Yesterday I sent out this newsletter in which I listed all of the challenges I faced and overcame in order to successfully record my most recent song, “Together We Compose This Bloody, Bleeding, Beating Drum“. And although I haven’t heard this particular feedback (or any, yet), it just occurred to me that listing those challenges might easily seem like bragging.

Oh, look at how great I am, I made this thing after it was so hard but I pulled it off anyway. Yahoo, me!

I am aware that the appearance of this kind of self-congratulatory attitude can be damning, especially in our humble Liberal Quaker culture. Maybe this would be a little more culturally appropriate:

Here’s something I made. It’s OK I guess.

But what kind of celebration is that for something that you’ve just witnessed, against all odds, overcome the inertia of inexistence?

Here’s the real message behind my bragging:

I had so many opportunities to screw this up, to get in the way. I almost took all of them.

Maggie rocks out some ministry between Jon’s songs at Earlham College in a show for Scattergood and Olney Friends Schools.

Sometimes Friends approach me after performances, on the internet, after a Meeting for Worship, and praise me, noting how deeply my ministry affects them.

With all due respect (and thank you, truly), we might be going about this thing all wrong.

Invited Into Fully Being

When I take on a new project, I find that it is more often because there is something about the subject matter that I don’t know than because I do. That is to say – I receive a leading to go where I am blind, not where I am familiar.

When I lived at Pendle Hill in 2006-07 I named my project The Art of Fully Being. I saw that our shame and fear of judgment causes us to live limited lives in which we allow ourselves to experience openly only a narrow scope.

Rather than feeling that “I have figured out the way to live fully and now it is time to tell everyone else”, I felt that I was being invited into knowing that my own shame and fear of judgment limits my ability to love myself, to allow myself to be (which undoubtedly affects my ability to love others and allow them to be!).

To be specific, I tend to panic when emotions arise in me that I am not proud of or comfortable with: anger, jealousy, doubt, shame. My panic exacerbates the emotion that I am trying to avoid. What if, instead of hating and fearing these emotions, I allow them to rise in me and examine them lovingly…?

“Why don’t you try it and see what happens?”
-The leading to make The Art of Fully Being

What a gift is art. And what a challenge.

Invited to Clothe Myself in Righteousness

My current project is about nakedness. On a similar vein to TAoFB, I have found that our shame and fear of judgment hinders our authenticity in the world. We care deeply about being loved and being accepted, and we often will go to great lengths to prove our worthiness and hide aspects of ourselves that we perceive to make us unworthy.

I see that I wrap my perceived value up into my identity. My ability to be a clear and loving presence is hindered by my anxiety about how others perceive me and what I see as my value level in the social hierarchy. I have found myself clothing myself in my value as a musician or as a well known Friend. In this project I have been invited to dig past those layers, and it has caused a great deal of soul searching.

…and the project is not done. I am still in the final stages of recording (just posted this update on the CYiR website) and surely will continue to be ministered to by the project (often it is in the presentation and reaction to the project that I am the most stretched, as you might remember from my last music video).

But I can already point to major shifts in the way that I approach art. Instead of comfortably nestling my voice into layers and layers of instruments, production, and backup vocals, I have felt called to “strip it down”, lift my voice out and place it, bare, out in the front of the mix. The guitar work, similarly, is bare, with few layers and other instruments to distract.

I am videotaping each part of each recording session and will post videos online. This is taking something that once was a very private, solitary process for me and exposing it.

I am putting the project (my baby!) into the hands of others for the mixing and mastering.

Each of these things is dramatically new and different, and oh, how naked I feel! I am certain that the songs will speak to people, but while I am glad that others can benefit as witnesses of my projects, I wonder if passive observation is an easy way out.

We are all able to listen to the ways in which we are called into radical experiments in being. It is fine to appreciate “my” ministry, but I would like to encourage us to see others’ ministries as a beginning, or as the inspiration to follow the leadings that would minister to us.

I stopped by Pendle Hill in early September to help them set up their social networking system and interviewed with Shirley Dodson for their September newsletter.  The interview came out quite well.

Shirley was a patient and deep listener, asking questions like How did your musical ministry develop and What do you see Quakerism offering to the world?  Take a look:

http://www.pendlehill.org/blog/266-jonwatts