​Eli "Paperboy" Reed

Gospel Music for Everybody

​
Springboards for Reflection while listening to
Eli Paperboy Reed sing Gospel Songs for Everybody

​​

​Listen and Enjoy

Trust in the availability of fresh possibilities.  

“When I can’t run anymore, I will walk / When I can’t walk anymore, I may stumble / When I stumble sometimes, I might fall / And down on my knees, I will crawl, but I know I will find my way home."
​
Gospel music can help us find our way home in times when our faith, if we have any at all, is but a very dim light at the end of a very long tunnel. This faith is our small opening to a healing energy of a Great Compassion – sometimes called the Lord. – who is always seeking us even as we may have lost ourselves.  Jesus revealed but did not exhaust this Lord.  You do not have to be Christian -- or to belong to any religion at all - in order to receive the blessings from the Great Compassion and its energy. Gospel music can be a channel of grace, a sacrament through which the energy is felt..

At least this is how we process theologians understand things; see God with a Spacious Heart. For us, God is a womb-like Love whose very breathing is the energy is the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (Dylan Thomas) and our own innermost lure toward wholeness.  This energy becomes especially available when we place our trust in it. God's energy cannot reverse the past or fully control the present. But it can bring forth fresh possibilities for walking home, whatever path we happen to be travelling.  This, then, is the nature of faith.  It is not blind belief but trust in the availability of fresh possibilities.  The trust is elicited by the light of love, which appears as the light at the end of the tunnel.

The light itself leads us home, not once or twice, but again and again.  This home is not a place but a state of mind.  It is the activity of becoming a wide mind and open heart: gentled by time and stumbling.  We call it becoming a fat soul.  It takes great feeling to find this soul, great passion.  Often we need inspiration for the journey.  Gospel music can be this kind of inspiration.  It helps us see the light more clearly, making our way toward a home that always calls us, never abandons us, and enfolds us within its loving care, even when we don't know it.
Gospel Music and God's Breathing
​
Gospel music is not for Christians alone.  It is for anyone who faces the grittiness of life and realizes that, with help from the spirit of creative transformation, there is hope for a better life. This spirit is God's Breathing at work in the world - a Breathing which can be felt and known without being named or even believed in.  We might also call it unexpected, grace-infused energy for life.

Gospel music helps mediate and evoke an awareness of this Breathing. The core message of the music is that, even if we are lost, we can find our way home.  Home is not a place but a state of mind.  It is what happens to us when our hearts grow wide with empathy, our minds grow open to new ideas, and our spirits are refreshed by renewable energy. Patricia Adams Farmer and I call it becoming a fat soul. See the Fat Soul Manifesto.

In the course of a lifetime we must find our way home many times.  Truth be told, we can have as many fat souls as there are moments to live.  Every moment has its fat soul possibility, its opportunity for becoming wide relative to the situation at hand.  But sometimes the only way to find this possibility is to release ourselves into a process of of creative transformation: into what Monica Coleman calls "making a way out of no way," such that the sour grapes of life (sometimes of our own making) turn into sweet wine.  See Making a Way our of No Way.  Gospel music is understood when, through intuition rather than formal reflection, we sense that there is a spirit of creative transformation at work in which the world which, while not coercive or manipulative, turns grapes into wine.  This transformation requires honesty about suffering and pain, about shortcomings and flaws.  The music then helps effect the transformation.  In the listening, at least for a moment, we come home.

​-- Jay McDaniel
​Eli "Paperboy" Reed (born Eli Husock) is an American singer and songwriter. After graduating from Brookline [Massachusetts] High School in 2002 he moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi and immersed himself in the juke joint culture of the Deep South. It was in Mississippi that he got the nickname "paperboy," because of the newsboy-style hat he word.  After spending a year in Clarksdale he enrolled at The University of Chicago to study sociology. While in Chicago he hosted a radio show called "We Got More Soul" on the college station WHPK and played organ and piano in the South Side Chicago church of the famed Soul/Gospel singer Mitty Collier. After one year of study in Chicago he returned home to Boston to focus on music, recording his first album Sings Walkin' & Talkin' & Other Smash Hits!

​-- Wikipedia
How important is faith
​to this kind of music?

I think it's very important. And I think that, obviously, religiosity comes in all shapes and sizes. I think that you can be a faithful person — I certainly consider myself a faithful person — without necessarily having to adhere to something to strict as a particular religion.

Somebody once said — I don't know who it was — that gospel music is just the idea that everything is going to be all right. And that doesn't have anything to do with a particular deity — just the idea that things have got to get better one day.

-- Eli "Paperboy" Reed, interview with NPR, June 11, 2016
The soul with size

"By S-I-Z-E I mean the stature of [your] soul, the range and depth of [your] love, [your] capacity for relationships.  I  mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure.  I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness.  I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions.  I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature."

-- Bernard Loomer ​
​The aim of the universe

The aim in the Universe is God’s loving presence with us, God’s spirit tirelessly at work in the world—sometimes it is felt most strongly in the form of possibilities yet to be realized.  Thus, ironically, it is often in this gap between dream and tragedy that we come to believe in, and even find a foretaste of, what Jay McDaniel calls “a harmony beyond suffering”—“a Harmony of Harmonies which includes tragedy within its scope, but in which tragedy has been overcome.” It is here that we find faith.  It is here that we experience a peace that surpasses all understanding.

​-- Teri Daily
​Crossing borders and
speaking new languages

Fat Soul philosophy can  serve as a kind of wide-angle lens through which to examine life, love, meaning, and spirituality.  But Fat Soul is not just a lot of abstract head-talk, but rather mirrors actual life: it is shot through with feeling; it is earthy and active and poetic and whimsical and messy. It is never quite finished, and has a penchant for improvisation.  It dares to cross borders, to speak new languages, to color outside the lines, and to laugh and play and think and dream and form rock bands.

If the word “fat” is just too existentially painful for you—I hear you—Fat Soul can also be thought of as an acronym:   F-flexible, A-aesthetic, T-tender.  These three words make up the essence of Fat Soul thinking.  That is, a Flexible-Aesthetic-Tender Soul (F.A.T. Soul, if you will) chooses flexibility over rigidity to deal with the realities of change; it values an aesthetic of intense harmonies–diversified forms of beauty—over sameness; and it responds to the world with tenderness and compassion rather than control and coercion."

--Patricia Adams Farmer,  Fat Soul:  A Philosophy of S-I-Z-E
Open Horizons