In need of better songs….

We all sing. In terms of musicality some of us sing well, some not so well. But much more important than the tunefulness of the melody is the meaning of what we sing. Admittedly this is apparently contradicted by the lyrics of many of the most popular songs. I am often bemused by the words folk are happy to belt out at the top of their voices, even on those occasions when I actually understand the words that are being used. The aim of song writers often seems to be to provide a diverting overall sound rather than any sense or message. There will be the odd half phrase perhaps hinting at what a song is “about”. On that basis one might be able to classify it as happy or sad, or whether it’s about life or love or loss. But meaning and message are often lost among slush and filler. And some songs seem to be “about” nothing. There are interesting exceptions.

In this city (Liverpool) there is a particular song sung as an anthem that has taken on a particular significance. Collectively we (if I might number myself among the Scousers) have become known for it. “You’ll never walk alone” is a show tune from Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel”. The actual words are, largely, nonsense. If taken as advice on what to do in a given set of circumstances (“When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high”), they would lead to disaster or at the very least stinging eyes and a severe headache from flying debris. And some of them are flat wrong and not true to life (“At the end of the storm, There’s a golden sky, And the sweet silver song of a lark”). At the end of some of life’s storms it often seems that there’s more storm. And usually the larks have more sense than to hang about; rather than singing sweetly they swiftly relocate to sing elsewhere. But we all innately understand metaphor, and where a lyric chimes with our hopes we suspend our disbelief. When sung by thousands of Scousers at Anfield, in the context of remembered disasters like Hillsborough, with their attendant multiple injustices, the song takes wing and does seem to make sense after all. Then the sound of singing fades, and we’re left with what? Well, not a lot. Perhaps a warm fuzzy feeling. But this too doesn’t last. How we need better songs.

Last week, Week 3 of the Keswick Convention, in the morning Bible readings Vaughan Roberts was considering just such songs. They are the collection of 150 songs nestling in the middle of the Old Testament, the Psalms. But no random collection this. Like every other book making up the Bible, these particular songs were not just thrown together. Although they were accumulated over a long period of time, the book of Psalms has a structure and trajectory;  as VR put it “momentum builds up”. So, day by day we traced the pattern that leads from the sweeping introduction of Psalms 1 and 2, through the succeeding books, from struggle and lament, via hope to the praise due to the God of covenant promises, whose individual, global and cosmic purposes will not be thwarted. Here are the better songs we need. Songs worth singing. And VR drew our attention to the effect of singing these songs.

The analogy he used to illustrate his point was the scene in "Casablanca" when Victor (the hero unless you’re a big Bogart fan), outraged by a bunch of Nazi officers singing their Nazi songs, tells the band to strike up the Marseillaise. Up to that point the non-Nazi denizens at Rick’s had looked weak and befuddled, compared to the apparent strength and confidence of their new overlords. But led by Victor the crowd picks up the words of the song of their homeland. Lungs fill, backs straighten and soon tears flow with hope of better days to come.  That is the effect of such songs (partly captured by “You’ll never walk alone” too). But there were no guarantees that this hope would not be crushed.

Not so those songs in the Psalms, even when sung by exiles. For the whole of creation has a goal set for it and Heaven’s King will one day be vindicated. Those who take refuge in Him will be saved and safe. This state of affairs has never appeared believable to fallen humanity, so taken with themselves and singing competing songs. The hope in Psalms appeared even less believable when the long-promised King was executed on a Roman cross. And of course if that was the end of the story, then these songs too would simply be about pious but ultimately frustrated hope, with no real purchase on reality. But it was this King who could not be held by death, and who was raised to demonstrate the inexorable progress of His Kingdom. Even so, at the time it didn’t look much like progress. The ancient world was not impressed. After all, how can a crucified God be any kind of God at all? And yet the Psalm of the sufferer (Ps 22) becomes the Psalm of the Sovereign (Ps 24). And although what is ancient is past (obviously), the good news of Jesus the still-coming king, continues to spread. His songs continue to be sung.

To be reminded of better songs at Keswick was valuable and refreshing (and the singing was good too). The need for others to learn these better songs has been amply demonstrated by the riots that broke out in the UK a week ago and appear to be continuing. The rioters have their songs of course, songs of hostility and hatred. These, it turns out, are also old songs. But they have never achieved anything except to provide an accompaniment to destruction and heartache.

I know which songs I’d rather sing.

Don’t be duped (or even gooped….)

