Mark Scandrette

See the article here.

[as transcribed from the early meetings of The Church Basement Roadshow: A Rollin’ Gospel Revival]

As you may know, they call me Preacher A.L. Withee– that’s Allen Lockwood Withee–W. I. T. H. double E. Hailing from Wessington Springs, South Dakota. Called to be preacher when I was a tender 12 years old, I’ve traveled far and wide to proclaim the kingdom of love at hand in these present times. I’m the son of a farmer, a proud son of the American plains, and by God’s mercy and holy ghost power, a son of the living God– hallelujah!

I haven’t got much time tonight, so I will get straight to my point. I am a plain speaking man endeavoring to speak to plain and sensible folk. Kind ladies and gentlemen I wish to address the present controversy over the illicit soul Graffiti-trade. — a blight sweeping like wild fire across our great nations public streets, civic buildings and private dwellings– this tagging, scratching, spraying– the questioning of values and assumptions that mars the air-tight and lilly white vistas of our religious landscape. Why the silver bugbear. That’s what’s the matter with this country.

Now I’m sure you know that in every literate society since ancient times we human beings have acted on the impulse to scratch our names, our questions, our wisdom or our subversions upon the floors and walls of public spaces– in both public discource and private consciousness and conversations. The vile pestilence and dirty work of the graffiti-trade is causing a panic that threatens to defile and upset the common decency and fragile sensibilities of the status quo of religious life in these United States that has been so daintily wrought over so many years.

Be it ever so humble there no place like home… without the illicit soul graffiti-trade

Now I ask you, and please be honest with yourself, “If no one was looking –and you could do so annonymously–What would you dare– what would you be tempted to write on walls or sidewalks about your deepest spiritual longings, your doubts, or your questions?

I don’t blame you for the lump that comes to your throat when I ask you this– because I know that you have been tempted by the graffiti-trade. I know i speak to people with discontent and hearfelt questions about what it means to be truly spiritual in the times and places where we live.

Would you confess your dissatisfaction with the substance or limitations of the religious life you have inherited?

Would you admit that secret longing for a larger story that helps you make more sense of all that you see?

Would you confess your illicit longings for community, justice, simplicity, and peace?

Would you admit that you have often found yourself in the valley of the shadow of death? That dark night of the soul called deconstruction?

I believe the villanie of the graffiti-trade, this trafficking in questions and conversation, is a medium of deconstruction, revealing an utterly primitive hunger for renewal that some might say makes space for what is emerging. You and I, ladies and gentlemen, are alive during a time that many believe to be one of the great turning points in history—a time when previous constructions are breaking down and we search together for solutions in an increasingly complex, mobile, interconnected, and fragmented world. This is a time of great possibility– for healing, reconciliation and greater awareness about how we can live together in harmony with our Maker on the planet we call home.

Yet these changing times have created fault lines, particularly within our religious communities. Surely you have heard about the widespread intrigue and controversy over what some have describe as “the emerging church”– one of the main instigators of the illicit-graffiti-trade. But is this really something new?

I suggest to you, dear brothers and sisters, that this phenomenon, rather than representing a particular organization or comtemporaneous movement, is the historic and pervasive process of our collective response to an ever evolving and emerging flow of human consciousness. Show me a time when faithful people have not aganized over the meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ in their day? The church of Jesus Christ has always been emerging—wrestling with what it means to follow his message and teachings faithfully in particular times and places.

Don’t let anyone fool you. The soul graffiti-trade, this discontent and heartfelt questioning about what it means to be truly spiritual in the times and places where we are living, is dangerous business– utterly and dangerously alive. And I defy anyone to say otherwise. The soul graffiti-trade in its most provocative form, is a tool for revolution that sounds the alarm and calls men, women and children to action. The Graffiti trade reveals tremendous dissatisfaction with religion as usual–it betrays a vile quest for perspectives and practices that integrate, body, mind and spirit with moral, social and political consciousness to address tanglible needs and opportunities in our world. The graffiti-trade leads people down a slippery slope in search of a spiritual path that is not merely a way to believe, but also a way of life.

Well, by the Grace of God I am going to give it a push, with a whoop, for all I know.

