A little story about me.
Back in 1999 one of my close friends put me on to one of the latest hip hop albums: 2001. This album came out a full two years before its moniker and my friend had an early copy as it had yet to hit the college circuit. Well a few months later while working on one the hardest courses of my colligate career (digital systems II) One of my buddies in the grad lab had his speakers and win amp blasting and one of the songs came on.
Being that the album was new I found myself in the unique position of being the only one in the lab that had heard the album.
Well it was a hot album and being such I had placed this recording in heavy rotation. When one of the tightest cuts on the album came on in the playlist I could not front and act like I hadn’t heard it. As much as I tried to pretend when the now infamous line sung by Nate Dogg came on I had to chime in right with him…..
“Hold up, heeeey...get ready for the next episode, Heey aay yee yay…..” well you know the rest.
When I sang that line it struck a chord in one of my teammates mind and she made this statement that has stuck with me ever since and it’s the reason I write this blog today. As innocent as it was at the time, I looked at it one way and I see it differently as I have grown. Heather looked up at me soon after I quoted Kurupt and Nate and said:
“For a preacher you sure know a lot of rap songs!”
My two other cohorts Toya and Osei nodded and agreed.
Now at this time I was only two or so years into having accepted my calling. This statement spoke to the notion that we all had of a preacher that didn’t quite Jive with me listening to and singing Dr. Dre’s latest album. And it is a notion that I struggled with for years after.
But now I am a little bit older and a tad bit wiser. I have come to realize that for me to have pretended to not know or have heard “the next episode" before and even more to pretend that I didn’t enjoy the song, would’ve been to deny my own personhood. Also it would have confirmed a certain dualism that far too many suffer from.
Any dualism of self is unhealthy in my estimation.
You see your understanding of self frames your world. Dualism is rampant among my people. We all have an understanding of the degree self that is one way here and another there. A self that can laughs at something in one setting but shuns the very same notion in another setting. A work self and a home self. A self that is this way with this group of friends and another with the other group of friend. This kind of schizophrenia is unhealthy
I admit I did struggle with that kind of dualism in my personality and public persona….somewhere around my first year of seminary and the birth of my daughter I made the decision to stop any forms of denial of my true self altogether. Not that I have arrived and or did so by myself. Now for the last several years one of the most anticipated albums since then has been the detox album. I guess it helps that I have a president that is a Jay-z fan, along with the CIO of my organization.
The bottom line is it is easier to be comfortable with who you are than trying to be what you think people expect you to be.
