My hidden ambition is to live outside under the stars, damp with dew, reading holy texts in forgotten alley ways, chalking my pithy sayings on the sidewalks and boulevards after hours. When I am not needed by my family and compatriots, I will steal away to that secret and abandon place to build my castle in the trash, cherishing every piece.

--- Mark Scandrette, March 2009

Some of you might remember Mark Scandrette from the Three Stooges tour called "The Church Basement Roadshow" which bombed everywhere a surprisingly small number of religious dropouts were desperate for a good time. Tony Jones has since high-tailed it for Beliefnet and Doug Pagitt is running for political office. (Whether the abuse of the trombone continues I cannot say.) Mark, on the other hand, continues his making of a life in the way of Jesus by writing numbered pieces of doggerel. The epigraph you just read is Saying of the Wanderer #21.

I gather Op. 21 might have been written at a time when his family did not need him, and for that reason I'm surprised it isn't a bit longer. I would have thought we'd get something roughly the length of War and Peace.

But why?—the sensitive reader is asking himself—why are we being reminded of this Dumpster Duke? What terrible crime did we commit? What orphanage did we burn down? What litter of shivering kittens did we throw down a well? What possible purpose could be served by reposting his drivel? Couldn't we be just as edified with a picture of an urban pigeon eating a wrinkly French fry?

Well, maybe, but our art department doesn't have such a picture on file.

Besides, I thought I would show you what passes for relevant these days. This is poetry for the postmodern Jesus follower. That's why I put the date underneath it. So you would know.

If I didn't tell you this was cutting edge poetry appropriate to the 21^st Century imagination, you might well guess that it was a cheap imitation of the beat poetry found in the middle of the previous century. Yah, the 40s and 50s: Harry S. Truman vs. Thomas E. Dewey! In nine years Spud Melin will manufacture and market the hula-hoop.

Incidentally, if you want to get a sense of real beat poetry, of passionate engagement with the grit of life, uninformed spiritual appetites and social insurrection, read William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.

I say this to remind us of something very, very important. Not everyone who is hawking relevance can be trusted to know what is relevant. Reading Scandrette is as hip as listening to John Dowland's Seaven Teares for lute and viols.

And why is this important to us?

It is important because everywhere you turn these days someone is telling you that we need to speak to the postmodern seeker. We have to speak his language; even if that means profanity.

So why is this new church so ineloquent? And it's not just Scandrette. I cite Scandrette because he is so derivative and pathetic that even fundagelicals can spot the joke. We were promised "intentional communication with God through sacred acts of prayer, communion, worship, art, music, silence and meditation on Scripture". Sacred? What we got was goofy hand-me-downs which no one wants to wear because he will be laughed at on the school bus and he will probably lose his lunch money.

There is something very wrong here, whether it is Scandrette's fake beat poetry, fundamentalism's Lawrence Welk schlock or evangelicalism's boy bands. No one is seeking this stuff! This isn't a big secret anymore. This is not "a new song".

This is just playing in yesterday's garbage.