Lenten Listening

Said he saw him comin’ with his dyin’ garments on/ said he saw him comin’/ said he saw him comin’, dyin’ garments on. Wouldn’t mind dyin’ if dying was all. –Blind Willie Johnson

Durer, Head of the Dead Christ

I. Lent is a terrible season. Modern usage being what it is, a word like terrible has largely been evacuated of all meaning, profundity, and now is taken as something unpleasant, bad but to a higher degree of badness than bad,. The word, though, comes from a Latin root terribilis, to frighten, to cause terror. In his novel Descent into Hell, Charles Williams tries to reclaim terrible for its root, one of the characters asks the playwright Stanhope (Williams’ representative much like Prospero is for Shakespeare), “If things are terrifying, can they be good?” “Yes surely,” Stanhope responds, “are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?” Lent is a terrible season.

II. The bluesman Blind Willie Johnson seems like a character out of a Flannery O’Connor story. Blind, black, destitute, he lived in a run-down house on a street corner in Depression era Beaumont. Every day, he would go out into the street with his guitar, a glass slide made of a broken bottleneck, and a Bible to preach on the streets and sing wild, frightening songs about Jesus dying on a cross. At some point he was noticed, brought into a studio and paid $5, $10 dollars a side to sing his eerie music into a can to be preserved on cheap acetone. One of his sides, surely unsettling to his producer sitting in the booth, reinterpreted the wreck of the Titanic as an Icarus-like fall, God’s judgment on the overweening pride of the ship’s captain – “A.G. Smith, mighty man, built a boat that he couldn’t understand/ named it a name of a god in tin/ middle of the sea, Lord, He pulled it in/ God moves on the water and the people had to run and pray.” Like all black (and many white) musicians of the day, he received no royalties, only a flat fee; soon he returned to the streets busking and preaching Christ crucified for our sins. One evening in 1945 his house burnt down, having no money, place to go, or way to make a living, Johnson lie down every night in the ashes of his ruined home in the place where his bed one stood. Every morning he would rise take up his guitar and head to a thoroughfare to play his wild music about his wild God giving His life for the folks living in Beaumont, Texas. In the late summer or early fall of that year Johnson caught malaria and died, refused any care at the hospital because of his skin color.

"God Moves on the Water" by Blind Willie Johnson

III. The terror of Good Friday is too often leapt over as we hasten to Easter; Easter itself has become for many day of obligatory church attendance and seasonal candy and, like language, is evacuated of much of its meaning. Music still seems like an entry point, an unguarded door where things can come in. It is hard to listen to Blind Willie Johnson moaning about the crucifixion in “Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground” and not be moved (to terror or pity).

It is hard to listen to Van Morrison, stunned, angry at his dying girlfriend for dying in “T.B. Sheets” and backing slowly away from the horror and the stench and not realize death is a terrible thing, an obscenity.

Johnson’s gravelly voice singing the refrain “I just touched the hem of His garment” in “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole” is not the treacly pop of CCM that can easily be dismissed; the man knows where he was, knows what Jesus did for him, knows where he’s headed.

Good Friday, Holy Saturday are places we need to linger a bit, imaginatively enter into, and this sort of music aids in that. Easter Sunday was, is a shock; people don’t rise from the dead, sealed tombs stay sealed, full, and all a messiah dying can possibly mean is that he wasn’t the messiah, God is with the victors. Yet death is swallowed up by victory, the tomb is founded empty and the King isn’t there, He’s on the move, abroad in the world. And we too, need not fear, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally/ And death shall be no more: death, thou shalt die.”

The Need for Grace (or "Why I sometimes remind myself of a 'kept woman' from a 19th century Russian novel")

Lately I've been reading Grahame Greene's fantastic novel, The Power and the Glory, and it has really affected me.  If I thought my posts to be more memorable, I would warn against spoilers, but since you probably will not remember any specific details from this even if you do end up reading the book, which I of course recommend, I will press on.  In it the Catholic Church is being violently suppressed in a rural Mexican province, to the point where only two priests remain who haven't been executed or fled.  One renounced his vocation and married in order to save his life and is now trapped in despair; the other, always refered to as "that whiskey priest", has serious moral failures, not least of them his alcoholism.  As the only remaining priest however, he feels the weight of responsibility and the tension between his calling and his failures.  He longs to be caught by the authorities at times because he feels unworthy, but knows it is his duty to avoid capture, visit the villages in his parish and minister the sacraments of confession.

 Hopping to another novel and another writer, in Dostoevksy's The Idiot there is a similar tension in one of the female characters.  The story revolves around two overlapping love triangles basically, the common point of which is the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin.  It opens with Myshkin returning to Russia after years spent convalescing at a sanatorium in Switzerland.  Upon arriving, he is quickly confronted with choosing between two women: Aglaia, a beautiful young girl he feels natural attraction to and the pitiful Natasha Filippovna.  Natasha was orphaned at a young age and taken in by a wealthy noble who provides for her education.  She grows into a strikingly beautiful girl herself and is the victim of what nowadays we call statutory rape by her "patron", and becomes a kept woman.  At the start of the story, her patron, now looking to marry is trying to off-load her even offering to pay someone to take her, as she is "damaged goods".  The two who eventually end up competing for her affections and making up the two legs of our second triangle are Myshkin and a man who is very nearly his antithesis, Rogozhin.  All this complicated introduction is made to come to one main point (for my post at least), Natasha Filippovna must decide wheter to go with Myshkin who is sacrificing his high position and social standing to save her (she would basically be regarded as a prostitute at that time) or the wild, unprincipled Rogozhin who she perhaps thinks she deserves.  The tragedy is that she really does love Myshkin, but fears she would ruin him; she feels the loving thing to do is to prevent her from loving him and choosing Rogozhin.  This type of character occurs in several of big D's novels, including Notes from Underground, from which this blog partially takes it's name (along with the Herbert poem heading the page).  All of them feel a call to goodness and life, but feel unable to live up to the standard they think they must meet to be saved.  Rather than be caught between the two, they try to go Underground, to embrace wickedness and so become something- a wicked man.  They always fail, they can't really becoming completely evil, they still feel the call to life, and this is a grace.

I see quite a bit of myself in both these characters, both with the relationship problems of Natasha Filippovna- if I, out of Christian love, want a good man for a girl I'm interested in and know I'm not a good man, what do I do?- and because I quite frankly don't feel qualified for my vocation.  But then grace comes in.  You can't fall to the temptation Natasha and the "whiskey priest" felt to sacrifice yourself- martyrdom can't be chosen and the Sacrifice has already been made.  Christ came to bring new life to the dead.  Man occupies the place as Luther said of being "simultaneously sinner and justified"; I know myself to be a pretty poor man, but in Christ I am declared to be otherwise.  And this is not simply a vain, "Aww, you're not so bad!", but fully acknowledges my wrong, crucifies it, and actually creates that which it calls me to be.  Justification is not simply a declaration of God's indifference to my sin, it is a collaborative effort through the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian to bring him into the newness of life.  Despite all this, sin is still destructive, temporally at least, and human rebellion can at least change the way in which the God works to "interweave all things to the good."  So what do y'all think, how gracious are we called to be?  Is NAMB or the IMB, for instance, right in barring Christians with rough pasts from service?  What about sins that people still struggle with? (Because we love victory stories- "I used to beat my wife and get drunk every night.  Now look at my smiling family and our perfectly straight teeth.  Gee, thanks Jesus! This abundant life is awesome!"- but we don't like so much to hear about people who still struggle or doubt).  As far as forgiveness goes I think we all agree that grace covers, but at what point does discipline come in?