Church Music

by Bob Millard

Where is the Hymn for Job?

I don't know about you, but I'm stressed. My normal workday includes paperwork with breakfast, planning during lunch, and grading papers over dinner. Because I'm a new teacher, and dedicated, my day runs around 11- 12 hours, and I'm fairly efficient.

My profession is underpaid, overworked, and vulnerable to crackpots, politics, rumors and lies. We are also grossly over-regulated and "held accountable" via a battery of constantly changing assessments, ever-tightening policies, and rising benchmarks. Most evidence tells us the quality of our students' developing minds are less important than "hitting the quarterly numbers."

Stress - can I get an "Amen!" out there? I thought so.

It's a wonder everyone over 25 isn't deeply depressed. Medical research cited in a recent issue of Newsweek suggests that many more of us suffer at least situational depression, than are diagnosed and treated.

If there ever was a guy in scripture who had reason to curl up in the fetal position and surrender to the dark gray numbness it was Job. Yet his friends only spoke nostrums and gave lousy advice. There are numerous Psalms about King David and his troubles, but at least we can make sense of their origins.

Where are the psalms for the Jobs of the world? What about the people that lack his stamina and strength? Great blows and losses can be overwhelming, and I, for one, am not ready to contend with God Almighty, much less stand up to the world shaking chastisement of Yahweh.

I've participated in some powerfully services for healing and wholeness, with meaningful litany, communal prayer and the quiet laying on of hands. But I have found no music in church worship repertoire for the alienated, the stressed out, the mentally and emotionally exhausted.

Proud as we are of our Scottish Dissenters' heritage, we are a church of emotional reserve, everything in decent order. Life is not particularly orderly. Our beloved bagpipes and side drums play straight on the beat in an almost martial manner. Their solid drone and keening melodies reflect denominational strengths of persistence, precedent, and a willingness to go slow, building consensus. I think we are often seen as a ministry of the well mannered and the highly educated.

Being afflicted with an advanced degree myself, I'm grateful to have such a denomination in which to worship. Thinking is a key engine in the quest for the meaning of God's saving miracle in Christ Jesus in a rapidly changing world.

But I am not a post-Post-Modern man. These are merely times in which I live. I am little different from my rural Baptist Grandma Millard, or my rough-hewn German Lutheran Grandfather Schwant in my need for something to hang on to in the hard times life hands us all sooner or later.

Both those forbearers were born in the late 18th century and grew up in places largely isolated from the revolution of electricity.

Grandma Millard lost a baby to the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Grandpa Schwant was shorn of his prairie farm by the plague of grasshoppers that set stage for the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. It was the Schwant's turn to lose an eldest son in combat during WWII.

I was separated from wife and family only a few days before our beloved Second Presbyterian sanctuary burned to the ground. Unable to sleep in strange surroundings, absent the reassuring sound of loved ones sleep-breathing, I got up and made coffee in the grim pre-dawn darkness.

I needed something to hang on to, some sense of a solid foundation. So I called upon God. Hot scalding tears ran down my cheeks as I prayed earnestly for some sign to show me where my life was headed.

At about 4:30 I turned on the television and there before my unbelieving eyes was a live newscast of the church building engulfed in flames. I looked to the ceiling and mumbled, too dumbfounded for irony, "Tell me that's not my sign."\

As things turned out, it was.

Worship is a group event. Each person's sorrow is his or her own.

I can't imagine formal church music addressing that successfully. That's the realm of so-called secular music, if anything in God's creation can truly be said to exist with no connection to the Creator.

For my generation the secular songs of balm and understanding have included Pete Seeger's adaptation from Ecclesiastes, "Turn, Turn, Turn." But there are also John Lennon's "In My Life," and Simon and Garfunkle's "Old Friends," among others.

Author Kurt Vonnegut was not a church going man, though he was as committed to truth and social justice as any Presbyterian I know. In 2002 Vonnegut confessed, "Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference"

We make hymnals, but we did not invent music as a gift to God. God gave it to us through the twin marvels of the human ear and imagination.

Even in the deepest personal pain, try to remember that, and "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." Especially the blessing of music.