Ren & Theologies of Radical Community, Doubt & Hope

why liminal art saves us

Hi friends,

Next week we are starting a brand new series here at The Liminality Journal on alchemizing the soul to get through chaotic times, but before we get there I want to share about an artist that I am really enjoying right now.

This is my process as an author and artist, how I get to the books I publish and the words I share with you here every week:

1. I get really sad about the state of the world

2. I get really pissed about the state of the world

3. I exercise/climb/play and spend time with the beautiful people in my life

4. I eventually calm down and turn to nature/quiet/space

5. I alchemize my sadness and rage into words

As I’ve been reflecting on this process, I decided I wanted to introduce you to Ren Gill, an artist I’ve recently found who has become an inspiration to my work and has led me to asking deeper, better questions about my own theology, holding space for me to work through that rage and alchemize it into meaningful medicine.

First, since I’m sharing about the theology of Ren’s music, I just want to define what I mean by theology—the exploration of god(s)/the universe/The Sacred. While some people may have a more narrow view of this, mine is more universal, holds space for all sort of religious and spiritual beliefs and backgrounds, and is deeply and radically rooted in decolonization and liminality.

I found Ren’s music on Instagram one day recently, and have slowly been digging deeper into his songs the last few months. Ren is a Welsh singer-songwriter, musician, rapper, producer, and director, whose musical career has spanned years from studying in university to forming more than one band and now creating his own music with a lot of incredible collaboration partners. In 2023 he released Sick Boi, which hit the UK number 1 in 2023 as well, and was self-produced.

Ren covers topics like colonialism, greed and institutional oppression in his music, and also a range of topics relating to mental health, suicide, faith, and his own struggles with Lyme disease.

And as soon as I started listening to his music, I related deeply to it—to the humanness of it, with all its crass honesty and deep questions, with the ways he helps us view ourselves and our connections to one another. He raps about his own chronic illnesses, which I appreciate as someone diagnosed with a chronic illness myself; his music and interviews/social media posts about health and care and art hold space for the everyday struggles of so many people in our daily lives and bodies.

I also love that he celebrates our millennial era of 90s music, with some songs reflecting the styles of groups like Rage Against the Machine, Beastie Boys, and Kriss Kross, among others.

The first theme I appreciate and want to share about is radical community. Often anti-capitalist language is used in his music and he has a passion for supporting independent artists and local community, and I appreciate everyone who shares about this, as we in the United States live under the rule of a president who is solely motivated by greed and his own ideals of manifest destiny, and we fight against corporations on a daily basis as artists and citizens.

Here’s a first song, Money Game Pt 2, from a series of songs on this topic—how greed corrupts us. And as we understand and deal with greed in the world, how are we to understand who God is, and how we are called to support one another? Many of us are pointing back to community again and again both as a theological grounding and as a way to stand up against systems like consumerism and capitalism and colonialism. I write about this in my new book, Everything Is a Story, because to honor our stories is to honor how they grow into the systemic issues we have today.

The lyrics I want you to listen for, which are clever and deep and call out the way greed is insatiable and buried deep within us, show up in the middle of the song:

Money is a game and the ladder we climb
Turns a saint into a sinner with his finger in crime
I'll break it down for you motherfuckers line by line
This is business economics in a nursery rhyme

She sells seashells on a seashore
But the value of these shells will fall
Due to the laws of supply and demand
No one wants to buy shells 'cause there's loads on the sand

Step 1, you must create a sense of scarcity
Shells will sell much better if the people think they're rare, you see
Bare with me, take as many shells as you can find and hide 'em on an island stockpile 'em high
until they're rarer than a diamond

Step 2, you gotta make the people think that they want 'em
Really want 'em, really fuckin want 'em
Hit 'em like Bronson
Influencers, product placement, featured prime time entertainment
If you haven't got a shell then you're just a fucking waste man

Three, it's monopoly, invest inside some property, start a corporation, make a logo, do it properly
"Shells must sell", that will be your new philosophy
Swallow all your morals they're a poor man's quality

Four, expand, expand, expand, clear forest, make land, fresh blood on hand
Five, why just shells? Why limit yourself? She sells seashells, sell oil as well!

