August 28, 2008 by djackson.

O ye, wha sing sae guid yoursel,
Sae tuneful and sae lovely,
Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tell
Your neebours’ flats and folly ;

Hear me, ye gifted wonder-voiced,
As counsel for poor mortals
That frequent pass the note of choice
For glaikit clinker’s portals.

This has been on my mind for quite a while now. Someone needs to say a few things to people who sing well, on behalf of those of us who can’t sing at all. This is a matter of civility. Moreover, it is a matter of Christian community. I believe that one reason for the decline in congregational singing has been the license that the musically gifted take toward their tonally challenged sisters and brothers. So here, for what it is worth, is my “Address to the Unco’ Guid Singers.”

1. WE DON’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK OF OUR SINGING.
If we did, we’d ask. You’ll notice that we don’t. That is, you’ll notice if you’ll wait until you’re asked before busting in with a critical comment, usually in the form of a joke, about how bad our singing is. You wouldn’t (I hope you wouldn’t) rip into a friend with unsolicited advice about how she dresses or raises her children or walks or eats or smells. Why is it that cracks about a person’s ability to sing seem sacrosanct from basic social courtesy?

2. WE AREN’T INTERESTED IN IMPROVING OUR SINGING.
Perhaps worse than the Retort Humorous is the Advice Solicitous. “You know, with just a little work you could hit those notes better.” And with just a few missed meals you could unload those two bulldogs you seem to have stuffed into the seat of your pants, but you’d be mortally offended if I offered THAT suggestion in an effort to improve you.

3. SINGING IS NOT DIFFERENT FROM OTHER SKILLS
Singing is something that virtually everyone can do and that some can do much better than others. It does not differ, in this regard, from other human activities such as, say, talking. I’ve noticed a mentality among musicians: singing takes talent, skill, and practice but anyone can talk. This explains why rock stars feel qualified to tell us who should be president. The same mentality leads church soloists to utter those dreaded words, “Before I sing, I’d like to share something.” Simply put, the ability to hit a set of notes, while admirable, does not bestow competency in all fields, including theology. Now I’m all for the priesthood of the believer, soul competency and all the rest of it, but as Paul’s metaphor of the body of Christ teaches, equal worth does not mean equal ability. That’s why, although I want to be allowed to sing with the congregation, I would never put myself forward as a soloist. (”Before I preach, I’d like to sing something.” THAT would empty the pews!) As someone who has invested his life in learning what to say and how to say it, let me whisper in the ear of singers everywhere: There’s a reason somebody else writes the words for you.

4. RESPECT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONGREGATIONAL AND SOLO MUSIC
Reports of the death of hymnody, like that of Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. Still, praise choruses are probably here to stay and are, at least, here. I don’t mind; some of them are very good. I have noticed one thing, however: many church musicians these days seem to make no distinction between a chorus written to be sung by everyone and a ballad meant to be sung by a talented soloist. This is not new. I still remember my bemusement when the 1991 version of the Baptist Hymnal included Andre Crouch’s “How Can I Say Thanks?” It is a beautiful song, but the elegant dips and curves daunt the untrained singer and require more agility than multiple voices can muster. (The fact is that the song demands more than most soloists, at least in my experience, bring to the task. Accompaniment tracks are in many ways a blight on church music but that’s a bellyache for another day.) What I’m saying is that many worship leaders apparently hear songs on the radio, like the tune and text, and splice ‘em into the order of worship the following week without realizing that most of us can’t keep up with the vocal stylings of the latest recording artists. Hymns and praise choruses both have the virtue of simplicity, so let the vocally simple among us sing them. If you want to sing a song written as a solo, sing it as a solo.

