April 2012. Greatest month ever. Job. Coachella. Caps. Nats. RGIII. 

No one ever tells you how to live life after college. Nobody tells you just how boring a well-paying job is and how depressing it is to wait for Friday COB 50 weeks out of the year. No one mentions how much time is actually wasted even in the most intense work environments and how the nagging sense that you’re wasting the prime years of your life never goes away. Nothing can prepare you for this reality. 

The ones who are really lost are the creative ones. The free and lost souls. The ones who pity friends in med school or dent school or just grad school in general. The ones who have big dreams but are afraid to admit they have them. The ones who want to create and bullshit for a living but can’t find a practical way to do so. They are the ones who really feel lost - doubly so when 80% of their friends will have a comma and some combination of letter “D” in their initials soon. 

These are the ones that email me. Little lost souls in their early twenties. Maybe I whine so much they see a kindred spirit. Maybe they just need some hybrid uncle-friend who pretends to listen. I tell them all the same thing:

Don’t be scared and don’t compromise. Not yet, anyway. From a bird’s eye view of time, a few weeks, months, even years of searching is a small price to pay for finding contentment. The only real mistake you can make right now is to be scared and settle. Contentment is life’s great puzzle. Jigsawed pieces made of money, and independence and security and creativity and love and whatever else matters to you. It’s all a delicate balance, you obsess over one and it’s at the expense of the others. Find what really fulfills you and chase it, even if it scares you. What is it that gives you a sense of accomplishment? What makes the time fly by? The only real mistake you can make right now is to ignore those things. 

Maybe it’s writing a song. Maybe it’s snowboarding. Maybe it’s digging ditches. These don’t have to be hobbies. A true dream job isn’t vacation; that’s vacation. A great job is about improvement: making life better for yourself and whoever else cares. That’s it. Pursue those things without fear, chase contentment. Do work that drives you crazy when someone else is better at it than you. Do work that makes you proud. That’s how we improve.

Just don’t be scared. You are smart, honest, and kind. You’ll be fine. Go ahead and fail. Get used to it (P.S. you never get used to it, but you get real good at getting back up). It’s ok to suck now. You’ve gotta start somewhere. Just start. Shut up and start.

And please remember me when you’re happy and rich. 

Gawker published a great point-counterpoint-counter counterpoint today on working in advertising. A few quick excerpts and my response:

Hamilton Nolan:
Do not go into advertising. Your creativity, as trite as it sounds, is worth more than that corporation will ever pay you. We all need jobs. There is nothing wrong with doing something that is not your dream job, out of necessity. But it doesn’t have to be advertising. If you are young, you have time to try a lot of things. Try to be a writer. Try to make it with your band. Try to be a working artist. If it doesn’t work out financially, at least you gave it a shot. And you never have to stop making art, regardless of your circumstances. Unless you agree to sell your creativity to that machine.

Drew Magary:
Yeah no, that’s wrong. Your creativity isn’t worth anything. In fact, you probably already have a terribly overinflated sense of just how awesome all of your ideas are. “Why do I have to be slave to corporate America, man? Why can’t people appreciate, like, the purity of my art?! MY PRECIOUS ART!” It never hurts to work inside a system that knocks you and your bullshit pretension down a peg. You can try to make it with your band or be a novelist in your free time. But during the day, you may as well learn about how to work creatively with other people, and how to accept rejection and outright failure, even if you still think that Verizon catalog copy you wrote was a masterpiece. God forbid you work to please someone other than yourself 

Fine points all around, but it’s never so black and white. Advertising, as an industry, has always been viewed as this freak nasty beast shoving products down our throats and raping our poor, innocent eyes with pictures of hot women eating cheeseburgers, but there’s more to it than that. I’m 29, married, and I work as a management consultant. For the past two years, the majority of my projects have involved me writing literature reviews for the Department of Defense. I have clients paying for my ability to read and write and they can be just as asshole-ish as any corporate stooge who shows up at meetings just to say something sucks. I write for a living, but I’m still doing it for someone else. I’ve learned to stop complaining about that. It helps that I get to work from home and walk my dog every afternoon. I even get my “contributing to society” rocks off knowing my work is going towards helping active duty service members and vets stay safe and healthy. But it’s not enough. 

