What A Curious Term...

I was sat playing my bass earlier today and I suddenly remembered I hadn't posted a blog for a good few months, to be honest I felt pretty awful. I had promised myself that I would post regularly and it just didn't happen, primarily because I have been fairly busy. I've got a few thoughts that will be spread across a few posts in the coming days but for now I want to discuss the last few days just briefly...

We are finished for the term here at Moorlands (I still have an essay to write, but that is a subject for another post!) and it went out with quite a bang: the Moorlands Variety Show! Involving Bhangra dancing, a rather disturbing video created by myself and a very good friend of mine Chris, some great music and to top it all off a marriage proposal (congratulations to James and J!!). However, the following morning I cleared off, skipping out on the final chapel of the year and the end of term breakfast, to Chesterfield to meet Mark Broomhead and his wife Sarah, founders of The Order of the Black Sheep (OBS). I will be on a placement with them for five weeks from early January  and I am very much looking forward to getting involved up there with the amazing work they're doing.

One of my greatest 'smile moments' this term must have been the first meeting of the Moorlands Metal Cell. We are a small group of people, all from different backgrounds but all of us have a love for various kinds of metal. After I got back home from Nordicfest I found myself with a huge burden for the folk in college who had been alone for most of their church lives in their love for the extreme end of music. I have struggled in the past, perhaps under the radar, with opening up and being honest with people about how much I love extreme music. There seems to be a culture of almost apologising for liking it, I suppose I need to get over it but it is rather difficult.

'So what sort of music are you into?'

'Well, um, I like heavy music... But I also like lots of other things like Justin Timberlake!!!!'

Why not just say, 'I like extreme metal.' then have the other person pull a weird face, question your sanity and edge slowly away? I think like many Christian metallers I have this inherent desire to be accepted by the church and don't get me wrong it is better than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but there still seems to be a shying away from this 'black sheep' culture. We seem to be the ones who are just too far gone, we are the ones who will laugh off the jokes about our 'Satan music' or the 'Satan worshipping festivals' and who totally find them hilarious. How would a standard, evangelical Bible College Christian feel if I started knocking 'worship music'? I've tried it, it does not go down well.

 

Sometimes I wish people could listen to and acknowledge the power that comes with metal, you have this strange sort of dichotomy now: wishy washy, ambiguous 'worship music' which is as dull as dull can be VS powerful, declarative, unashamed metal of all genres which sounds like it speaks. I used to think it was my calling to turn every Christian into a metalhead but it just will never work, people are too safe within the confines of their bubble and if anything tries to burst it, well, decry it as 'noise'. I've talked about this before, I don't care if someone dislikes it just don't try to tell me I should also dislike it.

Metallers seem to be one of the most misaligned groups in the Church today, they are often left to their own devices, it is assumed that they will just band together and be a little clique. Now, while it is important to encourage each other with mutual passions, it is just as important to accept them into the body. I've experienced this to some degree with my current church (more about them in a later post!!) but there is still this weird sort of, 'leave him to his own devices, he'll work himself out!' vibe. When metal is such a part of me that I find it hard to have a conversation without working it in (heck, whenever I preach I end up quoting a song!) why can that not be accepted just as much as musicals, Switchfoot, sports, dancing or film? Why should it always be questioned/mocked/joked about?

Why is it that metallers tend to be the quiet ones who sit at the back of church? I'll tell you, it's often because they simply don't feel welcome. No matter whether or not you would accept them or not experience has often shown that they just cannot broach the subject of metal, it has shown them that people will judge them based on what they see (it still happens), not what they experience.

Anyway, this post has become a fairly lengthy ramble about something it wasn't meant to be about so I will go to sleep now. I will be posting probably daily for the next couple of weeks with thoughts, poems etc.

Goodnight friends, and don't take this as a pity post, take it as a truth post.

For now, I leave you with love (and one of my favourite songs at the moment!),

The_Rambler

Oh Sleeper - The New Breed

Beginning of the End

It is the Friday before the new students turn up to Moorlands Bible College, I have started a fresh blog, we have new housemates, I am back to playing bass and on top of all that I am now a third year student. This is the beginning of the end! 

As I sit here in my cupboard room listening to the dulcet tones of Mayhem's 'De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas' I am reminded of the day when I first arrived to the campus. At that time I was living in halls, had only visited the college once for my interview in August and really did not know what I was going in to. To be totally honest I didn't particularly know what the course I would be studying involved and wasn't nearly 100% on why I was there. 


