Gungor, Zombies and Inhabited Music

It looks like a human... It eats like a human… It still walks and makes noise and resembles a human, but it’s not. It’s a zombie. It has no soul. – Michael Gungor

If you have not discovered Gungor’s music yet, I would highly recommend giving them a listen.  It’s rare for me to find music that truly excites me, let alone excites me more each time I listen to it.  Gungor’s music has that effect on me.  It’s extraordinarily engaging on the first listen, and rewards further more detailed listening as well.  I’m waiting on further work from them, but I’m dangerously close to including them in my pantheon of all time favorites. 

For me, the quality of their music that seems to most consistently catch my ear is its inhabitedness.  There is an alive quality to it.  The music embodies the heart of the song.  The melodies, harmonies, instrumentations and voicings all seem to exist to serve the song.  To Gungor, the song and the body of songs seem to be a beautifully valid end in and of themselves, period.  What makes this more interesting is the ideas embodied by the music and lyrics are what might typically be categorized by genre as “worship”, though I don’t think much of their music would be adaptable to many contemporary liturgies.  I’m always a sucker for tension, so this is one I’d like to take a quick dive into.  Why would this beautiful, worshipful, engaged music seem to be out of bounds for most churches?  Or perhaps to rephrase the question, is there something about their music that is at odds with Christian, and perhaps more specifically Evangelical Christian tastes?  We’ll explore two sets of ideas to answer that question, Michael Gungor’s and Flannery O’Connor’s. 

Michael Gungor, the lead singer and songwriter of Gungor, obliquely addresses my question in a blog he wrote last November.  He suggests, I believe correctly, that many Christian singers and songwriters view music simply as a vehicle intended to deliver the content (lyrics) of a song.  The vehicle (the music) from this perspective then is interchangeable.  It doesn’t matter what the vehicle is as long as that which is carried in the vehicle clearly points people to Jesus.  Songs here are simply 3 to 4 minute sermons.  He cites a quiet, intimate song he had written that was covered by a hardcore/screamo band as an example.  Instead of recognizing the inherent connection of the lyric to the music, the screamo band uprooted the lyric from the shell of the song and replanted it into what from Gungor’s perspective is an entirely foreign and inhospitable terrain.  He goes on to share why he believes this utilitarian understanding of music undermines music’s inherent value.  He writes,

 If you want to reach emo kids, then sing emo music but with Jesus language. The problem with this is that emo music is not simply reducible to certain sounding tones and chords. There are emotions and attitudes of different genres of music that are the soul of the music. You can’t remove the anger from screamo and have it still be screamo. It’s the soul of that music, whether that soul is good or evil is not the point, simply that it is the soul. So when you remove the soul from music and transplant the body parts (chord changes, instrumentation, dress, lights, and everything but the soul…) and parade it around with some more “positive” lyrics posing as Christian music, then what you have is a musical zombie.

It looks like a human.. It eats like a human… It still walks and makes noise and resembles a human, but it’s not. It’s a zombie. It has no soul. It just uses its human body for its own purposes.

I find it interesting that this “body snatcher/zombie” music essentially puts on the style and airs of the genre its engaging, but replaces its soul with something foreign.  Granted this is very imprecise/metaphorical language, but I think you get the picture.  There’s a sense in which when Christians engage musical genres (and one can make the same case for film, novels, the visual arts etc…) in this manner, they actually create something that undermines the heart of the Christian message, which is the Incarnation.  I understand that may sound preposterous, but follow me here.  

The Father loved and respected humanity, which is of course a Divine creation, so much that the Father sent the Son to share their existence as a means of communicating the depth of the Father’s love.  Jesus became the language (the Word) through which the Father chooses to communicate this love.  The Father didn’t simply send the Son as a facsimile of a human in order to articulate a proposition; no, the eternal Son BECAME flesh. The Son embodied the message of the Father and through his words and actions on Earth acted out the Father’s love for all to see.  So if the Father respects the brokenness, foibles, and foulness of humanness enough to fill it with the Son, shouldn’t Christians respect musical forms (the language of music) to the extent that we don’t zombify it with the Christian message.  Instead, if we’re to follow the Father and Son’s lead, shouldn’t the musical form be inhabited by the Christian who then embodies that Divine message of love?

