Where Is the Easter Joy?

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. – Pope John Paul II

Is it just me, or does the church have difficulty expressing joy?  I ask because I’ve begun to associate the celebration of Easter directly to the notion and experience of joy.  Easter is the epitome of the unexpected, joyful plot twist in the story.  It’s in essence the source of Tolkien’s notion of “eucatastrophe”, the joy of the unexpected, unforeseen happy ending.  Given the stakes at play in Jesus’ life and death, the Divine killed by humanity, and the apparent failure and defeat of the Father, unadulterated, astonished, overwhelming joy seems to be the only appropriate response to the resurrection.  Victory was literally wrenched from the sure, clenched jaws of defeat.  I get choked up when I spend time meditating on it.  The reason I bring it up is because I don’t recognize that joy in our liturgy.  Our worship tends to accommodate prayer, confession, adoration, and praise pretty well.  But we seem to have a difficult time accommodating Easter joy.  I will confess to contributing to this joylessness.

I have the opportunity in my church to put together and arrange the worship songs once a month.  A few years ago my Sunday fell on Easter.  I was excited about this.  Easter is the Christian “main event”, and I was going to get to contribute to the Easter experience.  I flubbed it completely.  It’s that year that I understood the joy of Easter for the first time, because my choices contrasted so starkly with the rest of the service.  I remember 2 of the songs I picked, “Here I Am to Worship”, and an arrangement of “When I Survey”, both of which are Good Friday songs.  They deal with the death of Jesus, not his resurrection.  They’re both somber and introspective.  I would submit that neither is joyful.  Those responsible for this year’s Easter service did a much better job.  They chose “Jesus Messiah”, “Glorious Day”, and “Mighty to Save”.  All three carry the content of Easter much better than my choices had; however upon playing them Easter morning I realized though the content may have been “right”, the music didn’t embody the joy of Easter.  Now this is no slight to those who put the worship set together.  I might suggest that there choices were limited by our own liturgical limitation in relation to joy.  It seems to me we don’t write it well, and so it isn’t available to be drawn on.

This begs the question of why, which I suppose would be the point of this particular blog.  Why this difficulty?  I’d be interested to get input in this regard.  I’ll confess that up until that Easter experience a few years ago I had an excruciatingly hard time with joy.  After that experience I came to recognize it when it appears in my life and it’s become an important part of my faith experience.  Playing drums has helped.  As I’ve said in a previous blog, I experience joy most completely when I’m playing.  From there I’ve been able to recognize it when it appears in my life (it feels like playing drums).  At any rate, any ideas for why our liturgical joy is often incomplete?

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.

Is Faith a Gift?: A Theo-Dramatic Perspective

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. – Ephesians 2.8,9 (NIV)

I have had a few conversations recently with friends where they asserted the notion that faith was a gift from God.  In each instance the notion just didn’t sit right with me.  Upon doing a bit of research and reading here and there, I unearthed a long standing and open theological conversation that’s been running through the centuries regarding just this topic.  I’m ashamed to admit I’d never taken note of it, perhaps because of the fixedness of my own position and understanding in relation to faith.  At any rate I began to reconsider the question or perhaps just consider it, given I’d never given much thought to it previously.  Also after reading texts on both sides of the debate, I wanted to bring a particular set of eyes and ears that I thought might be helpful to my process of thinking.  I wanted to briefly read the question through the eyes of Theo-Drama.  If you’ve read this blog previously, you know I’ve employed this template before as a means of working through a particular thought, text or theology.  So how would this notion of faith as a gift play out if we filter it through the separate notion that existence is a part of a larger story or drama being told and played out on the stage of the world?  Well let’s find out.

First, I must make a quick detour and define what I mean when I use the word faith here.  For that we could go one of two roads and reach the same destination I think.  The first would be a Biblical road.  I am not going to do an entire exegetical analysis here on the nature of Biblical faith, but I will (even with the danger of proof-texting) pull from the writer of Hebrew’s definition of faith.  He or she suggests, “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (NIV)  The key words I want to draw on for my purposes here are “confidence”, and “assurance.”  They embody the notion of trust.  A person who trusts something or someone is willing to place their physical, emotional, or spiritual safety (depending on what one is trusting in) in the care of the thing or individual being trusted.  I trust that the engineers and builders of my car have designed and constructed it to such a quality that it will not explode as I drive it.  To that extent I place my faith in both them and my car. 