I remember walking through the corridors with my meagre belongings thinking to myself, 'I'm really not going to find anyone here who likes metal, comic books and the bass am I. This is going to be a lonely three years...'. It turns out I found someone who liked one of the three, a couple of people are/were kind of into bass (maybe not as obsessively as I can be but you have to take what you can get in these situations) and semi-found someone who was into metal of some form. 


To be honest though, there is little that can knock your confidence in who you are more than being in a place where the individual aspect of your personality can't really thrive. Now don't get me wrong, that isn't to say that people don't want to let it thrive, just that when people are simply unable to passively (or, dare I say it, actively!) nurture a part of someone's identity the rest of the psyche can begin to question its validity. Curiously, it seems that the most important part of my identity, that which is rooted in Jesus Christ, is the one which should be thriving the most in this environment. It is, however, a constant struggle to feed that into the dying parts of who I am because the feeding line is a complex one. When something is so deeply rooted (metal for example) and it is unable to be nurtured effectively within the context of the deeper core (Christ) everything begins to suffer. 


We are a relational people, this is not a post encouraging people to attempt the nurture of personalities which they cannot effectively relate to but rather to suggest a new approach. 


When you recognise something within a person which you perhaps perceive as lonely, rather than either ignoring it or *shock horror* mocking it in a jovial manner think about the impact your words or lack thereof are having on that person. If you feel able, maybe ask them something about it, appear interested in something that they are rarely able to talk about or that you know they might be desperately wanting to talk to someone about (be it a gig, a new computer game, a new album, book, date, whatever). You don't need to be over-sensitive, most people can take a jibe or a stereotype, but don't let it overstay it's welcome. There is always a line to these things.


On the note of nurturing, metal and being relational there is always a chance that someone is going to show up in the new intake of first years who I can invite round to listen to metal with me. It's unlikely but you never know! It's going to be interesting next week, I think I'll post tomorrow discussing 'Moorlands Orientation Week Protocol' which could prove controversial!


For now I leave you with love,


The Rambler
Follow @BenMartinBass

(Obscura - The Anticosmic Overload)

No Surprises... Creep! (Originally posted on 18/06/11)

Those of you who are total music nerds will have instantly recognised the very subtle reference to two Radiohead songs in the title of this post. During the course of this day I have continued to attempt to get a few thousand words of my New Testament essay written and have continued to fail. I keep coming back to these two songs or rather I have kept coming back to them, especially today. Creep seems to especially describe how I have  been feeling of late; I mean, there is more but let's not go there.

Human beings rarely see themselves in a positive light, it isn't how we are and it most certainly is not our nature. Occasionally we find someone who tells us how it is, doesn't beat about the bush, exposes you for who you are even if that exposed person is the opposite of who you always thought you were. Once you are faced with a true mirror image of yourself you have a choice, do you ignore it or do you keep looking at that mirror, see yourself for who you really are?

What do you see? On that rare occasion where you've looked into the mirror at the correct angle what do you see?

But I'm a creep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here...

That's what I tend to see. I am going to pre-empt posts and say that I think when we all look at ourselves we see something along these lines, maybe it looks more like this...

But I'm a fool
I'm not who I thought I was
Why do I bother doing this?
When I see my true face?

Okay it doesn't rhyme and maybe I associate myself more with the first one but you get my point, we all have a Creep style chorus which defines our true reflection. How do we get around this? How do we stop this, can we change it?
Recently I have questioned the ability we have to change it, I am a creep and I am a weirdo, I will never know what I'm doing here but we can certainly try to look at ourselves in a better light, maybe get some surgery. We will all have our No Surprises moments, some of us will have more than others, but despite those moments we all have this innate desire to keep living and to keep improving on the reflection.

This is a post to say that whatever you see in that reflection, whoever you really are, however ashamed of that reflection you may be, sift through it. Find the good in who you really are. Sometimes you will find very little, but hold onto that little you have. The whole point of sifting for gold is that you get rid of an immense load of dirt but end up with a few gold nuggets which are worth more than a hundred thousand palettes of that horrible silt and mud you saw when you picked that sieve up. Sift for the gold... It will hurt your arms and you may not find a lot of it but just keep going, get rid of the dirt, expose the gold and then you'll be happy to look in the mirror.

For now, I leave you with love

The Rambler