Tuesday October 2: 9pm Shalom Worship - Cap and Gown Room, Student Union, George Fox Campus
Aaron and worship team will lead worship

Wednesday October 3: 10:30am George Fox University Chapel - Bauman Auditorium, George Fox Campus
Aaron and worship team will lead worship

Sunday October 7: 6pm Songwriting Course - SPIL House, George Fox Campus
Aaron will lead an interactive time of songwriting and creative learning

Monday October 8: 9pm George Fox KFOX Radio Show
Aaron will be the featured guest

Sunday October 14: 6pm Songwriting Course - SPIL House, George Fox Campus
Aaron will lead an interactive time of songwriting and creative learning

Wednesday October 17: 10:30am George Fox University Chapel - Bauman Auditorium, George Fox Campus
Aaron and worship team will lead worship

Sunday October 21: 6pm Songwriting Course - SPIL House, George Fox Campus
Aaron will lead an interactive time of songwriting and creative learning

Sunday October 28: 6pm Songwriting Course - SPIL House, George Fox Campus
Aaron will lead an interactive time of songwriting and creative learning

Monday October 29: 10:30am George Fox University Chapel - Bauman Auditorium, George Fox Campus
Aaron and worship team will lead worship

Wednesday October 31: 12:40pm Class Panel Discussion on the Psalms - Dr. Brian R. Doak

Sunday November 4: 6pm Songwriting Course - SPIL House, George Fox Campus
Aaron will lead an interactive time of songwriting and creative learning

Tuesday November 6: 9pm Shalom Worship - Cap and Gown Room, Student Union, George Fox Campus
Aaron and worship team will lead worship

Friday November 9 - Sunday November 11: Fall Retreat - Twin Rocks Retreat Center
Aaron and worship team will lead worship

Monday November 12: George Fox University Chapel - Bauman Auditorium, George Fox Campus
Aaron and worship team will lead worship

Sunday November 25: 6pm Songwriting Course - SPIL House, George Fox Campus
Aaron will lead an interactive time of songwriting and creative learning

Monday December 3: George Fox University Chapel - Bauman Auditorium, George Fox Campus
Aaron and worship team will lead worship

Tuesday December 4: 9pm Shalom Worship - Cap and Gown Room, Student Union, George Fox Campus
Aaron and worship team will lead worship

Thursday September 13: 7:30-9pm: Peace and Justice Symposium: a night of story and song around the fire - Pavilion, George Fox campus
Aaron, along with 2 other panelists will be sharing song and story - based on global experiences with peace and justice

Tuesday September 11: 9pm - Shalom - Cap & Gown room, Student Union Building, George Fox campus
Aaron will be speaking and leading worship during this Tuesday night gathering

Tuesday September 4: 10pm (after Shalom) - FoxHole, Student Union Building, George Fox Campus
Aaron and his Australian slam poet friend Joel McKerrow will host a spoken word/slam poetry session - participation is encouraged: bring your own poetry!

Friday - Sunday August 31 - September 2: Wild Goose Festival West, Benton County - Oregon
Aaron will be playing with George Fox student Sam Saxton on Saturday at 12:45pm on the Main Stage

Tuesday August 28: Shalom - Cap & Gown room, Student Union Building, George Fox campus
Aaron will be leading worship during this Tuesday night gathering

In jazz, melody is often a bit off-kilter, swung, played in a way that lilts rather than marches. Notes travel and race and bend upon one another in measured chaos and mostly, the result is an imperfect perfection...a dissonant beauty - which is a good thing. As I was thinking about this, the term “ghost note” came to mind, also known as “dead note” or “false note.” They are the notes that sit between the dominant melodic notes in a swung melody line. It is the “da” in the “doo-da-doo-da-doo-da”, most often not possessing a discernible pitch but having an implied pitch based on the notes surrounding it. It is an essential part of the line though it is, by definition, without pitch identity.

As I was thinking about this, I was also thinking about the connection of dominant cultural themes and the underlying, unseen, but very felt parts of our lives. Specifically, I was reflecting on how celebrity and violence, fame and dominance, so often contribute to and define our melodic lines pertaining to relationship, well-being, and our sense of shalom. Yet, when these values rule, rather than peace, justice, and compassion, we become ill-equipped, under-nourished, and weakened to function as a society and a Body whose head is the Prince of Peace.

Daniel Berrigan, looking at our society in the 1970‘s, states:

Man is unready for a human future. He has not grown those organs and resources which allow him to function in an alternate way, where he lives, and to reach out with public consequences.