The other road is the dictionary road.  Given we are dealing with an English translation of the Bible, the folks translating decided that “faith” is the best translation for the Greek word translated (which we’ll get to momentarily).  Our friends at Dictionary.com assert that our English word faith is “confidence or trust in a person or thing.”  That fits in pretty well with what the author of Hebrews asserts as a working definition.  If I were to expound on the Biblical and dictionary definitions together, I’d say that faith is a confident, assured trust.  Quick and dirty, but fair I think.  Unfortunately for lovers of pith, this simple understanding of faith is in conflict with much of the historical understanding of Christian faith. 

To establish this conflict I’ll have to start with a little bit of Greek, which I suppose is a dangerous course in the hands of one ignorant of Greek; however it’s a course we will take anyway.  The most widely employed Greek word which we translate into English as “faith” is the word pistis.  It’s rooted in the Greek word peitho, which means, “to persuade or be persuaded.”  So in the minds of the New Testament writers, faith contained in it the notion of being Divinely persuaded to trust.  If one is of the mind that these types of word choices are beyond chance and have their roots in Divine inspiration, then Christian faith by its nature, given the object of the faith, is revealed as an interplay between Divine persuasion and the human response to that persuasion.  The conflict then arises in relation to the manner in which people through history have tried to make sense of that interplay. 

Those who tend toward the notion that faith is an entirely gratuitous gift from God tend to find themselves favoring the Divine portion of the interplay as dominant over the human portion.  To be fair there is scripture that seems to bear this out.  For example Paul in the Book of Romans suggests, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith (Romans 12.3 NAS).  Paul also lists faith as one of the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5, meaning it’s something produced by the Spirit, not by the individual’s effort.  In addition the verse at the beginning, Ephesians 2.8,9 is also often cited.  Folks who hold this perspective read the line, “and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast,” as referring to faith.  Given I’m going to argue for a different reading, and that this is a blog, not a book, I will not lay out this case further.  I don’t intend to be unfair to it, but to represent it simply and quickly. 

I’m also not going to argue that faith is entirely of human origin.  To do so would be to marginalize the parts of Scripture I find difficult, and what fun would life be without Scriptures that blow holes in your understanding of God? Instead I’m going to argue that faith is a mysterious inter-penetration of both God’s persuasion, and humanity’s trust.  I could go directly to scripture for this, but that’s been done, and would not add to the conversation (though what I’m going to argue I suppose isn’t new, unique, or extra-biblical).  As I wrote earlier I’m going to filter the question through Theo-Dramatic Theory.  For this I’ll be drawing heavily on Balthasar’s understanding of the notion. 

At its heart is the idea that the story or narrative God is telling in history, that is the fall, redemption and restoration of humanity, is being played out in the world as if on a stage.  One could loosely see the Father as the author of this play, the Son as one sharing the stage with humanity, representing and revealing the Father’s vision, and the Spirit as the play’s director, bringing the play to life, directing the actors and action on the stage, and improvising to bring about the Father’s vision.  As members of this stage, we all have “roles” in this play.  Some have more to do than others, but as Stanislavsky said, “there are no small parts, only small actors.”  This however does not mean that our contribution to the story is entirely pre-determined.  On the contrary, just as any actor in a play or film must bring their entire person to a role, their interiority, their subjectivity, their creativity, so we must if we’re to play our part to the fullest on the world stage.  It’s our freely exercised choices which bring life to the role given us by God.  In other words for the drama being played out to have life, the actors must contribute something to the work, and the Father seems, through the Spirit, to expect and encourage our contributions to the story.  What’s in play here is our understanding of the manner in which our finite freedom interacts with God’s infinite freedom.

