Having a Bad Hymn Day

The last few Sunday mornings I have begun the day by reading from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The language is thrilling, the images ethereal, the themes exalted. Then I proceed to church, a congregation that sings “praise songs” accompanied by a keyboard and guitars. Without fail, someone requests the children’s favorite, “Our God Is an Awesome God,” which contains the eminently forgettable line, “When He rolls up his sleeves He ain’t just puttin’ on the Ritz.”

For me, the jarring descent from Paradise Lost to “Awesome God” has come to symbolize a major dilemma of aesthetics. How does one appreciate high quality without becoming a snob? About some things, I have no snobbery: I wear hand-me-down clothes, stay in budget motels, and drive a boxy, practical car. But I can instantly sniff the difference between coffee brewed by Mr. Coffee and that brewed by Braun. And when it comes to music, I’ll always vote for Bach and Mozart over songs built around three major chords and a dull phrase repeated over and over.

How do we encourage Bach while not quenching the spirit of “Kum Ba Yah”? How to appreciate Milton without scorning gospel tracts? How do we recognize high quality of any type—physical beauty, intelligence, athletic ability—without devaluing those who lack such gifts?

Our world rewards the gifted at the expense of the ungifted. Stand outside a kindergarten playground and watch how children treat playmates who seem clumsy, ugly, or dense. Adults continue the pattern, paying professional athletes $5 million a year and teachers $30,000. We choose young girls of promising beauty, then starve, pad, and carve them with a plastic surgeon’s knife to transform them into Supermodels, who will then leave less-endowed women (99.9 percent of the female population) with a permanent self-image crisis.

The church has wavered back and forth on the issue of values. Those who followed the ascetic way solved the problem by renouncing all sensual pleasures. They ate diets of bread and water, lashed themselves with whips, and rigorously practiced celibacy. Jerome, an outstanding proponent of this school in the late fourth century, had a stunted aesthetic sense, but he had much time for prayer, worship, and acts of discipline. He sublimated his sexual drive translating the Hebrew Scriptures, which resulted in the Vulgate version used for the next millennium.

Augustine, Jerome’s contemporary, took a different approach. He had a keen eye for beauty and worked to improve his body, mind, and soul. Augustine believed in the essential goodness of created things; the Latin phrase dona bona, or “good gifts,” appears throughout his City of God. The trick, as he saw it, was to maintain a careful balance between the values of the City of God and the city of man. “The world is a smiling place,” he preached once in a sermon.

Naked stylites who live on poles and ermine-draped bishops who live in palaces point to different ways of resolving the aesthetic dilemma. Today, some churches play Bach on organs more magnificent than Johann himself could have imagined. Others accompany “Awesome God” with a 40-piece orchestra. Still others ban instrumental music altogether. I once attended a wedding in which the scratchy strains of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” came from a turntable positioned well outside the sanctuary; a long extension cord allowed the church to heed the denominational proscription against such music.

The risks of goodness

In light of church history, I doubt anyone will soon devise a neat formula to solve these matters. But I do believe that Christianity, and only Christianity, has two essential contributions to make.

First, the good things in this world are remnants that have been spoiled. Augustine stressed the essential goodness of created things; but there is an implicit risk as well. Every good thing in this world contains within it the potential for exploitation and abuse. Think of sex, of food, of our planet’s grand resources. Power, beauty, and brilliance are all good things, qualities possessed by our Creator, but human history amply demonstrates what can happen to these in the hands of human beings who have tasted of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Second, even spoiled things can be made good. I have observed in art museums that saints are rather ugly, portrayed with gaunt faces, aquiline noses, and scraggly hair. I do not know whether they chose a path that led them to sainthood because of social ostracism, or whether their appearance suffered as the demands of sainthood took a physical toll.

Regardless, saints by definition bear out a lasting truth of the Sermon on the Mount: God judges by different standards, and the poor and lowly, who suffer disadvantage in the city of man, have an actual advantage in the City of God.

I take comfort in the fact that Christianity, while honoring God’s good gifts, still finds an esteemed place for those who lack them. In the City of God, a paralyzed Joni Eareckson Tada leaps and dances with Olympian grace. And as for my original quandary about music in church, I am trying to learn a lesson from C. S. Lewis, who wrote this about his (Anglican!) church:

I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the great merit of it.… I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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