I want to work in advertising to learn how to communicate and inspire. This is ridiculously naive and idealistic, I know, but I can think of few other industries where I can learn to write in a way that motivates people to do something. It’s not sexy or glamorous to think about ways to get a middle-aged housewife to buy more laundry detergent, but the principles of writing to inspire action are invaluable. So many of society’s great ideas are lost in the weeds because they don’t know how to communicate. Potential solutions to complex problems like climate change or poverty or disease prevention often fail, not because they’re flawed ideas, but because they lack great advertising. Learning how to write and sell ideas that spur action, that’s pretty damn exciting to me; regardless of whether I’m selling shoes or federal fiscal policy changes. Every “Lost Puppy” poster and “[Your Favorite Band] Live!” flyer is advertising. It’s not always soulless and evil. 

One day B.B. King is going to die. I say this because everyone dies, eventually, and B.B. King is 86 years old. One day B.B. King is going to die and pages and pages of words will be written about him. College boys who insist they only love “real music” will write “RIP BB” on their Facebook walls and tell the girls in the quad how If You Love Me is the best love song they’ve never heard. Gangly white hipster baristas in LA will tweet about how much they loved Lucille and how BB was at his prime in 1970 before they added strings to The Thrill is Gone LP. Proper journalists will chronicle his illustrious career, his brutal touring schedule (200+ nights a year, even into his 70’s), and his rags-to-riches story as the son of a Mississippi Delta sharecropper. Rock critics will note his undeniable influence on early guitar gods (Clapton, Hendrix, Richards) and the staggering amount of soul in his left index finger. All of these tributes will sound like predictably reactionary “legendary old guy dies let’s all pretend he was the most important thing ever” media nonsense, but for me, all of it will be 100% true. No single musician has meant more to me than B.B. King. 

When I was 15, I wanted to play guitar so I could serve God. I’m not joking. I knew who Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix were, but I also knew they were druggies who were probably headed for hell or in Jimi’s case, already there. I wanted to play guitar and sing songs about how much I loved Jesus; Jimi and Eric never did that. It wasn’t an electric guitar I wanted to play anyway. In church, we only used big fat acoustic Yamahas or Takamines and “soloing” was unnecessary for praise music. Just learn D, A, G, chords and maybe a Bm and you’d be set. Learn the E scale and bar chords and you’re a bona fide christian rock star. I was a quick study, learning chords from a book and picking up strumming patterns from my older cousins. I was dedicated enough to finally warrant a visit to the music store with my dad a few months later and he ponied up $299 for a brand new Washburn D12. It was nothing but church songs and major scales for me. 

A few weeks later, I don’t remember how it happened or where, but someone saw me playing guitar and told me to listen to a song called The Thrill is Gone. I found it on Napster and it was the first secular (gasp!) song I ever illegally downloaded. As soon as I hit the Play button on WinAmp my memory goes blank. I only remember bliss. What the fuck was this? How can something sound so sad and sweet and pure and happy? That was it - whatever it was, that’s what I wanted in my ears all the time from then on. 

I downloaded everything. Internet was so slow back then and downloading entire albums was out of the question, so I double-clicked the most innocuous sounding song titles: Sweet Little Angel, Let the Good Times Roll, Why I Sing the Blues, Lucille, Paying the Cost to be the Boss, Blues Man. I listened and I listened and I had no idea how he was doing it. How can two notes sound like three and a half? How can one note sound so sad? Sometimes I swear I would KILL to have YouTube back in my room at 15 years old trying to figure out the notes BB was playing, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. The magic wasn’t in the notes, it was in the hands.

B.B. King was born Riley B. King. He was born on a plantation in 1925. A fucking plantation. He was given his first guitar around age 12 and he hasn’t put it down since. He moved away to Memphis in the 1940s, playing churches and street corners. Riley B. King eventually became known as the Beale Street Blues Boy and then just Blues Boy, that’s where the B.B. comes from. Somewhere between being raised on a fucking plantation and playing on the corner of Beale Street, whatever was inside BB came out through his guitar, Lucille. Lucille is big, black, and beautiful. Make of that what you will. She plugs straight into the amp - no pedals, no compressors, no overdrive, no nothin. Whatever you hear coming out of that loudspeaker is Lucille singing straight into the mic. No lip syncing, no auto tune. Shit, not even delay. Like BB says in his song Lucille, “I like the way Sammy sings and I like the way Frank sings, but I can get a little Frank, Sammy, a little Ray Charles, in fact all the people with soul in this. A little Mahalia Jackson in there.” Look out. 

