It was almost the best day of his life. Joe Gardner, a resident of New York City, had spent most of his years teaching jazz band classes for middle-schoolers. The work had its own peculiar charm. Sure, the racket cooked up by distracted brains, untrained ears, and clumsy fingers could be grating. But there were moments of magic along the way: flickers of musical progress, sessions when the students caught some of Joe’s infectious enthusiasm for jazz, and a young prodigy named Connie whose soulful trombone playing reminded Joe of the day he first fell in love with music. However, despite those perks, the work remained a chore which competed for time and energy with Joe’s true passion: playing jazz piano. Year after year, Joe’s dream of lighting up the stage seemed increasingly unattainable, dwindling into the darkness like a missed subway car. But that all changed when a smooth audition landed him a gig with Dorothea Williams, the legendary trumpet virtuoso. Before the audition, life had been mundane and monotonous – a melody that puttered along and circled back with all the predictability of a broken record. The gig with Dorothea was a key change, infusing the melody with new colors and possibilities. “I was born to play,” Joe had told his students. At long last, he was finally on the brink of doing so.
Then, on his way home from the audition, he fell into a manhole.
In a sick twist, Joe found his soul on a cosmic conveyor belt, moving with countless other souls toward the blinding light of the “Great Beyond.” Desperate to escape his fate, Joe leaped off the belt and plummeted into the void, only to find himself landing with a thud in the “Great Before.” Here, new souls were mentored and given their traits before heading to earth. Mistaken for a mentor, Joe was tasked with training a notoriously difficult soul named 22, who had zero interest in life on earth. The job presented Joe with the makings of an escape plan. He would take 22 to earth to help her find her “spark,” the missing piece of her palette. In exchange, he would get a chance to locate and rejoin his body. It was almost too good to be true: for one, a chance to witness life firsthand before committing to it, and for the other, a second chance at a life snuffed out by bad luck. However, in their undercover journey to earth, both Joe and 22 would get far more than they bargained for.
I’m a huge fan of Pixar’s latest film, Soul. While it may sound like heresy to you animated movie lovers out there, I must confess that I liked it even more than Pixar classics like Up, Inside Out, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and Toy Story (Now, before you hunt me down and burn me at the stake, hear me out). Sure, there are plot flaws and corny bits. Sure, the spirituality of the film is a hodgepodge of the sincere, the strange, and the schmaltzy. However, more than any other Disney or Pixar film that I’ve seen, Soul hit me in the heartstrings and swept me into its propulsive, wonderfully outlandish plot. It also did what the best art does, prompting me to pause and reevaluate my life with fresh eyes. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I was delighted to find echoes of the Gospel in the storyline. Specifically, I believe that Soul has some profound and deeply countercultural things to say about a topic that is frequently overlooked in modern storytelling: the magic (or, in this case, the music) of the mundane.
Make Me Interruptible
Despite his commitment to helping 22 find her spark, Joe Gardner’s journey to Earth is really motivated by one goal: find and rejoin his body at any cost. It’s a race against the clock, made all the more pressing by the Accountant who hunts the escaped souls in an effort to return them to the Great Before. However, as a newcomer to Earth, 22 is arrested by the strangeness of New York City – the stew of sights, smells, and sounds that flavors its hustle and bustle. Throughout the film, she stops to appreciate things that Joe hurries past in his frantic quest: seeds spinning down from the branches of trees, the aroma of fresh pizza, a busker singing on a subway platform, and the rush of air through a sidewalk grate. To Joe, these interruptions are both bewildering and irritating. To 22, they’re burning bushes: moments of astonishing beauty that demand her full attention.
Like the streets of NYC, our society is characterized by relentless momentum. Efficiency is the name of the game. Whether by TV commercials and touchless technology, freeways and fast food, or sound bites and cellphone upgrades, we’re trained to expect results that fit neatly into our accelerating timetables. The quicker and more streamlined the path to our goals, the better. We plug in earbuds to drown out distractions, use GPS to avoid detours, and fill our spare hours with activity to minimize downtime. Unlike 22, we rarely pause to notice our surroundings, because slowing down is missing out. “Adventure is out there,” we tell ourselves, and we chase after it with everything we’ve got, hurdling over anything that threatens to waste our valuable time. Like Joe Gardner, our eyes are on the clock.
