Song, Resurrection

On Easter, I wrote a song. At church, we played the song for the first time. It was an exhilarating moment. I had hoped it would be exhilarating, and I still wonder if that kind of hope is wrong.

The word resurrection is in the name of my church. The resurrection is something I never doubted. It was never that difficult to believe. If you can have incarnation, resurrection is not that much of a stretch. Yet, I have been struck by the number of people who have denied it, and have expended much energy trying to deny it. There are all sorts of apologist kind of debates, which became familiar to me growing up around evangelical circles. However, when I was in Freiburg engaging people in evangelistic discussion, the question was not about proofs. There seemed to be an overall consensus, right or wrong, that something so long ago could not be proved for certain, though the evangelicals are right in saying that the testimonies and behavior of the Apostles are worth noting. The question was more whether we need to believe in the Resurrection. Is it something truly so important? Can it be a symbolic myth, that folks could choose to believe if they are comfortable with it? It seemed to them an unnecessary and divisive miracle.

It occurred to me that, in a fashion not untypical to evangelicalism, I had lost the theology and the beauty of the Resurrection in the apologia. Easter was a holiday of uncomfortable clothes and sugary pastels. We sang beautiful songs about the cross, but the songs about the Resurrection seemed comparatively shallow.

Easter, while attending a church that purposefully celebrates the Resurrection, inspired me to write a song about it. I wanted to write a song that would manage to capture a drop of the rapturous joy, rich theology and weighty consequences that convinced Paul that any theology without it is hopeless. We will follow our Rabbi, our King, from death to life, and that joyful thought should be a sobering, happy weight on our hearts that we cannot ignore.

If my song (or the words above) could catch a drop of that endless waterfall, it is by God's merciful grace. These were my thoughts as I wrote it, and I hope they were holy, as much as they could be so, and I hope that these were words that God could smile on.

I wanted to share it with my church, and dread set in. It seems arrogant to want to even write something about it, something almost too beautiful to utter. I worried that the song structure would not be compatible to group singing or that my theology would be off. I wanted it so badly to be accepted that I spent too much time worrying. Not exactly a Resurrected way of looking at things, free of pride and fear.

In any case, we sang it, and it went very well. People sang and seemed to truly worship (as did I), which is all a praise song can ask for. I reveled in it a bit, fantasizing about selling the rights to Chris Tomlin and growing rich off the royalties. I have always dreamed of being some sort of artist, and I wonder if others, particularly Christian artists, struggle between worry and pride, to the point where the beauty of the message is lost in self-reflection (the blog itself perhaps is an attempted to exorcise this). C.S. Lewis seemed to know this. Biographers marvel at how humble he managed to stay among is fame and success. He wrote that God wants us to be the kind of creatures that can make a cathedral or symphony, know very well that it is good, take joy in this goodness, and go along our way. He said that true humility dispenses with modesty. As little creators we can revel in the joy of the Creator, in as long as we are learning to reflect him, as long as we are learning to follow Christ, out of pride and into art, out of self and into Him, out of death and into life abundantly, resurrection.

Wine, Quickly

Once again wine makes for interesting conversation and cultural commentary. Good New York Times article by Roger Cohen:


Of Wine, Haste and Religion

Hirshhorn

There were two things that especially struck me at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. I almost bought one of them.

We braved Sunday's storms to take advantage of D.C.'s free pieces of culture and made it there with soaked ankles and a couple of soy-based granola bars, courtesy of a storm that did not apologize for danger, excitement, wetness and inconvenience, and some hippies who did not apologize for believing the world would be safer and cleaner if we all ate more soy.

Hirshhorn is in a cylinder-shaped building with bronze sculptures dancing in the grass all around it. They did not seemed to mind the rain, and I tried to follow their example. The building is also skirted by a convenient roof so we could enjoy the wet, delicious air and watch the hippies run for shelter as we squeezed rain out of our pant-legs.

The first thing that struck me was a current exhibit called The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Movie Image, Part I: Dreams. According to the Hirshhorn website, Dreams "addresses film’s ability to transport us out of our everyday lives and into a dream world. Using a series of artists’ installations, the exhibition moves us through the different stages of consciousness and dreaming, from those moments between wakefulness and sleep to the darker recesses of the imagination and fantasy. Dreams is curated by chief curator Kerry Brougher and associate curator Kelly Gordon."

It succeeded for me, and it seemed to succeed for other museum goers. The darkness of the whole exhibit, each installation, kept me in a constant, isolated feeling between awake and asleep. (Incidentally, the effect gave my wife a headache, but she was nice enough to wait for me while I meandered through to get the whole effect) These were not Disney dreams, but honest explorations of the subconscious. Parts were strange, fascinating, morbid, beautiful and frightening. It explored isolation, fear, sexuality, violence, desire, love, abandonment, and many other abstract echoes from the deep that we have all felt waiting for morning to approach. Each installation was a piece of film, set up by artists from all over the world (most of whom found their way to New York, London or Berlin). The use of film, screen, sound, light were all different. Some were interactive, some were traditional. In "You and I Horizontal" the viewer feels himself to be part of the light of the film itself (I won't explain it more than this - see it yourself). My favorite film was called "Eight," which follows a little girl in a dream-like loop through a party (her eighth birthday, perhaps?) drenched by a dark storm. Ok, it's better than I'm making it sound. I'm looking forward to part II.

The other thing that struck me was a book I browsed in the gift shop called Street: The Nylon Book of Global Style. Perhaps the title is a bit unfair. It only explores interesting fashion cities - New York, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, etc..., leaving important populations and styles unexplored. It really was not the style that interested me. I had never heard of Nylon the magazine before. Indeed, I am not that interested in reading the magazine itself, but I loved the concept of the book, nonetheless. They found interesting people, the kinds of people that I used to be drawn to in Germany as we would carry a tray of soggy salad and strange noodles to speak with isolated students about Jesus. They would take a picture each person and fill the page with it. They would ask them their name, occupation, what they were wearing and fashion icon (I can imagine the puzzled looks many gave at this one. My favorite answer was the young woman who said her grandmother). Many of the clothes were hand-me downs, many of the occupations were artists, many were too thin but attractively cool. They were pictures of people who cried for a spirituality, the kind of people I hope for, pray for, want to meet.