A Different Sort of Glorious

"There is a very important connection between the Church’s worldview and the Church’s hymns. If your  heart and mouth are filled with songs of victory, you will tend to have an eschatology of dominion; if, instead, your songs are fearful, expressing a longing for escape – or if they are weak, childish ditties – your worldview and expectations will be escapist and childish.

Historically, the basic hymnbook for the Church has been the Book of Psalms. The largest book of the Bible is the Book of Psalms, and God providentially placed it right in the middle of the Bible, so that we couldn’t miss it! Yet how many churches use the Psalms in musical worship? It is noteworthy that the Church’s abandonment of dominion eschatology coincided with the Church’s abandonment of the Psalms."

- David Chilton

Last week as we sang Psalm 63 in English metre to Thomas Tallis' familiar third mode melody, I was impressed not only by the nature of the music and its powerful words but also the nature of our assembly, gathered in a circle, singing ancient words of longing and praise for our Lord.

When I was little, Emily read a book aloud to me, parts of which I will never forget. The book is called St. Bartholomew's Eve (by G.A. Henty) and recounts the story of the French Huguenots, their mission and the persecution they endured throughout the 16th century. In the story, the hero hears singing in the woods and discovers a Huguenot church meeting. The Huguenots are singing hymns of praise to God and studying His word together at the risk of their own lives, since meeting outside of a state church was prohibited. The author paints such a vivid description of the scene I was convinced I had seen an illustration, even though, as far as I can tell no significant painting or drawing representing this aspect of history exists. The Huguenots are gathered in a circle, their faces uplifted, fearlessly singing. In the story, as was the case for most Huguenot gatherings historically, the city authorities discover their meeting and slaughtered them without respect for age or position. Only a few escape who were perhaps protected by men at arms or missed in the general uproar.

Generally, when we think of glorious music we imagine grand, state-sanctioned church productions of Handel’s Messiah or Kyrie Eleison or Saint Matthew’s Passion. Most American’s have grown accustomed to worship music productions so noisy they can’t even hear their own voice.

Perhaps we have forgotten a different sort of glorious, the kind that comes from impassioned believers producing imperfect but heartfelt music. Believers who have tasted persecution, counted the cost and embraced the trial before them, produce an entirely different sort of music. The average church attendee comparing our assembly last week to a grand church production complete with perfectly balanced sound and acoustic sensitivity would perhaps be dissatisfied.

But if you put on a different set of glasses you would see patriarchs earnestly seeking God’s truth with their families gathered around them, mothers holding babies in their arms who will change the world, sons and daughters embracing their family’s mission with joy and energy, families who love the kingdom of God, singing out of the conviction that the ability to worship God in sincerity and faithfulness to His Word is an immeasurable privilege. And it is glorious! The kind of glorious that relishes the battle and rejoices in the eternal victory of God.

O Lord, My God, Most Earnestly

Psalm 63

Thomas Tallis, 1567; alt.

Psalter, 1912

rev. Psalter Hymnal, 1987

O Lord, my God, most earnestly I seek Your holy face,

Within Your house again to see the glories of Your grace.

Apart from You I long and thirst and naught can satisfy;

I wander in a desert land where all the streams are dry.

The loving kindness of my God is more than life to me,

So I will praise You all my days and pray continually.

In You my soul is satisfied, my darkness turns to light,

and joyful meditations fill the watches of the night.

Beneath the shadow of Your wings I sing my joy and praise.

Your right hand is my strong support through troubled nights and days.

All those who seek my life will fall; my life is in Your hand.

God's king and people will rejoice; in victory they will stand.

Variations on What Theme?

Is Musical Taste Perception or Principle...or Both?

Musical talk these days is heated.  Likely it always has been so; but now the debate takes on the flavor of a society which is fiercely committed to humanism.  Even among Christians, the banter can become surprisingly pragmatic and presuppositionally trite and many are nearly rudderless when it comes to the principles of the matter.  Most Americans prefer to maintain the anonymity of our principles under the guise of preference.  Many of us, on one level or another, have accepted the constraints of a culture dogmatically loyal to tolerance...ultimately the worship of human wisdom.  We consistently refer to taste in musical style as an issue of personal preference.  And I suppose in one sense you could say it is.  But when did you ever hear of a preference that wasn’t born out of principle? As Christians, we should have preferences based upon that which is principally right and true.  We are required to take our preferences captive to the obedience of Christ, along with every other thought. A lawful Christian preference is perforce born out of the word of God, not our own imaginations.  We are supposed to be equipped saints, prepared for kingdom building: 

"so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes."