During the summer and fall of 2017, I had the opportunity to live, work, and study with residents of a slum in a Southeast Asian megacity. While there, I was frequently surprised by my neighbors’ attitudes toward privacy. I’m an extrovert. I draw energy from being with people and get stir-crazy if I’m alone for too long. Nevertheless, I found myself getting annoyed when kids pounded on my door and poked their heads in during homework sessions, when neighbors sidled over to strike up chats while I was trying to read, or when late-night karaoke music came rumbling like thunder through the walls of my house. My neighbors in the slum used almost all of their spare time to do one thing: visit their neighbors. By contrast, I found myself coveting alone time like toilet paper in the spring of 2020.
Early in my stay, I recall sitting with two of my Kiwi teammates before our weekly prayer time. One of them confessed her frustration with neighbors who showed up uninvited in her house at all hours of the day, seeking conversation or help or nothing in particular. Then, as our prayer time began, my teammate prayed this prayer: “Lord, help me be interruptible.” Listening to her, I was convicted and humbled. She wasn’t asking God for a break from interruptions. She was asking him for fresh perspective – for the grace to see these disruptions of her plans and projects as opportunities for relationship-building.
My teammate’s attitude was remarkably Christ-like. During his three-year ministry on Earth, Jesus was a busy man. There were disciples to train, crowds to teach, sick people to heal, religious leaders to infuriate, and many, many miles to travel (not to mention a world-saving mission that needed some attending to). Yet, in the Gospel of Mark, we see Jesus not only allowing himself to be interrupted, but even encouraging disruptions of his agenda. When his disciples shooed away a group of kids, dismissing them as an unnecessary distraction, Jesus called the children back and turned their interruption into a teaching moment (Mark 10:13-16). When some folks interrupted Jesus’s sermon by lowering their crippled friend through the roof, Jesus put his lesson on hold and took time to heal the man (Mark 2:1-12). When a woman interrupted Jesus’ meal to anoint his feet with perfume, Jesus defended her unusual action in front of his companions (Mark 14:1-9). And when a penniless, chronically ill woman tugged his robe in a crowded street, Jesus forced his disciples to stop and made time to chat with the woman, despite the fact that he’d been hurrying to the home of a wealthy dignitary (Mark 5:25-34). Jesus operated on a different timetable than the people around him. Like 22, he saw interruptions not as cause for irritation, but as moments of profound beauty and possibility. In his eyes, each and every moment was worthy of attention.
Slowing down can be much harder than speeding up. I resonate with the lyrics of Half Alive’s song “Arrow”: “This heart is afraid to beat slowly / Miss a chance at what I could become / I know that I can’t run forever / But I can’t stand still for too long.” Life hurtles forward, and we’ve got to keep up. Yet, if we spent more time looking out our windows, bringing into focus the blur of colors and shapes rushing by outside them, I wonder what we’d see. Perhaps, we would glimpse some of the truth that Jesus tapped into: the reality that, as John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (or, as Vanessa Redgrave so eloquently put it in Letters to Juliet, “Life is the messy bits”). Pausing in our rush to adventure, we might start to wonder whether the interruptions around us might actually be adventures in disguise – an unexpected party of dwarves in our kitchen, summoning us into a quest for dragon gold. We might find ourselves agreeing with the words of C.S. Lewis, penned in a 1943 letter:
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day. What one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination.
Small Things Matter
As Joe and 22 travel through New York City, 22 ponders what her “spark” might be. Enraptured by her surroundings, she suggests that it might be eating pizza, or listening to music, or talking to strangers. Joe shoots these ideas down quickly. A spark is something extraordinary, he tells her – a purpose or passion that directs the course of one’s life. By contrast, the things that delight 22 are small, which makes them trivial.
