For years now, I’ve headed down a road that is unfamiliar to me—one laced in doubt, wonder, and ill-founded fear, but it hasn’t been until this past year that I’ve really come to explore these tendencies in myself, figuring that if faith is anything worth possessing, it will survive what some would call my “downward spiral”. It’s put me in an odd place in my faith—one where the things from which I used to find inspiration, don’t quite have the same appeal in my life anymore. Case in point? Music.
Jeremy has this saying that he derived from a man by the name of Miguel De Unamuno. “We are our wish to be what we wish ourselves to be.” Unamuno made the example in terms of immortality, but really, we could take this idea into other aspects of our life. “We are never anything, only our wish to be something.” For example, I am not a good wife and mother; I am my wish to be a good wife and mother. I am not a good writer; I am my wish to be a good writer. I am not a person of faith; I am my wish to be a person of faith.
I got back into music a little over two years ago. We had been going to this church for a while, but I’d never told anyone that I could sing. I didn’t want people to know me that way by that point in my life. One evening, however, there was a man there who was learning how to play guitar. He tried to show Jeremy and me the song he was learning, but his guitar was out of tune, and since he didn’t have a tuner, he struggled to tune it on his own.
“May I?” I asked.
Puzzled, he handed his guitar over and I tuned it by ear.
“So you play?”
I held the guitar back out to him. “Used to.”
He pushed it back toward me. “Let’s hear it.”
After that night, I began playing on Sunday mornings for the regular church services, but there were very few times when I felt like I had any real inspiration. You see, I was not a church musician anymore; I was my wish to be a church musician again, always wondering what might have happened had I not gotten pregnant out of wedlock and been kicked out of my church unless I repented. There was this unresolved aspect of that part of my life—the life that had seemed to stretch out before me until I screwed up and it was snatched away.
When I began playing music again, I cringed at the song choices that other musicians would bring to the table. Lyrics were such as these: “I’m coming back to the heart of worship when it’s all about you, it’s all about you, Jesus,” “Lord I’m yielding all I am to you. You have captivated me, and I come to give my devotion,” “I sing a simple song of love to my Savior, to my Jesus”. I guess what I’m saying is that the worship music movement tends to be an affirmation of what we want faith to be, rather than what it really is—or at least what it really is to me. The post-modern philosopher and theologian, Peter Rollins calls these “Jesus is my boyfriend” lyrics. These lyrics say everything about what we hope our relationship to God to be, not what our relationship to God really is. A person like me can’t sing these lyrics without the suffocating feeling of being disingenuous. They sound like entrapment, too empty, and too simple—almost like if I don’t see Jesus this way, I’m less than spiritual. It could be said that a person who sings modern worship music is not theologically sound; it is that when that person sings modern worship music, it is that person's wish to be theologically sound.
A fellow musician said to me last week that he feels like that if music is geared to where people as a whole can sing along to it, and it is easily understood, then it is stifling. As I thought about what he said, I had the thought that this idea frees up the performer to do music that has intense meaning to him or her, without gearing it to a crowd of people as a whole, and in turn, it becomes inspirational to the people individually as they experience it. Music can be poetry, having diverse meaning from one person to the next, yet without beholding to one particular meaning. This makes music expansive, inclusive, individualistic, and communal.
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