audio-visual meditation- "Dear God" by the Monsters of Folk

I've put this video on Facebook before, but I wanted to return it and write a bit more about why I find it so powerful.  I recommend you watch it beforehand; I think you'll find it a powerful audio and visual meditation on the mystery of God.

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.)

"Starlight"

There are a few songs that I can listen to again, again, and again.  I'm sure many people have these songs.  They are songs that are tied to particular events; they may help put people in certain moods.  What I have been most interested in recently is how certain songs or tunes give expression to certain emotions.    The music becomes a vehicle by which the unspeakable is expressed--unspeakable joy, exuberance, anger, melancholy, pain. 

When I listen to music for the work it does on me emotionally, the song I most readily turn to is "Starlight" by the Wailin' Jennys.  (Below is a youtube video with the song and lyrics, but I ask you not look at the video; the background picture will be distracting.)

(Lyrics)

When a song or tune rocks me to the core, I can't help but close my eyes and sink in to the experience of the music.  But a peculiar part of my experience of music is that songs rarely take me back to a particular place in my own memory, but to a place the song creates.  It is in this space that the song creates that I remember past emotions.  In hearing a new song that seems to promise to touch somewhere deep within me, I close my eyes to see where the music will take me.

This song brings me to the middle of a snowy field at night, a clearing miles wide surrounded by forest.  The only light is ambient.  Stars shine brightly against pitch black moonless night; the snow reflects the light back up to its source, as only snow can. The cold air is oppressive and makes breathing difficult. There are signs of civilization in the distance--power lines with no origin or destination in sight--but they seem so far off, and in the emotive space created by this song, civilization is not good enough.  Home--warmth-- is what I long for.  I imagine beginning to walk...in any direction... but never quite making it out of the field.  Yet the movement itself is important; the attempt to leave the frozen fields keeps some sense of hope alive.

The closest approximation to my mind's eye's view.

That sense of hope is a feeling muted in the song, but it is there.  This is not a song describing the hopeless, although I imagine that it is a song that would speak to one in pain and despair.  The song speaks of victimization, brokenness, pain, coldness, the dark night of existence...but...there is also resilience.  The lyrics and tune are plaintive, yet insistent.  A cry of defiance against the night after naming the pain.  "Take us home."

I was reminded of this song, and the images it conjures for me, a few months ago.  I've always experienced this song in my mind.  In my mind I've stood in the field.  I've laid in the snow staring at the stars. I've felt the heat of my body desert me for the surrounding air and the ground in that field, leaving me chilled.  I've walked with only the sound of boots crunching the snow in my ears. But I have never seen this field in what is commonly called reality. That changed in January.  

I was riding in the back of a friend's car on a trip to a retreat.  We were driving at night, due north from New Haven into Massachusetts.  Near the state line the urban landscape became rural and we crossed into snowy ground.  It was a welcome sight for me.  I am not often in the back seat on road trips anymore, but I took it as something of a treat that night.  We passed fields I have only imagined in listening to this particular song.  Sure, I have seen plenty of snow in my time in New Haven, but this was different.  In New Haven, snow becomes brown in a day, and nowhere qualifies as deserted. But here...along this road... moments would sometimes pass where, aside from the headlights and instrument panel of the care I was in, stars and moon were the only lights falling on fields of undisturbed snow.  I pressed my hand against the window, and felt the heat leave my body.  The song jumped into the realm of the intellectual, then reactivated the realm of the emotional, and finally entered the realm of the physical.  The song was finally in the flesh...in my flesh...a living expression of melancholies in which I have found myself.  

That night, I didn't find myself experiencing the melancholies and pain that I have taken with me to the snowy field.  I remembered them, like running my hand over healed scars, but they were not opened by the experience. Now I listen to the song to remind me of the reality of pain (and I know there will be a time that  I will return to the song for its expression of a truth within me); but the need for resilience is what is at the forefront in the song for me.  

And, now, I'm not in the middle of the field.  I've walked quite a distance...towards a light long ago seen, and it beckons still.