Part of Me, Apart from Me

Justin Vernon, maybe like you, seems to have a mixed relationship with himself.  The singer-songwriter of Bon Iver became famous as an artist for an album he created in isolation in a Wisconsin cabin.  In that album, Vernon harmonizes his own layered voice using variations of autotune with immaculate rhythms   As Vernon expresses in his most recent album about self examination: “There are things behind things behind things.  And there are rings within rings within rings.” Behold, my magnificent self!

And yet.  And yet, earlier in that cabin album Vernon sang of that same experience of “getting caught looking in the mirror on the regular," that his taking a good, honest look at himself actually reveals: “And at once, I knew I was not magnificent.”  What are we to make of that confession, that the constant self-projection is actually less than ceaselessly interesting?

David Kelsey says the heart of theology is actually existing eccentrically. Kelsey doesn’t just mean that living as a Christian is weird (although, duh).  But it’s deeper than that.  Eccentric literally means "outside the self."  Our faith as followers of Jesus, who believe the creeds and center life around worshipping God, and loving God and others, at the center of all of that Christian life is embracing this existential reality: that my deepest meaning is found outside myself and in God, rather than just within myself.  Or as Vernon sings: “Someway, baby, it's part of me, apart from me.”*

You’ve probably picked up that Justin Vernon is one of my favorite musicians, although given my family’s responses to his falsetto voice around the house, maybe not one of theirs? But I don’t think its an accident that Vernon is most well-known for his musical collaborations.  Yes, he worked with Taylor Swift, among many others.  But perhaps my favorite collaboration is with an acoustic choir at the Sydney Opera House (See below).  There’s an aching in it, a feeling, a realization that my self, it’s multitudes, it’s past, can never be as rich as me engaging in a collaborative project outside myself. 

And so, let me invite you to sing with others this Sunday at Lanesville, or at a local church near wherever you are reading this:

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout to the Rock of our salvation.

Let us come before Him with thanksgiving and extol Him with music and song.

For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods.

Psalm 95:1-3

*For more, see: Andrew Root.  The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms: Why Spiritualities without God Fail to Transform Us.  Grand Rapids: Baker, 2023.