God in popular music

Popular music includes a plethora of artists and styles, and our tastes vary dramatically. So we cannot think of it too simplistically. And in general we tend to simply enjoy the beat, tap our feet or let ourselves be absorbed in the sound. We probably don’t often think about what messages it has for us.

And when or if we think about popular music, we may not usually think about whether or how God is present in it or what it might have to say to us. But three new books help us do just that.

Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God by Christian Scharen (Brazos Press, 2011, $17.99) looks at “the paradoxical nature of human hope and despair, joy and suffering, and the ways God is revealed in the midst of it all—from various points of view, including Leonard Cohen, the blues and Scripture.”

Scharen quotes a line from a Cohen song that reads, “there is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.” Music often reveals the cracks in life, the sorrows we experience, but also hints at light, at redemption.

As the Psalms often express both the sorrows and the joys of the Psalmist, so popular music can serve that function. Thomas Dorsey, who wrote “Precious Lord,” saw “a profound connection between the blues and church, rooted as they both are in what it means to be human, to cry out in the depths of our being in response to the circumstances of life.”

At the root of all good art, including music, is honesty. Scharen quotes Bono of U2: “The most important element in painting a picture, writing a song, making a movie, whatever, is that it is truthful, a version of the truth as you see it.”

Unfortunately, many Christians use what Scharen calls “checklist Christianity,” a constricted imagination that simply counts the number of “bad words” in a song or tries to measure it against Christian doctrine.

Scharen calls us to first give ourselves to the song and let it speak to us. He quotes C.S. Lewis, who wrote that we “are so busy doing things with the work [of art] that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves.”

Two other recent books follow similar themes while exploring other artists. In Hip-Hop Redemption: Finding God in the Rhythm and the Rhyme (BakerAcademic, 2011, $17.99), Ralph Basui Watkins explores the history and influence of hip-hop and asks how God is present in this music.

Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination by Brian J. Walsh (Brazos Press, 2011, $18.99) engage the work of the popular Canadian (and Christian) singer-songwriter and how entering the world of his songs “is so helpful in the shaping of … a Christian imagination.”

Both authors also sound the theme of truthtelling in art. Walsh quotes Cockburn: “If you’re an artist, you’re immediately put in a position of opposition to mainstream society, because you are trying to tell the truth.”

This idea is behind the line of a Cockburn song that gives Walsh’s book its title: “nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.”

This also puts the artist in the role of a prophet. Watkins asks, “What if God is actually using hip-hop and its young artists to speak prophetically to the church and call her to task?”

“Prophets are visionaries who discern the times,” writes Walsh. They, like many artists, describe what is happening and may speak judgment. As one Cockburn song says, “The trouble with normal / is it always gets worse.”

But art can also be redemptive. Watkins writes, “The redemptive principle in hip-hop is rooted in the truth in the stories that artists tell as they resonate with both their own lived experience and that of their listeners.”

All three authors emphasize listening to the music and let it speak before judging it. As we listen, it may reward us to also listen to the cries of people and for God’s healing voice.

My experience of the artists mentioned in these books varies. I’ve long been a Cockburn fan, though not to the extent of Walsh, and I’ve listened to some of Cohen’s music (“Hallelujah” is a great song) and to some blues. But hip-hop is out of my ken, though Watkins makes me want to listen to it.

While these authors point to lessons we can learn about God’s presence in popular music, all three of them encourage us to engage the music, surrender to it, as Scharen says. Music is more than some message, more than the words. It is an experience. And like all experiences, we weigh its effect on us in the light of God’s love and mercy. Through it we can find ways to engage our world and God’s Spirit.

Questioning assumptions

Every year I choose my five top books of the year. I believe I've already read one of my top five for 2012.  When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, $24, 202 pages) collects 10 incisive essays on an array of topics, though common themes thread their way throughout, including education, religion and the nature of humanity. (Robinson is also an outstanding novelist; her novels Gilead and Home have appeared on previous top five lists of mine.)

When I read a book for review (and I've reviewed this book for the Wichita Eagle), I underline passages that strike me with their insight, the beauty of their language or their troublesome nature. Typically, by the end of my reading I’ve underlined a dozen or two passages at most. My copy of this book, however, is filled with such markings. There are few spreads without something underlined.