50 years later, the Beale Street Blues Boy is blaring from the stereo of an Electron Blue Pearl Honda Civic Si piloted by a 16 year old Korean boy living in rural Maryland. Sport Compact Car and B.B. King Live at the Regal defined my life from 1998-2000. The Washburn D12 was now collecting dust in the corner of the bedroom and a cheap Epiphone Les Paul was connected to a mini Crate practice amp beneath my desk. I bought a Les Paul because it looked close to what BB played, I bought a white one because I didn’t want to copy him too much. This is what passes for creativity in the mind of a 16 year old. Every day I sat and copied. A phrase here, a note there. Most nights I’d quickly become frustrated and give up, and instead of working it out, I’d make some pathetic scale runs in an attempt improvise my own way through a song. It was an awful, undisciplined, way to practice and retarded my musical development by about ten years. I wish I had known that it was all in the hands - there was really nothing to figure out because the actual notes were secondary.

B.B King taught me the beauty of soul. He taught me the power and sophistication of simplicity; how fucking hard it is to make it sound good. B.B. King is the first musician to make me feel something more than hearing it. He unlocked my awareness of feelings like melancholy and joy that I didn’t know were inside me. It all sounds trite now, but at sixteen, who else could teach me things like that? And to this day, in a world full of tools and gimmicks and gadgets, I’m reminded of the truth of B.B. King: you don’t need anything but a good pair of hands and a little soul to be whoever you want to be.

What I needed to know at sixteen, living as the yellow alien among white folk, was that emotions are universal. Soul translates in any language at any time in any place. Soul is colorblind and ageless. Even I, Kyoung Whan Choe, born in Seoul, South Korea, living in Frederick, MD could have both Seoul and Soul (sorry, couldn’t resist). If I wanted to love the blues, I could love the blues - I didn’t have to look like B.B. King to love B.B. King. Again, it sounds obvious now, but this is earth-shattering to a sixteen year old who sees the world in terms of Age, Sex, and Location (A/S/L, remember that?). My previous love of church music was fueled in part because it united us under the banner of Christianity, regardless of race or gender or age. BB taught me that soulful music is the same way. Soul is truth and truth is universal. In hindsight, that’s the truth that really set me free. 

All of this truth flowing from the hands of a Beale Street Blues Boy who would become a King. The truth is in the King’s hands. Long live the King. 

(photo: Mike McGregor for Esquire)

Me Too Often
Too often I wait for permission, needlessly.
Too often I ignore the freedom around me; only to obsess over restrictions. 
Too often I observe meticulously, but from the outside. 
Too often I climb inside and regret it immediately.
Too often I put my hands behind my back, voluntarily.
Too often I exercise restraint. 
Too often I stand so close to the door that only I can open it.
Too often I stay tight lipped. 
Too often I choose to stay put.  
I love hoodies. 

and I creep!

will be the year my life changed. just watch. 

It dawned on me the other night that I actually don’t know how to write. I only feel. This is a strange realization for someone who thinks himself a writer and hopes to earn a living writing someday. But the reality is, I don’t really write; I feel.

A few weeks ago, I watched “Page One: Inside the New York Times” and walked away thoroughly impressed and grateful for all the true journalists in the world. Journalists full of integrity and talent and complete badass grit. Journalists who wrestle with deadlines and grind at a merciless pace that would certainly kill any mortal man. Above all, it was their unrelenting need to get the truth that struck me most. They want to get it right. They have to. They put their feelings and prejudice aside [as best they can] and they dig and dig until they get it right. They write on command about anything, really, and they’re able to translate mountains of data from head to print with such ease and balance. That is real writing. That’s not what I do.

I watch or read or experience and something inside needs to come out. I just feel it. Usually I don’t know what it is and so I force myself in front of a white screen and a blinking cursor and just let shit out. I have no recorded interviews or notebooks filled with research, I only have my feelings. And even if I did have all that other stuff, it would still take me weeks to put it together in a cogent way unless I had some strong feelings about it. This lack of skill and logos makes me feel incredibly inadequate at times, but feelings are all I’ve got. It’s who I am. So, maybe I’ve been wrong to consider myself a writer all this time. I only feel. I consume and consume and consume and then write down what I feel. What do you call someone like that?

