My friend's a rock star.

So I've known my friend Wes for probably a decade, give or take some months.  He was a youth pastor at my mom's church and I met him when he spoke to my college's GLBT support group.  He was one of the smartest and most compassionate people I'd ever met, certainly among the religious crowd.  (Most of them seemed to be checking me for the horns and 666 birthmark.)  He got the fact that Jesus hung out with prostitutes, not pillars of the community and never acted like he was better than anyone else. 

He's one of a very few people that I've taken to immediately. :)

Fast forward a few years.  He's one of probably three people that I've seriously discussed my lack of faith with, especially as it relates to my dad's death.  He never made me feel awful about it and he took me seriously.  (You know how hard it can be to find people who will take you seriously?)

And then a year or two ago (time blurs, sorry), he said that he was going to leave the ministry to start focusing on his music full time. 

Vacation 010

(Picture above is Wes playing at Market Street)

Here's an article he wrote explaining why:

"Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name."

As I sang those lyrics to the Rolling Stones classic, "Sympathy for the Devil," I noticed a familiar face at the bar laughing at the irony. I recognized him as someone who years ago knew me in a different role. I had been his pastor.

Just as the Stones' song doesn't really glorify the devil or anything evil, I don't promote anything harmful, though I guess not everyone sees it that way. These days I play rock 'n' roll for a living, mostly in bars, and to many that seems a stretch for a former member of the clergy.

In truth, even during my 13 years of pastoral ministry, the role didn't always seem an easy fit. Although I found it rewarding to be there for people in times of need, there was also much about my work I found problematic, especially as I sought to be true to my deepest values and beliefs. Of course, sometimes our values and beliefs can get buried to the point where we don't know them anymore.

Many of the faithful struggle with the church as an institution and with some of its teaching, but that struggle can be particularly intense for someone who is called upon to represent the church and proclaim its message week in and week out.

Increasingly I realized not only that the church as an institution was too confining for me, but also that in my heart of hearts, many of the basics of Christian theology didn't ring true for me. When people would ask me questions about parts of the Bible they found troubling, I started to face the fact that the answers I was giving were no longer convincing, even to me.

So I started confining my sermons to simple wisdom for daily living. But even then the nature of my work had me presenting those ideas in a theological packaging in which I was quickly losing faith. I knew that in order to be whole and at peace, I needed to live my life with integrity. So I decided to find a new profession.

In my teens, I had started singing and playing piano and guitar, and over the years I did a bit of songwriting. To find a new line of work, I went back and learned to play a lot of the classic rock I grew up with, along with newer material, even as I reignited my passion for writing and recording music.

I guess timing and some networking skills worked to my advantage because I quickly found myself with a full performing schedule, mostly at the beach. And my own songs started getting radio play and good reviews.

I found it freeing and refreshing to be known simply as Wes, rather than The Rev. Davis or Pastor Wes. Yes, I had begun to recover "me." People no longer acted a certain way around me because that's the way you're "supposed" to act around a minister. No longer did I hear "excuse my language," or find that people tried to put on a front to convince me how spiritual they were. And I didn't need to accept people judging me according to a standard I didn't embrace, a standard they probably didn't live up to themselves.

I happily approach life not as someone who has the answers, but as someone who'd rather say "I don't know" than act like any answer is better than admitting ignorance.

It seems a lot of people come to a point in life where they know they are acting in a role that is in conflict with who they really are. The sad thing is that most, whether for reasons of finances or the opinions of others, never break free.

Jazz legend Miles Davis once said "Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yourself." To me those words are about a lot more than just music.

And then there are those immortal words from Hamlet, which for me are much more than an empty cliché: "This above all: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." They represent a path to a richer and more authentic life.

I would also suggest that any spirituality that tempts you to profess something with false certainty is something that weakens the soul, rather than nourishing it.

It takes real faith to resist that temptation.