The liberation of belonging

In a 2016 PBS interview celebrating the anniversary of her debut album Horses, Patti Smith talks about the opening line of the first song on the record, “Gloria,” when she sings, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” In the interview, Smith says those lyrics have been misunderstood since they were first heard in 1975. The song was a declaration of independence, Smith explains, and not about disrespecting the claims of Jesus, whom she considers an important prophet.

I first learned about Patti Smith by reading an interview with REM’s Michael Stipe, who famously sat up all night as teenager, eating a giant bowl of cherries and listening to Horses on repeat. “In the morning I threw up and went to school,” Stipe told Interview in 2011.

I’ve always loved this story, and in my head it looks like this: A young Stipe with curly hair and big headphones sits cross-legged in the dark, spitting cherry pits into a metal bowl. It’s quiet in the house, and his family is asleep. He can sense the risk and confidence in Smith’s voice, he knows intuitively that she is visionary, that this music not like anything else.

I can relate to declaring independence from our family of origin when we’re on the way to forming an identity. I sat up plenty of nights (sans cherries) with headphones as a kid, trying on different aesthetics and ideas. I also went through small waves of creative and emotional detachment from family in high school and college, and again 15 years ago when I left the Midwest for Seattle.

A lot of us Northwesterners speak the language of self-definition and self-reliance, regardless of religious affiliation. There is still a strong spirit of pioneering here.

Most of us don’t end up in Seattle unless we choose to migrate to the top left pocket of the US, where outside of the city it quickly grows green and wild.

And as a Christian, here is a contradiction: I feel an ongoing need to declare independence from the parts of church that are causing cultural brokenness. But — in a way that I’m sure is perplexing to a lot of folks who don’t identify as Christians — I’m fully dependent on God. In fact, I find freedom in that dependence.

It’s a paradox, to both declare independence as an individual and declare full dependence on God. I think of Matthew 10, where Jesus says, “If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.”

What if we declare personal moratoriums on mentally separating faith life and public life?

A new freedom comes when we belong to God. There is liberation in fitting into yourself and your calling.

But if we’re othered by some as Christians, it doesn’t make sense to turn that into self-pity or to make ourselves some sorts of victims. Not for a moment. There are real victims and perpetrators, and our call as Christians is to claim our identities, admit we’re moving inside a bruised and broken space culturally, and get to work.