Flannery O’Connor speaks about this when she discusses the inherent value of the novel.  Citing Jacques Maritain’s assertion read through Aquinas that art exists for the good of that which is made, O’Connor asserts, “The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.”  She goes on to suggest, “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.  Then they find themselves writing a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.”  I think this parallels what Gungor writes.  What is created, particularly by the Christian who respects the Son’s Incarnation, should only be created for the good of that which is created.  To this end O’Connor would write, “God does not care anything about what we write.  He uses it.”  The Christian creates out of a creativity/muse/heart/inspiration under the influence of the Holy Spirit.  Should we not trust the Spirit to work through the gifts given the Christian?  

That brings us to the heart of the answer to the question I posed earlier.  I might suggest part of the reason Gungor’s music would seem out of place in many liturgies is because Christians, particularly Evangelical’s don’t trust art.  Perhaps it’s because it doesn’t directly produce results, read conversions; or perhaps because we prefer direct references to the truth to indirect allusions. Whatever the reason, I think the music of Gungor is evidence that we do ourselves a disservice.  We miss opportunities for Divine encounter by not allowing the arts to do their work in our lives.  Take a listen to a few of the links below, and see if you might agree.    

Let There Be - An amazing song about creation.  You can hear form coming to formlessness 

This Is Not the End - A wonderfully joyfully defiant song about death

Church Bells - A melancholy song about lost joy

Ezekiel - Drawn strait from Ezekiel's parable 

Haggai, Daniel, and the Violent Non-Violence of God

Tell Zerubbabel governor of Judah that I am going to shake the heavens and the earth.  I will overturn royal thrones and shatter the power of the foreign kingdoms. I will overthrow chariots and their drivers. –Haggai 2.21,22

This is a passage from the last of the four messages given to Haggai from God which Haggai then passed on to their intended recipients.  In this case it was a message meant for Zerubbabel, the Governor appointed by the Persians over Judah.  It’s a message about a future Zerubbabel will never see.  In fact it’s hard to see how much of this message benefits Zerubbabel at all, except to encourage him that God has chosen him to be his “signet ring”, which upon further consideration I suppose is nothing to sneeze at.  In all reality there are myriad subtle references in this message to the plans that were in motion regarding the pending arrival of the promised Messiah, but given the subtlety of the references I would suggest they were most likely lost on the message’s first audiences.  I would also suggest that much is lost on us as well when we read these types of apocalyptic, fore-telling messages, particularly when the foretold events have yet to come to pass in our own times.  In particular I would propose that we often misread the method through which the Divine mayhem quoted above is accomplished.  We see the shaking of the heavens and the overturning of thrones and chariots and tend to assume that these violent acts will occur violently.  In doing so I believe we make some of the same mistakes that caused the people of Jesus’ time to miss the fact that he was the Messiah.  I believe we’re always in danger of this type of misreading whenever we run our understanding of the Kingdom that does the overturning and shattering through a human sieve.  However, before we consider that sieve, I think we must consider the nature of the Kingdom doing the shaking.

Haggai is not the only prophet to characterize the interaction of this Divine Kingdom with the kingdom and powers around us using this violent language.  In fact one of his contemporaries, though one much older than he, used very similar language 50 or so years earlier.  In interpreting a dream of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, Daniel gives the following interpretation of a part of his dream where a stone destroys a statue representing the kingdoms of the world, and subsequently grows larger than a mountain.  He said, “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.” (Daniel 2.44 NIV)  Again we have this violent language, God’s Kingdom “crushing” the kingdoms of the world.  How do we make sense of this violent language in light of the Kingdom of God that Christ reveals in the Gospels? 

Perhaps there’s not much to make sense of.  Many of the references by Christ to the Kingdom of God have their own apocalyptic and even violent touchstones.  The Kingdom as Christ describes it tends to be characterized by healing, wholeness, plenty, justice, mercy, and love, but also by separations and conflict.  One could make the case that the Kingdom of God can be partially characterized by the sword Christ said he came to bring in Matthew 10.  There do seem to be similarities here between the inherent violence in Haggai and Daniels’s Divine Kingdoms and the Kingdom of God being described by Christ.