Such a plethora of insights and apt sentences make it difficult to do justice to the book. Any quotation will represent a small sample of what could be quoted.

In the book’s first essay, “Freedom of Thought,” Robinson notes what will become evident throughout the book, that she tries to free herself of constraints and not simply accept the standard approaches to certain areas of knowledge. She writes that the tendency of much of what she took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics and cultural history “was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty.”

Over and over, Robinson questions the assumptions made by so-called scholars that see human nature as simplistic, reductionist. She points out that often “the most important aspect of a controversy is not the area of disagreement but the hardening of agreement, the tacit granting on all sides of assumptions that ought not to be granted on any side.” One example, she notes, is “the treatment of the physical as a distinct category antithetical to the spiritual.”

She writes, “We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.” Then, adopting her role as a teacher of fiction writing, she adds, “Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.”

She challenges assumptions about religion or ancient peoples (“The Babylonians used quadratic equations.”) and points out the limits of science. She concludes that essay thus: “Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.”

In “Austerity as Ideology,” she applies this failure to see the mystery in humanity to current views of economics. She note that “market economics … has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear, if the list can be taken to include culture, education, the environment and the sciences, as well as the peace and well-being of our fellow citizens.” She also shows that “America has never been an especially capitalist country.” Meanwhile, “our wealth is finally neither more nor less than human well-being.”

In the title essay, we get a glimpse of what has already become evident: the wide and extensive range of Robinson’s reading. We also gain some insights into her fiction. She writes, “In a way Housekeeping [her first novel] is meant as a sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood.” Remarking on her study of Latin in high school, she notes that her “style is considerably more indebted to Cicero than to Hemingway.”

She discusses her growing up in the West (Idaho) and the kind of individualism that often inheres there. However, she writes, “there is no inevitable conflict between individualism as an ideal and a very positive interest in the good of society.”

In “The Fate of Ideas: Moses,” Robinson defends the integrity of the Old Testament against critics who want to write it off. She pulls no punches in her interaction with Jack Miles’ God: A Biography, calling it a “dumbed-down pseudo-syncretism.” She calls some of the thinking behind such criticism “the flip side of fundamentalism” and concludes with: “Whether he was a rabbi, a prophet or the Second Person of the Trinity, the ethic [Jesus] invokes comes straight from Moses.”

In spite of these punchy quotes, Robinson’s style is more formal and florid, more—as she writes—Cicero than Hemingway. And she often includes a smile if not a laugh. For example: “I have never heard anyone speculate on the origins and function of irony, but I can say with confidence that it is only a little less pervasive in our universe than carbon.”

She questions accepted opinion and helps us think through its implications and its reasonableness. In “Cosmology,” her concluding essay, she takes on scientism and atheism: “The difference between theism and the new atheist science is the difference between mystery and certainty. Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology.” 

If you read When I Was a Child, be ready to have certain assumptions challenged and think through important issues while enjoying a master of prose.

The shame of U.S. prisons

Most of us, I imagine, have not spent time in prison. Thus, we cannot know quite what it is like to be incarcerated. Yet many of our fellow citizens are incarcerated. In fact, writes Adam Gopnik in “The Caging of America” (The New Yorker, Jan. 30), “Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags.”

Gopnik writes that “a prison is a trap for catching time.” The relentless ennui is suffocating. “The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock,” he writes. Time stops.

Given the inhumane horror of being in prison, the greater horror is how ubiquitous it is in our country. “For a great many poor people,” writes Gopnik, “particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones.”

He adds that “more than half of all black men without a high school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives” and calls such mass incarceration “the fundamental fact of our country today, … as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” In truth, he writes, “there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation or on parole—than were in slavery then.”

Just as startling as the number of people jailed today is how much the prison population has grown in the past 30 years. “In 1980,” Gopnik writes, “there were about 220 people incarcerated for every 100,000 Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to 731.” This growth has huge consequences on our society. In the past 20 years, “the money states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.” The irony here is that the single greatest factor in reducing recidivism (relapsing into criminal behavior) is education.

