This week, the Rev. Shaft writes in with a brief meditation on loss and redemption:

“I wanna talk / of a city they call Buffalo / at zero degrees below / it’s too damn cold and funky (pass the joint)”

So misunderstood Rick James was. I don’t think anyone really understands what we’ve lost this past week. Rick was… well, poetry. He was a caricature of Man’s sexuality in the postmodern world, the leather-clad high priest of the “Me Generation”.

Raised in a poor family from upstate New York, Rick James ascended the heights–and plumbed the depths–of human experience through his rapid success in the music industry. While one might take exception with the fact that he abused drugs and was convicted of abducting a woman in the early 1990s, one must also remember that Rick James was a product of the 1980s. That was the age of Ronald Reagan, the dawning of MTV, leg warmers, and crack cocaine. While Reagan was screwing the inner city poor all over this great land (as well as all of Latin America), Rick James was screwing three prostitutes at a time in the back seat of his limousine. By the early 1990s, Rick James’ choices came back to haunt him and he spent some quality time in the pokey. But perhaps we should be asking ourselves, however, if Rick James wasn’t simply a scapegoat of a self-absorbed generation–the one pierced for OUR offenses–a mirror, if you will, for OUR OWN self-destructive indulgences. Perhaps Rick was us, and we were Rick. I do not think it a coincidence that Ronald Reagan and Rick James passed on to their eternal rewards during the same summer (but Rick looked far better than Ronny in black leather pants).

But the Rick James story did not end there. He came back. He got out of jail, and rather than resigning himself to being consigned to the “whatever happened to…” file, he got back on his metaphorical horse. The horse had to be metaphorical because of his hip replacement. But he was back on tour, back to bring the joy of funk to a new generation. Because of the stroke he suffered, his tour was cut short, and the world once again tasted loss. We were left with Depeche Mode and Poison. Broken and crippled, Rick James became for many a sign of redemption–back from the dead, risen from the ashes of his previous choices.

The world lost a great man this week… a musician, a lover, a man well acquainted with pain. A victim of his time, he became our sin, so as to save us from ourselves. By his stripes we were saved.

It’s almost Biblical.

So, let’s have a prayerful moment of silence to remember.