"God' by Bladee, Mechatok
Bladee is a Swedish rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, fashion designer, and member of the artistic collective Drain Gang.
I first heard Bladee on the hyper-pop Spotify playlist with his song āBe Nice 2 Meā in 2019.
āBe Nice 2 Meā by Bladee
I found the lyrics surprisingly helpful during the breakdown of my marriage that year over my newfound belief in God/the spiritual world/the Holy Spirit/the mystery/whatever you want to call it/etc.
Which she didnāt share and frightened her due to its ecstasy being associated with my previous bipolar disorder diagnosis.
But:
To be honest, if it's wrong, I don't want to be right
And:
I don't wanna talk if you're not gonna talk to me nice.
Many times I did want my (ex?)-wife to just ābe nice 2 meā.
Or how I perceived that to be.
At one point, she asked if I could ever go back to before.
Before the veil had been lifted.
It felt like this:
All this shit, I'm goin' through a crisis (Through a crisis)
If you do this for me, you're the nicest (You're the nicest)
How many times I prayed?
Bladee says of his musical style that āheās evolved into some sort of auto-tuned dark angel" and he finds making music ātherapeuticā.
I wholeheartedly resonate.
Not going to front (on Debra or anyone else).
But it became my most-listened-to-song of 201
Be nice to me
Todayās shuffled-to-song by him and Mechatok, āGodā, is one from late 2020 that I canāt remember having heard yet.
But it feels like a synchronicity, because I recently received a new work of art from the artist Kellee Brewer Stall and posted a photo of it on Instagram yesterday:
I told Kellee that I plan to take a similar photo of anyone who visits my home with their face in the mirror and pair it with more Richard Rohr quotes for a further art project.
And how her artwork reminded me of what he wrote about the famous painting by Andrei Rublev, The Hospitality of Abraham, or simply The Trinity, depicting a story from the book of Genesis.
Which Rohr points out had a mirror in it as well:
At the front of the table there appears to be a little rectangular hole. Most people pass right over it, but some art historians believe the remaining glue on the original icon indicates that there was perhaps once a mirror glued to the front of the table. Itās stunning when you think about itāthere was room at this table for a fourth.
The observer.
You!
Yes, youāand all of creationāare invited to sit at the divine table. You are called āto consciously participate in the divine dance of loving and being loved,ā as Wm Paul Young, the best selling author of The Shack, writes.
The mirror seems to have been lost over the centuries, both in the icon and in our on-the-ground understanding of who God isāand, therefore, who we are too!
The standout lines in the Bladee and Mechatokās song are:
God is love is my drug
And those lyrics + the expansive dance beat, they feel to me what itās like to enthusiastically (en theos - in god) feel āthe Love that has been planted in our hearts by the Spirit dwelling within usā as Richard Rohr says in my IG caption.
Itās a drug that is alcohol-and-drug-free.
And the goal is to gift that awareness of Spirit:
All the way around (All the way around)
And by this, I donāt mean any form of sectarian religion, Christianity, or otherwise.
But as Lewis Hyde writes in The Gift, which I continued to work my way through again last night, Christianity is a helpful way to think of whatever this is.
āThe image of the Christian era would be the bleeding heart. The Christian can feel the spirit move inside all property. Everything on earth is a gift and God is the vessel. Our small bodies may be expanded; we need not confine the blood. If we only open the heart with faith, we will be lifted to a greater circulation and the body that has been given up will be given back, reborn and freed from deathā¦
The image of the Middle Ages is the expanding heart, and the deviant is the āhardheartedā manā¦
[But] the hard heart [came] back into the Churchā¦
The Church still affirmed the spirit of gift, but at the same time it made peace with the temporal world that limited that spirit as it grew in influenceā¦
[And] the heart continued to hardenā¦
After the Reformation the empires of commodity expanded without limitā¦
The ābleeding heartā is now the man of dubious mettle with an embarrassing inability to limit his compassionā¦
Among the British in the Empire it was a virtue not to feel touched by the nativesā¦
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf lets us know with one sentence that Peter Walsh will never amount to much because he has fallen in love with an Indian womanā¦
Now the deviant is the heart thatā¦touches others with feeling, not reckoning [theĀ actionĀ orĀ process of calculating or estimatingĀ something].
Gift exchange takes refuge in Sunday morning and the family.
The man who would charge interest to his wife would still be called hard-hearted, but outside the family circle there is little to restrainā¦
In this century the man with the bleeding heart is a sentimental fool because he has a feeling that can no longer find its formā¦
Still, his sentimentality is appealing.
Everyone likes Peter Walsh, though no one would give him a good job.ā
Thereās even a line in Bladee and Mechatokās āGodā about the failure to maintain this spirit:
Keep the gift in another life
Of which Genius.com notes:
āHere is about the gift of eternal life
John 10:27-28
Bladeeās line suggests, to me at least, that this spirit of eternal life has been delayed to a promise of an afterlife by rational, logos religion when itās actually to be experienced in the here and now in enthusiastic, eros spirituality.
Or maybe, like Peter Walsh, Iām just a sentimental bleeding heart fool :)
Okay, thatās the two hundred and eighty-second Shuffle Synchronicities.