The Death of One Thing and the Beginning of Another

Today is my twentieth birthday. I've never really been one to "celebrate" (click and read definition 2b) a birthday much. The idea of a birthday always seemed to me like a way to glorify oneself (especially the "deviate" part) beyond what our human credentials should allow, which, in its very nature, is antithetical to my belief system. With that being said, I have always found my birthdays to be a time of inward reflection.

This time around has been even more so contemplative, because as the title of this blog implies, this isn't just any birthday. This is the death of something. Something that plays a defining role in every person's life: adolescence. It is during these "teen" years I believe a person really develops who they are, and what they believe. Don't get me wrong, these things last a lifetime, but our teenagedom lays the framework. Since starting college, I have found myself occasionally looking upon young, though not much younger than me, high-schoolers and, sometimes with strong emotional force, but also sometimes faintly, longing to go back to my high-school years. But overall, I am ecstatically happy where I am now, and wouldn't trade it for a million high-school memories.

The years of being a teenager are now over for me. I've always considered myself as a "grown-up", pretty much from the time my first sister was born when I was eight years old. It seems like a laughable concept for an eight year old to feel like an adult, but this is how I was. Even when talking with my family about my upcoming birthday this year, my mother told me, "I never really thought of you as a teenager". I think somewhere deep inside of me I just always had an idea that as human beings, we should take responsibility for our actions, and the act of being a teenager, especially when you embrace being a teenager, is almost the exact antagonist of responsibility. This is all to say that, basically, I haven't felt like a teenager for years already. My twentieth birthday then, was just one thing to finalize another thing I had already felt for quite some time. To me, it was just another day, to be treated like, well, just another day, akin to my aforementioned mentality. It wasn't until this morning when I actually woke up and got out of bed that I realized how special and amazing this day really was. It was on this very day twenty years ago that I entered the world and breathed my first. This was an illuminating realization.

Entitlement is a human trend—I know it, and I know it well. It is such an easy trend for us to follow. As humans, we want to be loved and accepted, but even more than that we want to be praised and adored. Birthdays as we know them now are a perfect segue (see definition 3-noun) into that sentiment. They are a day designated and set aside for a specific person, usually with an entire day's activities revolving (again: deviated) around this person and their desires, temporarily elevating said person to godlike stature. Suffice it to say, my realization when I woke up this morning had not the slightest sense of entitlement woven into it. All I felt was humility, and a beautiful awe and respect for life. Humility because of the fact I was even given the opportunity to live in the first place, and awe and respect because the gift of life is perfection. I am writing this to give those of you with a birthday coming up, or recently passed, or if you have a birthday at all, insight and encouragement. Like I just said, being able to live is perfection. There are more politically correct ways to state this feeling, I am sure. I might be criticized by some for putting such a label as "perfect" on something that is so blatantly not, but I don't care. I am an artist, and maybe this is a feeling only artists can relate to, but I think we can all be artists. I believe we can all look at life with such respect as to say, "This is perfection. This is beauty"... If anything, a birthday should be a day where one's eyes are taken off of themselves and put onto the world around them. To be alive is a beautiful thing, and I am glad to have been born on this day, twenty years ago.

Our North Shore Adventure

This story began on January 2nd, 2011. It was a Sunday morning. My cousin and best friend, Coty Durazzo, had just gotten back from California the night before, and we were both staying at my parents, along with one of my classmates, Seth Keymon. When I awoke, Coty was outside on his cellphone. It was his step-mother. She said she missed him and wanted him to move back to North Carolina with her and his father. That's all it took. His flight was booked for Tuesday; just like that my best friend would be uprooted and taken from me, again.

With our time together now permanently limited, we decided we must do something great, before it once again ran out. By nine o'clock PM we had accomplished nothing, and all of our nerves were on end. I had almost resigned to my bed, totally defeated and frustrated with all things. But then something inside me lifted, and a conversation started:

"If you could do anything right now, what would it be?" my cousin asked.Exasperatedly I looked at him, and then it hit me. "Duluth!" I proclaimed. Coty had never been, and according to my experience, the North Shore had never disappointed. Plus, the road always provides some sort of a cure.

So that was it--we were going to Duluth. I walked into the living room to see Seth comfortably nestled on the couch, pleasantly losing his mind to his laptop. I asked if he was coming, and seemingly sluggish he arose. I sent a text to my aunt, Skye Harrison, who lives in Duluth, to see if we could crash at her place when we arrived. We started to pack our things and bundle up (the temperature on this lovely night in Savage, MN was a bone-chilling -11° F, and it is always much colder on the Great Lake). We received the "okay" from Skye and we were on our way.

As soon as the wheels started turning on my old Buick, Coty and I instantly felt better; everything seemed to disappear. The rest of this blog is about the restoration we found on the road that night, and the realization that all things--even the ugly, uncomfortable, and unsettling--come together in the end to create something that doesn't often compute with our human understanding, especially in the midst of our present circumstances--the realization that true beauty exists everywhere, and the ability to find it regardless of whether we want to find it or not, is a gift worth chasing after. This is our North Shore Adventure.

