Babylon is a real place, as real as it ever was, but it’s not confined to a particular geographical region or political stripe or socio-economic status. Babylon is the broken, barren, scary, hard place we all end up, whether we want to or not. Babylon is “the desert of the real” and to live there is to understand Always Winter and Never Christmas, it’s finishing doing all your laundry and realizing the clothes you have on are going to be in the empty basket before you have a chance to bask in the afterglow of laundry freshness. To learn to live in Babylon, without a Temple, without a home, as an alien, and as chattel is to make peace with the constant war between what the empire tells us we should desire for ourselves and God’s intention for us…but we aren’t here to just to make peace. That’s not enough. We are here–all of us together– to tell the stories of what came before and to sit and sing and dream the possibilities of what come next, and then to live our guts all the way out into that next new thing. It will take all of us doing our very best and loving our very hardest. I don’t know how, but I know this will be enough.
Surviving Babylon is about utter and complete, total and unconditional surrender. For me, coming to terms with Babylon means physically and spiritually laying down on the floor of the deepest darkest part of myself, and admitting to God that I have the tendency to make a real pig’s ear out of my life, that I cannot create and sustain joy out of my own devices, that I am unable to fix all the broken and jagged edges of who I am in this life. It’s a hard road, regardless of whether we are staggering and stumbling into Babylon or sprinting toward the Kingdom.
Any way you slice it, there are days when joy seems so far off the path, it must surely live in a different galaxy. There are days when the only music playing is a dirge or something loud, jangly, and obnoxious. But some days, when the wind blows just right, and a sudden stillness descends, the sounds of the story of God—songs of creation, praise, thanks, blessings, and love come wafting through, and nothing seems irreconcilable…like a mix tape from God, to speed us on our journey back to The Land of Milk and Honey.
One of my favorite things to do in high school was to make mixtapes. I would spend hours creating the perfect tape. I loved sitting for hours on my bed with a yellow legal pad and all my tapes, cds, and albums on the bed around me, figuring out just what to all to put together to say something good, hopeful, full of love. I still find myself making cds and mailing them to people…and I still refer to them as mix tapes. Mix tapes are my love letter of choice.
This place and what I share here is a love letter, so you know that you are not alone, and that you can do this. It’s tough out there, and we’ve got to stick together. We have to remind each other that Jesus is real and really loves us.
We have to remind each other to be nice, and to share. We have to remember that the monsters under our bed, in our closets, in the middle of the living room, or in offices of inscrutable power can’t have the last word. So, this is my mix tape for all the people who live and work in Babylon, for the people who remind me that I am a real person, that God is good, that nothing but the steadfast love of Jesus can fix a broken and dying world.
I’m dropping you a new play list (complete with liner notes, y’all) in a couple of days. And maybe even a podcast. Get ready to turn it up, loud.
Love you five-ever,
Rachie
Mixtapes From Babylon 