Berrigan speaks in this quote to the inability for society, as he perceived it in the Vietnam War era, to function in a holistic, healthy manner, communicating foundational human needs of peace and affection in contrast to violence and domination. The desensitization, isolation, paralysis, and ultimately, the hypocrisy that our culture has bred throughout its rise in an industrially fueled domination of other countries and civilizations has settled into the roots of our people; it’s settled right into our living rooms where we sit with our upgraded and unnecessary flat screens, iPads built in unhealthy working conditions, trays full of composite, engineered, pink-slimed, steroid-injected foods. Our spirits and personalities are too wilted by uninspired entertainment, degraded dreaming, and monetized news to either absorb the true gifts God has poured out upon us or to react in the ways of Isaiah’s “rebuilders of ancient walls and repairers of broken streets.”

Over the years I’ve come to cherish Wendell Berry’s writings. Part of the reason for this connection is from my growing up in the farmlands of Iowa. Berry’s writings are a lot about sustainable agriculture and living and how this mode of engaging the world healthily translates to our awareness of life around us.

However, at other times, Berry speaks of our culture’s unhealthiness, of its detachment from and inability to absorb reality through current modes of information access. Speaking in 2012 as the National Endowment for the Humanities 41st Jefferson Lecturer in his talk titled ‘It All Turns on Affection’ Berry spoke of a certain kind of destructive knowledge:

We may, as we say, ‘know’ statistical sums, but we cannot imagine them…to hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined. The economic hardship of one farm family, if they are our neighbors, affects us more painfully than pages of statistics on the decline of the farm population…It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits. This brings us to an entirely practical question: Can we—and, if we can, how can we—make actual in our minds the sometimes urgent things we say we know? This obviously cannot be accomplished by a technological breakthrough, nor can it be accomplished by a big thought. Perhaps it cannot be accomplished at all.

Click here for the online written lecture

Click here for the online archived video of the lecture

When I read this, I am deeply moved; it speaks to a dysfunction in our ability to care for one another...in terms of melody, it’s not simply dissonant (which is valued in jazz), it’s a breaking of melody...the things my humble eyes, heart, and mind see and struggle with in the world have to do with the disconnectedness of stated value and lived reality. I say I am for peace, but am completely happy to live in a safely militarized society. I say I am for holistic living, but am completely happy to use the tools that only a culture who dominates another can possess. I say I am for connection, but am completely happy to absorb knowledge in a way that keeps me from interacting with my neighbor. These questions and conclusions interrupt the shalom – the completeness, well-being, or wholeness – of mind and conscience that I desperately seek... are we relegated to understanding only the plight of our immediate neighbor? Who is our neighbor now that we know, intimately, the lives of [perhaps] too many people?

Can poetry and song speak to these questions at a level that includes but also transcends the mind?

Five years ago I wrote a song that will finally be released this fall while I am at George Fox on an album called Buffaloes. It’s called Man of Peace and is written from Psalm 120. It goes like this:

My dreams are haunted by those who hate peace//My days are darkened by the deaths of my friends
My nights are troubled by tears I can’t stop//My heart is broken cause I can’t see the end
They buy and sell fear, they try and sell fear//To sheep without their shepherd
We cry and say no, we fight for our hearts//We won’t give in, we won’t, give in
You never gave in//You never stopped
Man of Peace, Messiah who came to save
You never gave in//You never stopped
Even when your tears were red//Even when your robe was drenched in blood
Even when your head was crowned and cut//Even when your hands were nailed down flat
You never gave in//You never stopped

Click here to listen to an early, unreleased, rough-cut version of Man of Peace

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel throughout Europe, South, Central, and North America, Israel and Gaza, meeting people whose lives are variously disconnected by violence, but also often simultaneously connected in a beautiful sharing of peace with others that keeps them going against very many odds . My prayer has become, “let peace rule in our hearts,”, so that:

the violence that surrounds won’t be victorious in its disruption of our lives;
our melodies won’t be broken;
our ghost notes will be healthily undefined, producing harmonious, differentiated tones of peace;
we will choose weapons of personal sacrifice rather than weapons that sacrifice others; weapons that give us collusion with, rather than contestation against Christ, the Prince of Peace.

My prayer is that the Man of Peace – the one who gave his life willingly for all so that all might have life – would be our leader, that his example would become our life style.

If my time in Israel, Gaza, and Haiti in the last two years has shown me anything, it is that our pop-perception of humanity around the world comes through terrifyingly bent and opaque lenses, that the truth and clarity of Christ is best employed and known person to person. It is in these places that the power of the Gospel and the peace, justice, and restoration spoken of by the Old Testament Prophets is fully actuated. And so the songs that I write and sing are best sung and known in the context of sitting with, among, and as a broken people. In this space I find the shalom and faculty to live as Daniel Berrigan says, “a human future” with the “organs and resources” of a connected Body that can “function in an alternate way, where he lives, and to reach out with public consequences.”

Conclusion

I am very excited and honored to be invited to partner with The Center for Peace and Justice at George Fox University.

I fully expect to be challenged and continually matured through this fellowship; I expect to continue to ask troubling questions, to seek to live hopefully and helpfully in the friction of imperfect understanding, and to strive to infuse transcending peace into violent foundations and worldviews.