Girly music (again)

Girly music in church? We’ve set a hare running here…

One of the things the Charismatic Movement did in the 1970s and ’80s was give expression to worship that engaged the emotions. This probably had more to do with style of music than mere lyrical content. But it opened some parts of the church up to more emotional songs and that was surely no bad thing. There must be a limit to how many times you can robustly tell God who he is in any one service – which is what a lot of traditional hymns involved us in doing. (I suspect we are telling God what he already knows anyway; so for whose benefit are we doing it? To prove our orthodoxy or otherwise? Discuss…)

As music has developed, however, it has been interesting to see what has longevity and what passes by quickly. Unfortunately, some nonsense has as great a shelf life as some good stuff. I am still not sure how Jesus is supposed to respond to our invitation to ‘fill your sheep’ – as one famous worship song has it: what with – sage and onion?

It is also surely too easy to see a vicious circle between the drift of worship music and what people are increasingly referring to as ‘the feminisation of the church’. Although there may be elements of connection and truth here, I suspect this is too easy a correlation. English blokes are not always the best at being fully rounded emotional beings; so, shaping a spirituality around their sometimes stunted emotional articulacy might not be the wisest of moves. To go back to what I said in my last post on this matter, we need in public worship a diet that feeds not only the whole individual, but the individual of different temperaments at different times of life – that takes the individual as part of a community on a journey that will not always feel the right one at that time.

In other words, ‘worship’ (which, we must remember, is primarily directed to and about God) should provide a vocabulary (for body, mind and spirit) that enables a massive variety of people in a particular community at a particular time in a particular social context to express the truth of their experience and their soul to God and each other.

This is where I found the music of John Bell and the Iona Community‘s Wild Goose Worship (now ‘Resource’) Group revolutionary. Taking traditional (and, therefore, already known and loved) tunes, they put new words to them and opened up new expressions of worship. This meant starting where people really are and not pretending that worship starts where life is left behind. Rather than collude in the fantasy that has a worship leader announcing: ‘Let’s leave behind all the stuff of the week just gone – all the preoccupations, etc. – and focus our minds on God’, it encourages people precisely to bring to God their individual and communal experiences and NOT to forget or ignore them. That is why the singing of songs from the World Church (in their own languages) is so important: it helps us briefly enter into the experience of others who are not like us and learn to pray for them.

But two further points remain from comments on my last post. The first has to do with the ‘sacred/secular’ divide. The banality of some Christian worship music (both lyrically and musically), when set against the raw honesty and lyrical intelligence of some ‘secular’ music, is embarrassing.

I contributed to a BBC Radio 2 documentary in November 2008 which was celebrating the 25th anniversary of Leonard Cohen‘s Hallelujah – before it was desecrated by Simon Cowell’s pets – and trying to work out why the song had been covered by so many people. What was the appeal of the song? One of the questions put to me was: ‘Hasn’t Cohen simply stolen the language of religion and applied it to sex and physical experience?’ My response? ‘No, Cohen has understood what many Christians have failed to grasp: that God is interested in the whole of life and not just the ‘spiritual’ bits. When Cohen, reaching deep into the contradictions of sex and love and loss, recalls fallen biblical characters (who are also, and despite this, seen as heroes in the Bible) sings of the ‘broken hallelujah’, he is accepting that we all come to God as messed up people.

But this leads me to the question put to me in an interview with Ludovic Hunter-Tilney of the Financial Times (4/5 April 2009) about the concern of many rock musicians with spirituality. Ludo questioned whether the rock gig now replaces the ‘church’ experience of corporate worship. I think my response can be summarised as: the rock gig might engage with spirituality (seen as the ‘existential reality and experience/questioning’) of the audience, but it is not ‘worship’ insofar as it is not directed towards an object of ultimate value. But it is an experience of corporate questioning, valuing, affirming and questioning – however contradictory.

Maybe the rock gig has become the closest some people get to ‘common worship’ because the churches have failed to provide the space in which genuine (and often inadequate or contradictory) expression of life, emotion, affirmation and questioning can take place without the leader putting you right before the end of verse 4 of the final song/hymn.

Wesley said that we learn our theology not from what we hear from the pulpit, but from what we sing. Put a good tune to rubbish and it will become popular – and it will soon have us believing rubbish as well as singing it. The ancient/modern debate in relation to worship is now redundant. The question that is pressing has more to do with whether we have clergy and other ‘worship leaders’ who understand what is going on in ‘services’ and are able to create the space in which people can find that the whole of life matters to God – and that, in expressing our individual and common experience, we find that we have been found by the God who is not surprised by what he sees and hears?