Six, guns, sell stocks, sell diamonds, sell rocks, sell water to a fish, sell the time to a clock
Seven, press on the gas, take your foot off the brakes, Run to be the president of the United States

Eight, big smile mate, big wave that's great Now the truth is overrated, tell lies out the gate

Nine, Polarize the people, controversy is the game
It don't matter if they hate you if they all say your name

Ten, the world is yours, step out on a stage to a round of applause
You're a liar, a cheat, a devil, a whore
And you sell seashells on the seashore

(My favorite lines of this song are sell stocks, sell diamonds, sell rocks, sell water to a fish, sell the time to a clock—that is exactly what colonization has done and continues to do today. How are we to resist?)

As we make way for truth telling in our stories, words, music, and art, we create space to explore deep topics of liminality, doubt, and hope, and I’ve seen this again and again through my career in writing.

Doubt, hope and liminality show up in Ren’s music constantly, along with themes exploring the ways we fight for ourselves and our own healing, and the reality that there is often no answer or relief to the questions we carry, and that’s okay.

In 2022 Ren released a song that went viral, called Hi Ren, a story of the inner struggle between the different parts of ourselves, and learning to honor them, to dance with them, to learn from them. His musicality is incredibly bold and moving, and reveals how talented and passionate he is about his medicine, his art.

At the end of the video, Ren shares a monologue, and I think it’s a really important one for a lot of people, especially the ideas of the pendulum swing between “good” and “evil” or “light” and “dark”, or what we perceive those to be inside ourselves.

I share about the pendulum swing of belief/spirituality with people a lot, as a way to help us understand that it is normal for us to question and change our beliefs, and it’s okay that we don’t always find an exact balancing place—that maybe the entire journey of our questions, our doubts, our hopes, is about the journey itself, that it is what makes us human.

We honor the softness of surrender.

Read the lyrics from Hi Ren below, and then take some time to watch the music video.

As I got older, I realized there were no real winners and there were no real losers in psychological warfare
But there were victims and there were students
It wasn’t David versus Goliath, it was a pendulum
Eternally swaying from the dark to the light
And the more intensely that the light shone, the darker the shadow it casts
It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance
And like a dance, the more rigid I became, the harder it got
The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps, the more I struggled
So I got older
And I learned to relax, and I learned to soften, and that dance got easier
It is this eternal dance that separates human beings from angels, from demons, from gods
And I must not forget, we must not forget, that we are human beings

I’ve only scratched the surface of Ren’s music for us, but I hope you’ll hold this as a reminder that art is both radical and everyday.

Art points us to the humanness in ourselves, to the sacredness in ourselves and in the world, and is meant to help us ask deep, enduring questions of all of it.

An an Indigenous woman, I know my ancestors saw iterations of the very horrors we’re seeing today—greed, hate, colonialism, racism, institutional oppression, war machines. They lived through their own cycles of oppression, of governments controlling the ways they lived their everyday lives, taking away their livelihood, their homes, their human rights, their spiritual rights, their cultural connections.

Still, here we are today. The spirit of resistance is strong, lingering, a shkode, fire, that we hold on to. And sometimes, music pulls that out of us right when we need it.

Art is meant to help us dig into the deepest questions about ourselves, about whatever or whoever God is or isn’t, and about how we are meant to survive on this earth, individually and collectively.

I’ll leave you with this video, for those of you who’d like a bit of jazz, from Ren’s band The Big Push (also a really fun busking album).

In all that you do, let yourself take the fear/rage/exhaustion and alchemize it into the very ideas that shape our reality into something better.

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Thanks for being here. Your support means now to me more than ever, as we survive the chaos of the world. Words are medicine, stories are medicine, and the way we use art to resist in the world deeply matters.

Onward.

Preorder Everything Is a Story here!

Come spend a week with me at Iona, Scotland. Festival of writing and storytelling this October, right as my new book launches in the UK!