Facing the Music (22 page)

I wouldn't read Henri Nouwen's book
Reaching Out
for a couple of years, but when I did, my memories went back to my
days recovering in the Outback. I understood him, when he talked about the differences between loneliness and solitude.

The agony of loneliness has always been the emptiness I experience when I reach out and feel nothing there. It is the desolate place where I am forced to acknowledge my own weaknesses. Whenever I have been frightfully suspended in that ever-widening darkness, I twist and flail, screaming, “
I don't want to be alone!
”

Solitude is different. It is much more quiet and restful. It's the place where, as Nouwen suggested, I could “claim [my] aloneness” and still find peace.

One day, under the cool, mottled shadows of the eucalyptus, I noticed those old tensions had fallen silent. I sat there, drunk in the ethereal space between wakefulness and dreaming. I kept my eyes shut and enjoyed the ceasefire.

I felt warmth cover the top of my hand. Like someone had gently placed their hand atop mine in a gesture of comfort. I smiled and let out a gentle, welcoming hum. I opened my eyes, expecting to see Karen, but there was no one there, only the silhouette of gum leaves dancing across my skin.

Maybe it was God? The wind? A patch of sunlight? Or maybe just my imagination? I didn't know and I didn't care. I was free from my usual compulsion to explain it. Beautiful and serene, it just
was.

With another satisfied hum, I rolled my head back in submission, closed my eyes, and accepted the stillness there.

twenty-one

O
ur Australian expedition would take us six months to complete, leaving only the center and desert country for another time. All told, we had spent nearly three years traveling, and I was finally ready to set up a more permanent camp back in Sydney. I was so very fortunate to be able to afford what Karen called our “midlife retirement,” but I was getting a bit restless. It was hard to admit, but I needed to get back to some kind of meaningful work that offered a sense of purpose.

I took a job at an antique shop that was within walking distance of my house. It had been over a decade since I'd worked nine to five. The rhythm of it felt good . . . for a while. Each day I'd come home, tired from moving furniture for hours on end, happy to take the aches and pains as a sign of usefulness. As an added benefit, getting amongst the workforce helped complete my assimilation into the Aussie culture.

I loved the Aussie bush. I was a pro at cooking snags (sausages) on the barbie (BBQ grill). I fell so in love with Aussie cricket (the sport, not the insect) that my friends affectionately called me a “cricket tragic,” a term reserved for only the most die-hard of fans.

And my Yankee twang had softened. After much teasing from friends, I realized that I'd started calling bananas, bah-
NAH
-nas, and that was it. The only thing left was to seal the deal and finalize my Australian citizenship.

Clocking in, clocking out. Life wasn't exciting, but it was good.

One day, I got an email from my mom. She was excited about the fact that I was releasing a new record. I had no earthly clue what she was talking about. I went to the Internet to see what she could have possibly meant.

It turns out that Gotee released what I call a
posthumous
album of my live performances from the Back 40 Tour
of years gone by. I had been off the grid for so long that no one had even bothered to get hold of me to let me know about it. I wasn't ready to call anyone back in Nashville, so I downloaded it from iTunes to have a listen.

I had all but forgotten that I had ever sung a note. Normally, I hated listening to my own records after they were finished, but I'd never heard anything but rough board tapes of my live shows, so I was curious as to how it had all come out.

Karen found me at my desk, headphones on, crying as though someone had died. I could barely speak. Tears streaming down my face, I pulled the headphones out of the jack and let the music spill out into the air.

“It's good.” I trembled. I didn't want it to be. I needed it not to be.

She listened quietly for a while, reminiscing. “It is,” she agreed. “Why aren't you doing that anymore?”

“I don't know.” I was too dizzy to remember, but something in me sparked.

Not long after that, I had walked into a scene at work that would add fuel to fire. One morning I found my co-workers
gathered around the front-desk computer, grinning and nodding their heads in an odd synchronized fashion. I could hear the faint sound of music that sounded strangely familiar. When they saw me, they all started to giggle.

“What are you guys on about?” I asked and walked around to face the computer screen.

To my horror, they were watching YouTube clips  . . . of me! My face was red with embarrassment. “Stop it! Stop!” I scrambled, trying to take control of the mouse, but I was blocked.

