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Make him tick?

I confess to not being a devoted Prince fan so much as a distant admirer for his sense of independence and sometimes purposeful outrageous efforts to distinguish himself from the crowd. I liked that and I liked his song titles, especially “Purple Rain.” Yet I did not follow his music nearly as religiously as did his strong fan base. I always wondered what made him tick and where his spiritual sensibilities were rooted. I knew he had some roots in conservative Christian movements like Jehovah Witness, and I heard him cited that reading the Bible kept him grounded most of the time.

But of course one goes to the artist’s work to get glimpses into his or her soul and Prince’s work offered many a glimpse into his spiritual roots. His attention to detail, his obvious genius at song writing and singing and acting and dressing up and handling an audience, all of it speaks to great discipline as well as great devotion to his calling, one might even say his priesthood. For if a priest is, as I propose it is archetypally speaking, a “midwife of grace,” then clearly Prince was a priest to many of his ardent fans. He graced them and he brought out the grace in them.

His philosophy seemed to be especially devoted to cutting through dualisms, whether those of gay and straight, male and female, sex and spirituality, black and white, personal and societal. The fact that he grew up in Minneapolis, one of the whitest cities in the US, and called that his home by choice his whole life long says something about his ability to cross boundaries. It was striking that the big party that gathered last night at his compound to celebrate his life was probably 95% white—which is pretty much the case for the twin cities themselves.