Granted I haven’t argued exhaustively here to prove my point, but if we assume this construct reflects something of the reality of things, it would mean that humanity has something of themselves to contribute to the drama, including their trust of the God who gave them their role, and though not mentioned previously, also their identity, both of which are tied up in the imitation of the self-gifting of Christ, but that’s another blog.  Ultimately, if one leaves no room for humanity’s trust/faith, then one strikes an almost un-repairable blow to human freedom, which itself runs contrary to much of scripture.  I would suggest human freedom is a Biblical concept.  I would also suggest Biblical freedom is the freedom to do what we ought to do, to employ our God given gifts, and creativity and apply them to the role God’s given us in order to achieve God’s ends.  In the end I will grant that God is ultimately responsible to bring about the ends God has planned, choreographed and orchestrated, and that I see God’s fingerprints all over my life, wooing me, influencing me, persuading me, cajoling me, loving me.  But I also experience my active pursuit of God, which can’t be diminished.  So in the end has God given me my faith, or do I freely, by my choosing offer my trust to God?  For me the answers to those questions are yes and yes, and must be in order to preserve both God’s and humanity’s respective freedoms.

Art for Arts Sake?

I recently read an article by the founder of The School of Life, Allain de Bottom, who broaches the question “Should Art Really Be For its Own Sake Alone?”  I would highly recommend this brief article to anyone at all interested in the intersection of Theology, the Church and the Arts.  The article reminds me of much of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s critique of the arts in his book Art in Action which I would also recommend.  de Bottom argues that an artist’s reason for creating doesn’t necessarily undermine the value of that which is created.  This of course butts heads so to speak with much of the modernist “art for arts sake” aesthetic, which he suggests loathes any whisper of aesthetic utility.  From this relatively rigid perspective, art must be encountered and experienced only as art, nothing more, and nothing less.  At any rate I wanted to take a few moments and play his assertion, which I generally agree with against another assertion I tend to agree with, Jacques Maritain’s assertion that the artist should create first and foremost for the good of that which is made, and see which one might come out on top. 

I appreciate de Bottom’s concern with artistic content.  Most artists through history don’t share the 21^st century art world’s aesthetic.  Most through the 18^th century at least connected art with some other purpose. Their art wasn’t created solely for its own sake.  Even modern artists respected in the art world have done the same.  de Bottom sites one of my favorite artists Mark Rothko as an example.  He suggests that Rothko himself hoped his work would accomplish something: “allowing the viewer a moment of communion around an echo of the suffering of our species.”  I would suggest many who have seen his work, particularly the layered black canvases he painted for his work for the Rothko Chapel, can attest that he accomplishes this, and perhaps more.  From the opposite direction I was struck on a trip to the National Gallery of Art in DC last year (after reading Art in Action) at the manner in which art work intended for devotional use, for example altar pieces which at one point were installed in churches, were displayed outside of their intended context, with no meaningful nod to their liturgical past.  This removal of an art work from a utilitarian context in order to serve in a purely aesthetic one seems peculiar at best to me.  So I resonate with the assertion that the artist inserts some content into what they create, even if that content is the assertion that what they create carries no content.

On the other side I resonate with the notion of art’s inherent value regardless of its content.  For that I go to Roman Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, who I must confess I read largely through Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of him which she shares in her book on writing Mystery and Manners.  I’ve since read Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, but for some reason I still tend to prefer O’Connor’s Maritain over Maritain himself.  At any rate, I tend to agree with O’Connor that the artist, particularly the Christian artist, should not create as a means to simply promulgate some message.  She would suggest that message lives inside the artist and will reveal itself through the work.  In order for it to be truly heard it must be deeply incarnated into the work, in a manner similar to the way in which the Being and truth of God were incarnated into Jesus, partially to give that truth a greater resonance with those with whom the Divine intended to communicate.  So in short, the purpose the artist hopes to accomplish must be deeply packed into their work.  It must come second to the value of the work itself.  The viewer, hearer, reader of the work’s encounter with the artist’s purpose must be earned through the hard work of the artist to incarnate this purpose into their work. 

So which side wins?  Well, you may have figured out by now if you’ve read any of my blogs that I tend to be a both/and type of person.  I believe both the aesthetic and utilitarian, for the lack of a better word, have to live together for art to function in a manner in which I would tend to recognize as art.  Now I understand the subjectivity of that statement.  And I understand the cans of worms opened by that conclusion, but that’s what the comment section and future blogs are for, isn’t it?