“Why are you embarrassed? You're good,” one of them said with sincerity and surprise. It wasn't exactly a secret that I had a career once upon a time back in America. Humiliatingly enough, I had little more to put on my résumé when I had applied for my job. Now, it was coming back to haunt me.

“What on earth are you doing here? Why aren't you playing?” The lot of them stood there looking at me like I was a complete idiot.

By now, I had my story down pat. As if by rote, I gave them my usual spiel about how I had drunk the American Christian kid Kool-Aid for a while, that I sang about it, and, now, had outgrown it and gotten on with my life.

“Yeah, but you're good.”

“Play normal music, then,” they all piped and interjected.

“Even if I did go back,” I explained, “it'd probably be too hard to get fans when people figure out I'm gay,”

“Yeah, I dunno mate, seems like an excuse to me.”

I was fooling myself trying to make it seem like the years I had spent putting my heart and soul into music was frivolous. Few were buying it, least of all me. No matter how far I ran away, no matter how I tried to paint a picture to myself or my new
Aussie friends that my former career was a just a fun, idle little adventure of the past, I could never shake the feeling that I was avoiding what I knew I was made to do. Maybe being a Christian rock star wasn't ultimately the best fit for me, but the voice inside me that longed to create and connect through music had never eased up. There was no measure of distance I could put between myself and the calling to sing that seemed sufficient enough to render it silent. It started to become clear to me that it was a lie for me to say that I didn't want to do it anymore. The drive was in me. I had made work of denying it for nearly five years by insisting that I wasn't interested, when the truth was that I had lost my courage.

I had lost the courage to be myself.

Whether it was music or even my faith, these things were a part of me, even if I didn't have clarity as to what to do with them. Whether I liked it or not, I lacked the fortitude to admit aloud that both had added to my own life's journey and made me the person I am.

I could talk all I wanted about how I was traveling the world in search of peace and personal understanding, but my Aussie friends consistently called my bluff when I made excuses as to why I wasn't practicing my god-given talent of being a musician. I didn't have to be great, but I owed it to the gift to at least try.

The joy of the collective Australian personality is the strong adherence to the social contract of giving everyone a reasonable right to have a
fair go
. You can be all manner of crazy, spiritual, intellectual, or godless. Gay, straight, Christian, Greek, Muslim, Yankee, a circus performer or a janitor. It shouldn't matter; no one person is better than another. Each individual is released to dream, achieve, and inspire. The personal challenge to each citi
zen who calls themselves Australian is to honor the privilege of making another's path as wide and peaceful as you imagine for yourself. So long as you are
fair dinkum,
honest and true in your personal integrity, no matter how nuts someone else thinks you may be (and if you are, you'll usually hear about it!), it is this social contract that helps define the intrepid Australian spirit
.
In many ways, to make excuses, to fail to try, is practically an insult to the very idea that all things are possible.

It took me a while to break the habit of letting my confused experience in the Christian music industry turn into a condemning judgment of my entire life. I wanted to erase my faith. Erase my talents. But I couldn't. These things were, are, a part of me. I was still doing my best to excise them through avoidance and minimization tactics, but they kept coming back, demanding to be recognized in moments that seemed like orchestrated interventions.

One such intervention took place in the office of Dr. Petros.

Dr. P. is a plastic surgeon I met in Sydney, who was supposed to remove a couple of potentially troublesome moles that had developed on my face. (Due to the weakened ozone layer over Australia and resulting potent nature of UV rays that sun-drench the country, skin cancer prevention is among the routine health concerns that every Aussie takes seriously.)

The architecture and design of Dr. P.'s clinic spoke volumes about how he viewed the world. The decor of his clinic had a clean, European feel. Every inch of the modern, fashionable interior design smacked of erudite perfectionism. His walls were decorated with photographs of beautiful, pristine faces of serious, steely-eyed models. Next to them, with surprisingly seamless continuity, images along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, Rolex, and
Bentley. Stepping into his faultless, sterile clinic made me feel like a thick and uninspiring Kansas girl. A fat, bumbling accident of nature that needed thinner thighs, bigger tits, and a better nose. I couldn't help but feel shockingly imperfect in this place. What did it say about my weak attempts to be vain by removing a couple of pin-point moles, when it was obvious only a complete overhaul would help such a sorry physical specimen?

