Retreat (and Why Christian Music Doesn't Do It For Me)

The world, the age, "people these days", society, modern western civilisation...call it what you will, it's out there.  It's got some pretty bad things in it, and if one were to imagine a unified, purposeful vision, plan, conspiracy or spirit to the whole thing, one would have to assume it was pretty destructive and wrong-headed, if not downright evil.  What to do about that? 

 [in case you don't get through the rest of this off-the-top-of-my-head-stream-of-consciousness venting, the little epiphany of today is this: The world is full of bad stuff, including bad attitudes.  I was brought up to hide from all that, to retreat.  I didn't know that you can be separate when you need to, but without that being a form of hiding.  I tried to further retreat from the culture of retreat, because I was dying in there, and this of course only left me more alone, and made the problem worse.  

    The answer is to walk around in the world, to not be afraid to know and touch the lives of everyone.  Many of us couldn't even touch the lives of our own families to any great degree.  Things aren't safe, and they aren't perfect, yet we're alive, right?  Looking after yourself, trying to not breathe in any of the germs, trying not to touch anything you ever heard might have hurt someone once in some way?  That's a sickness in and of itself.  Compulsive hand-washers and sterilizers of everything do nothing more than destroy their skin's natural ability to keep the germs out of one's tissue.  They also create super-bacteria which can survive any number of things designed to kill it.   

   You can be smart, of course.  You save yourself needless trouble.  You need to watch being overcareful, though, because excesses of caution can eat your whole life up.  The bible gives words of caution in places, but also says "be careful for nothing (for no reason)", which spirit is a strong, ennobling, powerful one.   

    We're in this together.  If we view others as "them" people and decide to avoid them and hide with "us" people to save ourselves, we have failed to grasp the spirit of Christ.  Christ sometimes went off alone, and sometimes was separate, but he was no hermit.  He did not have a building he stayed in with his followers, and careful rules in there, keeping out bad stuff while singing about how nice it was to be in there.  He was walking around and talking with all sorts of people all the time, and he didn't use preaching as a shield to keep those people's lives from touching his when he was out there.  He wanted to connect to people and he did, daily and effortlessly.  He wasn't scared, careful or easily offended by things.   

     I have been trained differently.  I was told "You aren't the Lord.  It isn't safe for you to walk through the world in the way that he did.  He couldn't sin, so he could associate with sinners and talk to anyone he wanted and go anywhere he wanted.  You can't live like that, because you can and will sin if you try."  

    Who then was to be my role model?  Not Christ.  Christians.  Our flavour of them, too.  Put me anywhere in the world, and following my training, I will draw off by myself, or with one other person, and talk about myself, or get them to tell me about themselves and then try to relate that to me, or learn lessons from their lives vicariously that I can use in my own.  Others raised similarly to me keep people at just as much distance by continually trying to force people to accept help of very specific kinds (pamphlets, preaching, Christian says and CDs and videos).  It's no good if it's merely the manifestation of a spirit which just doesn't get it.  Others will seek a church to shove their heads up.]  

Society Experiences a Death of Optimism 

When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, there seemed to be a slow death of what had been a prevalent spirit of optimism.  I don't know if it came from the hippies, or even the 60s in general.  I know that Nixon lying really wounded the idea that "the President of the United States would never lie."  Pierre Trudeau gave the office of the Prime Ministership of Canada not only a new-found personality and humanity, being unafraid to be known for eccentricities, indulgences, peccadilloes and quirks (along with the manifest pleasure in life that was going along with them) but also made us view the Prime Minister as "just a guy" more than ever before, when before we saw the Prime Minister as more of a creature of dignity, a serious face to show the world, a power figure, an authority cypher, a not-quite-or-merely-human bulwark against chaos.  

   There have always been political cartoons.  There was not always Saturday Night Live with every authority figure presented by actors as amusingly lying, stupid and or crazy, inhuman figures, and an audience of millions sitting back and saying "that's so true" when they increasingly knew nothing of these people beyond what they saw in the skits.  