Comfortably Numb: A Restless Prayer

When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown,
The dream is gone.
And I have become comfortably numb

-Roger Waters

I’m not too manly to admit it.  I cannot listen to Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb without tears coming to my eyes.  There’s something about David Gilmour’s 4 minute guitar solo at the end of the song that does it to me every time, which of course is no good when you’re stuck in traffic and trying to choke back tears so the guy in the Beamer next to you doesn’t catch sight of you weeping like a baby in your car.  On a side note, this is why I try not to judge the folks who dance and make hand gestures to the music in their cars to harshly… there are times when I’m one of them. 

At any rate, I would venture to say that the song stirs in me something akin to my experience in worship.  Of course what is stirred isn’t a worship of the song, or of Gilmour or Floyd, but of the God who gave Gilmour his hands and feel on the guitar, and gave Roger Waters his creativity with words, concepts and composition.  It’s the same experience of Divine encounter I often feel when playing drums as I individually, and as a member of the faith community, employ music to worship in a church setting.  I know that will sound odd to many ears, and I don’t fully understand why or how that happens, but I’ve been thinking about it, and would like to explore that “why” and “how” a little here.  This may be irrelevant to most folks, particularly if you don’t experience this song in the way that I do, but I’m pretty sure we all have some song, or movie, or television show that regularly, if only fleetingly, pulls back the veil that separates seen reality from the reality not typically available to our senses.  So perhaps this might be helpful to someone other than me.

The music for the song was written by Gilmour who brought it to Waters who then wrote the lyric.  It was included on Floyd’s 1979 concept album The Wall, and is one of only two songs on the album that don’t fully integrate into the story being told.  The song itself can be viewed in 2 sections.  The verses are written in the key of B minor and, depending on the arrangement, can sound ominous and threatening, which is the way Gilmour preferred it.  Waters didn’t take to that arrangement, and so the recorded version sounds less ominous than Gilmour’s live versions.  At any rate, the verses are sung from the perspective of someone other than the song’s “protagonist”, for the lack of a better word.  It’s someone trying to “help” the singer, perhaps a doctor or counselor.  This helper seems to be someone who does not necessary have the singer’s best interests at heart.  The chord progression, Bm, A, G, Em, Bm, is constantly descending.  In short the verses are a constant and continual “downer”.  I would suggest this plays on our conceptual constructs involving angst and depression. We describe it as “feeling down”, and it’s often described as a feeling of “drowning” emotionally.  The verses seem to embody that feeling of being pulled under, of being out of control, a victim of hopelessness and despair. 

The chorus changes keys to D major and seems to be the protagonist’s inner thoughts.  It’s far brighter than the verse and alternates between A and D and then C and G chords, moving in fifths, which embodies a more familiar and comforting quality than the verse progression.  The singer seems to describe an inability to communicate with those outside of his or her body, and in both chorus’ reaches for and cites childhood memories as a type of comfort.  The singer seems to want to push back at the verses’ narrator’s attempts to anesthetize him or her, but seems unable to, ending each chorus with the admission that “I have become comfortably numb.” 

Additionally, latent in each chorus is a sense of unarticulatable spiritual longing for something only fleetingly experienced as a child.  In the first chorus there is the assertion that “this is not how I am”.  This longing is clearer in the second chorus when he admits that as a child he “caught a fleeting glimpse” of something, but “cannot put my finger on it now”  That fleeting glimpse as a child has been replaced with numb acquiescence as an adult to something seemingly less meaningful than that childhood experience with what I might call mystery.  Then at the end of the second chorus we go back to the “downer” verse progression.  It seems the protagonist is stuck in his or her numbness.  The chords seem to answer this inner struggle with, “this numbness is all there is”… but that’s when Gilmour steps in. 

The rest of the song, which is about 4 minutes, a lifetime in rock music, is dedicated to David Gilmour’s brilliant guitar solo.  It’s at this point the waterworks prepare to flow.  At the start of the solo Gilmour tends to hang around the middle to bottom of the guitar fret board, playing “lower” notes.  He even gets down to playing around the 2^nd and 4^th frets on the A string, inserting an open A few times.  The solo starts in the territory of the verse progression, low.  Over the course of the 4 minute solo Gilmore seems to slowly work up the fret board.  Spending time riffing around the 7^th, 9^th and 10^th frets, then at the 14^th and 16^th frets, until finally in the wailing climax of the solo he’s droning for measure after measure on the 21^st and 22^nd frets on the high e string, which is the part of the solo that most deeply affects me. 

