Requiem

Most of the time I don’t like contemporary Christian music. You know the kind I’m talking about – the upbeat, unwaveringly positive, with a beat that’s stuck in the 80’s kind of music.

I’ve especially been having a hard time with contemporary worship music since my mom’s stroke. I feel fake every time I sing along, with lyrics about the good and the beautiful and the whole – my life just doesn’t feel like that. Where are the songs about how unbalanced and broken life can be? Where are the cries to God for mercy?

“It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented…. It is my judgment that this action of the church is less a defiance guided by faith and founded in the good news, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life.” 

            --- Walter Brueggemann, Spirituality of the Psalms, p. 26 - 27

I can’t deny or deceive myself into thinking that things are all sunshine and rainbows. I can’t pretend that my life isn’t disoriented. I need music, sermons, anything that speaks to a “life that is savagely marked by incoherence, a loss of balance, and unrelieved asymmetry.” (p. 26) I know I’m not the only one who feels it – just read Psalm 130.

My friend suggested I should listen to David Crowder Band’s new album, Give Us Rest or (a requiem mass in C [the happiest of all keys]). (Translation: a mass for the dead.) For the first time in a long time, I feel like singing along to contemporary Christian songs. Or at least I feel like playing it over and over and over again as I soak in the music.