Dogmatism and Grace

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning”  — Aaron Copland

From time to time this blog will degenerate in discussing music. Part of this is just that fact that I love music and want to talk about it. But part of it is that I believe that music has an unparalleled ability to affect the way people experience and think about the world. To walk unashamedly into a cliché – music is philosophy for the masses.

Put it this way, both Plato’s Symposium and Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ have the ability to shape people’s views about relationship and love; both Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and The Smiths’s ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’ can set a person’s orientation in thinking about hope, death and the afterlife. I suspect that both can do so as powerfully as one another, and in both cases it is much easier for the latter to do so. For Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to affect your thinking on religious matters you have to read a difficult book from the 1790s, probably learn some background details about Kant, German Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, and enter into a critical reading of the text, considering its premises and analysing its arguments. For The Smiths to achieve a similar result, you just have to listen to the (awesome) 3-minute track a few times. Music does not require the deliberate act of reading and scrutinizing a difficult text and its affect is often gradual and unnoticed.

All this is a preamble, and something of a justification, for saying that I think music can play a large part in shaping us and deserves to be thought about. Lately, this song has struck me…

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule

I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black

And I held my tongue as she told me, “Son,

Fear is the heart of love,” so I never went back.

– ‘I Will Follow You into the Dark’ by Death Cab for Cutie (2005)

A couple of Christian friends of mine don’t like this song – taking issue with the shallow, shapeless hope for eternity which runs through the song, and the fact that the band is practically synonymous with The O.C. But it grabs my attention. I think the song is about the deep consolation of friendship and commitment in the face of uncertainty and drastic change, told through promises made from one atheist to another to follow the other into the dark after death, since neither of them will be going to heaven or hell. It subtly blends a romantic rejection of imposed norms with a simple and powerful affirmation of the strength and peace which a loving companion can offer.

The writer, Benjamin Gibbard, recounts a memory from his teenage years when he was repelled by Christianity. A nun dressed in black gave him a good whack on the knuckles for believing the wrong thing, and told him to believe something which sounded utterly unintelligible to him and ran against his deep desire for a loving relationship. This is a tragic scene to me and reminds me of the importance of attempting to communicate about Christianity in a language which makes sense to other people, which speaks to their humanity, and in a way that is soaked in the kind of grace, acceptance, love and invitation to security which Gibbard ended up celebrating as an alternative to Christianity. What if a Christian had told Gibbard about the kind of love they know, the energy they are filled with, and the peace they are assured of in a language which he found intelligible, and in a way which spoke to his deepest human longings which made it hard to disbelieve?

This almost sounds as though I am saying, ‘What if some Christian had been crafty and tricked the young Gibbard into being a Christian!’ I’m not – the scene just makes me sad, and I wonder how many people who now find Christianity strange, cold and a little offensive had a similar moment. I suspect many first gave up on Christianity after an experience which they felt crushed their humanity, hurt them, and asked them to check their brain at the door.