And, as is pointed out often, the cost of keeping a prisoner is much greater than the cost of educating a person. For example, says Karin VanZant, CEO of Think Tank and the National Circles Campaign, studies show that by looking at third grade reading scores you can figure how many kids will drop out of high school before they graduate, and many of these will end up in prison. In Ohio, instead of investing $7,000 per year to raise reading scores, they are spending $37,000 per year for a prisoner.

Gopnik also points to the brutality of U.S. prisons. “Every day,” he writes, “at least 50,000 men … wake in solitary confinement, … locked in small cells where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo ‘exercise.’ ” Add to this the existence and threat of prison rape (see Gopnik’s quote on page 11), and you have a horrible situation.

Gopnik looks at some recent literature on prisons and crime and encounters some interesting insights. For example, “Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crime,” he writes. If you close down an open drug market in one neighborhood, it does not necessarily move to another neighborhood.

Another insight: “Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.”

Gopnik concludes: “Since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime.”

Take time to read the entire article. This huge problem in our country needs radical reform.

Two letters in the Feb. 27 issue respond to Gopnik's article. One, which I quoted from in my blog on immigration, is from Katherine Fennelly, who points out that "over 20,000 immigrants now languish in federal prison for no crime other than entering the United States without a valid visa."

The other letter is from Laura A. Tyson, who calls "our national obsession with imprisoning people for relatively petty and nonviolent offenses … a modern-day form of debtors' prison." She notes that many inmates she encounters "are arrested for outstanding warrants, some that date back as far as the 1980s. Nearly all of these warrants are for unpaid fines" for such things as loitering, "shoplifting, traffic violations, parking tickets and possession of small amounts of controlled substances." Since these women cannot pay the fines, they serve time in lieu of paying. They are "credited" about $30 a day toward their outstanding fines, but their stay in prison costs the public $100 a day. Talk about waste.

The U.S. prison system is not only immoral, it is wasteful, inefficient--in a word, stupid.

In the same chapter of the Bible (Matthew 25) where Jesus talks about welcoming him when we welcome the stranger, he also says, "I was in prison and you visited me" (v. 36).

Visiting is certainly important, but reforming prisons and removing prisoners is equally important. It's a shame.

The consequences of separation

When I made my list of the best films of 2011 (see my Jan. 20 blog), I hadn't seen A Separation, which recently won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Now that I have, I would place it in the top three. It is outstanding.

It opens with a married couple arguing in front of the camera. Simin wants to live abroad to provide better opportunities for their only daughter, Termeh, who is 11. Nader, on the other hand, wants to stay in Iran and take care of his father, who suffers from Alzheimers. Simin, however, is determined to get a divorce and leave the country with her daughter.
Termeh chooses to live with her father. Her strategy, we learn later, is that as long as she is with her father, her mother will not leave the country, because she doesn't want to leave her daughter. So while they are living separately, they are not divorced.
 Asghar Farhadi, who wrote and directed the film, introduces us to an array of characters that capture our interest. Nader hires Razieh to clean his apartment and care for his father while he is at work and Termeh is at school. He doesn't know that Razieh is pregnant and working without her husband's permission or that her husband is out of work, in debt and unstable.
Events soon unfold, and a major confrontation takes Nader, Rezieh and her husband before a local magistrate (or whatever the Iranian equivalent is). Nader lies to avoid going to prison, and Termeh confronts him on this.
Mix in devotion to the Quaran and some cultural practices regarding debt, and the various actions of these characters lead to a mess that might have been avoided with truthtelling from the beginning by all concerned. Or, and perhaps this is one of the film's lessons, the mess might have been avoided if there had been no separation between Simin and Nader.
The film wisely refuses to take sides or present simple solutions. In fact, at the end we're left in limbo, uncertain what will happen. Instead it presents the messes we make in our fumbling of relationships. And it shows how our pride and inability to compromise or put ourselves in others' shoes can lead to destructive consequences. 
Another possible lesson from this film concerns the universality of art. When he accepted his Oscar for this film, Farhadi made the point that this film is not about the politics of Iran and the West but about human relationships. This is true and worth paying attention to. Films are one medium for helping us learn about other cultures and recognizing our common humanity in their stories and how they intersect with our own.
A Separation is a film worth seeing and pondering and discussing. 

