Friday Miscellany

A few stray threads to pick at as another week winds down…

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I spent the August long weekend with a few long-time friends in Seattle. Guys always need a reason beyond just getting together to get together, and in this case, it was a concert. Greta Van Fleet was in town and this seemed like a pretty good excuse to make the trek. I’m likely a bigger fan than a few of the other guys, but I think everyone enjoyed the spectacle.

And a spectacle it was. Think screaming guitars, howling vocals, men in tights (shirts optional), makeup, long hair, flames and lights and pyrotechnics. It was a blistering, face-melting two and a half hours of throwback rock and roll (it’s weird to use the word “throwback” for a bunch of guys in their twenties, but the world is full of strange and beautiful things). The concert would probably not be everyone’s cup of tea, I grant, but I love this kind of thing.

I occasionally get asked, usually by politely curious church members, why this is the case. Why do I love full throttle, ear-splitting rock concerts? It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that a respectable pastor should enjoy. After reminding them that I’ve never claimed to be “respectable,” (just kidding… kind of), I’m usually surprised by how inarticulate my responses can be. I usually fumble toward something like, “Well, I like how it makes me feel” or some other insipid justification. It sounds lame even as it’s coming out of my mouth.

But it’s true. When the drums feel like they’re going to bore a hole in your chest, when the guitars produce a majestic wall of sound, when the voices crescendo up to the rafters, when the crowd roars as one, when you feel like the whole package might just crash over and through you… You feel alive. You feel like all the stress and strain of ordinary life is suspended for that one slice of time. And it is pure exhilaration.

Some people say that music makes them feel closer to God. I get it.

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Further to Wednesday’s post about trigger warnings and cultivated fragility, David Brooks addresses some of the same issues in an article from today’s New York Times. He comes at it from a bit of a different angle, though. He’s talking about maturity and about how the therapeutic ethos that has taken over world works against this.

A few money quotes:

The instability of the self has created an immature public culture—impulsive, dramatic, erratic and cruel. In institution after institution, from churches to schools to nonprofits, the least mature voices dominate and hurl accusations, while the most mature lie low, trying to get through the day.

The people with these loudest voices often operate in that histrionic manner that suggests they are trying to work out personal wounds through political expression. People on all sides genuinely come to believe they are powerless, unwilling to assume any responsibility for their plight—another classic symptom of immaturity.

And then this one, which I had to read a few times to let sink in:

David A. Bednar, a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once observed that “one of the greatest indicators of our own spiritual maturity is revealed in how we respond to the weaknesses, the inexperience and the potentially offensive actions of others.”

In other words, a sign of maturity is the ability to respond with understanding when other people have done something stupid and given you the opportunity to feel superior.

The whole article is worth reading. Maybe more than once. Especially that last bolded part of the quote above. I will be dwelling with this one myself.

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Another follow-up to my post from last week on the decline of the church, the crumbling of institutions, and what this might mean for (or require from) the witness of the church.

A few weeks ago, a man died in our church. I suppose you could say that, by the world’s metrics, he occupied one of the lower rungs on life’s ladder. He was not well-educated, wealthy, influential, or socially connected. He came from a family that struggled in countless ways and could not be relied upon to do any of the normal things that must be done when someone dies.

A day before the funeral, the funeral director and I were discussing some of the details. “We don’t seem to have any pallbearers,” he told me. “Hmmm,” I intelligently responded. Where does one find a pallbearer, I wondered? I don’t imagine Amazon sends those via next-day delivery. I’ve seen a lot of odd requests at or around funerals, but this was a new one for me.

So, I did what I always do when I need help. I asked our office admin to send out an email to our church list. (I do this, for example, whenever I run out of scribblers to give to the inmates at jail—I usually have more than I can carry out the door that Sunday.) Would anyone be willing to serve as a pallbearer at _______’s graveside service tomorrow? Four to six people needed. Call Ryan if you can help.

The next morning, I found myself sitting at a viewing in a sparsely populated funeral chapel. The minutes ground awkwardly on and eventually it was time to take the casket to the hearse and then off to the cemetery. Five men from my church stood up, walked to the front of the chapel, and carried our departed brother in Christ out the doors, into the summer sunshine. They did it again at the cemetery where he was finally laid to rest. Five men who could have done anything else on a summer morning, took time to carry the casket of a man that they didn’t know particularly well, and had little in common with, simply because there was no one else to do so, and because they believed that every death, whatever rung of the ladder the deceased was imagined to occupy, was an occasion for dignity, for reverence, and for care.

Where else would this happen but the church, I found myself later wondering? For all of the church’s real or imagined sins, it is still the place where this kind of thing is the rule more than the exception. The church, for all the rumours of its inevitable decline, is still the kind of place where a bunch of volunteer pallbearers can be rustled up a few hours before someone is put in the ground. The world is indeed full of strange and beautiful things.

To bring all this back to rock and roll (this, of the less blistering variety)… and to try to force some illegitimate connections between the preceding paragraphs… One of my favourite songs of all time is U2’s One. I turned it up as I drove home from the cemetery, after I watched the church carry one of its own on the last stage of his earthly journey.

We’re one, but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other.