Brother Blue

In the future, everyone will be on YouTube. Specifically, all the odd videos taken of you will migrate to the site. Back in 1999 or so, a local band here in Chicago called OKGO was invited to appear on a public access cable show called Chic-A-Go-Go, in which local bands lip-synched their songs while pretending to play their instruments. OKGO said to hell with that, and choreographed a dance number. But who should pretend to play the instruments? The then-girlfriend of Damian Kulash, lead singer and guiding light of band, worked at our show, and Damian had become close to a lot of people at Chicago Public Radio. Thus, in this video, they are backed by the Chicago Public Radio All-Stars: me on bass, Gretchen Helfrich on lead guitar, Jerome McDonnell on keyboards, and yes, Ira Glass on drums. BTW, I can’t play the bass, so note my too-energetic attempts to fake it. OKGO has gone on to greater things, and much more interesting dance routines, but the seeds of their genius is here.

While living for a few months in one of the “young towns” surrounding Lima, Peru, I first heard the term “reverse mission.” I had come from the North to the South to help the poor, but the longer I was among the poor the more I became aware that there was another mission, the mission from the South to the North. When I returned to the North, I was deeply convinced that my main task would be to help the poor of Latin America convert their wealthy brothers and sisters in the United States and Canada.
Ever since that time, I have become aware that wherever God’s Spirit is present there is a reverse mission.
When I marched with thousands of black and white Americans from Selma to Montgomery in the summer of 1965 to support the blacks in their struggle for equal rights, Martin Luther King already said that the deeper spiritual meaning of the civil rights movement was that the blacks were calling the whites to conversion.
When, years later, I joined L’Arche to live and work with mentally handicapped people, I soon learned that my real task would be to let those whom I wanted to help offer me — and through me many others — their unique spiritual gifts.
This “reversal” is the sign of God’s Spirit. The poor have a mission to the rich, the blacks have a mission to the whites, the handicapped have a mission to the “normal,” the gay people have a mission to the straight, the dying have a mission to the living. Those whom the world has made into victims God has chosen to be bearers of good news.