So Jacob, a long way from home, lay down to sleep. He had a dream that scared him out of his wits (no wonder — he had a rock for a pillow!). God appeared in the dream, and spoke to him, “Wherever you go, I will go,” God said. This startled Jacob at least as much as the angels climbing up and down the ladder. God was in this place too, not just safe at home! It provided Dorothy and me with a good wedding text and years later, I wrote it in a song:
Wherever I go, whatever I do,
whoever I am, I'm going with you.
No matter the time, no matter the place,
however I move, you walk at my pace.
On every day of every year
the weather may change,
but you're still here.
(Wherever I go, © 1997)
People mean many things by ‘spirituality’. Spirituality in music often seems to mean an ‘other-wordliness’, a style or an atmosphere designed to put us in touch with God. But does such a notion fly in the face of the central Christian doctrines? After all, our attempts to get in touch with God are relegated to the bin of history in the light of God’s breakthrough to us in the person of Jesus Christ.
Maybe spirituality is so overloaded with the idea of escaping the physical that it’s not a good word for us to use when talking about practising the Christian faith. Perhaps we should find another word for ‘practising the presence of God’. Such a word could represent for Christians not an escape from physical reality. Instead it might signify an approach to living that is thoroughly grounded in the here and now, a way of life that looks at the world with the eyes of faith. As John Beavis put it in ‘Give Glory’:
Take this sand, take this snow,
Cooper’s Creek to Omeo,
give glory, glory to the Lord.
Tiger snake, kangaroo,
Franklin-Gordon, Kakadu,
give glory, glory to the Lord.
We Christians believe in a God who is involved in our existence, who has become physical, human, to express love to us and the whole creation. If a spirituality is to be genuinely Christian, it must surely be modelled on God’s action.
I don't believe in a God up in the sky
who sits in heaven and never hears me cry.
I don't believe in a God who's far away —
I believe in Jesus living here with us today.
(God. Version 1.0 © 1991)
This kind of understanding should come easily to Lutherans, the tradition I belong to. In Luther’s Catechism, the phrase ‘in, with and under’ is used in relation to the sacraments. God’s activity, God’s presence is understood to be so closely identified with the physical elements of water, bread, wine that God is ‘in, with and under’ the elements. Hidden but present. Faith believes what it can’t see. All too often, of course, Lutherans don’t appreciate it any better than people from other traditions.
The candles are lit and the table is laid;
Everything's set to begin:
Parents and children and husbands and wives
Brothers and sisters and friends.
Here we meet you once again,
God of mercy, God of grace;
Taste your love in bread and wine,
We meet you face to face.
(Face to Face © 1977)
But perhaps this kind of spirituality is too common, too ordinary for people to get excited about. We naturally find it hard to believe that spiritual realities are right in front of us, just as the two on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognise their companion. It needed words of explanation and a familiar action:
Day of sorrow is forgotten
when the guest becomes the host.
Taking bread and blessing, breaking,
Jesus is himself made known.
(‘On the day of resurrection’ Michael Peterson)
We recently saw again the movie ‘As Good As It Gets’. Near the end, Melvin says to Carol, “I might be the only one who appreciates how amazing you are in every single thing that you do … and in every single thought that you have, and how you say what you mean, and how you almost always mean something that’s all about being straight and good. I think most people miss that about you, and I watch them, wondering how they can watch you bring their food, and clear their tables and never get that they just met the greatest woman alive.” Melvin could be talking about Jesus. Most people missed his identity. Most people still do. And the followers of this mysterious Messiah do both themselves and potential followers a considerable disservice if they don’t highlight the same characteristics their leader chose to emphasise.
The songs from the Iona Community carry a very physical spirituality, a recognition of God’s reality in the people, places and events around us, as in ‘Take this moment’:
Take the tiredness of my days,
take my past regret,
letting your forgiveness touch
all I can’t forget.
Christianity too often represents an escapism that is unreal. The words of ‘Take this moment’ help us to express the fact that we live in the midst of weariness and unresolved problems. Time and again a song from Iona will express our failure to allow God’s reality into our lives:
Lord, where have we left you —
somewhere all can view,
well polished and presented,
undented and untrue?
(Lord, where have we left you)
Not only do these songs express our failures so well, but they do it in terms that cut to the very core of our behaviour, as in ‘These I lay down’, the first Iona song I ever sang:
The narrowness of vision and of mind,
the need for other folk to serve my will,
and every word and silence meant to hurt —
these I lay down.
John Ylvisaker from Iowa , USA, captures the same physical reality in ‘Jesus was a servant’:
When he came to wash my feet...