If I sound bitter and envious, it’s only because I am. I do my own share of shower-singing and I’ve often swelled the chorus as Willie belts out “Whiskey River” on my car radio. I wish I was one of those specially called to praise God in song. If you think about it, music outlasts preaching. I’ll be out of a job in Heaven; no need to tell people about Jesus when they’re in his presence. As far as I can tell, though, singing goes on around the throne 24/7 long after the 24 and the 7 have ceased to exist. But for now, I beg the charity of my musical brethren and sisteren. Try to remember that, as the great R. G. Lee once said, the greatest earthly choir ever assembled will, once we reach glory, sound like a bumblebee in a fruit jar. In that light, the distinctions between your singing and mine don’t seem so significant.

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August 19, 2008 by djackson.

The pulpit has not generally been the friend of poetry. After all, Helen Steiner Rice rounds off the three-point alliteration of sermonic certainty so well, while real poems tend toward an uncomfortable ambiguity. (So do real sermons but that’s a topic for another day.)

This topic is on my mind because the current issue of The Christian Century contains a wonderful offering by Christian Wiman entitled, “Small Prayer in a Hard Wind.” It hit me so powerfully that I felt compelled to share it here.

As through a long-abandoned half-standing house
Only someone lost could find,

Which, with its paneless windows and sagging crossbeams,
Its hundred crevices in which a hundred creatures hoard and nest,

Seems both ghost of the life that happened there
And living spirit of this wasted place,

Wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood
That is open enough to receive it,

Shatter me God into my thousand sounds . . .

It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Notice the gospel allusions hidden by their use with opposite connotations - “lostness” in the first couplet, and the pun on “paneless/painless” juxtaposed to the “CROSSbeams” in the second. And in the third set (don’t miss the number!)we get both “ghost” and “spirit,” similar terms applied to the same agent (the wind, another reference to the third member of the Trinity) but the first time referring to the dead and the second to the living. Then the lovely alliterations (yes, that device does have its legitimate place) of “Living SPirit of this waSted PLaCE” and “SeekS and SingS every Wound in the Wood.” And notice the “wood” once again - back to that crossbeam!

Best of all is the idea of wounds as a source of song and the prayer to be shattered into praise. How much could our relentlessly cheerful happy-clappy-sappy-crappy music and our addiction to success-oriented preaching profit from the prophetic word of a poem like this? Like the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, we are forbidden to be sad or alone. Worse -the prohibition comes ostensibly in the name of Jesus, whom, we forget, is still the Man of Sorrows. As Marva Dawn asks, “If that is the only kind of worship a community has, how will the people learn to lament?” James 1.2-4, anyone?

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August 7, 2008 by djackson.

“All contemplatives are failed contemplatives.” - Eugene Peterson

Evelyn Underhill claimed that there was a mystic temperament and that either you have it or you don’t. I much prefer Eugene Peterson’s view. “Contemplative,” he writes in Eat This Book, “is a designation that any of us can accept for ourselves and one that we all should.” He also adds the helpful observation that “‘Contemplative’ is not a term of achievement. It is not a badge of merit.” Rather, it is simply a way of seeking God, one that involves an effort to push the truth of Scripture through our minds and hearts right out to our nerves and muscles. If the image of “pushing” sounds too Pelagian or (perhaps worse still in some ears) Armenian, try an agricultural metaphor: contemplation is that process by which the sun’s rays suck dirt and dark and damp out of the soil and up through the trunk until, transformed to aqua vita on the journey, it bursts out as life and leaves on the ends of the tiniest twigs. “Contemplation” - Peterson again - “means living what we read, not wasting any of it or hoarding any of it, but using it up in living.”

So, I’m a contemplative and - in my cockier moments - a mystic. And bless Eugene Peterson’s bearded little face, a failed one, because knowing God in the hermeneutic of active faith is never a completed process. I’ve been intentionally walking this route, treading what Susan Howatch in one of her novels calls “mystic paths,” for about twenty years now and it occurred to me the other day (actually I was at the gym, slogging along on an elliptical trainer) to wonder if I’ve actually gotten anywhere. What do I have to show for a couple of decades of reading Richard Foster and John of the Cross and fasting occasionally and spending time in solitude and all the rest of it? Legend says that Teresa of Avila floated above the floor when at prayer in her cell. St. Francis received the stigmata and preached a man-eating wolf into submission. I don’t have any such experiences to report. I have preached to man-eating deacons but I don’t remember any of them ever repenting.