~Ephesians 4:14

To have this kind of “preference” is an obligation...a necessary result of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  By this, I mean no more nor less than that, as we grow more and more into the image of Christ, the things which God loves and calls beautiful will be the definitions of our personal taste...our comprehensive aesthetic. Aesthetics and the cultivation of certain tastes are a part of our nature…a nature created to worship. Since we are worshiping creatures, the god we serve must and will dictate the manner in which we worship.  This is a chilling reality.  It brings the mirror of truth to bear on our labels and categories.

One simply cannot deny the nature of music.  It is a lucid reflection of the thoughts and emotions of man’s mind as he reflects the creative nature of Him in whose image he is created. Down to the very wavelengths of the notes, music acts obediently to its Maker.  Consequently, it cannot be other than powerful and communicative.  For this very reason, one cannot appeal to the topic’s supposed neutrality.  Granted, the music itself… that is, the notes, the tools, the function, is not the source of our definition for musical morality. There is after all nothing inherently sinful in a violin (perish the thought) or an electric guitar.  The depravity of the human heart is the source of the morality or immorality we find in music; harboring an infinite variety of wrongs which it can cause inanimate tools to express.  Since men’s hearts are desperately wicked, apart from miraculous regeneration they produce all kinds of evil…and the world of music is no exception.

"If even lifeless instruments, such as the flute or the harp, do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played? And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle? So with yourselves, if with your tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is said? For you will be speaking into the air."

~1 Corinthians 14:7-9

This is why men like Bach are fascinating to me.  Regenerate and submitting his will to Christ, he recognized the mortal danger of taking the power and wonder of music lightly.  He is the kind of man whose music still speaks about the glory of God, even after he himself has long gone to his eternal reward.  To this day Bach exacts a kind of awe and applause from even the most nihilistic and degenerate audiences.  A kind of noblesse oblige drags the modern musical world to its feet in reluctant ovation.  Bach himself admitted to no genius, but only adherence to the rules of the created thing; which rules he uncovered through painstaking study.  Like a surgeon delving into the uncountable wonders of the human body, Bach probed with single-mindedness through a perfect creation long twisted by sin; inexorably demanding everything from it, and consequently unveiling the undeniable fingerprints of God.

Christians need to stop imagining that they are not bound to do the same as he.  When he said he was obliged to work hard, he said no more than was strictly true .  We are not given the option of neutrality any more than he was.  We are not even allowed to "do it just like Bach" because that would abrogate the principle.  Because of this, Christians tend to allow the issue to slide.  The idea of working as hard as Bach makes our flesh, well, balk!

So how does one even begin to form a right opinion on music?  It would be easier indeed to call our taste in music a preference in the neutral sense of that word.  But I believe this position denies the Lordship of Christ over this as well as every area of life.  We must begin by study; identifying the sources and purposes of each musical style and holding up every note to the mirror of God’s perfect word to judge whether it meets the standard.

There are such things as excellence and truth in music principle.  They reside first in the nature of God, and appeal to nothing and no one for their authenticity, identity, or authority.  If one cannot acknowledge His authority and comprehensive dominion of this matter, one does not even have a logical basis on which to base any kind of knowledge or opinion on the topic at all.  If we believe this, we can draw at least two conclusions about music.

First, from infancy music, like any other element of culture, has discipled us. Music teaches men a manner of thought and speech.  It formulates an attitude, and a bearing towards our fellow man; and ultimately, strongly influences the nature of our thoughts and emotions towards God.  Consider other forms of communication which can be analogous: speech, dress and carriage.  No wise man uses slang or street talk before a king.  No pure woman wears the garments of a prostitute.  No honorable soldier ambles in a slovenly gait.  No just business man hangs his head like a coward.  And no Christian brings impure, slovenly, disorderly, excessive, insolent or ungainly music into the presence of the Most High God to offer it as a sacrifice of worship with the excuse of preference, ignorance, neutrality or perception.