Am I the only person who was shocked by Bill Clinton's verbal eloquence when hearing him speak casually, candidly and unscriptedly in interviews years later once he was no longer the all-too-fallible presidential figure, because I'd pretty much only thought of him as Phil Hartman in a white wig,

Science was to be our Saviour 

There was a great faith in science as well, and it was dying in the 70s.  Science had sent man to the moon.  What else would it do?  What could it not do?  Flying cars, family robots, holidays on the moon and meals in pill form weren't happening.  

    And now, we found that despite the most amazing increases in technology of all kinds, it wasn't fixing quite a few things we'd hoped it would, and all sorts of odd techno-problems seemed to be cropping up.   We know that messing with the food is making it unsafe, even if the intention is to make it safer to eat, for a longer time, simply by doing scientific things like adding chemicals or irradiating it.  

     We know that there is really no plan to do anything much with the moon at this point. We've sent things to Mars, and really, what good did that do? Baldness, cancer, the common cold, morning sickness continue to be beyond the reach of common, available to everyone scientific breakthroughs. Science continues down the "we can cut things up, chemically disrupt and break things apart right down to the atomic level, yet we don't know much about all the rest, including much about how consciousness works, much about the brain, what's making the sound when cats purr, exactly how animals navigate the globe, or how life works" path. We can't create life. We can barely prolong it.

  

What We Know About 

We know about matter turning from living to inert stuff, and about taking inert matter and smashing it so the energy comes flying out of it, but we can't do anything at all in the opposite direction. We've discovered all sorts of things we don't really know how to deal with, also. We invent things, and they change us in ways we didn't foresee and can't control or even understand until much later, if at all.

Hiding From Society's Ills 

There are hermits, Luddites, the Amish, new agers, and any number of religious systems which encourage and facilitate retreat from all of that.  I was raised in one:

"Movies, television, music and friends outside the group will infect us with the evil, dark Spirit of the Age.  We will create a lifestyle that is a hiding from it, a retreat, a refuge.  If anyone is foolish enough to wander outside the Safe Area, he or she will most likely get infected and have to be sent away.  There is no cure from the Spirit of the Age besides us quarantining ourselves." 

And I see non-religious versions of this in fanatically atheistic people who don't let their kids partake of many of these very same things, with the addition of numerous food prohibitions as well.  It isn't necessarily a religious thing to hide from what is seen as "the evil."  Killing your kids with caution isn't only for Christians.  

Christianity Builds a Sub-Culture 

Christians today are homeschooling or Christian schooling their kids, and raising them with lives packed full of charitable and church-centric activities.  Where I had to make do reading the family encyclopedias and western literature, particularly if it was a hundred years old or so, because it would therefore be less infected with the Spirit of Today, modern Christian kids can had iPods jam packed with Christian analogues for Hannah Montana, Tool, AC/DC and Spice Girls.  They can have shelves groaning with DVDs which are the Christian versions of Friends, Seinfeld, American Idol and shows from the Discovery Channel.
   I'm sure there is a glut of christian reality TV right now.  I wouldn't know.  I know that there are Christian video games, comic books, textbooks and novels.  This means that Christianity can be a subculture now, and not just a denying of the culture we were born into, and replacing it with nothing much.  

What's Wrong With Stealing? 

And is that so bad?  Well, there is unarguably something plastic about Hannah Montana, as there was about the Backstreet Boys.  It is true that that music often was the cynical work of hitmakers, and not an actual attempt to make heartfelt points, or to share and express things that mattered deeply to people with their hearts in the right place trying to get and keep their heads screwed on straight.
    Is it an improvement to build upon that foundation, but with a Christian image and agenda?  I don't think so.  For instance, the Sex Pistols were definitely up to something, and had a crusade of their own (which, as I understand it, had to do with standing up and being counted as being angry, smirky and disdainful of the monarchy, the upper class, and what was thought cool in the 70s pop music scene, for instance, the Bay City Rollers).
    To take the look and their sound of a group like this, who were to a large degree doing their own thing in their own way for their own reasons, purely because "the formula worked" for them, and then to make the words all about how much we love Jesus and love to go to church is, to my mind, stealing.  Hard to respect, anyway.  

Why Is Stealing Music From God Better? 