“Bigger is better” is a maxim that’s widely accepted in American society. We see it everywhere we look: in our multi-million dollar sports stadiums, in the lavish spectacles of our entertainment industry, in the frenetic calculations of our stock markets, and even in the products that we purchase from our local grocery stores (Costco, anyone?). It isn’t necessary for something to be physically big to fit the bill. If there’s anything cellphones have taught us, it’s that a shocking amount of stuff (most of which we never knew we needed or wanted) can be crammed into a tiny space. In addition to efficiency, our culture prizes productivity, influence, and recognition, values exemplified by the soaring skyscrapers of our urban centers and the ceaseless scrolling of our social media feeds. We’re trained to tabulate costs and benefits in our pursuit of maximized results. If an activity can’t be chalked up to a specific career goal, turned into profit, or shared with our Instagram followers, then it’s probably a waste of our time.
By contrast, when we examine the life of Christ, we meet a man who, by all earthly accounts, wasted a whole lot of time on a whole lot of trivial things. The Son of God could have chosen any form he wanted for his entrance into our world. Instead of racing to start his mission, as most of us would have done, he chose to spend thirty years living in the backwater town of Nazareth (Luke 2:39-40,52; 3:23). During those years, he followed in his father’s footsteps and learned carpentry (Mark 6:3), a blue-collar vocation that had no direct relevance to his future work of teaching and healing. Throughout his ministry, Jesus spent numerous days visiting homes, sharing meals, and attending festivities with common folk (Luke 7:36, 10:38-42, 22:7-13; John 2:1-2). He did this so often that the influential people of the day called him “a glutton and a drunkard” (Matthew 11:19). And while he could have commandeered chariots (of the regular or angelic variety) to spread his message as fast as possible, Jesus walked everywhere he went (which, unless he was an Olympic-level speed walker, took a considerable amount of time). If ever anyone had reason to hurry through life, it was Jesus. Yet, the Savior of the world moved at what many today would consider a snail’s pace, investing huge amounts of time in small-scale activities that produced no grand or even substantive results.
Earlier this year, one of my favorite artists made national news headlines for a very odd reason. Andy Gullahorn, a singer-songwriter based in Nashville, was interviewed by The Atlantic and CBS News regarding a high-five tradition that he started with his friend and fellow musician, Gabe Scott. Once a week, Andy and Gabe walk thirty minutes to give each other a high-five, which includes a unique snap and clap routine that they developed together. After high-fiving one another, they usually keep walking and make their way back home. They’ve been doing this for seven years. At first glance, the ritual seems silly and a bit superfluous. However, for the two friends, it has become deeply meaningful over time. Gabe was hospitalized recently with a severe form of encephalitis, which ravaged his brain and caused him to forget his entire life. Andy visited his buddy regularly in the hospital. Amazingly, while Gabe couldn’t recall anything about who he was, his body remembered the high-five ritual that he’d shared with his friend – snap, clap, and all. Gabe’s memory has returned slowly, filling in the gaps left by his brain infection. In a bizarre twist of fate, something as silly and superfluous as a weekly high-five became both a step toward recovery and the glue binding two friends together through a season of intense suffering.