Well, “amateur” comes to mind. Or how about “raw” or “unpolished”? That would be a fair assessment of my character. It’s pretty spot on, as a matter of fact. It explains a lot; my taste in music, for one. I like things that sound honest, whether it’s a warbling poet or a drunken, hot mess diva, certain songs and singers and tunes just sound more honest than others. I’m all about shit that comes from the gut (where else would shit come from?). I value honesty in art and everything else. I think I’m ok with that. I’d never want to write something I didn’t believe or just to appear contrarian. The people I love most are also this way. They may be utterly sweet or harmless pricks, but they are who they are. Honest to themselves and loyal to others. Keepin it real.

I’ll keep writing; probably forever. Because that’s how I stay honest. Whatever it is I can’t say for fear of hurt feelings or appall or ridicule, I can write. This is probably why I write so much about religion and parenthood and career and angst and other things that tend to get bottled up. It’s my way of staying honest - setting the record straight. However far that takes me, it’ll be enough to keep me satisfied - knowing that I did the best with what I had and held onto some integrity of self along the way. It may not get me onto Page One of the NY Times, but it’s all I’ve got. And I think I feel pretty good about that.*

*is it me or is all of this starting to get a little too “Sex and the City?”

Idea Roadblock by Andrew Myers

I found this at the New Leaf Gallery in Sonoma, CA this weekend. The books are titled “Self Doubt” and I thought it was brilliant. 

One morning, when I was 12, I stood waiting for my school bus at the bottom of the hill where Granalta Circle meets Kemp Lane. It was a crisp Maryland morning, still early enough to see the white fog of breath and the light grey sheath of morning dew atop the fields across the street. I was alone at the bus stop each morning as I was the oldest kid in the neighborhood (there were only 4 of us), and I usually just stood there fidgeting in my Redskins Starter jacket, pushing my glasses tight up against my face. This was the only method for keeping my glasses in place on my fat, flat, Asian face which lacks a bridge above my nose.

My fat, flat, Asian face.

I wasn’t aware of any of this at the time, my fatness or flat facedness or Asianness. Well, not in a self-conscious way, anyway. I knew I was different, but I was just a goofyass kid. I had scored some major cool points in 6th grade by writing an original horror story about a family that had their limbs cut off and stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered to their relatives as free pizza (because, hey, who doesn’t love free pizza?). Not only was I writing for an audience, I was also performing quite a bit in the classroom. I once received a written referral citing my creation of “250 paper missiles and other spitball projectiles positioned in a threatening way to fellow students.” Another time I was made to sit out in the hall during science class because I kept pointing to an empty chair next to me and telling my friends to “come shit over here.” I once spent an entire math class miming as “Michael Jackson in a Box” from my desk at the back of the room.

And that morning, waiting for the bus at the bottom of Granalta Circle, I was just another goofyass 7th grader waiting for the bus. The bus was a crazy place. My middle school shared a parking lot with my high school and so, the district thought it only made sense to pack petrified 11 year olds alongside 19 year old redneck ‘super seniors’ who’d had their driver’s license revoked for conducting ‘hillbilly drive bys’ with their BB guns, all in one yellow school bus. This is all true. And for the fifth year in a row, I was the only non-white person on the bus.

When the bus finally arrived that morning, I climbed aboard and found it unusually quiet, even for a Monday. Our bus driver, Mehrle DuVall, usually had country radio playing in the background, but he was in no mood that morning. I quickly surveyed the scene: the eighth grade girls doing their hair up front, as usual; the 6th graders huddled three to a seat hugging their clarinets; the high school couples dry humping at 6:47 in the morning; and the aforementioned super senior rednecks in the last three rows. I usually sat with my friend Colin somewhere in the teens, but that morning, I saw Colin’s pale arm shoot up and wave me to the last row - he had been accepted by the rednecks! My face lit up as I made my way back; there was always unspeakably awesome mischief taking place beyond row 25, or at the very least, candy. 

I sat down next to Colin and kept quiet. I had no idea how he got the invite back there, but I wasn’t gonna blow it. I fidgeted some more with my jacket - it kept puffing up in the middle, and I cleaned my glasses with the Redskins shirt I had on underneath (we had just beaten the Giants on Sunday). I still couldn’t help but wonder what Colin had done to move up (back?) the social ladder so fast. After silent deliberation, I decided it was the condom-as-a-skullcap bit he did on Friday that put him over the top. Yep, condom as a skullcap, it’s exactly what it sounds like. The hicks LOVED that.

