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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