Why did Jesus devote so much time and energy to small things? Like Andy and Gabe, he knew that small things have a way of adding up over time, becoming meaningful in surprising ways. He knew that there is no hierarchy of events – that a human life is the sum of billions of individual moments, each one every bit as precious and meaningful as the one before. Like 22, Jesus rejoiced in simple things like good food, beautiful music, and conversations with strangers, not because these things were instrumentally valuable as a means to an end, but because they were intrinsically valuable as God-given gifts. He invited his followers to ask themselves whether, in their hurry to get busy and get ahead, they had been missing the innumerable gifts woven into the fabric of their lives. The Apostle Paul echoed Jesus’ attitude toward small things in his letter to the Corinthians: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Paul’s words remind us that all of life – the big stuff and the small – is an opportunity to worship the Giver of all good things. Andy Gullahorn makes a similar observation in his song “Small Things Matter,” which was inspired by his high-five tradition with Gabe Scott:
So take a walk with me on Monday morning
Through the same old small streets of our neighborhood
Oh, it’s no marathon that ends in glory
But it’s good
My Hometown
Near the beginning of Soul, on a conveyor belt bearing him toward the Great Beyond, Joe Garner vents his frustration at the accident that stole his longed-for gig with Dorothea Williams. “I’m due,” he says. “Heck, I’m overdue!…This can’t happen. I’m not dying today. Not when my life just started.” In Joe’s mind, everything before that fateful day had been a prelude. His “spark” had always been jazz piano. By contrast, his years in the classroom were a necessary evil – a tiresome stage of life that he’d always assumed would be temporary. Sure, the job had its moments. But it wasn’t living, not in the full-hearted, ravishing sense that Joe had anticipated a professional jazz gig would be. If his life ended before he could achieve his dream, then what had that life really amounted to?
I resonate deeply with Joe’s struggle. When I graduated from college several years ago, I was excited to find a job that I was passionate about. Aimless and yet eager to change the world for the better, I plunged into work in the foster care system. Very quickly, I learned that social work was a lot less glamorous than I had expected. There were endless stacks of documents to sign and file, countless conflicts to sort out, and dozens of days that left me feeling spent and discouraged. Soon after arriving, I started itching to move to greener grass. Yet, without clear alternatives, I found myself agreeing to stay for longer and longer periods of time. My restlessness intensified. Rather than pondering why God had given me the job, I fretted over skills I had that were going unused and imagined other vocations that would surely be more fulfilling. On TV, on Facebook, and in the streets around me, I saw people scrambling to escape the drudgery of their routines and to find jobs that they truly enjoyed (jobs which, according to Confucius, would keep them from ever having to work a day in their lives). Like Joe Gardner, I felt cheated, stuck in a monotone melody that was drowning out the strains of more promising tunes. Fulfillment was out there somewhere, and life was making me wait for it. The chorus of Half Alive’s “Arrow” captured my feelings perfectly: “The hardest place to be is right where you are / In the space between the finish and the start / It’s the arrow in your heart.”
Joe Gardner is a nerdy fan of jazz. In the past several months, I’ve become a nerdy fan of Bruce Springsteen. Prior to 2018, I knew him only as the dude screaming “BORN IN THE USA,” who sounded like he’d had the dual misfortunes of swallowing a bucketful of gravel and setting his pants on fire. Then, I discovered his landmark album Born to Run, started reading his song lyrics, and burned through his 508-page autobiography. I’m currently working my way through his entire discography and thoroughly enjoying it. Springsteen is famous for writing songs that interrogate the American dream, exploring the tension between our country’s promises of a brighter tomorrow and the gritty realities of its streets, tenement halls, and factories. His songs are marked by a longing to escape the monotony of working class life and, at the very same time, a fascination with the mundane details of that life. Perhaps the best example of this paradox is his song “My Hometown.” The track opens with a tender father-son interaction:
I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick and we’d steer as he drove through town
He’d tousle my hair, and say, “Son, take a good look around –
This is your hometown.”
As the song progresses, Springsteen recounts the toll that changing times took on his hometown: the race riots that endangered innocent lives, the textile mill shutdown that stripped men of their jobs, and the gradual exodus of the town’s citizens. In the final verse, Springsteen confesses his longing to leave the town that has fallen so far short of his childhood dreams. Then, unexpectedly, he hits us with a twist:
Last night me and Kate, we laid in bed, talking about getting out
Packing up our bags, maybe heading south
I’m thirty-five, we’ve got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said, “Son, take a good look around –
This is your hometown.”
That final verse gets me every time I hear it, because the redemption in the lyrics is impossible to miss. Although thoroughly disenchanted with his hometown, Springsteen still feels an inexplicable loyalty to the place. He wills himself to see its landscape through new eyes: the eyes of his son. He seeks beauty in familiar streets. Ultimately, he recognizes that no hardship can sever the ties that bind him to his birthplace. Sure, it’s screwed up and run-down and a sorry excuse for what it was. But it’s home.