If that is the case, then what do we do with the healing, wholeness, plenty, justice, mercy, and love that typify the kingdom and which seem out of sync with these violent hallmarks?  How do we reconcile a kingdom that apparently marginalizes the rich, but is freely open to prostitutes and those widely considered immoral and repulsive?  How do we square the violence of the Kingdom with the notion that it’s freely available to everyone, wantonly scattered to any and all soils, even those in which it will not grow?

Perhaps a hint toward an answer to that question can be found in Jesus’ metaphor/parable of the mustard seed/plant.  It’s also meant to picture the Kingdom of God.  As a seed it starts as something inherently small and inconsequent, but grows into something so large that cannot be missed.  The parable is meant to highlight the notion that God specializes in endowing importance into the unimportant; significance into the insignificant.  So how does this relate to the apparent violence inherent in the Kingdom of God?  I’m glad you asked. 

In relation to the question I would suggest that violence and those who wield it are not inconsequent, small or insignificant.  In fact violence in a way is a powerful and more often than not sinful assertion of significance and importance.  By its nature, it gets our attention.  It triggers our self preservation instincts.  It cries out for justice.  Even if wielded justly it triggers the urge for revenge. It is a power play.  It asserts the muscle of the aggressor over the weakness of a victim.  In fact by its nature it creates victims.  So while there are violent touchstones of conflict in Jesus’ descriptions of the Kingdom of God, it seems that violence, at least the manner in which I’m describing it, can’t be a part of a Kingdom characterized by healing, wholeness, plenty, justice, mercy, and love.  This would suggest that perhaps it is the human sieve through which we filter our understanding of violence that is creating this irreconcilable tension here and affecting our ability to imagine an alternative means of overturning thrones and shattering kingdoms.

I suggest that when we hear of Kingdom’s being “crushed”, “overturned”, or “overthrown” our imaginations immediately conjure up the violent means by which these events tend to occur.  We think of coups, revolutions and wars.  We often lack the grace-filled imagination necessary to envision any other way of accomplishing these titanic shifts.  In doing so, we miss the God of the mustard seed at work in the world.  We miss the awesome power of God’s grace, which author Phillip Yancey asserts in his book What’s So Amazing About Grace is the most powerful force in the universe.  As an example of the power of grace Yancey submits the events in Poland in the 1980’s. 

Under the leadership of Lech Walesa, with some of its roots in the Catholic Church, the Solidarity Trade Union asserted themselves through non-violent means with the intent of gaining grater self-governance from the Polish Communist Party.  Granted that is a great over simplification of events, but it will do for a one sentence summation.  The character of the movement though can be seen and understood in one key event, the assassination of one of the movement’s spiritual leaders, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko.  A quarter of a million people publicly mourned him, and as they processed down the streets of Warsaw they chanted, “We Forgive You” to the Communist regime.  Within five years the Communists were out of power.    

Is this not the overturning of thrones and the shattering of powers through the wielding of the power of grace?  You could even make the case that this is part of the sword Christ said he came to bring.  I would suggest that in light of the attributes that distinguish the Kingdom of God from earthly kingdoms, that grace is the primary weapon given to the church to accomplish the establishment of healing, wholeness, plenty, justice, mercy, and love, and the acting out of these qualities of the grace-filled Kingdom is what undermines and subverts the authority of the Kingdoms out of line with these hallmarks.  This is a force with the potential to shake, overturn and crush governments, using the Biblical language.   

To be clear I’m not arguing that the events in Poland in the 80’s are in anyway a template to be followed in every circumstance.  I suppose I’m simply suggesting we need to be mindful of the limits of our imaginations in relation to both the manner in which we reveal the Kingdom of God through our actions now, and the manner in which the Divine Kingdom will be and is being established.  We need to be careful to not assume that these violent allusions will be accomplished by brute force.  Much of this, I believe, will be accomplished by the simple, steady, strong grace of God.