The Sound of God

Warning: contains strongly worded opinions, religion


It's been...almost a month since last post. I suck at this blogging thing.


But I promised I wouldn't post emo things, and the past three weeks have been like that. I was rather abruptly jolted out of emoness by the actions of someone who was a lot farther down the road. So now it's just back to manic cheerfulness interrupted every eight seconds with morbid observations.


I also promised not to mention Nazi Germany in this post, even though it appears to be the only thing I can blog about without burying myself in research. (Is that sad? Yes. Do I care? No.)


Instead, here is a story. 

In 5th grade, we were herded to church for what we had been vaguely told was a “music presentation”. This turned out to be a woman and her guitar, alone in the front of the dark cave-like monstrosity that was St. Jude. She started to blather about how she was going to praise God with her music.

I was supremely bored. We already had to sit in the church twice a week—once for Mass, once to listen to Father Tom lecture at length about the nuts and bolts of Catholicism to supplement the watered-down tripe we learned in religion class. (I liked this time. In third grade I distinctly recall asking "If science says that the dinosaurs came first, and the Bible says that Adam and Eve came first, isn't it like science and religion are fighting?" He was silent for a bit and then started talking about Thomas Aquinas.)

Finally, it looked like she was going to play something. I perked up. The woman crossed to the piano and plunked out the melody line of a hymn on the piano, singing along with it. She mentioned that it was written in 1793, using the sort of tone that nine-year-olds use to say "Is that a booger?"

She then hoisted her guitar and sang the same melody, only syncopated and set to the idiotic acoustic strumming of non-committal chords.

I was horrified. You weren’t supposed to do that to hymns. You just weren’t. It was like taking the Duke of Wellington and making him wear a trucker hat and a shirt that said "bros before hoes". It was like putting ketchup on lobster.

I faintly recall hissing to my neighbor on the pew “I liked it better in 1793”. This was the first moment I had been exposed to Contemporary Christian Music, and I've never stopped hating it.

You'd think that someone who is normally so repulsed by overblown ritual, so horrified by oppressive obscurantism, would welcome this sort of thing. At least they weren't chanting Latin like they did only a short while ago. Maybe this was just the thing to drag Catholicism kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. 

Why, then, was I sickened?

In the Christian tradition there has always been a fairly consistent boundary between what you did and did not sing in church. God lived there, and you respected that. When the more progressive branches decided "Hey, maybe we should try to bring the average age of our congregation below 276!" they began to incorporate 'contemporary' services into their schedules, with many churches choosing to only offer contemporary fare. I felt (and feel) that the incorporation of Christian pop into church services cheapens the message. 

The creation of new music should be welcomed, but the form used in worship should be sacred. By sacred I mean "not worldly". Who am I to decide what is sacred and what is worldly? Well, no one. Perhaps a good litmus test would be to decide whether the music would sound out of place in a grocery store. If it does, great. If it doesn't, it panders too much to the lowest common denominator. 

It may seem like I am clinging to this one arbitrary and even backward tradition while rejecting many others. That is true. A huge part of my religious sense hinges weirdly on the existence of music, and I was raised on classical music alongside the horrible post-Vatican-II songs of our parish. So it's out of self-interest that I rail against Christian pop. 

My opinion still stands, though:

When you have gone out of your way to go to a place of worship, you should know that you're dealing with a being beyond human comprehension. You should not be coddled. You should not try to make your god relatable to you. You should try to relate to your god.  

Please do not think I am opposed to all modern religious music. There are literally thousands of horribly shitty hymns, just as there are truly talented modern religious musicians that don't feel constrained by a commercial formula that works. (maybe. somewhere.) That's fine. By all means, make pop-style music that fits your morality. Just don't bring it to church. 

Alas, all the other opponents of modernized Christian music seem to be fundies who would probably hang me for wearing pants to church. (In the name of the Lord God Jesus Christ and his Great, Just Plan for Us In His Word.) They appear to think that anything with a beat is an instrument (har) of Lilith and her harlots, who spend their time alternately providing Satan with sexual favors and seducing The Youth. 


And, I mean, I don't even go to church and am honestly not interested in places of worship except out of religious curiosity. So this doesn't really apply to me except when I am dragged into church by my hoodie strings. For now I will jealously guard my collection of polyphonic chanting and classical sacred music. 


P.S. Imho, if you want to hear the sound of God, go listen to the Valaam Institute Choir or 'Et In Terra Pax' from Vivaldi's Gloria. When I first heard Valaam, I honestly said "Oh. My. God." without breaking the second commandment.