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5-Minute Rock Stars & Buddhist Cemeteries

Sunday - "Jumping Worship"
We took the train into the heart of Osaka to play as a worship team at J-House, one of the newest and liveliest churches in Japan. On the way, we met up with Eriya (one of last year’s graduates at PBC), who had taken the bus through the night to meet us at Osaka Central Station. After meeting him, we walked for about 15 more minutes to find the J-House building, passing a myriad of small Buddhist shrines on the way. Since we are a praise-and-worship team, we had all of our instruments in hand, and so we were quite exhausted by the time we got there.
During the walk, Sharon (one of our team leaders) observed that people were parking their cars on a sort of metal ramp which would then lift the vehicles up a few levels by pulley. She said that this was how Japanese had to park in these crowded urban areas. I would have taken a picture, but my hands were full of instrumental equipage.

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J-House was interesting--not a very big church, but full of young people and remarkable in a staid culture for its lively worship. Lots of “jampingu waaship,” as the pastor called it. (Bob seized upon this as joke fodder immediately.) Bob preached, Joel translated, and the rest of the team played for a special worship service. After the service, we all went downstairs and had lunch.

I met a lady downstairs from Jamaica there who was nice until I asked her how, being Jamaican, she failed to speak with a Jamaican accent. After this question (which I thought was innocent enough) she became quite prickly, informing me that any real Jamaican can immediately discern the conversational context, and can switch the accent on and off accordingly. I decided that that was a good enough answer and finished my lunch.

We hung around after lunch because the afternoon service was about to begin. This time, it was just our team’s band playing. So we played and I dropped my pick twice while trying to look cool and our jampingu waaship leader Shinya broke a string and despite our best efforts, everything still managed to turn out alright in the end.

The second service ended and we packed up and walked about 15 minutes to another building across the river (I have no idea which one). We went in and it was a youth rally taking place in a big theater-style building. A couple of kids sang a song and an older Japanese man preached (he had an amazing testimony – his Dad was a traveling evangelist who never had time for his family and as a result, his Mom abandoned the family when he was 9 – God helped him deal with abandonment issues), and the J-House worship team played for a bit. After everyone was done, we got up and played “Shine,” (a song someone at City Bible Church wrote) and then that was apparently all the playing we had time for.

I got to play the J-House guitarist’s Stratocaster, which was awesome. Eriya had told me before we went on that he’d asked him, but after the service said guitarist came up glaring and huffing.
“I don’t mind if you play my guitar, but it would have been a matter of common courtesy to ask,” he said in a way that let me know he’d been offended.

I tried to respond as politely as I possibly could: “A friend of mine told me he did ask you,” I said in a conciliatory tone. He appeared surprised, and then Eriya showed up and said some things to him in rapid Japanese, and I suppose that something was sorted out, because the guitarist proceeded to shake my hand enthusiastically, smile broadly and tell me how much he'd really enjoyed our set and how well I'd played.

We were all beat, but the night was not yet over. Kenji, the regal-looking man whose wedding we'll be attending at the end of the week, treated us all to dinner at a terrific Japanese restaurant. The Japanese guys on our team introduced me to "hambaagu"--which as far as I can tell is an American hamburger patty (pattie?) stripped of the bun, ketchup, mustard, and heart-arresting grease and chemicals, and served as a meat entree. I ordered it and it was good.

We had a long train ride home, and since Eriya had been awake for over a day without sleeping, he joined me in sleeping very soundly and awaking the next morning in a groggy state of mind and wishing I’d had just a little more sleep.

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Monday - New Hope Chapel
We got to sleep in a bit later this morning, since there was only one service to play at in the afternoon. Took the train out into the hills, got off at Yamazaki station, and made our way to New Hope Chapel’s beautiful new building. It had wooden floors and wonderful people. The youth leaders there had invited youth from other local churches to attend a small youth meeting at their church. There were maybe 30 people there in the end, which is rather large for a Japanese Christian meeting.

I looked in vain for an electric guitar and finally had to settle for playing my crappy Alvarez acoustic. I had forgotten my capo, so I had to play a lot of barre chords at first, which made a bad guitar sound even worse. By the last few songs, however, I’d hit my stride and kids were visibly touched by the worship as members of our team laid hands on them and asked if they needed prayer for anything. Shinya, Eriya, Andy, and Hisato all got down from the platform after a while and helped Bob and Joel pray for and minister. I was too shy to venture into the crowd and pray through a translator, so I stayed up on the platform and helped Kelly keep the music going.

I really wrestled with feelings of insecurity very badly today. Constant feelings of not being good enough, of not doing enough, of not being spiritual enough all plagued me to the point where I couldn't really enjoy anything we were doing. I was glad when the service finally ended and I could have a few moments to myself.

After the service was over, we hung around while pastors coordinated car rides back to the train station and Bob got bored and started messed around with the church’s Hammond organ, its wavering electric tones creating responses of deep approval within my brain.

As I listened from the top of the staircase, I tried to sort through some of what I was feeling while staring out the window at the Buddhist cemetery across the street. Several rows of narrow graves were stacked almost vertically straight up the side of a bald rock hill, and there were a couple of sad-faced girls solemnly carrying flowers in their arms as they picked their way down the winding concrete slope that ran between them. The combination of listening to the Hammond's strange, Gospel-tinged warbling (which reminded me of funeral scenes from films I'd seen that were set in the American South) and staring at the sad Buddhist mourners created a strange juxtaposition in my mind which seemed, for a moment, to explain some deep, ineffable ache within me. In a way (and I can't quite explain how), the idea that people all over the world were dealing in different ways with sadness and loneliness and loss in the best ways in which they knew how helped make me feel a little less self-conscious about sitting on the steps of a church and feeling so sad and lonely and lost myself.

posted by John Adams @ 10:03 PM