This is by no means a straight line.  There are peaks and valleys.  Sometimes rising, sometimes falling, but always with what I might describe as a transcendent trajectory.  This feels like an attempt to accomplish musically what the verses couldn’t, to climb the fret board, overcome the numbness, and touch that briefly glimpsed mystery.  I can identify with that struggle: which manifests itself in my spiritual life in my pursuit of God.  Not to mix musical metaphors here, but Jon Foreman of Switchfoot articulates this well in their song Restless.  He sings:

Until the sea of glass we meet
At last completed and complete
Where tide and tear and pain subside
And laughter drinks them dry

I'll be waiting
Anticipating
All that I aim for
What I was made for

With every heartbeat
All of my blood bleeds
Running inside me
I'm looking for you

What moves me about the song is that I experience musically what Foreman describes lyrically; that restless search and struggle to find God, which mirror’s Augustine’s ancient assertion that, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  I would suggest this is true even after coming to faith.  Even then we’re restless for a deeper understanding, a greater knowledge, and more complete experience of the Divine.  This is what the song and Gilmour’s solo draws out of me.

The song ends with Gilmour sliding back down the fret board, ending back where he started on the Bm.  Was all of that transcended trajectory for nothing?  Were the verses right?  Is the numbness inescapable? I suppose that depends on how a person hears the song.  I travel up and down the fret board myself.  Sometimes experiencing and reflecting the glimpses of God’s breaking into the world in Jesus, and sometimes acquiescing to the world’s anesthetizing numbness. It’s then, in the pressing numbness, that I find I’m thankful for the restlessness.  There’s a sense in which one can view it as the Spirit’s loving elbow to our ribs, and you can see it in action in the song’s protagonist and his or her longing for the source of that “fleeting glimpse.”  So take heart, even if we find ourselves back where we started, after all of our efforts, we find the Spirit there continuing to draw all of us toward the love of God.  May we have the ears to hear it… in this and other songs.

The Darkest Night of the Year

"Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you Good News of a great joy... This day is born the Savior", that is, he who, as Son of God and Son of the Father, has traveled (in obedience to the Father) the path that leads away from the Father and into the darkness of the world. Behind him omnipotence and freedom; before, powerlessness, bonds and obedience. Behind him the comprehensive divine vision; before him the prospect of the meaninglessness of death on the Cross between two criminals, Behind him the bliss of life with the Father; before him, grievous solidarity with all who do not know the Father, do not want to know him and deny his existence. Rejoice then, for God himself has passed this way! – Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The musical group Over the Rhine entitled their 1996 Christmas album TheDarkest Night of the Year.  The tone of the record matches the title.  It is Christmas sung from somewhere near St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul.  Granted, not everyone will find that appealing, but I have a soft spot for it because anyone who knows me knows that I have a fascination with darkness.  I’m fascinated by our collective instinct in relation to it.  I’m fascinated by the mystery and unknown quality of the darkness, and the potential it has to reveal something of the Being and actions of God.  And I’m fascinated to survey a landscape that God promises will be transformed and imagine what it might look like after that transformation. 

It seems to me most folks aren’t comfortable with the dark, and I include myself in that number.  Leave me alone in a dark unknown room, and the heebie-jeebies that follow have the potential to cause a panic.  So we often try to mitigate the dark, and introduce some level of light into the murk.  I suppose we could ignore it and make due until our eyes adjust.  Or we could sit quietly and wait for a light source to present itself.  Some actually enjoy the dark, and are irritated at any inroads the light might make.  It’s rare though that anyone who prefers a lit room to a pitch black one would be willing to enter a pitch black room and remain there until given permission to leave it, though that of course is the heart of the story we celebrate every December 25. 

With that in mind, I think I’m going to make it a Christmas tradition to post a link to the homily below every year on this blog.  It is a relatively short, but potent review of a story we can tend to be overly familiar with.   It’s also the sermon from which this blog takes its title, Into the Dark With God.  Enjoy.