...we arrived in Duluth at about 1:30 AM; anyone who has taken the journey there should know about the point in which you come around the bend on 35 North, and there in front of you is a view (that snapshot doesn't do it justice) of the whole city, in all its wonderful splendor...just as we came around that bend, the chorus to Arcade Fire's "Wake Up" blared over the sound system, and it was too good to be true. We drove through downtown, then down to Canal Park. I parked the car in Grandma's parking lot, and we walked to the shore. Every single rock and boulder was covered with at least two inches of ice. It was cold and absolutely beautiful. We stood there for a few minutes and took it in. Seth and I peed on the rocks. We shivered. We walked back to the car and drove to Skye's. I was supposed to work in the morning, back in Bloomington at nine o'clock AM, so we were just going to sleep for a few hours, catch the sunrise over the lake, and then drive back to make it in time. We went to sleep about 2:30 AM, and set our alarms for 4:45 AM...4:45 came and none of us were ready for it. We fell back asleep and didn't wake again until 11 AM, leaving no chance for me to make it back for work. Luckily I was able to get off (I am working for my Grandfather, so I texted him as we left for Duluth, and he got back to me at 8 AM that morning...close one!) so we could enjoy our day in the city. Skye drove us into town so we could catch some of it in the daylight (something neither Seth or Coty had ever done). We went to the Electric Fetus and I found a couple sweet 7" singles for only a few bucks each (click the images to learn more):

We went to lunch and then Skye took us down to this area of the lake I have never been and we walked around on the ice and snapped a couple of photos:

After that, we headed back to Skye's apartment, packed up our things, and started our journey back to the Twin Cities. Our trip was short, but it was just enough to realign all of us, something that remedied our self-loathing and restored our understanding of what life is actually all about: chasing after the beautiful.

Coty's road haikus:

(click to enlarge)

"Everything has washed away--I'm perfectly normal again...I'm sitting smiling in the sun, the birds sing again, all's well again. I still can't understand it...Something good will come out of all things yet--And it will be golden and eternal just like that--There's no need to say another word."

-Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

The Wisest Man I Know

Less than an hour ago I confronted my grandfather with a question that I've been fighting with for years. Whenever I struggle with heady questions about my faith, he is my go-to man, and one of the few men whose advice I always trust. This issue has been particularly bothersome to me within the last week or so. Being I go to an Assemblies of God school, I am exposed to an overwhelming amount of Pentecostals. And because of that, the emphasis on tongues is very overbearing. Last Thursday night I was invited to go to a house church just outside the city by a few of my friends. By no surprise (since I was invited by my friends who also go to my Pentecostal school), the church was, in fact, definitely Pentecostal. Since I wasn't raised in a Pentecostal church, I wrestled the whole entire night, riding the fence, trying to come to a good assessment of the church and whether or not I agreed with its "doctrine".

It wasn't until about halfway through the speaker's sermon that I came to a place where I felt comfortable with what was going on and found myself agreeing with what he was saying. He started (of course) addressing the Spiritual Gifts, and said something that astounded me, coming from a Pentecostal--he said that people receive the gifts of the Spirit as they need them. That was the greatest thing I could have heard in that moment. By now you should understand why that was important for me to hear. Over the last year at North Central I have been saturated in a community of people that emphasizes the gift of speaking in tongues more than any other spiritual gift. There are people in my school that believe if a person doesn't speak in tongues, they are not filled with the Holy Spirit, since the fundamental truth of the AG (Assemblies of God) is that speaking in tongues is the initial physical evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I understand that there is difference between these people's beliefs and that of the actual doctrine. Not all AG people are that gung-ho, but numerous times I have heard people say that if a person doesn't speak in tongues, there really isn't any "proof" that that person has received the Holy Spirit. This bothered me, because I don't have the gift of tongues, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Spirit lives in me. I hear his voice every single day, and I am also certain that I have some of the other Spiritual Gifts, for example: Faith and Discernment. It wasn't until I started hanging around AG people that I felt my faith was questioned. So, hearing a Pentecostal say that a person receives the spiritual gifts as they need them was refreshing to my ears. I started to relax, but then the sermon took a turn.

As the speaker began to close, he once again began speaking about the Spiritual Gifts, but this time there was an emphasis: tongues. He began to explain that in order to make tongues work, a person must first begin to make syllables and sounds. He said that he wanted everyone in the room to start speaking in tongues right then and there. Wait. Hold on. So not only was he putting one of G-D's gifts in a box by "teaching" us how to do it, but he also contradicted what he said earlier about people receiving the gifts when they need them; he said it himself--he wanted everyone AT THAT moment to speak in tongues. At this, I turned to my friend and said, "I think that's my cue", and I stood up and walked out. I was beat up, bitter, and confused. It seemed so hypocritical! After the service was over, I tried battling the confusion out of me by talking with my friends, but none of their words brought consolation. It wasn't until an hour ago, when I brought this up to my grandfather, that I found peace.

We talked for awhile and hit many points, but what my grandfather left me with were two final thoughts. The first was this: like receiving faith and accepting Jesus in the first place, it is not something that should be rushed or forced. It will only come when the person is ready, when they come to that breaking point where they sincerely say out of their humility and brokenness, "G-D, here I am, use me". The second: actively seek the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. All of the Spiritual Gifts are available to every single person, but a person will never accept a gift they don't want. I believe this is part of my problem; the reason I haven't received the gift of tongues is because I don't want it. G-D won't give me something I won't use. It is because I have had a problem with tongues that I haven't received them. It should be our desire to pursue everything G-D has in store for us. I pray that G-D will help me break down walls and accept the things I don't understand fully, like tongues, or healing.

To me, this was such a beautiful conclusion, absolutely liberating. Sometimes all it takes to make sense out of chaos is to talk with someone who is wiser and older than you, someone who has had their own battles of faith with the same issues, and that is what I have with my grandfather. I now will no longer feel like a weak tree cracking in the wind when the topic of tongues is brought up. I know where I stand. Thank you, Grandpa.

I need a tape recorder.