 

The day the music died (again)

When I read yesterday that the prolific American writer John Updike had died, I didn’t feel particularly moved. Martin Amis’s obituary in the Guardian ended with the observation: ‘This is a very cold day for literature.’ Well, Philistine that I am, I haven’t actually read any Updike, so I wouldn’t really know if it was a cold day, a cool day or any other sort of day. Perhaps when I have finished working my way through Dostoyevsky I ought to remedy this and see what all the fuss is about.

But today I was deeply saddened to hear that the great singer-songwriter John Martyn has died. He was one of the great musicians who didn’t really give a toss about playing the game and instead just kept on writing and recording beautiful songs. Why the difference in response when I heard of his demise only a day after that of Updike?

Much to my horror, I was in someone else’s office this afternoon when I read the news on the BBC website and nobody there had heard of him. Far be it from me to suggest they are cultural pygmies, but… well… they are.

The first time I heard John Martyn play live was in the mid-1980s at the Colston Hall in Bristol. The sound failed and, drunk as a skunk, Martyn struggled to keep a decent show on the road while attempts were being made to fix the problem. He tried (unsuccessfully) to tell jokes. He even tried singing songs from musicals. It was embarrassing and annoying – especially as I had paid good money when I had very little good money to spend.

But there was a rare honesty to his songs and he had a wonderful ability to make the guitar sing. Many people don’t realise that they know his songs because they have only heard them played by other artists: Sweet Little Mystery and Head and Heart are two of his most famous. Over four decades he managed to put into words and music the deepest experiences of a human being exploring the beauty of the world and love and loss at the same time as wrestling with the demons of drugs and alcohol. Out of the struggle came a rare beauty and an integrity that reads in his lyrics like the guileless openness of a child. Complex and inconsistent, he wrote and sang and played of life as it is – not as we think it ought to be.

I have thought for years that it is always the poets and musicians who tell the truth about the world and enable us to keep alive the hope of redemption amid the intricacies of life. It brings us back to Leonard Cohen’s ‘broken and holy hallelujah’. Like the poets of the Old Testament, who (as Walter Brueggemann put it) ‘kept alive the language of home’, it is the raw honesty of these guys that breaks through the polished conventions of ‘life’ and allows light to shine through the cracks of their brokenness into the worlds we inhabit. They articulate in word and sound what some of us struggle to formulate.

Anyway, it is a sad day and a great loss. And I am going to listen to Solid Air (1973) this evening while I read.

 

Wide space…

In the summer of 2008 I went to a day of lectures at the University of Cambridge to commemorate the ecumenical visit of a group of Germans to England in 1908 (reciprocated in 1909). The morning lecture was just brilliant: the retired German theologian Jurgen Moltmann giving an overview of German theology from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Now this might not sound the most exciting way to spend a hot summer day, but this elderly academic, speaking in superb, faultless English, was interesting, funny, wise and perceptive. To anyone interested in theological development in the last century it was a unique opportunity to hear the great man do his stuff.

Over lunch I mentioned to him that I would like to read his autobiography, but wanted to read it in German and not English. I immediately forgot the title of the book and thereafter kept forgetting to order it.

A couple of months later I was with a group of bishops at Lambeth Palace for a theology day with the Archbishop of Canterbury – another brilliant, stimulating and challenging day. After lunch I approached the Archbishop with a query I had been too embarrassed to ask Moltmann in Cambridge. During his lecture Moltmann had suddenly quoted something that sounded deep and ‘old’. I wanted to ask where it came from, but thought I would look conspicuously ignorant among a load of keen Cambridge academics. So, I asked Rowan if he knew where this had come from – the Desert Fathers perhaps? It went like this:

God is our happiness. God is our torment. God is the wide space of our hope.

Rowan thought about it for a moment and then said: ‘I think he was probably quoting himself.’

Was I embarrassed? Of course I was! But at least I learned something. Anyway, I finally got a copy of the book when I was at a theological conference near Dusseldorf last November. And the German title of the book? ‘Weite Raum’ – Wide Space. Rowan was right… and I am hopelessly ignorant.