They were smelly from the heat...
Apart from acknowledging our physical humanity, John’s words also add some humour, a quality mostly lacking in the songs we sing in worship. This lack has always struck me as both curious and unfortunate, and something of a denial of the incarnation. (Aren’t both laughter and tears at the heart of being human?) If we are to practise the presence of God, an honesty and an openness about our shared physicality seems a good start. Especially since we share our humanity with God as well. And laughing about it together seems just as appropriate as any other response.
And what about the music? If our practice of the Christian faith is to be faithful to Christ, the music we use will reflect our humanness, our physicality, as well. So rhythm, vitality, a certain cragginess are likely to be part of our music. Too often these elements have been minimised or erased altogether from church music. Like the centuries-old church practice of adopting folk tunes from the culture, but then taking the rhythm out of them. (Sydney Carter’s ‘Lord of the Dance’ was a shock to the church system for its music as well as its words!) This is as true of modern popular styles as it is of more traditional music.
But the best of Christian hymnody has this earthy, robust character both in the words and in the music. The honest directness of Isaac Watts’ words — ‘my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride’ — or the arresting individuality of a Johann Crüger tune (‘O dearest Jesus’, ‘Now thank we all our God’) keep us close to the humanity, the reality of the one we follow.
And another question: if our spirituality is to be Christian, should the music we use be identifiably ‘church’ music? Or should it reflect a range of musical styles from the surrounding culture? Not identical to the culture — genuine Christian culture is always ‘in, but not of the world’ — but while it may be a bit counter cultural, perhaps it should be closer to the music of the day.
Is ‘religious music’ an oxymoron?
When introducing a song that I often perform called ‘Complaint’, I usually mention that about a third of the Psalms contain complaints. One of them (Psalm 88) has only the slimmest positive word in verse 1 — it’s all downhill after that! The spirituality of the Psalms is in touch with how our lives really are. They always know that God is present, that God can be addressed. But they also don’t shy away from the reality of life: shame and honour, joy and disappointment, thanks and complaint, success and failure. In addition, as Walter Brueggemann argues in ‘Israel’s Praise’, the Old Testament people of God are asserting a particular world-view, and arguing strongly against alternative views. The title alone says it well: Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology.
The songs we sing together as Christians are not chosen primarily to make us feel good. Our doxology shows our theology. If it is to be truly Christian, it will be down to earth, in touch with daily realities, and always, in one way or another, revealing the God we believe in, the God who comes as a human being to meet us wherever we are, and who stays with us in every part of our life.
As we sang ‘Holy, holy, holy … heaven and earth are full of your glory’, the five year old girl shared the contents of her Tupperware container — nuts, sultanas, M&Ms — with her 3 year old sister. Yes, heaven and earth are full of your glory. We don’t need to go somewhere else to find it. The eyes of faith may see it anywhere.
November, 2000
The change arrived, and as the steady rain fell, a magpie keened outside the window. It made me grin. “Another one of God’s choir. And singing in the rain!” God made this bird, shaped each feather, gave it the voice-box that makes such a variety of sound.
Such miracles pass unnoticed in front of us all the time. Maybe most of the miracles, the wonders, are not seen. Some can’t be.
I was thinking how to introduce a song called ‘M-m-m-miracle’, by Gerry Holmes, a lovely children’s song about baptism. I began to think about the meaning of baptism being concealed. The event seems ordinary. What Christians believe about it is astounding. It was then I got thinking about a seed growing:
Like a seed that’s growing secret
in the darkness of the underground.
No-one knows it, no-one sees it,
no-one hears it growing, not a sound.
You get things done.
With a minimum of fuss you get things done.
We may never hear the beating of y’r drum
but that’s the way the world is run.
We don’t see a human life beginning, nor the life of a tree, or an animal. Sure, we can watch a birth, see a plant sprout, be surprised by an egg hatching. But life begins unseen.
Letter from ‘The Advertiser’ 18.10.00 (responding to some churches’ claims of miraculous visions and signs) from Bill Wheatland:
I have checked our church building for faces on the wall, but there aren’t any. Our building is new and the plaster is not flaking yet.
I went outside and looked at the shadows under the trees. There’s nothing there either. I saw a family of magpies feeding their young. I have seen a rabbit playing under the trees at the back of the block. There is a willow tree which was bare and dead a little while ago and is now sprouting new life. The massive gum tree which reaches skyward came from the tiniest seed. A wattlebird is nesting nearby.
In the Adelaide Hills, we don’t go searching for miracles. They are all around us.