When I was in High School I would like to keep my albums in alphabetical order by genre. I would have three main genre's, rock or pop, r+b, and jazz. Anything that didn't fit those genre's then went into a fourth group, miscellaneous. This way of keeping order worked well until about 1981. In 1981 George Benson released his album "Give Me The Night". Up until this point George always went into my jazz section. He would always have a vocal number or two on each album, but the majority of the songs would be jazz instrumentals. With "Give Me The Night" it all changed. Here was an album with two instrumentals and except for "Moody's Mood" the rest of the tracks all had an r+b feel. George, for the most part has kept this trend up with all of his following releases. When it came time to label him, I couldn't. Was he jazz? Yes. Was he r+b? Yes. Where do I put him in my collection? From that point all I could do was put all the albums together, and just alphabetize from there, no more genre's. It was too difficult to label.
Being a musician myself, I found that people like to label. If I was playing in a Mexican band, people just generally thought that was the only style I knew how to play. They didn't know I could rip into a classic rock song or a funky r+b number at anytime. When I would play jazz, people had no idea I could do other genre's. They would just label me by whatever they saw me doing. I have seen the same thing with my other musician friends.
Why do we like to label people in life? Maybe we want life to be simplistic and not have to think too hard. I really don't know why we want to do it. I do know it is very hard to do. We humans are complex, and to try and label one is very dangerous and takes away the beauty of our complexities.
Think of David in the Bible, he is referred to as a man after God's own heart (1 Samuel 13:14). Yet this same man would commit adultery with a woman, get her pregnant, and then order her husband to the front lines so that he would be killed in battle (2 Samuel 11). So was David a man after God's own heart or was he a murdering adulterer? Yes!!! That is the complexity of us humans. We have the capability of being both.
Maybe you and I will catch someone on a good day, maybe we will catch someone on a bad day. Maybe your waitress has a parent who is deathly ill the day she waits on your table and seems rude. Maybe she is having marital problems. On the flip side maybe you are having a tough time and the waitress needs to be reminded about this before she says to another waitress that you are rude.
Scot McKnight says the story of humans is about being both brilliant and bad. In his long sentence prose Brian Doyle reflects on the heart of all humans. Humans, he says, carry with them a heart filled with all kinds of pain.
I think about this all the time. I find myself staring at the shoulders of counselors and priests and doctors and mothers, to see what the weight looks like. I find myself thinking that most people sure are extraordinary. I find myself thinking, as I get older and less cocky and less sure and more merciful and more hip to the fact that everyone has scars on their hearts and will, and everyone carries their loads or will, and everyone carries their load alone or will, that maybe all people are extraordinary, whether or not I see that clear, and that my seeing it or not seeing it has nothing to do with the reality of grace under duress, which is pretty much the story of the human race. Love carries a lot of pain in its chest.
When I was younger I thought labeling my record collection was a tough task. I have since learned that there is a similarity in dealing with humans. We just can't be labeled. We are capable of both good and bad actions. To quote Scot McKnight again,"We find in humans around us a glory that astounds as well as a frailty that can shatter."
I never would have guessed that all those years ago as I was trying to label George Benson, I was being taught a lesson about life. A lesson about myself and other humans.
Troy
Works Cited
Doyle, B. The Wet Engine (Brewster, Mass: Paraclete,2005), 132
McKnight, S. Embracing Grace (Brewster,Mass: Paraclete,2005), 29,30