Cleo and Tommy
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Essay Posted August 14, 2007 by James E. Nelson
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A week ago Wednesday we went down the Chesterfield for open mic night. It’s typically the house band and a handful of people—some of them with talent—jamming for an evening. But this was not a typical Wednesday at the Chesterfield. It was Aug 1—Tommy Bolin’s birthday—and the Tommy Bolin Tribute Band was going to play an extended set in honor of Tommy. Although his name has been largely forgotten in the thirty years since his death, Bolin is still a big deal in Sioux City because he’s a Sioux City boy with a lot of relatives still here in town.
I remember Tommy Bolin as a sort of bogey man, a poster boy waved around by fundamentalist youth leaders and camp directors, to prove the evils of rock ‘n roll. Best known (in my mind) as the guitarist for the heavy metal band Deep Purple, he died of a heroin overdose my senior year in high school at only 25 years of age.
Before Deep Purple, he was well on his way to becoming one of rock ‘n roll’s greats, but the drugs got in the way. He was increasingly unreliable as a solo performer and eventually had to become a backup player in a band. (The fact that the band was Deep Purple is tribute to his remarkable talent.) When he was in good shape he was famously fabulous. But as often as not, the demons of drugs and addictions would take control, and he was pretty worthless to the band.
I was therefore shocked when, only a few weeks after we started attending St. Thomas Orthodox Church, Cleo told us Tommy was her relative and his funeral was held at St. Thomas.
At the time I didn’t know much about Cleo, but she seemed a little odd. On the one hand, she was one of only two people who greeted and visited with us of her own accord the first Sunday we attended worship at St. Thomas. Throughout the time that we’ve been a part of St. Thomas, Cleo has taken a particular interest in me, largely because of our other connection: We both liked the music down at the Chesterfield. I never saw Cleo down there because I’m a Wednesday night open mic sort of guy (and will also stop down if they have a singer-songwriter passing through town). Cleo, on the other hand, usually went down on the weekends.
As I said above, on the one hand, Cleo was one of the first to befriend us at church. On the other hand, the conversations (including that first one) always took an odd turn. (I later learned that Cleo was a bit simple and had a variety of physical and emotional maladies. She was able to function in society, but needed quite a bit of help from friends and relatives to navigate the more difficult aspects of life.) It was the second or third week of church that out of the blue she told me about her relative, Tommy Bolin, and his full-blown church funeral at St. Thomas.
Her story was a bit scandalous to me when I first heard it. After all Bolin was, as I observed above, a bit of a bogey man for anti-rock-n-roll fundamentalists. It seemed inconceivable that he was given all the pomp and circumstance of an Orthodox funeral. So I did some checking, and sure enough, it turned out that the Bolins are Arabs and part of the St. Thomas community (if those terms are defined rather broadly).
But after considering the matter, I gained a new perspective. I’d never really thought of Tommy Bolin as a person . . . a person with a family and community in which he grew up and still had connections with. Upon further reflection, I began to realize that the bogey man I grew up with was not Tommy Bolin the person, but rather a caricature. Not Bolin himself, but rather a mere poster of him with his addictions hung prominently about his neck, like a gold neckless or scarlet letter, so that we might more easily condemn him. It’s easy to demonize his addictions when he’s viewed one dimensionally as merely a heroin shooting guitar player in a rock ‘n roll band. But when you become acquainted with his community—his relatives who mourn his loss, remember his humanity (hidden to most of us behind his addictions), and celebrate his remarkable achievements, in spite of those addictions and excesses—it begins to make sense that the church of his family would call out to God asking for God’s mercy and withhold their own judgment of him, leaving the judgment business to God.
One of the ironies of Christian community is that the community—when it functions well—continues to embrace those who are part of the community, even after the person strays. The Christian community is supposed to be like God, and God waits on the front step, watching for the prodigal to return. I consider this an irony because it is also one of the reasons Christian communities are condemned: “Oh, you’re not real Christians. If you were real Christians you’d demand purity from your members, It is so hypocritical to give a person like that a Christian burial. He was no Christian!”
And yet the community suffers such taunts and embraces its own, even when a member of that community utterly corrupts and masks their humanity through addictions and excesses. God didn’t just die for polite, clean, and respectable sin, he died for unspeakable sin as well. And God never stops seeking the lost, even when most of the Christian world has relegated that suffering soul to the role of a “sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll bogeyman.” In spite of the horror, the authentic Christian community embraces the horror of it all and embraces the taunts of others, saying, “Yes, this is indeed who we are; this is our human condition apart from Christ’s salvation.”
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