Welcoming Jesus

You shall love the alien as yourself.--Leviticus 19:34
I was a stranger and you welcomed me.--Matthew 25:35

The other night I watched the 2011 film A Better Life, which had come up on my Netflix queue. The previous night, watching the Academy Awards telecast, I saw a clip from this film showing Demián Bichir, who was nominated for Best Actor. After seeing the film, I decided he deserved his nomination.

 
He plays Carlos Galindo, a gardener in East L.A. who struggles to keep his son away from gangs and immigration agents while trying to give his son the opportunities he never had. Early on, the film feels topical, but soon it gets more specific and tells the story of this man who tries to live a moral life in the midst of hardship and trying circumstances that feel like rotten luck.
He borrows money from his sister to buy a truck so that he can have his own gardening business and make some money in order to get him and his son into a better situation. But another immigrant that he hires steals his truck and sells it in order to send money to relatives back in Mexico. Carlos enlists the help of his son to find this man, and when they do, the son can't understand why his father isn't angrier or more vengeful toward the man who stole his truck.
The film helps viewers get into the skin of an immigrant who lives in constant fear of being caught and removed from his son, who is legal because he was born in the United States. This describes the situation of thousands of people in our country. We also see that immigrants are not a homogeneous group. Neither are Hispanics. Although Carlos shares a language and culture with many other Hispanics in L.A., he feels out of place with many of them as well. 
What makes the film better than most is that while it gives us a glimpse of this "issue," it mainly tells the moving story of a father and son caught in the grip of larger forces and doing their best to get buy. That helps make this specific story a universal one as well.
At church the previous day, last Sunday, I spoke with Jesus, who was visiting with his wife and two children. They'd been there a few weeks earlier as well. He and his son, Alejandro, helped us set up tables and chairs for our twice-monthly potluck after worship. Jesus told me a bit of his story, his going to Michigan from Mexico five years ago, then moving to Wichita, Kan., to find work, then bringing his family here. When I said, "I'm glad you're here," he smiled. It's not the message he hears much in our culture. There seems to be a lot of vitriol expressed toward immigrants, and too much of it comes from people who call themselves Christians.
I'm not claiming it's a simple issue. There are many complexities. But the Bible verses quoted above represent a thread in Scripture that ties strongly to the Golden Rule: "Do to others as you would have them do to you" (Matthew 7:12). 
The argument in Leviticus is that you love aliens (that word sounds strange, as if they're from Mars) because you were once aliens. In Matthew 25, Jesus identifies with the stranger, saying we welcome him when we welcome a stranger.
Yesterday I had lunch with Caleb Lazaro, a young pastor from Colorado Springs who is scholar-in-residence at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan., for six months. I'd heard him at our church back in January, where he talked about his own church. Most of the 45 or so in his church are undocumented, and he says the main issue he and others address with them is their anxiety. They often feel shame, he said. And their kids are often raised without a sense of home, which leads some to join gangs. Caleb said there has been no reform in citizenship laws since 1965. There needs to be a redefinition of citizenship, he said, so that people who've been living like citizens (paying taxes, contributing to the economy) for, say, five years, should be recognized as citizens.
In a letter in a recent New Yorker (Feb. 27), Katherine Fennelly notes that "immigration prosecutions now make up nearly half of federal felony prosecutions." NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) brought a freer flow of goods and capital, she writes, but not an increase in visas for blue-collar workers. "Over 20,000 immigrants now languish in federal prison for no crime other than entering the United States without a valid visa."
A Better Life tells a story that helps us see in a clearer way the experience of many undocumented workers. It doesn't explore why people are leaving other countries and coming to the United States at such risk. A documentary that does that is Dying to Live: A Migrant's Journey,which is available from Mennonite Central Committee (www.mcc.org). It's a 35-minute film and shows the desperate straits that drive people to leave their families to try to find work here. I recommend it.
Immigration is a huge issue, but it involves real people. As people seeking to follow Jesus, we need to summon the courage and the decency to welcome people some call aliens. In doing so, we may be welcoming the Lord we claim to follow.