Just wanted to share a link to a good talk by Ken Myers. He argues that the traditional search for the good, the true, and the beautiful has been replaced by the quest for the new, the cool, and the sensational. That’s a pretty good way of putting it. I particularly like the use of the word ‘sensational’ because of its connection to the senses.
You can listen HERE.
Ken Myers shared this quote in a recent talk (HERE). The author is referring to Marcion’s early dualistic Christological heresy, which stands in direct opposition to the truth:
Human nature, or the condition of having a material body and participating in the change and suffering of the creation, was that from which man had to be delivered, but not that by which he would be delivered.
-Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, p. 76
I have noted elsewhere the notion of so-called religious asceticism which is actually worldly. You could call it dualism as well. This quote rings true to that idea. While Christians should yearn for the life of heaven, because it is life in the immediate presence of God, and while they should denounce the works of the sinful nature, we should never think that physical matter is innately bad. We can say with Paul, ‘Who shall deliver me from this body of death?’, but we must not forget that it was God taking on a body and dying that brings life to this dead body.
In other words, when you start to look down on this early existence, the frailness of life, and the persistence of suffering, rather than thinking that these things are somehow evil or unfitting, remember that it was through these very same means that Jesus Christ redeemed you. And so thank God for them. Thank him for the fact that he has given you a body, and that his Son took on a body that your body will not stay in the grave.
We feel the need to be delivered from our flesh, it was a man in the flesh who delivered us. We feel a need to be saved from suffering, but it was suffering that saved us. Take comfort in the gospel.
The crickets have been chirping on the blog for a couple of weeks. The reason being: I had finals, two sermons, and a Sunday school lesson to work on. But alas, all of the above are in the books, and I actually have a week off from any particular study obligations. This means I will try to do a bit of catching up on the blog this week. I’ll mainly be posting quotes but I have been working on a couple of other things to post.
As for my practice of recording quotes on the blog, today illustrates my primary reason for doing so. In my sermon and Sunday school preparation I pulled four or five quotes directly from the blog that I wanted to use in my sermon and lesson. It comes in very handy. It’s nice to have helpful quotes cataloged and readily available. But I digress.
If you’ve been around the blog for the full two years of its existence I usually declare summers to be ‘the summer of biography.’ I may read a biography this year, but my plans are different. I’m planning on rereading the second volume of Calvin’s Institutes and reading The Silmarillion for the first time (I started it and failed to finish a while back).
Speaking of which, HERE is a link to the lecture that motivated me to get back into The Silmarillion. Click lecture 3. It’s worth a listen if you enjoy Tolkien’s work. As a matter of fact, all of the talks are worthwhile, and the interview at the bottom of the list is very, very good.
Speaking of which again, I had a massive project to work on for my technology in education class and I decided that I would put together a mock course for a 12th grade English class on the subject of 20th Century Imaginative Literature featuring Lewis and Tolkien. We had to come up with ten projects that integrate a technology into each. It was worth a third of our grade and I got a big fat 300 out of 300 on it, so needless to say, I’m proud of it. The ‘livebinder’ for my project, which outlines the course and its projects, is available online, and you can look at it, if you so desire, HERE. It’s obviously a mock lesson plan, but, nonetheless, my focus was on coming up with a strategy for fostering the development of the imagination through the examples left for us by Lewis and Tolkien.
Ken Myers, of Mars Hill Audio, recently gave several lectures on the subject of music and meaning. Videos of the talks are available HERE. Myers addresses the nature of music and cultural trends and problems in modern music. I must confess this is an issue I have struggled with over the past few years, but I think Myers does a fine job of crystallizing some of the issues with modern popular music, and especially modern music in the church.
One of Myers’ points that I found helpful was the idea that, in general, music has evolved in recent centuries from what he calls ‘cosmo-centric’ music to ‘self-centered’ music. I think Myers is right in his contention, and that this paradigm shift can be found in more than just music. Take poetry for example.
This was illustrated to me in a discussion I recently had with a university student on the subject of poetry. I discovered that this student basically thought of poetry as nothing more than pithy self-expression. Poetry, for her, is a way of expressing yourself eloquently, but that’s about it.
Compare that to C.S. Lewis’ statement about Geoffrey Chaucer:
Poets are, for Chaucer, not people who receive fame, but people who give it.
You can see his point quite clearly by considering the famous ancient and medieval poems. Take the Odyssey and the Iliad for example. Homer’s work was to spread the fame of Troy, the gods, and Odysseus – not himself. The ‘modern’ view of poetry, however, as expressed by the viewpoint I noted above, will yield primarily introspection and personal emotion. It turns inward, and points readers to the poet, rather than attempting to spread the fame of someone or something ‘outside itself.’
Myers is arguing that much the same is the case with music. My family and I explored this idea by listening to several pieces of classical music. As we listened to, for example, several of Bach’s violin concertos, I asked my daughters to tell me the impressions the music made on their minds. They gave answers such as ‘fairies frolicking in a meadow,’ ‘fairies being chased by a wizard,’ ‘sunshine,’ etc. The common thread in all of their answers concerning the various pieces we listened to is that they all pointed outward. They never said, ‘that piece of music makes me think of my emotions.’ They easily related to the music, not because it pointed them to the song-writer, or the music itself even, but to outward reality and imagination.
I am no music-snob. I know relatively nothing about classical music. But I understand Myers’ point. Much of the classical and ancient music I have encountered tends to set the mind on things outside itself. It’s easy, almost necessary, as you listen to many classical pieces, to begin thinking about thunder and lightning, or sunshine, or the sea. The music was cosmic-centered – it exposited, and pointed to, the grandeur, beauty, ugliness, etc of the world around us. Whereas much of today’s popular music is highly flippant and ego-centric, pointing to nothing outside itself other than the emotions of the song-writer or singer. It exists to spread the fame of the artist rather than something outside the artist, and so the artist lives to spread his own fame rather than the fame of another.
Does this mean that modern poetry and music is bad? Not necessarily. Modern, self-centered, music can be very good, for example, at expressing empathy. A good-songwriter can use his own experience and imagination to eloquently express the human condition. Old country songs about loss and heartache can be a balm to a soul that has suffered those experiences. As a matter of fact, I think the psalter does this exact thing. The psalms give us examples of, and words that we ourselves can appropriate, for expressing and praying our own emotions through song and prayer. Yet I believe there is something to be said for the classical practice of turning our eyes off ourselves in music and poetry, and using the imagination to capture and exposit the world around us.
Let me make one final point. A while back I read something from C.S. Lewis (I think it was in Surprised by Joy) where he talked about the different ways in which people use their imagination. Lewis noted that there is a difference between sheer fantasy and imagination. By fantasy, he was primarily thinking of using the imagination to think about oneself – from visions of grandeur, to lust, and in various other ways, man uses fantasy to make himself the center and hero of the story taking place in his mind. In the other form of imagination, man uses his mind to build worlds of which he is not necessarily a part. Lewis used as an example that he would often use his imagination to create landscapes and the like.
As I read this I took time to reflect that I had rarely, if ever, used my imagination in this way. It seems that my imagination always terminates on one subject – me. I’m always involved. In my own mind, as I imagine, I am always either the hero, or the victim, or the centerpiece of the story. I wonder where I picked up this type of thinking(?). Myers has given me one answer to this question.
Our music habits contribute to how we see the world – especially when they implicitly lead us to think primarily, or only, of ourselves. We become the world, and, more than that, we become the sun – everything revolves around me and my own fragile psyche. This world – me – is surely not as glorious as what is outside it. I pray that I, like the poets of whom Chaucer wrote, will learn to spread the fame of others rather than myself.