Actually, real mystics will tell you that things of that nature aren’t the point at all and are as much a distraction as anything else. Teresa, for instance, warns in The Interior Castle that even if the Lord speaks directly to one in prayer, “do not think that . . . you will for that reason be any better. After all, He talked a great deal with the Pharisees.” Still, I wondered, with none of the classic racks of antlers to hang above my spiritual fireplace, what can I say that being a contemplative has brought me? I’m going to try to express a few things that surfaced in my musings.

First of all, I think I have become more aware of other people. I’m sort of a high-functioning autistic (not to mention a depraved sinner) and other people, for me, have too long been basically so much scenery and stage property. I sometimes think that I glimpse, after a score of years spent softening up my granite selfishness, the beginnings of an ability genuinely to notice other people, to think about what might be nice for them in a given situation. I don’t always DO anything about it. Perhaps it would be accurate to say that other people have been upgraded in my soul from objects to irritants, but at least irritation is a form of interaction.

Next, I have become much more aware of my own sinfulness. Good Baptist children like me (and I was a very, VERY good Baptist child; all right, with a few lapses just in case any of my Sunday school teachers or children’s choir directors are reading this) are taught simultaneously to 1) admit how deeply sinful we are and 2) avoid sinning. Those of us who are adept at the second lesson (or, as Robert Burns said, have a “better art o’ hidin”) sometimes feel genuinely hypocritical in practicing the first. I can’t honestly stand before the congregation and trace in the needle-tracks of my tattooed arms the trail of my misspent youth. I’ve succesfully nevered all the thou-shalt-nots on the evangelical list of deadly sins.

But contemplation has helped. For a few years now I have attempted to spend an hour each morning in silent prayer. That sounds more impressive than it is. What it usually amounts to is sitting in a chair staring into space as random thoughts boil through my mind like a cloud of gnats whose last stop was a half-empty can of Red Bull. Lately, though, I’ve noticed something about these thoughts. More and more, they tend to take on the form of remembrances from my good Baptist past - in which, it turns out, I’ve said slighting and hurtful things to perfectly nice people, shoved myself into the center as the subject of conversations, eaten the last piece of fried chicken on the plate and generally behaved like an Adamic pig at a trough full of forbidden fruit. Funny how my depravity could Ghillie suit itself in perfect camo culled from the rags of my self-righteousness. My behavior hasn’t necessarily improved, but at least my repentance is more sincere.

Finally, I have learned to enjoy all my life more by constructing it as spiritual experience. When folding laundry flows more naturally out of folding my hands in prayer, when cooking for someone seems less distinct from offering the elements at the Lord’s Supper table, when scrubbing the toilet and cleansing my soul become not only similar actions but two steps in the same task, then I don’t feel quite as often that I’m wasting my time.

So there it is. Hardly enough to earn me that coveted St. Benedict decoder ring I’ve always wanted, but useful all the same. I think contemplation is like that scene near the end of C. S. Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength, the one where the women suit up for a medieval-style wing-ding. The group picks each person’s dress; she is not allowed to select it for herself. And there’s no mirror: each woman can gauge the beauty of her appearance only by the effect it has on the others. This means that the more they want to know about themselves, the more carefully they must attend to each other.

So when we stand ’round the throne to get eternally pimped-out for the unending praise of God, we wear what he gives us with no nonsense from us about our best color or how slimming vertical stripes are. And at this particular prom nobody takes our picture. We only know how brightly we shine by looking carefully at the throne, and paying attention to how well our presence helps others to praise.

Not bad, on balance, for twenty years of failed mysticism.

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