Like so much of my Australian experience, I took comfort in my anonymity. He was to have no idea that I was a fat, aging version of a Christian superstar from America. I was just a chubby Yankee who wanted to excise a few moles before the inevitable black witch hairs started poking out. Judging by the office decor, this would be the least he could do to help me avoid the pitfalls of aging. And, who knew, maybe it was my gateway to a breast enhancement?

When I first sat down in front of his scrupulously arranged architect's desk, he grabbed my file, leaned back in his chair, and began scratching thoughtfully behind his ear.

“Jennifer Knapp?” He questioned as if I wasn't in the room. “Jennifer Knapp.” Like a mystery he needed to unravel, he looked up at me and repeated my name again. “Why do I know that name? This is an unusual name for Australia. Why do I know this name?”

It had been years since anyone had treated me with any sort of recognition, so I was just as mystified as he was. Why on earth would he be so interested in what my parents named me?

“I don't know,” I shrugged, clueless, “I'm just me.” All I could think about was how fat and unkempt I must be compared to his typical clientele. I wanted him to pluck off my ugly moles and get out of there before he started critiquing my lumpy thighs.

“No. No . . .” he mused. “I know your name. You've done something. What are you? I've heard of you somewhere.”

It finally dawned on me, but I hoped I was just being presumptuous..
Oh God,
I thought. My face felt like it was filling with the blood of embarrassment.
Please
 . . . don't figure it out.
I wanted to be anonymous, especially here, in his perfectly manicured world.

“You're a musician aren't you? I've heard of you.” He was politely triumphant, but was still trying to place me.

Finally, I confessed to my Christian music career.

“That's it! Yes! You had a record . . .”

“
Kansas
? The red one?
”
I felt defeated, reminded of the fact that this part of my history would never die.

“No, it was pale green?” he launched himself into reminiscence again. “You had long, Indian-straight hair . . .
A Little More
or something?” He named one of the songs off of the
Lay It Down
record and knew that he had pinned me down.

I had only done a few shows in Australia, and years ago at that. I asked how on earth he would even know of it.

He went on to tell me about his life growing up in a devoutly Greek orthodox family. The private schooling, the assumptions that he would carry on his family's religion, his own atheism, but strong appreciation for the beauty of faith.

I tried to keep him at bay. I didn't want to let him latch on to some perspective of me that represented what I wanted to leave behind. I kept minimizing my art, my contribution to the world, with every sincere recollection he offered of my work. I had more than grown embarrassed about what people assumed my spiritual identity was, even more so in Australia, where proclaiming that one is a Christian is tantamount to many as saying, “I'm a reli
gious nut job.” I wanted the conversation to go to my moles, to my thighs, to my less than average-sized tits, anything, except for this conversation about the past. But he kept moving forward.

As I listened to him continue on, I began to realize his interest in the conversation wasn't about me. He was actually telling me the story of his life. While I was busy internally processing my own ego, I was missing out on his account of his own history. In recalling the music, he placed himself back in his own journey, his own experience with faith, and was sitting here treating me to an account that was appreciative, contemplative, and far from the bitterness that I had come to frame my own experience.

He didn't know it, but he was schooling me. I was feeling a sense of conviction, being caught out as arrogant. For so long, I had seen the music as something for which I was wholly responsible. I hadn't accounted for the role that music takes on outside the creator. He went on remembering how the music reminded him of his Orthodox school days, the soundtrack of his life, how he would be in a band or two and play music in and around his church. The music that he heard, adopted, and created, was a part of his life's fabric. It had nothing to do with my person. He wasn't thinking about how I, as another person, had impacted his life, but rather, was telling me about where what I had created had fit into his own.

I sat there, stunned. For the first time in a very long time, I wasn't entirely ashamed. He took ownership of his faith experience. He was appreciative of my perspective and my art, but in no way made me the creator or instigator of his own journey with Christianity.

My mind went from chanting the hopeful mantra of
mole, mole, mole, please
to gradually joining in the first of many restor
ative conversations I would be afforded to process what I had experienced.

At some point, I blurted out my embarrassment of my history. I downplayed my faith to him, as I had done to so many other of my Australian friends, as if it were a phase. He would have none of it.

“Why would you be embarrassed? What you did was good. The music was good. You weren't cheesy. It seemed honest. Were you honest?”

It was a genuinely probing question, the kind that is meant to discover something unknown about another. It wasn't a setup, I was free to answer truthfully and felt I had no other option but to be honest.