o1mnikent

I don’t belong to any of the demographic groups that you might expect to see at the grocery store in the middle of the afternoon.  Almost everyone else is either a mother, a small child, a mother acting like a small child, or the small elderly woman who buys astonishing quantities of dairy-free instant mocha mix every week.

Today is September 19, and we all know what that means. Others who feel inclined to blog about it may wish to use the Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates.

(ht: LL)

Shelly and I live next to a golfcourse. This means that there is nothing adjacent to our backyard except ponds, paths, trees, and flocks of geese who daily mow the lawn for insects, worms, and other delicacies – and try to avoid Maddie’s claws, sharp teeth, and prestidigitation. (No, Maddie is not the mailman. Yes, Maddie is our neighbor’s cat.) Since there’s no yard behind ours, we have an undisturbed view of the Canadian Rockies which are often shrouded in fog in the early mornings. The perfect backdrop for breakfast.

Except when golfers intrude.

We live near the fourth hole, the ending point of many failed aspirations and the occasional “Watch out Gary!” before Gary ducks or flees for his own safety. I still haven’t figured out if Gary’s wife is angry with him or if she’s just a profoundly incompetent golfer, or both. Gary seems oblivious, though. He tells her she should have used a five-iron, which means about as much to her as it does to me. I think she just wants to talk.

Some say that golf is not a spectator sport, and I’m inclined to disagree. I’ve stood by the window for no less than ten minutes, coffee in hand, to watch entire four-somes hit ball after ball into the pond, tree, golfcart, and neighbor’s yard. Why do situations such as these bring so much delight to the observer? I don’t have a good answer to that (well, depravity, I guess), but I’m pretty sure that half of the people who watch the PGA aren’t hoping for success.

But golf isn’t always just a spectator sport. Sometimes I become involved. It’s a startling thing, for example, to be reading on the patio and hear a distant “fooore!” before a ball comes whizzing into my reality and into the reality of the bushes next to the patio and into the reality of our neighbors’ cats who are were sleeping under the bushes.

Other times, our proximity to the course forces us – and many of our neighbors – to participate in golfers’ conversation as unwilling listeners. Like when you’re sitting in a restaurant and overhear a conversation that you really don’t want to hear, or the kinds of things people say when they’re pouring themselves another glass of water and accidentally spill ice all over the table. The ability to overhear conversations on the golf course has taught me not only that this world contains no shortage of bad golfers, but that the English language contains a fine selection of profanities, obscenities, and epithets that express a variety of possible catastrophes that range from hitting the ball into the pond (or golfcart, or wife, etc.) to fleeing geese who are feeding and prefer that you not tee off right now. Most often, golfers kindly tell the geese where they can go, what they can do, and how they can do it. And occasionally where they can shove it, but I have no idea what that even means. When you hear someone swear at geese, you shouldn’t take them too literally, because that’s just gross. I do find it odd, though, that one can choose to express his (this pronoun isn’t exclusive; it’s a compliment) frustration with geese or his ineptitude at golf with imprecations, references to excretion and sexuality, and invocations of deities. I have to wonder if people would speak so volubly of the scatological, the sacred, the prurient, or the uxorial if they knew that they were WITHIN EARSHOT OF SMALL CHILDREN.

These groups amble away, some in golfcart, others on foot. The ball eventually winds up in the hole, sometimes after frustration and torment. Golfers endure their struggles together, and form comradery in the process. It’s a game where individuals realize the enormity of their task and the insufficiency of their abilities. Teamwork, relationship-building, and pressing on. You might even say that golf is a metaphor for life.

The life lesson I’ve learned from golf?

Watch others play golf and write blog posts about them.

Andrew Waggoner writes about silence in the New Music Box, the webmagazine from the American Music Center. The article caught my attention because thinking about silence, stillness, and all such things within the context of corporate worship has always been a perennial interest of mine. There’s good theological rationale for silence, too: that we stop speaking in order to hear God speak, and remain still so as to notice such subtle divine relation as, say, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. More often than not, we don’t; hence, we don’t see his glory, either.

But silence also functions as a means of giving extra meaning to music. Waggoner acknowledges that “Music is everywhere; we have more of it, available in more forms, more often, than at any time in human history.” But,

“Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor’s home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical “negative space.” Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.”