There are any number of Christian bands which sound just like Tool and Korn and Primus.  They do sound very angry.  Often the individual words of the songs and things like the T-shirts and album covers look quite fierce also.  Deep down though, most of them are trying to point people toward Christian community, to church, to conservatism, to conformity.  That's odd.
   Ray Charles "stole" the church music of his childhood "from God" and used it to talk about women and partying.  For some reason, that worked.  He "got" the church music on a very deep level.  He felt it and grew up with it and identified heavily with it.  He didn't steal it from the outside because he thought it would make money.  To him, that's what music sounded like.  It was in him.  He took it with him when he walked out of church every Sunday.  The fact that he found heart and soul and inspiration in music he heard in a church isn't very surprising.  The music that black people heard in church was full of that, and it wasn't afraid of showing a range of deep, genuine emotions.  
    Why then do I have a problem with Christian people stealing riffs, costumes, fonts and sounds from Judas Priest or Black Sabbath?  It feels to me like they're stealing it from the outside, like they never understood the heart of that music on any deep level, and that, therefore, the jarring incompatibility of the heart of that music (which genuinely seeks to explore the dark side of humanity, yet also seeks not to be evil, but to be good with a wicked jacket on) with a message and lyrics which are often nothing more than infomercials for the superficial trappings of Jesus-ness (don't do drugs, stay in school, drink your milk, go to church, treat your folks right) and sound just as funny as when Mr. T would say those same things to the camera right after he'd beaten the living shit out of someone with a door he'd ripped right off the side of a Chevy Impala.  

What Emotions are Welcome Here? 

So, anger, angst, sorrow, loss, confusion loneliness, jealousy and all the other feelings that make up the emotional palette with which songwriters put out something that everyone can relate to?  All expressed eloquently in the bible.  Not welcome in most churches and most Christian bands, though, for some reason.  Also, where 70s and 80s rock music often has kind of an inclusive "Hey, kids, rock and roll!" and is about rallying together and finding commonality and accepting individual people, the spirit of much of the Christian community (of being holy when thou art not, of welcoming people to come in and put on the straightjackets, wear the uniforms and get the haircuts) is exactly opposite.
    Where Alice Cooper will sing wryly and amusingly about being a teenager and wanting to dress in a distinctive way which expresses the person one is becoming and learning about, he can simultaneously somehow touch a chord in everyone who's ever felt that way.  The Christian version of that song will too often encourage conformity and be about sacrificing one's true inner nature, what God made them to be, in order to embrace some supposed humility and think a certain way for the harmony and ease of the group in accepting them.  All the sacrifice, humility, quietness and devotion sound very pious, but they are being asked for in the name of a church community, rather than by God.
    When an arena full of people are asked to shout "No war! No War! NO WAR!" this is indeed a form of chanting.  It isn't about thinking.  When a hymn or church song of the 7-11 variety (seven words, sung eleven times) is sung, it is also a form of chanting.  When people shout together, sing together or chant together, it makes them feel connected, and makes them forget about the genuine differences which exist.  It reminds them of common emotions.  This also happens during riots.  And orgies.  It makes people feel united in feeling the same thing, but it can also be used as a great way to silence genuine questions, and to trivialize issues and slap pat answers, jingles and slogans over quite complex matters which require answers which aren't one-size-fits all.
   To generalize further: a disproportionate number of rock (and folk, and country and blues) songs are about asking questions, and about being confused or upset, trying to figure things out and not knowing things. 
An equally disproportionate number of songs by Christian artists are about what we have, what we know, about being in the know.  They are smug.  They are facile, and they do not acknowledge the complexity of the human personality that God made.
   So, I have pretty much never found Christian music which allows the feelings in my heart to come out.  And here's the odd part: when I write music which allows out the feelings that are in my heart about any number of things which probably bother me purely because I am trying to follow Jesus and his methods, spirit and teachings, (rather than just Western Christianity), the result is almost always that irreligious people of all kinds tell me "I really felt that.  I've felt that very thing.  That's very interesting."
    And Christians say "Why can't you just sing a good song about how much you love Jesus?"  Sing one hundred times "I love Jesus."  Like lines, on a chalkboard at recess.  Like they're scared they might forget.  Or like they're trying to make it true.