-86 singing the lyric that led to the Question one. You don’t have to be a televangelist to be used by God.

    They can’t say why they’re pushing every envelope, testing every limit, hopping the fence at every boundary. Like me, they don’t know why they think every door they open, will be THE DOOR of the universe. They just know there must be more to all of this than what the world is selling.

    Let me just say, I feel ya!

    But sometimes in all your manic searching you can get yourself so inextricably tangled up and lost, that you’re ready to hold out your hands and take a Day-Glo green pamphlet from a hippy chick you’ll never meet again, read it, and like a snake shedding it’s skin, walk away a different person. 

    The switch clicks, the Light comes on, and you get found by the One who has been holding you in His outstretched hands. And the only appropriate words, even thirty-five years later, are simply, Thank You. 

    The outside of the tract said, How Much Are You Worth? God thinks you’re worth the death of His Son, was written inside the tract…with an image like this one.

    A few years ago, I wrote out this version of my testimony . I re-read it this morning. It could benefit from some edits, and it’s kind of long, but if you have any interest in whether or not Jesus goes to Grateful Dead shows, it’s there for the reading.