Springtseen reminds me of another storyteller who was fascinated by the mundane (Guess who?). During his time on Earth, Jesus spoke often about “the kingdom of God,” which he described as God’s reign in human hearts. To illustrate what this kingdom was like, he told stories called “parables.” These parables included many images that were familiar to Jesus’ listeners: birds in trees, farmers sowing seeds, wheat fields at harvesttime, yeast rising in dough, village markets, and fishermen casting their nets (Matthew 13:31-33, 45-50; Mark 4:26-29). According to Jesus, God’s redemptive work in the world was transformative, unpredictable, and mysterious. Yet, the images that he chose to depict it were remarkably commonplace.
Why would Jesus describe a reality as lofty as God’s kingdom in such mundane terms? One reason is that Jesus himself was raised in a poor, rural context, so these scenes were familiar to him. However, I believe there’s a deeper answer. Jesus told tales about simple, monotonous, ordinary life because that is where the kingdom of God is built. To people who had been told that “important” things happened elsewhere, in cities and fortresses and halls of power, Jesus delivered a summons to God’s work in the here and now, wherever that happened to be: “…the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:21). To those who dreamed of future exploits while griping about their present duties, he issued a challenge to glimpse God’s hand in the daily grind, whether that grind took place in a wheat field, in foster care, in an abandoned factory town, or in a middle-school jazz band classroom. Jesus wanted people to see that no location is devoid of God’s presence, that no soul is free from God’s purpose, and that no task, however menial, is exempt from God’s call to service and self-sacrifice. According to Christ, God’s kingdom isn’t nearly as noisy and self-important as the kingdoms of this world. It doesn’t have to be. Rather, as Jean Marc Ela writes in African Cry, the road to redemption is “gestated in the deeds of the everyday” – paved with countless quiet acts of humility and faithfulness, right where we are.
The End of All Our Exploring
Have you ever wondered why “coming full circle” is an element of so many stories? Why do so many heroes and heroines set off on quests into the unknown, only to eventually find themselves right back where they started? While I’m no literary theorist, one possible explanation is that storytelling itself is a circular act. By yanking us out of our worlds for a little while and then plopping us back into them, stories invite us to reexamine our surroundings with fresh eyes. When we read about Harry Potter stepping off his train into King’s Cross Station, or about the Pevensie children tumbling out of the wardrobe into the Professor’s house, or about Frodo and his friends riding into the Shire, we aren’t meant to mourn the loss of these fantasy worlds. Rather, we’re meant to take another look at the world around us – that same old world that is shattered by sin and suffering and yet somehow still brimming with promise, if only we had eyes to see it. In tales like these, we’re reminded that the very places we so often yearn to escape from are the arena of God’s kingdom activity. Like J.K. Rowling, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, Christ whispers to our hearts in the language of story, inviting us to come full circle and rediscover the magic of ordinary life. Perhaps, as Frederick Buechner suggests in his book Wishful Thinking, that life was never really ordinary, after all:
If you think you are seeing the same show all over again seven times a week, you’re crazy. Every morning you wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. And the you that wakes up was never the same before and will never be the same again.
This, in the end, is why I’m such a huge fan of Pixar’s Soul. As I watched the mind-bending, metaphysical quest of Joe Gardner and 22, I was filled with gratitude for the miraculous world that I inhabit and for the Savior who entered into that world. Like 22, Jesus took a crash course in what it means to be human. He embraced life on this planet with all its quirks and repetitiveness, its delights and heartaches. He chose to walk our streets – to share the drudgery that is part and parcel of our everyday existence. He made our hometown his hometown. In doing so, he taught us that each and every facet of our surroundings, from the starry heavens down to the grime of the soil, is steeped in glory. In Pixar’s Soul and Jesus’s humanity, we’re challenged to listen to the mundanity of our lives and to hear the music that’s always been going on there – in the interruptions, in the small things, and in the places we call home. As T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem The Four Quartets,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Words for Wayfarers 