While singing in church during our service on Sunday, it hit me that there’s is a very insidious vein in a lot of modern worship these days, beyond the shallow theology, the ‘Jesus is my girlfriend’ stuff, and the six million chorus repeats without even a key change.
It is the pronoun, “I.”
I think something just broke in me on Sunday. I was singing a song about how awesome God is, focusing on being part of the corporate acknowledgment of his sheer Bigness, that I almost didn’t notice it. But, almost every time, there was a line (near the end/chorus) that brought it back to it being about us – no, that’s not right – me. I think I would be okay if it were we/us/let us, because then it is about the church in general in corporate communion with God. But nooo, it has to be about me.
Those that know me well, know that I admire and respect C.S. Lewis’ ideas about the Christian life, and one of my absolute favourites is that the opposite of selfishness is forgetting about yourself entirely – the removal of the ‘I’ pronoun. To correctly get on the road of selflessness and humility is to find one’s identity in God so much that you forget you are you. And as Lewis says, the great paradox of it all is that is when you become truly your unique self.
But what I am finding is, naturally, the opposite. By emphasizing our individuality now, we become drones to the hive, cogs to the praise-making machine. I’d like this to change.
So let’s just take all the ‘I’s out of our worship music for awhile, at least. Ok Church?
WK
This entry was written by , posted on October 26, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under Church and tagged Church, Music, worship. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I saw “Where the Wild Things Are” tonight with Christine.
First off, let me say that I’ve been waiting for this movie for a long time. Ever since I saw the poster some 10 months ago, I knew that I was going to see this movie. I was getting so pumped about it that I started getting scared that I was hyping myself up for it too much. Boy, was I wrong on that one.
The heart of this story, like Maurice Sendak’s original picture book, is all about the feelings of an angry, wild kid who just wants to be loved. These feelings scare him, and he recoils once he sees them come out of him. While the book is (obviously) more subdued and subtle, the movie fleshes these childhood realities out in a fantastic way.
While I can’t talk for anyone else, I saw myself in Max. I remember those childhood emotions of fear, anger, and loneliness. I was still dealing with these memories when I decided to face down my own monsters in counselling years later. It’s hard being a kid who feels like an outcast. Luckily, like Max, I did (and do) have family who loved me very much.
Go see this movie. I don’t often try to feed the machine like this, but this is culture-making at its finest. This movie doesn’t talk down to kids, it talks to them face to face and let’s them know about the consequences of your actions, as well as the redemptive power of hope and love.
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This entry was written by , posted on October 25, 2009 at 11:02 pm, filed under Culture, Life, Uncategorized and tagged childhood, movies. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.