He’s essentially saying that music no longer functions as an artistic expression that tries to meaningfully communicate, but as something that simply takes up space, such as the background noise of elevators or transitions on the evening news. It’s the antidote for the awkward silence of elevators. Or worship services, I might add. It has become the soundtrack – the mere background noise – of everyday life, which has caused it to lose its ability to communicate any kind of meaning. Worse, he says,

“We find ourselves as a culture unable to assuage our loneliness except through the ceaseless accompaniment of our everyday actions. In such a world buying a book or a shirt is not merely to acquire a thing, to fill a need; it is, rather, to participate in the forced scripting of our lives according to commercial archetypes that tell us, through the imaginary film score by which we buy, eat, make love, crap, worship, and, eventually, die, not who we are but who we wish we were, who the music tells us we want to be.”

I suppose that he’s suggesting that music is used subversively in order to tell us how to think. In some contexts this is appropriate, such as the act of listening to Martin Sexton or Sufjan Stevens (I’m trendy, I know), who are trying to communicate something meaningful with their lyrics and cadences. But in other contexts, music is used in a subversive way to tell us how to think. For example, the act of listening to Martin Sexton or Sufjan is markedly different from listening to the looped soundtrack at the Gap. Music at the Gap (or Barnes and Noble, or on a radio station, or wherever) is designed to introduce us into a kind of reality where we are (it is hoped) to think about ourselves and behave in a way that will inspire us to purchase something. Music is no longer creative, but one step in a series of many toward consumption.

Silence in corporate worship probably functions in much the same way that Waggoner hopes silence will function in the broader culture. The liturgically-minded among us tend to hope the silence in worship functions in a way that gives respite to busy life and gives a moment for stillness and contemplation. For example, during the times I worhipped at Church of the Servant in Grand Rapids I was appreciative of the few minutes of silence after the sermon because the silence served as a space for contemplating the words I had just heard, and it functioned as a counter-cultural statement against the noise of reality. And the longer we were silent in worship, the less awkward it felt.

At the same time, I wonder if the other half of the problem is that churches use music in their worship in a way that merely contributes to the noise – similar to the way that the Gap uses music to create a reality for its customers. Granted, it’s not really fair to compare the reality of church with the reality of the Gap, since the Gap only wants us to buy something with the hopes that it will make us happy. But the church increasingly uses consumer models with respect to the Gospel: we have a product that will make you happy, etc., and we’ll use the same means as the Gap to make you feel a certain way about it. This approach is lacking for several reasons (isn’t the Gospel more than happiness?), but mostly because it reinforces consumer Christianity.

If we subscribe to the view that worship is a conversation between God and the people of God (which I do), then we can view art in general and music in particular as a way to give meaning and add human creativity to our side of the conversation. Music in worship ought to function differently from music in the Gap or the local elevator – to fill in space, to prevent awkwardness, to make us feel better, to subversively usher the consumer into a new kind of reality. Any other use does little more than thoughtlessly lead us into a reality without showing us why we’re there or giving us the words to articulate it.

Who chooses the church’s music? Not individual congregations, not worship leaders and worship planners, not even denominational hymnal committees anymore. A growing proportion of the music sung in many North American churches is chosen by producers in corporate boardrooms in Nashville who are more interested in marketing and sales than they are in the appropriate liturgical use of music in worship. This doesn’t mean that the music they choose is inherently inferior, or that it can’t function it worship at all. But it does mean that churches will sing less often the kinds of songs that don’t sell well, such as songs of confession or songs that hope for an end to injustice. The church would do well to think more counter-culturally about the way music is chosen for worship, since the current widespread practice of choosing songs we hear on Christian radio seems to reinforce our identities as consumers, not our identity as people made in the image of God.

Waggoner ends his article thus:

“On the level of culture, my hunch is that with the implosion of the CD industry and the (probably coincident) resurgence of so many different kinds of live performance, serving so many different constituencies, we will, not as one mass but rather as a linked set of smaller musical communities, find our way back to a shared musical life. Indeed this is already happening, in every genre of contemporary music, at least in cities and in virtual communities defined by specific musical tastes. What it will mean for the society as a whole, however, for the exurbs, the strip malls, the churches, even the edge of the wilderness (where canned music is increasingly common) is difficult to say; no definitive answer is on the horizon.”

Waggener’s question, “What will it mean for the church?” interests me the most. If he is right, the music of the church will increasingly come from sources other than Nashville (in the same way that MySpace has allowed local bands to bypass corporate music producers), and this solution will probably present a host of new problems to deal with.

Since I can only assume that most readers of this blog (a) share my interest in meteorology, (b) have friends in Belize, Guatemala, or Honduras, and/or (c) are concerned about potentially devastating events wherever they occur, I thought news of Hurricane Felix might be relevant. In addition to forecasts, you might want to check out Jeff Masters’ excellent blog on wunderground.com