Cymbals

Weddings and funerals have a way of making you think.  And feel.  Last week, a cousin of mine (not the one who was getting married), was trying to make polite conversation with me over dinner.  How he did this was, he acceptingly said "So...you're an atheist now?"

            I was immediately annoyed.  I mean, I thought, why would I write the songs, the blogs and the books, if I had simply lost faith in God and walked away from a "path of faith"?  Why would I bother with any of it?  Wouldn't I have long ago moved on to gambling addictions, cocaine and whores?  How could anyone even skim part of my blog and conclude that I didn't believe in God, rather than what I felt was that obvious fact that I am someone who is seeking a deeper, more authentic, less self-deluding and soul-killing approach to Him?

           So I got a second opinion from a person who is more adept than I am playing the 'getting along with others' social game.  (To whit, anyone other than me). "Can you believe someone could read my blog and think I was an atheist?" I asked, innocently, confident in the reply being a soothing one. 

            The answer was immediate: "Yes.  Because you're always pissed about Christian things on there."

          I had been looking for something more along the lines of "What?!  Ridiculous! The very reason you write about Christian things is because, as a Christian, you feel so strongly about them!"
        And it was easy to be self-justifying and self-righteous inside, at that point.  Oh yeah, some people were clearly still way back at not being able to tell the difference between Jesus Christ: the Word, the Son of the Living God, and our, frankly, pretty pathetic church stuff.  People clearly can't "hear sound doctrine" anymore.  People only want to hear smooth things, "uplifting" things, "encouraging" things only.  "Positive" things. Nothing that re-examines our assumptions and practice and suggests that just maybe we might need to rethink, refeel and retool some of it.  And I believe that all of this is true.  I really do.  But...

         Still, it really made me think. I don't mind a bit if people view me as a perpetually dissatisfied, self-centred, bitter Christian.  That's their thing.  But an atheist savagely attacking Christianity and God's work on Earth?  That latter thing is not anything I want to get used to, the way I'm used to (bored of) the former.

      And, then yesterday I was at my cousin's wedding. And the same cousin who'd politely and non-judgementally brought up my supposed atheism, stood up and read the bible passage he'd been asked to read at our cousin's wedding.

            It's an old familiar one. You know it, no doubt (even if you're an embittered atheist, savagely attacking Christianity and God's work on Earth.)  The one about how, even if you as a Christian could speak with the languages of angels, and speak mighty words of prophecy and do all manner of miracles, if you don't have (show) love, then you're like...

             Well, let's talk for a moment about what you're like.  Growing up in our King James Only bible studies, we read the one part of that passage as:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Now, first of all, we weren't overly clear on the fact that charity might actually mean being nice to one another.  Warm.  Accepting.  Tolerant.  Even (especially?) if we felt the other person was wrong about something.  
       In fact, while This Wicked World around us was, we felt, preaching a dangerous gospel of "tolerance" which would bring it to absolute ruin, we didn't really connect that tolerance is a lower standard than the one we're called to.  We're asked, not to tolerate difference, but to love people.  Tolerance is just love, with less effort.  A manners-deep semblance of it.  Love is something people need to feel, or else it isn't working.  
          I guess growing up, I seldom felt love.  Some of us have the kinds of rubber hearts it kind of just bounces off.  And the more people I meet who can make me feel liked, accepted, appreciated and so on, the more I see how that might be supposed to work, in a more functional person.  
       (At the time of writing this, my Mom emails a response to me sending her a picture of we cousins at the wedding.  She says I'm certainly a handsome fellow.  And I'm standing between my younger, taller, slimmer, chiselled blond cousins.  The championship swing dancer and the male model/fireman (yes), both with tiny waists, and truly massive shoulders and arms, as well as many inches of height on me.  And my tall, blond cousin the high-powered corporate lawyer.  And my other cousin who seems to have extra muscles no one else has, on his compactly dense form.  I'm older than any of them.  But Mom says I'm handsome.  Exactly the kind of love certain folks like me are likely to dismiss as deluded.  We're silly like that about love. And just as silly about being able to show it to others.)

          Another problem understanding that bible verse growing up was that "sounding brass" or a "tinkling cymbal" sounded really nice to me.  Musical instruments.  We weren't allowed those in our church.  There were no cymbals in there, tinkling melodiously or otherwise.  No organ, piano or guitar either.  I played trumpet at school, sounding that brass every week joyfully, and I loved when drummers did drum solos, hitting the crap out of the cymbals.

          But this is a perfect example of where, given the translation process, the intended meaning might have been lost, across the millennia, cultures and hemispheres.  Other translations say things like:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I ever really understood (and, more importantly, felt) what that verse is probably trying to say.  If you're trying to talk, and the person can't discern any love that you may or may not have for him or her at all; then to them, they hear not words, but an annoying noise.

       At the wedding, at that point, hearing my cousin's deep, resonant voice declaim this bible passage, I was, in the parlance of modern church folk, "convicted."

     Why can't people hear that am a Christian?  Simple: because I don't know how to show people I love them.  (Or anything, maybe.)

       You don't get frustrated with people and stuff you don't care or think about.  I write because I care.  But I have to accept that I have been the blog equivalent of a cymbal being bashed with a rock beside the head of someone who is trying to carry on dinner conversation.  Or like Moses whacking a rock he was supposed to speak to.  I can tell you I care, but if I can't make you feel it, then to you I'm just noise.