Kick it Root Down!

"I kick it root down, I put my root down, I kick it root down, I put my foot down!" Sometimes, I gotta' kick it old school with some classic Beastie's. I love that song, because if you YouTube it, click on link to watch it, you will see New York (specifically Brooklyn) back in the late 1970's, early 1980's which was directly responsible for the foundation of break dancing. In a documentary entitled, The Freshest Kids, it details how the South Bronx and Brooklyn contributed to this new form of dance (break dancing) based upon "Dancing at breaks in the music, performed by DJ's spinning records." The DJ's would spin records which caused the music to break, over and over again, contributing to a beat which enabled people to dance in a more rhythmic form. Only New Yorker's could do something like that! JK of course. Kind of. The greatest part about the DJ's spinning records was that they used old time rhythm and blues artists. Mo-Town, James Brown, Disco...etc. There always needs to be the integration of the old, coupled with the new--feeling the classics, but keepin' up with the cultural milieu.

I, of course related this to the way that each generation in the United States thinks that it has been the first to develop a new concept. We would deny that our culture does this, but how many conversations do we have between the World War II generation, the Baby Boomers, Generation X, and now Generation Y? I know that there are some organizations and churches which have bonded the generations together, but for the most part, at least the people that I associate with have found that they are doing everything for themselves. Maybe this has to do with America's "rugged individualism", which is one of the core tenet's in the foundation of our country. Maybe it has to do too much with the modern quest to know the "true self." This is a funny identification, because the true self is whoever we actually are. We have heard the statement before, "Well, they were not really like that!" I am the first to say that blame is never completely on the shoulders of any one human being, even for their own choices, and the beginning of owning decisions starts with the premise that it is never one person's fault. But our true selves are sculpted by our history, our culture, other peoples judgments about us, societies labels of us, our associations, etc...the list could go on.

This leads to a radical restructuring of the centrality of discipleship. What does it truly mean to be "In Christ"? Is being In Christ integrally tied to being connected with my heritage and my roots? I started this blog by quoting from the song, "Root Down", because maybe something in us longs to truly know our roots, our heritage, our seeds. This is the reason that I truly identified with Black Liberation Theology, because its central message is the African-American experience, which believes in the incarnation of Jesus into the midst of our communities. This theological supposition does not need post-modernism to tell it that we should be living in community. It has been a part of the experience of Africans and African Americans for centuries. For the most part, my history has been color blind, but has our color blind-ness, really been a blindness to the depth's of the human story?

To truly know and be known is at the core of humanity and as Miroslav Volf has said in Exclusion and Embrace, post-modernity has a fascination with the self and deeply desires a "Liberated self", but in the process of liberation, have we lost our roots? I want to once again, "Kick it Root Down!" Peace!