So there I was, wedged into row 28 with my knees up against the back of row 27, listening to Alpha Redneck talk about how he was building a wall of beer (“burrr”) cans in his shed. He had fresh welts on his face and arms; apparently from a game of paintball war he plays with his brothers except instead of paintballs, they shoot copperhead BBs at each other. “Paintball is fer pussies,” he said. He looked hungover.

The bus hit the wavy part of Shookstown Road and Alpha Redneck slowly turned his neck a full 90 degrees to stare straight at me while keeping his shoulders awkwardly square with the seat. I avoided eye contact at first, but flashed a bashful smile and raised my eyebrows.

“What’re you doin back here (‘hurrr’)?” he asked.
I just shrugged, unable to speak as my mouth was suddenly deathly dry.
“This bus is white man only, don’t you know?” 

His tone was obnoxious and laced with a hint of sarcasm beneath it. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, he always sounded like that. Like Stifler making the jerk off gesture.

And suddenly, before I could respond, he said it: “no Chinks allowed.”

I gave a nervous chuckle and looked away. I was scared and I immediately sensed my brain trying to process the situation. The only thing I could surmise was that I had somehow never known the meaning of the word “Chink” until now. Why did I think it applied to Mexican people? Was it ‘Chico’ that I was confusing it with? Chicano, maybe? Wasn’t A.C. Slater Chicano? Is ‘Chink’ supposed to imply that I’m Chinese? He knows I’m not Chinese, he’s asked me before. In fact, just last week he kept referring to me as ‘Koreanese.’ I distinctly remember not knowing how to feel because I had no idea what the intended effect was. Is he joking? Is he gonna pick me up by the collar of my puffy Starter jacket with his huge, hay-bucking hands and kick my Koreanese ass? I knew it wasn’t the “N word,” but I knew it was derogatory. At least, I thought it was meant to be derogatory. No one had ever called me that before. Could Alpha Redneck really be that unabashedly racist and stupid?

So I just chuckled. That’s all I could do. Chuckle like a harmless, cowardly, little Chink. Chinks don’t fight back. Chinks act like they didn’t just hear that word come out of your mouth. Chinks sit there and chuckle, quietly. Stupid, scared, little Chink.

Alpha Redneck looked right between my eyes, at my fat, flat, Asian face and he said, “yeeaaah I thought so.”

Then, suddenly, he shot up like a prairie dog and pointed to the window, “Holy shiet! Look at that buck! Thas at least a 10 pointer right thurr!”

I was saved by a fucking deer. Durrrrrr.

Almost 18 years later, I think back to that morning and what it meant. I remember wanting to cry in the moment, but not because it hurt me; I just didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe it was the impetus for my fascination with words and my irreverence about race. Maybe it was the day I started classifying everyone in the world as either “stupid motherfuckers who don’t know what they’re doing and saying” or “cool people.” Maybe it was just another one of a billion odd and wonderful things that happened to me in Frederick, MD.

Last week, ESPN.com went with the headline, “Chink in the Armor,” when the Knicks lost and Jeremy Lin had a bad game. I chuckled. It was the first time I’d heard the word since 7th grade. The first time I recall, anyway. I wasn’t offended. In fact, my first instinct was to laugh my ass off. And when my wife heard about it the next morning, I told her I was certain the writer made an honest mistake as “Chink in the Armor” has become a rather boring, but common idiom in the American sports vernacular. (I swear this was my reaction! My wife will vouch for it! PLEASE BELIEVE ME!!) Anyway, over the next few days, the requisite media shitstorm invaded my internet universe and even conjured up some of Jay Caspian Kang’s best writing. I still chuckle at the whole thing.

I’m not 12 anymore and I don’t chuckle because I’m scared or confused. I chuckle now because I think a headline featuring an Asian basketball star that says “Chink in the Armor” is a pretty damn funny mistake to make. It’s better than a chuckle, in fact, it’s worth a full-throated laugh. Of course it’s not ok. Of course he should be fired. Of course we shouldn’t teach our children such words or values. Of course it’s hurtful and ignorant. Of course. But we’d all get on so much better if we’d just accept that racism happens. Yes, we’ve come a long way and we’ve all evolved so much in the last 20 billion years (Eminem! Obama! Tiger! Lenny Kravitz! Larry Bird! Jeremy Lin! ALF!!), but stupid racist shit still happens and it always will. Do you know why? Because there will always be somebody dumb enough to be ignorant or hateful, or both. There will always be stupid motherfuckers who don’t know what they’re doing or saying.