Secondly, music was not primarily created for our comfort or even our benefit, but for His own pleasure and glory.  Of course, in as much as we are submitting to Him, we will find His pleasure becomes our own.  However, the moment a man begins to rely on His own skill, taste, judgment and perceptions for a standard of music, so soon does he raise his own will up over the authority and pleasure of God.  Music cannot be the expression of the un-bridled human will; otherwise it becomes in every sense most vile and ugly.  Only as it reflects the divine image and will of God can it become truly beautiful and right.  In one sense, one cannot expect music to excel beyond the sanctification of the men who are using it.  It speaks the words of the heart which the mouth cannot utter.

If this little essay has hardly scratched the surface of the issue, then let it insight others to further study. I do not believe there can be such a thing as neutrality of aesthetics in music.  Its myriad diversity embodied in infinite continuity is awash with the splendor of the Most High.  Don’t let us become confused with our muddied perceptions.  The variations that exist within beauty are variations that originated in the mind of God.  So let our work in this field of God’s kingdom be variations on a Theme: the Theme of the Creator.

O be careful, little heart, of the music you make.

"Through a glass, darkly..."

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1Corinthians 13:12

The verse has troubled me for some time.  Or rather, I should say, its common use in contrast to its true import has troubled me.

Culturally, among Christians, it is quoted often with the ennui of a common truism and dressed up with the sparkle of interest and a butterfly that identifies references as “inspirational” and worthy of featuring on a Hallmark Card.  Read sonorously at uncountable weddings, it becomes the part of tradition which we hear without hearing...at once bereft of any but superficial meaning and tied up with the perfunctory bow of an enigmatical concept called love.

In any case, one gets the vague impression that being really known would be uncomfortable, so this verse must be referring to that best-buddy kind of knowing that makes you feel “understood” without baring more than a few select extracts from the heart censored for security of pride.  After all, if someone really knew us what room could there be for love?  There we often let the verse lie.

.....

I remember vividly the day I understood.  For perhaps the first time, I was consciously remembering and it frightened me.  A circumstance, itself inconsequential, settled a new yoke of responsibility on my seven or eight-year-old self and because I could recall a time when I was free of it, I was unaccountably terrified of going any further in my short lisp of a life.

Every child comes to this time...where childishness becomes conscious, even while it has yet to become maturity.  A mother mourns that first loss of the baby lisp, the stumble over a word.  Then others will watch in vain for childish communication with all its frank, winsome naiveté and haphazard rambling.  The three year old hardly knows what he means when he presents his three chubby digits for your smiling inspection, and no one grudges him the privilege of ignorance on that score.  Soon enough the five year old will be proud to tell you how big he has grown and you will almost unaccountably miss the unpretentious baby in the self-conscious boy.

To our dying day, every one of us has the same insatiable desire to understand, and a dread of what will happen when we do.  The thought of knowing brings with it the shrinking of our childhood from the brink of understanding because we only know in part.  Our human heart, peering through the grand score of God's Word as an amateur musician, struggles to trace out the infinite scope of power and complexity with finite eyes seared by the burning glory of it.  The indwelling Spirit leans over our shoulder and points out the feeble lines of our own parts with surety and love, humming the music until it fills our being with its beauty.  Shut the score, though, and the thought of remembering your part in the symphony with all its intense import and and excellence can cause any one of us to throw aside our sheets of music in despair.  

This is the knowing in part.  But partial knowing carries a heavy responsibility.  The reflection in the glass, dim though it may be, was never meant to be a high thought set aside for moments of euphoric reflection on the swing at sunset.  Jarring as the thought may be, far from moving us to apathy and futility, 1 Corinthians 13:12 is an imperative call to maturity.  The Father did not give us the promise in His Word and send us His Spirit to bear witness to the fulfillment of His promises so that we could languish in the waiting.

 For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer,

he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass:

For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.

James 1:23-24

To be in the midst of assembled believers and shudder over the raw grating dissonance and muddiness of the collected notes is to look in the glass and see the shadow of our natural face with all of its flaws and scars.  What natural man wouldn't wish to forget that natural face?  How easy it is to say then, “I saw the music once, and that is enough.  It is in my heart, and this is all that matters.”  How great a travesty is the secret of the eternal song carried about as a shadow in the depths of Christian souls and never learned or played simply because we all knew that in this life we could never perfect it.

The truth is, we are so concerned with the natural face peering out of the glass at us, that we forget the glass itself.   If we are honest, our sin, when held up to the light, fascinates us; not always, we can flatter ourselves, with the hardened inclinations of a dead conscience, but with the secret pride that says, "Mine is truly ugly."  The rehearsal is full of discordant sounds, and the first one to look up from the jungle of notes before him and say, "I can't possibly do this, it is too horribly difficult," has essayed to raise his "I" to a higher level than the symphony.  There is a great measure of pride in the one who indulges in self-deprecation by believing the music must stop because he has deemed his part to be beyond help or recall.

