Undeception

This installment of “Theologically Interesting Lyrics” features a song by the late Mark Heard, master lyricist, connoisseur of several stringed instruments, and pariah to the CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) industry of his time. Although widely acclaimed for his songwriting acumen, he was always an industry outsider: not only did he stand out as a “profane saint” who smoked, drank, and cussed, but because of his acute empathy for the outcasts of society and resulting social concerns, he even identified with the political left (whom he perceived to be more committed to those causes), setting him firmly at odds with mainstream evangelical culture. His lyrics are often melancholy, ironic, sarcastic, and rarely offer solutions.

Heard accused the Christian music industry of stifling the artists who strayed from the CCM norm of plastered smiles and facades of ethereal hope and who instead frequently deemed it necessary to use their lyrics to grapple with the problems of life and mourn the unfulfilled hopes that rightly plague us all, believers and unbelievers alike. On the last of over two dozen albums he released before his untimely death, he penned this song describing the plight of those artists like himself who felt exploited and whose not-always-pretty messages were essentially censored by what he considered to be a profit-seeking industry that held a seeming monopoly over Christian music.

(I’ve half a mind to leave the lyrics out so that you’ll just play the video and allow his expressive voice and the fitting music to carry you along. But nah, I’ll just post the lyrics below the video.)

(URL: http://www.youtube.com/v/N58edukzT8c)

The Orphans of God
written and recorded by Mark Heard on Satellite Sky

I will rise from my bed with a question again
As I work to inherit the restless wind
The view from my window is cold and obscene
I want to touch what my eyes have not seen

But they have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams
And sold us the remnants ’til our pockets are clean
‘Til our hopes fall ’round our feet
Like the dust of dead leaves
And we end up looking like what we believe

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins and make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

Like bees in a bottle we are flying at fate
Beating our wings against the walls of this place
Unaware that the struggle is the blood of the proof
In choosing to believe the unbelievable truth

But they have captured our siblings, they have rendered them mute
Disputed our lineage and poisoned our roots
We have bought from the brokers who have broken their oaths
And we’re out on the streets with a lump in our throats

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins
And make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

To date there have been two tribute albums making flutes of Mark Heard’s bones. There’s a marked contrast between his essentially incarnational approach to life’s difficulties in which he stands among the sufferers to give them a voice and the tendency of the CCM industry to offer advice from an enlightened position outside. The greater CCM lyrical tradition rejections the lyrical tradition of the orphans of God for bitterly complaining and offering no answers, while the orphans of God criticize the CCM model for merely offering platitudes and purely emotional pick-me-ups as solutions that too often prove hollow and illusory in the harsh realities of life. Those who prefer Heard’s approach will likely feel that his remains have been somewhat desecrated by a recent song from the CCM camp using his title that somewhat illustrates this tension. In this “Orphans of God”, the Christian pop vocal group Avalon offers this answer to the hopeless:

There are no orphans of God
So many fallen, but hallelujah
There are no orphans of God

Oh, you just feel like an orphan. God has made everything wonderful, if only you have the eyes of faith to see it.

CCM has changed; it is no longer such a monolith of pop/inspiration, and the degree to which CCM was actually stifling his music rather than, say, reflecting a low demand among the buying public that didn’t want to hear his moody, Appalachian-twanged music is certainly debatable. Either way, there are many more artists within and a robust movement outside of the mainstream industry labels who speak from the rubble, in the voices of the “fallen”, than there were in Heard’s day. But the tendency Heard identified remains in American suburban Christianity to eschew negative observations unless prepackaged with the dressed up “church talk” answers that most who go through a real dark patch find essentially dismissive. Most who have lost a loved one to a tragic circumstance tell us later that the least helpful and often most offensive thing they heard was, “It’s God’s will, and He loves you.” Yet that cold comfort is still routinely offered by Christians in “the bubble”.

Now, it is absolutely clear that mere words in songs, however poetic they might be, can never themselves resolve crises of distress, despair, hunger, sickness, fatigue, etc. in the same way that crying out accomplishes nothing but an appeal for an actual response. So in the end, the effectivity of Heard’s empathetic and others’ sympathetic approaches to lyrics will be judged by their comparative abilities to stir up the resolve to find real-world responses beyond pat answers within those who listen. From what I’ve seen, simplistically offering disembodied theological explanations that amount to gnostic escapism (particularly when those explanations seem to fly in the face of the facts) is perceived by those dealing with problems as taking those problems none too seriously. Those the most committed to not ignoring the emotional and physical hardships of life recognize that the suffering often sincerely need a shoulder to cry on and an empathetic acknowledgment of their pain rather than a tear and a lecture. In this, and in the potential to increase dissatisfaction with an intolerable state of affairs among the unaffected who might otherwise remain oblivious, I think Mark Heard’s approach triumphs.

So ends my hymn.

The (sometimes bewilderingly) controversial theologian Brian McLaren wrote an article in a newsletter (I think) in which he enunciates his take on where we are and where we should go in modern worship music. He addresses it as “An open letter to songwriters” (direct pdf link), and presents some well-stated observations and requests in his typically humble way. Here are a couple excerpts:

Let me make this specific: too many of our lyrics are embarrassingly personalistic, about Jesus and me. Personal intimacy with God is such a wonderful step above a cold, abstract, wooden recitation of dogma. But it isn’t the whole story. In fact—this might shock you—it isn’t, in the emerging new postmodern world, necessarily the main point of the story. A popular worship song I’ve heard in many venues in the last few years (and which we sing at Cedar Ridge, where I pastor) says that worship is “all about You, Jesus,” but apart from that line, it really feels like worship, and Christianity in general, has become “all about me, me, me.”

It’s embarrassing to admit, but some of us are thinking right now, “If spiritual songwriting is not about deep, personal intimacy with God, what else is there?”

The Bible is full of songs that wail, the blues but even bluer, songs that feel the agonizing distance between what we hope for and what we have, what we could be and what we are, what we believe and what we see and feel. The honesty is disturbing, and the songs of lament don’t always end with a happy Hallmark-Card-Precious-Moments cliché to try to fix the pain. Sometimes I think we’re too happy: the only way to become happier is to become sadder, by feeling the pain of the chronically ill, the desperately poor, the mentally ill, the lonely, the aged and forgotten, the oppressed minority, the widow and orphan. This pain should find its way into song, and these songs should find their way into our churches. The bitter will make the sweet all the sweeter; without the bitter, the sweet can become cloying, and too many of our churches feel, I think, like Candyland. Is it too much to ask that we be more honest? Since doubt is part of our lives, since pain and waiting and as-yet unresolved disappointment are part of our lives, can’t these things be reflected in the songs of our communities? Doesn’t endless singing about celebration lose its vitality (and even its credibility) if we don’t also sing about the struggle?

McLaren lists five neglected topics/themes and six “stylistic observations and requests”; of the latter, my favorite is, “Can our lyricists start reading more good poetry, good prose, so they can be sensitized to the powers of language, the grace of a well-turned phrase, the delight of a freshly discovered image, the prick or punch or caress or jolt that is possible if we wrestle a little harder and stretch a little farther for the word that really wants to be said from deep within us?”

Good stuff, hopefully altogether uncontroversial, and good to hear from someone as influential as he is among the next generation of songwriters.