But there doesn’t always have to be somebody on the other side being offended by them.

In the case of words, victims are voluntary. They called him Chink. So what? Give em the finger and move on. It is beneath us, all of it: the chatter, the fight, the “one step forward, two steps back” essays. I’m more offended by the amount of time and credence given to the word than the actual word itself. It wasn’t wanton (wonton?) discrimination. Jeremy Lin wasn’t denied the right to vote or told to use the Yellows Only bathroom. It was just a stupid word. Laugh it off and move on. Just laugh because it’s all so absurd, especially in this day and age. Laugh, and it loses its power. Laugh, not because you approve, but because it’s so stupidly wrong that anyone who attempts to hurt you with such words looks utterly stupid and wrong. Laugh, and make it “Chinks in the Armhair.” Laugh, and it loses its power. Laugh, and we become bulletproof. Laugh, and we eliminate chinks in the armor.

This is me. Well, no, those are my feet, but you get the picture. This was me five years ago at the southern edge of the Grand Canyon. I was driving cross country with a friend from LA to MD after quitting what I had foolishly considered a dream job as a youth pastor. I was 24 years old and recently engaged. I had a useless bachelor’s degree in sociology and the only marketable skill I had was making delicious cold cut sandwiches and bullshitting.

I was penniless, blowing my $2,200/mo paycheck on a $1200 apartment in Anaheim, $450/mo in car payments and a mountain of school loans. I was unemployed, moving back in with my parents, and applying to fine food establishments like Joe’s Crabshack and the Cheesecake Factory. Thank god for Cheesecake Factory. My goal was to make $200 a day by working both lunch and dinner shifts. I never made that much, ever.

I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to teach, but couldn’t afford to take time off for another degree. The wedding date was already set. I was a reluctant commodity at my local temp agency who sent me through half a dozen cubicle spaces in a span of 8 weeks. Somehow I wound up at a great consulting firm that’s provided more than enough these last four and a half years.

The strange thing about that time 5 years ago? I was never scared. I wasn’t stressed. I can’t explain it now and I couldn’t explain it then. I just knew things would work out. Because when you find yourself on the edge, you jump and hustle your way back up. You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like you. I’ve learned that whether I’m serving strawberry lemonade at Cheesecake Factory or evaluating hospitals with the former Under Secretary of the VA, it’s hustle and kindness that get me through (contrary to the notion popularized by the movie, hustle and flow are pretty useless outside of the music and prostitution industries).

There’s no reason to be intimidated. Whether the pursuit is creative or corporate, grind it out. Do work. Hustle and I’ll be just fine. Be a decent human being in the process and sky’s the limit (Sky’s the Limit is an example of a song that has both hustle and flow). I’m on the edge again and I’m ready to jump to another bottom. I’ve got more to lose this time and the fall feels steeper, but I’m not scared. There’s more fear dangling on the edge than there is looking up from the bottom. I don’t fear the bottom. I used to [barely] live off $2,200 a month in Orange County. I used to live with my parents and serve cheesecake to 15 year olds before homecoming. I once bought an engagement ring on a credit card with a 5 year payment plan. I can still hustle. I can still work. I can still create.

Just jump.

Christianity, and other collective mythologies founded on faith in a mystical deity are flawed. (<- Early contender for the most obvious sentence of 2012 award) The highest form of faith is believing in something that can ultimately be disproved. The more impossible the belief, the stronger the required faith. This is irrational and certainly not a virtue. For the purposes of this screed Faith = faith in a god. 

Faith is not a virtue - simply having it doesn’t make one a better person. For many, their morality is steered by faith and religious doctrine, but in no way is faith a prerequisite to moral living. Faith, however, does make one more hopeful. Faith spurs a hope that something bigger and smarter and better is in control or has the power to change our present or future reality. Faith may lead to hope that we’ll all somehow get what we deserve after death. In that hope, people find comfort, but it is not truth. Faith enables hope (good) but it also requires us to believe that which may or may not be true (bad). The Apostle Paul affirms this in Hebrews 11:1: Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

Hope can be a positive life force when we strive towards the improbable (e.g. beating illness, trying hard at anything worthwhile, etc…), and it can show itself in many forms, but it is certainly not exclusive to faith (in god) or spiritualism.  

