Tuesday, July 28, 2015

The Best Christian Song I've Heard...


A few months ago I added the KLOVE Christian music station to my presets.  I soon realized every single song is a theologically neutral, upbeat pop song about Jesus Christ.  This is fine at first, but after a while I found myself asking, “Is this all we’ve got?”

One of the constant complaints that Christian critics have about their own art is that it always goes straight to the point.  The message is the core point of the song or movie – so if it goes over the head of the listener then it was a waste of resources.  Best, then, to smack the audience right between the eyes.

The result is Christian art that … quite frankly… is an imitation of the stuff the pop culture feeds us.  It is the musical equivalent of tofu-turkey.  A sermon dressing up to be as cool as his friends.  

In Saint Paul’s writings you will find a couple enumerations of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Subtlety is not one of them.  This observation is leads us to the paradoxical observation that much of the best Christian music and film has been produced… by atheists and skeptics.


Not Where You’d Look:

In steps the bands Tool and A Perfect Circle, both of which have the same lead vocalist. 

This vocalist’s mother was named Judith Marie.  Back when said vocalist was a little kid she suffered an aneurism which left her paralyzed.  She found meaning in this suffering through her Christian faith, which she clung to unwaveringly. 

Her son found this infuriating… and these frustrations gave rise to the song “Judith”.  That little ditty was a blasphemous, grotesque tirade against his mother’s Christian faith written by a man who might have been a Satanist.  And perhaps that’s where the story would have ended.

But then something happened which the Ring did not intend.


Grace Intrudes:

Years later his mother passed away – having suffered from her paralysis for 27 years and never losing her faith.   I can scarcely imagine what was going on in the mind of her troubled and grieving son, but I maintain that the fruit his pain was the greatest Christian song of the century so far.

Recorded in two parts, “Wings for Marie” topped off at about 17 minutes.  The lyrics give me the impression of a man struggling to understand what has just happened.  Straining at words to describe the transcendent witness his mother gave him.

It ruminates on suffering.  It criticizes the shallow comfort offered by Christians whose lives have not seen such suffering.  It reflects on his own arrogance and blindness. It meditates on his mother’s entry into heaven. It calls out the three persons of the Trinity by name. 

All the while it retains the kind of brokenhearted anger at the Divine which could just as easily be found in the writings of the Old Testament.  As he shakes his fist at the gates of Heaven and demands an explanation, one wonders if God isn’t saying, “Good, at least now we’re on speaking terms.”

In other words, this man – who was anything but a practicing Christian – churned out a magnificent song about Christian suffering.  You literally cannot sing along to it because the words are not yours to sing.  You just sit forward in your chair and experience it.   And when it is done, you’re not sure what you just heard. 
 
It was deep, challenging, mysterious… and better than anything you’ll ever hear on KLOVE.

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