“For as the rain comes down and the snow from heaven, and do not return there, but water the earth, and make it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

"So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."

Isaiah 55:11

The perfect law of liberty was not composed for our especial benefit.  The divine artist writes to His own pleasure and glory, and His work does not exist merely so we can enjoy its sublime beauty on the mirror in our closet.  It is not the kind of symphony that can be made futile merely because we prefer not to participate, or play our part in secret so that no one may observe the wavering our touch makes in the reflection.

Any student of music can tell you that it does no good to dabble in music with self-fulfillment in mind.  There is no place for neutrality or, ultimately, the expressing of your own will.  In the same way, you must rest in the assurance that you can only begin to know your life-part because you are already fully known by Him.  Your heart must so submit to the hand of the master that you no longer know your hand to be pulling the bow, but you are at once certain of His hand pulling yours.  The beating of your own time must cease to wander stumbling off the steady rhythm of His music and instead be bound to it by His sure hand. 

This is to look into His perfect law of liberty, to see the reflection of true freedom in very submission and to continue in it.  

The compelling reality about the music of the perfect law of liberty is that one must not only hear, but listen... and not forget, but play.  

The overpowering weight of the score, after all, does not rest in our hands, nor even is the completion of our part given into our keeping. 

The secret to playing a symphony is to simply play the notes before us in obedience and 

trust the author to make the symphony.

In the waiting for completion we cry out with Paul:

“O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

A girl of especially stormy passions and vivid imagination, I cried the day I knew what I could never forget again.  I told my mother with an almost pettish desperation that I wanted to go back to being a little girl.

My dear mother...from my earliest memories the sensible, sympathetic constant that anchored my tempestuous emotions.  I will never cease to be grateful that she was usually undaunted by the wild outbursts of joy or sorrow that rocked my self-aware little world.  That day my tears brought a quiet smile to her face, not unlike the smile I imagine God harbors over our knowledge-bereft wailings.  Before she said a word, I knew she understood, and then she spoke comfort that I didn’t entirely understand, but accepted with the faith that children have in good mothers.  “When you have grown up, you will be glad that you were never able to go back.  You will learn to love growing older.”  And of course she was right.

To this day she still reminds me early and late of the words another wise woman, Elizabeth Elliot drew from this poem, “Do The Next Thing:”

"At an old English parsonage down by the sea,
there came in the twilight a message to me.
Its quaint Saxon legend deeply engraven
that, as it seems to me, teaching from heaven.
And all through the hours the quiet words ring,
like a low inspiration, 'Do the next thing.'

Many a questioning, many a fear,
many a doubt hath its quieting here.
Moment by moment, let down from heaven,
time, opportunity, guidance are given.
Fear not tomorrow, child of the King,
trust that with Jesus, do the next thing.

Do it immediately, do it with prayer,
do it reliantly, casting all care.
Do it with reverence, tracing His hand,
who placed it before thee with earnest command.
Stayed on omnipotence, safe 'neath His wing,
leave all resultings, do the next thing.

Looking to Jesus, ever serener,
working or suffering be thy demeanor,
in His dear presence, the rest of His calm,
the light of His countenance, be thy psalm.
Do the next thing.

The little girl in me no longer casts longing glances over her shoulder.  There can be no mourning for imperfections done away when every look into the mirror is a brush with the perfection that we long for.

But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

1 Corinthians 13:10

The time darkened glass, serene and expansive, unerringly casts back shadows of the light from timelessness.  The fading of it as it shifts away from a touch awakens the painful longing for it to be still it forever.  Here stands the briefest sliver of time, yet this space, thin enough to shatter at a brush from eternity, stands yet adamant before the mortal, an impenetrable testimony to a sure fulfillment...fulfillment that will engage the whole being un-impaired by sin.  At last to know as we are known, to truly commune with God, face to face.  What joy it will be to no longer reach out over the deep waters of His glory and see the muddying of our sin-tainted hearts obscuring them.  So into this glass, “this substance of things hoped for and evidence of things not seen,” we look again and again.

"But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty,and continueth therein,

he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work,

this man shall be blessed in his deed.

James 1:25