You say that the graffiti trade is just an innocent and innoucuous venture in cultural relevance or theological inquiry. Alas, All be damned to hell, if we forget that soul-graffiti is the most potent and vile form of vandalism known to humankind. There is nothing more disruptive, scandalous, or criminal than the very possibility that God the eternal being might actually be speaking into our history and humanity, spraying a message of subversion onto the hard as a brick walls of our hungry hearts, disrupting our assumptions, guiding us toward a new way of being and inviting us into the freedom we fear through the frailty of a trickster, messiah prophet. I mean to tell you this is not child’s play, watch out for this long-haired fanatic from Nazareth whose life, message and sufferings continue as an enduring scandal.

You might as well try and dam Niagra Falls with toothpicks as to stop the raucaus revolution that is being caused by this Nazarene love fiend.

Let me assemble before your minds the possibility that is before us. Experts debate at what point the soul graffiti-trade crosses the line from art-crime to art work. Gradually the voices of dissent can become the voices of hope, generosity and beauty. It is my hope that we can move from being “haters” to creators—imagining and working towards a different and better future together. If we don’t like the direction things are going in we can collaborate with our Maker’s good dreams to seek the kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.”

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, its time to make beauty with our lives. I am on the side of love. Everybody fall in! Come on, ready, forward, march. right, left, here we come with all the courage we can muster….we can make beauty with our lives. We can expand the boundaries of love in forgotten and unlikely places. By the Grace of God I am going to give it a push, with a whoop, for all I know.

In the name of your pure mother, in the name of your manhood or womanhood, in the name of your wife and the poor innocent children that climb up on your lap and put their arms around your neck, in the name of all that is good and noble, will you pledge yourself to cause of beauty?

WIll you pledge yourself to the cause of the kingdom of Love? Let me hear you say, AMEN!

Will you plege yourself to the path of the Nazarene? Let me hear you say, AMEN!

Deep within the American psyche is a longing for convertive piety. We are a nation and culture of extremes and polarities: The Saturday night drunk who weaps in repentance on Sunday morning; The Sunday night holy man who leaves his ethical convictions at the door of the church when he steps into the office on Monday morning; Lips that sing the halleluah chorus opening to display the forked tongue and nasty sting of our gossip, fears and anxieties. As a culture we are literally haunted by God– the preacher, the church lady, the tortured backslider, the agnostic and the atheist. Religion, and our strange reactions and repulsions to it, reveal more about us than the nature and character of any divine being. What is revealed in our convoluted spiritual pursuits is the beauty and ambiguity of our common humanity. We are people who can imagine what love is, but can never quite make it to be “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Nothing illustrates the tensions we feel about religion and our humanity more than the cultural relic of the revival meeting and the revivalist phenonmenon. In America, everyone is converting to something — to Jesus Christ or the teachings of the Buddha, from P.C. to Mac , from City to Suburb or country to city. We are going green or going straight edge, coming out gay or republican, becoming locavoires or vegetarians, quitting our smoking or not buying anything. We put our faith in the latest technology, the newest idea or the best looking person that serves it all up to us just the way we like to hear it.

Perhaps no American archetype better embodies the glories and struggles of our search for collective meaning and divine purpose than the tortured soul of the self-proclaimed and duly annointed preacher or revivalist–That rare mix of eloquence, showmanship, falsetto emotionalism, alligator tears and stark piety–selling us God, salvation or a revelation from the best and worst motives or intentions. Few images are more enduring or annoying than the two-bit, second rate evangelist in a starched white shirt, sweating up a storm as he labors to convince us to repent, to change our ways and to make a fresh start. He is running from what he knows about himself, fleeing from the leaks and shadows of his own brokeness that is briefly suspended by the white/black contrast of heaven and hell, God and Satan, good and evil that he whoops up into an ecstatic fury over 50 or 60 minutes. But secretly we know that the perspiring troubador revivalist is just like us and we wonder and we hope that the healing change being proclaimed is really possible. Because if there was ever a time when our world needs love and healing and reinvention and redemption, that time is now.

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.” Flannery O’Connor

Our friend Dieter Zander had a stroke earlier this year and is working hard on regaining his speech and movement capacities. Its going to be a long journey, and some of the many people who love the Zanders are running a campaign to raise the amount their family needs for the next two years. Dieter has been a personal mentor of mine and we cofounded ReIMAGINE together back in 2000. If you live in the bay area, come to the benefit event on Sunday June 8.