For the past several years, I’ve been struggling with this question of why I still attend church and participate in my religious community despite my apostasy. I don’t believe in the Christian teaching of God or soteriology. And while I’m open to the possibility of anything and everything existing in the unseen realms of energy and death, I certainly don’t have much belief in a heaven or a hell or reincarnation or all of us returning to planet Melmac. Upon death, we may become worm food or wormholes, I really have no idea.

But the church is what I know and what I love. It’s where I’ve met some of the best people in the world (and some of the worst). It’s where I’m comfortable and accepted. It’s a place that makes me feel needed and useful. It’s somewhere I can ponder bigger things in life and establish deep, meaningful relationships with others. These are the reasons that keep me coming back, despite hearing things about “relationships with Jesus” and how “God is in control” that make me want to claw my eyes out. 

So, imagine if churches, in their current structure, were to acknowledge that faith was flawed and our own mythologies were no more “truthful” than anything else. How do things change? What does a church look like without the doctrines of our collective mythology? What if we kept all the undeniably positive aspects of religion and threw out the mysticism? Who wouldn’t want to be a part of a community like that? 

The 5 C’s: Things I love about the church now.

Constancy: knowing who will be there, the routine and order of service, steady location, consistency of environment and atmosphere, knowing what I’m getting into
Comfort: comfortable surroundings, old friends, welcoming, non-judgmental environment where I can be and express myself, a place to be away from burdens of the workweek - a place to unplug
Connection: seeing familiar friends, meeting new ones, a perfect level of interaction for “acquaintances,” eating together, familial support, collective joy/grief, a place where it’s not weird (rather encouraged) to make a “deeper” connection with people - generally unavailable in the workplace, a safe place to bring children and meet like-minded parents, sharing/venting concerns and helping find solutions for them, having the sense of a shared, collective purpose/cause 
Creativity: opportunity to hear and play live music, learning through lectures/talks/stories/sermons, hearing new ideas and reaffirming old ones, high-tech showmanship (sound systems, computers, projectors, etc…), artistic expression/interpretation of shared values/beliefs, challenging intellectual discourse, 
Collaboration: working on projects as a group to tackle a problem or organize an event for the common good, having an elected, hierarchical leadership structure that leverages individual talents/passions, sports/games/activities bonding through conflict/adversity

If we were to build a formal community that cultivated the 5 C’s I’d be all in. I already am, we just have that whole “Jesus is God” thing that irritates me. A community like this would not be immune to all the negative characteristics of any group: discrimination, gossip, conflict, etc…, but with the right alchemy and leadership it could evolve into a community that seeks the common good. I wouldn’t call it a church either, I’d call it the Common Community. Imagine attending a TED conference every Saturday. TED is the first thing that comes to mind when visualizing the Common Community. Someone like Chris Anderson would be the “Pastor.” The cultivator and leader. The facilitator. The Pastor is integral to the success of the community, but he is not the sole source of knowledge. He curates more than he creates. A true communal learning experience. Ok, I’m getting excited now. 

Elements of the Common Community:

1. No more sola scriptura: Eliminate reliance on the Bible or any other religious doctrine as the sole source of truth. Lectures/talks can reference anything that holds observable truth or otherwise presents itself as theory. 
2. Love Rules: Exploration of love and compassion as the highest principles and virtues - not faith
3. Observation, not explanation: Exploration of science and the beauty and mystery of our world through observation - not mysticism
4. Speak Well: Compelling speakers, experts in various fields speaking with authority
5. Get Real: Discussion of real societal problems and how our community can help
6. No Such Thing as Blasphemy: Irreverence for dogma, reverence for our community and shared values
7. The 5 C’s: cultivate all the great things about religion, without requiring faith

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Update (1/17/12): So I wrote all of that ^ while suffering a bout of insomnia last week. Today, TED (speak of the devil), released a brilliant talk by Alain de Botton who is making way more sense than I am. Atheism 2.0. So brilliant. 

good luck beating that, 2012. 

This is my family. We wandered along the beach to watch the sunset for Christmas. We then got korean food takeout and watched sunday night football at home. It was perfect.