Dear god, I'm trying hard to reach you
Dear god, I see your face in all I do
Sometimes it’s so hard to believe in
Good god I know you have your reasons
Dear god I see you move the mountains
Dear god I see you moving trees
Sometimes it’s nothing to believe in
Sometimes it’s everything I see
Well I’ve been thinking about,
And I’ve been breaking it down without an answer
I know I’m thinking aloud but if your love's
Still around why do we suffer?
Why do we suffer?
Dear god, I wish that I could touch you
How strange sometimes I feel I almost do
And then I'm back behind the glass again
Oh god what keeps you out it keeps me in
Well I’ve been thinking about,
And I’ve been breaking down without an answer
I know I’m thinking aloud but if your love's
Still around why do we suffer?
Why do we suffer?
________________________________
I've said before that wonderful spiritual music--I mean music that touches the soul--is not limited to religious artists. Some of my favorite spiritual pieces come not from "praise bands," but from secular artists who share their faith with us. At one point, I could not articulate my own appreciation of their work. I remember writing and thinking that between the secular artist and the contemporary praise musician, the secular artist seemed more authentic to me. I think it is because I don't buy into the overly sentimental nature of modern "praise" music. That's not to say that I doubt the religious artist's sincerity, but it seemed to me to be shallow.
Now, I know that is a gross generalization, but I think I can point to the difference. For me, a praise musician is often limited to the positive expression of faith. The task is to make music for worship, which typically does not leave matters of theology open for question but instead seeks to wrap up God/belief/faith in a tidy package. Where I think secular artists are unhindered--and more realistic--is that they can end a thought, a song, with a question. That, to me, takes more courage. Instead of pushing aside the difficult parts of theology for the sake of a sentimental expression of hope, or the drowning of an experience of doubt, the secular artist can write a song that performs a harder theological task: sitting with the difficulties of the examined life of faith.
The song above is a meditation on the problem of theodicy--the existence of evil in a world created by a supposedly good, gracious, all-powerful, all-knowing, always present Creator. I take it to be from the viewpoint of a believer or a seeker who has known times of closeness to God, and yet even then the questions linger. The video that the band chose (by a video-making contest) to accompany the song is--in my opinion--a conceptually separate-yet-linked metaphor of the experience of our human existence: blindness of the world around us (sometimes by our own will), discovery of both the bad and the good, joy, freedom, exploration, boundaries, terror, confusion, the experience of being lost and of being alone, the search for the comfort of the loving embrace. Every move the little girl makes breaks open a realm of deeper meaning.
Breaking open realms of deeper meaning. This is for me the difference between bad-to-good Christian art and excellent Christian art--or maybe just art by Christians. While bad art cleanly ties up concepts, over-explains, or tells you the conclusions to draw from within the work, and good art does so less explicitly or offers a fascinating avenue of thought, great art instead invites one into a sustained engagement in which meaning is not exhausted and one is invited deeper into one's soul every time one beholds the object.
(Quick excursis: Other than music, the easiest medium to see this distinction is film. Compare the heavy-handedness and utter fantasy of Christian life in films like Facing the Giants to the deeper questions of human existence and responses to God present in, say, The Mission,...which explores issues of slavery, pacifism, sin, redemption, war, politics, and ecclesiastical authority.)
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