We are now just weeks away from the launch of our 36 city tour: The Church Basement Road Show- A Rollin’ Gospel Revival. We are busy finalizing host sites and revival committees and putting the finishing touches on our costumes and scripts. Revivalism, the call to rethink or reimagine our lives in view of the Maker’s good dreams, is deeply rooted in the American Psyche. What I hope we will be able to communicate with this tour is a vision of what it might mean to live life with God that is imaginative, hopeful and holistic. To explore our need for new awakening, we are tapping into the great revivalist tradition, not to make fun of it, but to remind our audience that we are always in need of some kind of healing and renewal. During the tour we will be peddling healing oil in small amber round bottles– and if you buy one, we’ll throw in one of our recently released books as well. In the ancient scriptures oil, olive oil in particular was a symbol of our need for cleansing, a tool for annointing, a balm for healing, and something to keep your lamp shining brightly. In the world we live in, we need all the cleansing, healing and annointing we can get! Check out the Church Basement Roadshow website for details about when the tour will be coming to a city near you this summer!

On Friday Hailey and I returned from San Salvador. We had an amazing time visiting projects sites of Compassion International and meeting children and doing home visits. We were very impressed with the work of their in-country staff and volunteers. In a rapidly accelerating global economy many people are being left behind– a disproportunate amount of our brothers and sisters in developing countries like El Salvador.

Our family sponsors Jeheira, a beautiful 6 year-old girl who is living in Santa Ana, El Salvador (pictured with Hailey, right). She lives just a few hundred yards from a shiny Toyota dealership– but a world a way in terms of standards of living. Jeheira’s family makes their home just above a filthy creek bed and her corrigated tin house is built into the wall of an ajoining neighborhood. Seven people share a one room hut with slanted dirt floors. The home smells fowl but is neat and contains the families few possessions. Jeheira’s father was murdered on a public bus by gang members when she was one year old. Through various odd jobs her family makes approximately $2 a day. Food costs and currency rates are the same as the United States– so her family has approximately 25 cents per person per day to spend on food. What shocked me the most was where they get their water– from the filthy creek we crossed to get to Jeheira’s house– full of paint cans, garbage and sewage. We were told that if we drank the water the family uses, it would probably kill us– but because their bodies are used to the levels of toxins and bacteria, Jeheira’s family is able to drink this water without getting sick (though I wonder what is does to their long term health).

The work of Compassion International projects in these neighborhoods provides children like Jeheira with access to education, nutrition and health care, socio-emotional support and spiritual nurturing that help her to have hope and an imagination for a better way of life.

On the way back from Jeheira’s house we walked past many teenage boys standing around aimlessly on the street. Many of these boys will be led into gangs by the lack of opportunity and positive male role models. Often these gangs prey on teenage girls– kidnapping and raping them as a gang rite of passage. I was told that in El Salvador 80% of girls are sexually abused by age 12. Its sad for me to think about the challenges Jeheira faces in her life– but I’m glad that our family can write to her, pray for her and give towards her education, well-being and sense of confidence and dignity.

I’m still processing what we saw on this trip. So many juxtapostions. People living in severe poverty who are so generous and happy. Guns and smiles on children’s faces everywhere. Our future is the children of this world– the good dreams of God belong to them– and they are worthy of our attention and conscious about how we live in this complex global economy– where the rich prosper and the poor suffer.

Hailey and I will fly out early Monday morning to spend a week in El Salvador visiting sites for the work of Compassion International. I really looking forward to this trip and glad to be sharing this experience with Hailey. If you know anyone in El Salvador, please let us know. I’ve been reading various novels about the Civil war in El Salvador, most notably, Manlio Agueta’s One Day of Life. Many of our neighbors in the Mission district are political refugees from El Salvador– so I hope this trip gives me a better understanding of our neighborhood. We are bringing along 5 soccer balls and thousands of baloons and pieces of bubble gum to share with the kids we will meet at the schools and sites we will visit. While in El Salvador we will be shooting a short film we will use to raise funds for the work of Compassion International during our 36 city Church Basement Roadshow: A Roll’n Gospel Revival.

Hailey Plays Mrs. Beaver in this creative adaption. Buy your tickets yesterday. All performances are selling out!

Marsh Youth Theater presents NARNIA
based on The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.

MYT’s Narnia will feature beautiful music, aerial dance, light spinning and a bit of magic. Audiences of all ages will love the retelling of the children who walked through a wardrobe and ended up in a magical land in need of their heroism.