But I love the description of God that Moltmann gives. We often try to narrow God down so that he reflects our own limited experience, expectations or prejudices. But God, as can be seen in the biblical narratives, occupies the wide spaces which offer uncertainty and threat as well as the fearful hints of his presence. It seems that God strides about in the wide spaces and won’t be pinned down by our own small-mindedness. But it also chimes in with the stuff I wrote a couple of weeks ago about Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ which refuses to hold back from God the contradictory realities of human/Christian life from God: we offer both the ‘broken and the holy hallelujah’ (missed out in the Alexandra Burke version).

Perhaps it is only people who are open to the wide spaces that truly enjoy God. Perhaps it is only such people who can find the wide spaces for seeking imaginative and bold potential resolutions of conflicts such as that in Israel and Gaza. Perhaps the frenzied protection of narrow self-interest is the natural and unavoidable fruit of abandoning the ‘wide space’ of God.

 

Ha-ha-hallelujah…

So, which version of the great song is going to hit the Christmas number one spot tomorrow? In one sense, I don’t really care. Cohen goes to the bank and recovers some of the millions his finance bloke nicked and a brilliant example of song-writing gets heard by a generation growing up on pap.

Mark suggests that this is music for adolescents and I wonder how old he is. Why? Because I grew up in the seventies when Leonard Cohen’s songs were called ‘songs to slit your wrists to’ – dour, morose and ‘deep’. But, contrary to Mark’s perception, I have found Cohen’s lyrics still haunt me after all these years in a way that few others’ do. Cockburn is a poet, Dylan gets behind the safe places of the mind and scratches away, Clapton captures the blues in a way few others can – and Cohen is a craftsman who creates lyrics that work at lots of levels.

Whatever we conclude about taste, though, the powerful thing about ‘Hallelujah’ is the way he suffuses spirituality with physicality and vice versa. He refuses to allow the dichotomy that disembodies spirituality and tacitly embraces Plato. This is why I think it is so good that this Christmas we will have a song at number one in the charts that ‘gets’ the point of Christmas: God opting into a messy and complicated world – not helping people escape from it. That, it seems to me, is what the Incarnation is all about. The Word became flesh – and we shouldn’t try to reverse the process just because it is less complicated.

Anyway, I’m visiting my parents in Liverpool and will reflect in the next couple of days on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s interviews on the global financial crisis and the possibilities for disestablishment of the Church of England. I bet you can’t wait…

 

Hallelujah… and other problems

There is a load of stuff going on at the moment about the choice of Leonard Cohen’s great song ‘Hallelujah’ for the winner of television’s ‘X Factor’. I thought we had reached the nadir of song abuse when it was used in the film ‘Shrek’ as a sort of sentimental reflection on the love of the ogre and his (now) green princess. In that case it was performed by Rufus Wainwright – which is fine in so far as it was a good interpretation of the song. But, I mean, really… in ‘Shrek’?

This song has been covered by hundreds of people and is now being murdered by buskers all over Europe. I heard a teenage girl in Lindau (Bavaria) killing it softly last summer. I gave her a couple of euros in the hope that she would go and get herself a drink, but also in order to encourage her – I used to busk around Germany and Paris when I was a teenager and I probably had the same effect on other people when I throttled their favourite songs. I understand it has been covered by around 120 people.

The song was written 25 years ago and it took Cohen five years to complete. During this time he wrote over 80 verses to it. Why? Because Leonard Cohen is one of the greatest poet-songwriters of our generation: he kept wanting to get it right. I recently contributed to a documentary on BBC Radio 2 (broadcast on 1 November 2008) in which Elbow’s Guy Garvey interviewed a load of singers about the song. I think (but I might be wrong) that he expected a bishop to deplore Cohen’s hijacking of religious language for ‘other’ ends, but I didn’t. I maintained that Cohen, in fact, had properly understood the Bible in a way that some Christians do not: that is to say, he understood that real human life – even that of the ‘heroes’ of the Bible like David and Samson – is deeply ambiguous. Whereas some Christians think that we must praise God at all times and tell him what we think he wants to hear from us, the biblical story actually portrays people as needing to bring the whole of their messy life to God. Cohen sings of the ‘broken and the holy hallelujah’.

Leonard Cohen is wonderful. He explores language and story in such a transparent way that he exposes the truth of the human condition in words that make you want to shout, ‘That’s what I feel/think/experience!’ And that is the power of the poet. Bruce Cockburn proposes in his song ‘Maybe the Poet’ that it is only the poets who can express the relaity of our lives and only the poets who can tease our imaginations in ways that keep the hope of heaven alive in desperate times. I haven’t got time to indulge in this, but read Walter Brueggemann and you’ll get my drift. Or listen to Cohen. Or Cockburn.