I may have invented a new word. As far as I can tell there is currently no verb “to goop”. However, goop does exist as both a common and proper noun. In the dictionary “goop” is defined as a sludge or slimy concoction. “Goop” (capital G) is a completely different box of frogs. It started off as a newsletter, authored by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow. It has since become a money-spinning “lifestyle brand”, and most recently, in the form of “The Goop Lab”, a 6-part Netflix “documentary” series. There is of course the obligatory website, a cursory look at which suggests that Goop is primarily a shop window for expensive cardigans and handbags, quack remedies and lifestyle hacks. To be fair, you’ll find various disclaimers on the website, and in Netflix series, that those behind Goop are not making medical claims. However, if people don’t buy their stuff they don’t make any money, so I suspect the hope is that the disclaimers will be quickly passed over and forgotten as you move on to various opportunities to part with your cash. I confess I’m not fashionable and I’m tight with my cash, so Goop wasn’t really on my radar. That is until the boss of the NHS mentioned it in a recent speech.  

Sir Simon Stevens is the Chief Executive of the National Health Service in England. He is clearly frustrated by health “fake news” and more importantly its effects. Political fake news is bad enough. And you could argue that it has led to a number of alarming consequences in recent years. But health fake news can have fatal consequences. Essentially his charge was that Goop, particularly with the reach given it by Netflix, was spreading health fake news widely and quickly.  In his remarks he grouped Goop with snake oil salesmen and anti-vaxers. It was, in his view, not a source of useful, health-related information. Nor was it providing health-related but basically harmless entertainment.

In response, beyond the widely reported and relatively anodyne statements put out by Goop directly, Gwyneth herself went on the record to reject this criticism. She feels it is unfair primarily because she claims that Goop doesn’t give health advice at all. And it might be that that the professionals are just over-reacting to bit of entertaining fluff, with the expected sniffiness of professionals and “experts”. One Guardian columnist while agreeing with what Stevens had said, reckoned there wasn’t too much to be concerned about. The public were smart enough to work out that Goop was an over-priced, modern snake oil operation. “It’s just a wellness brand – expecting it to hold toscientific/medical criteria is like expecting a lip gloss to do a handstand.” I’m not sure I get the allusion, but you get the idea.

So what about Gwyneth’s claims that advice isn’t being issued and scientific claims are not being made? On the Goop UK site, under the “About” tab, it’s not too difficult to find language that at least drops heavy hints that both scientific and medical thinking are central to Goop’s operations. Under “Wellness” we read “We have a tightly edited wellness shop of products vetted for efficacy by our in-house research scientists, and we’ve also created five vitamin and supplement protocols with doctors to cover all the bases.” (emphasis mine). And as for the Netflix series, it is called the Goop lab. I accept that on one level this all falls short of clinical advice and scientific claims. But at the very least there is a particular kind of signalling going on. It strikes me that they want a veneer of intelectual respectability, and think this comes from signalling the involvement of a degree of scientific and medical competence.

This isn’t just me being over sensitive (I am after all a scientist, and I do clinical research). Or if it is, I’m not alone. Dominic Pimenta, a cardiologist writing in the Independent put it this way:  “The problem is that the Goop“lab”  gives itself the appearance of scientific rigour, while in fact offering pseudoscientific laziness: they cite“trials and experiments” without evaluating them, and talk to “practitioners and doctors” without critiquing their conflicts of interest (of course the largest conflict of interest on the show is Goop's, a billion-dollar brand selling, among other things, alternative health products).” It appears Gwyneth and her chums want the respectability that comes from hinting that they are taking a scientific and responsible approach, without doing any of the hard (and expensive) work that this entails. This would after all impact on the bottom line.

Of course part of the problem is that we don’t really need Goop to tell us how to be well at all. We know what leads to wellness, and it is not expensively packaged supplements, coffee enemas, and various beads and balls stuck in unmentionable places. It’s simple, boring stuff like a diet with plenty of fresh fruit and veg, a reasonable amount of exercise and as much sleep as you need. Accompany these with a degree of intellectual stimulation (analogue or digital) and engagement, and a network of meaningful human relationships and psychologically you’ll probably be the right side of fine. None of this costs a fortune or need involve Goop or any other website.

Mind you, this will only keep you in temporal (and therefore temporary) good nick. Without wanting to sound deliberately preachy (which of course means I am about to), while these simple measures will keep us in good physical and psychological health, they won’t ultimately satisfy our most basic need. At the beginning of his “Confessions” Augustine of Hippo pointed out that “..our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” It’s that restlessness that Goop and much else in modern life seeks to address or at least distract us from. Inevitably it fails.

Don’t be duped. To quote the Psalmist: “For he satisfies the longing soul.” (Psalm 107:9). The "he" in this case is of course the God who created and sustains us (whether we recognise it or not).

Don't ask me how I'm feeling

Full disclosure – I’m a Scot. We have a reputation for being a dour, miserable lot. Some argue that this explains why we took to Calvinism so enthusiastically. Mind you, proving the direction of the causality (were we Calvinists because we were dour, or dour because we were Calvinists?) is probably impossible. This is all a bit unfair to both Scots and Calvinists. However, as it is emotion I'm about to discuss, I thought I had better point out I might be accused of having a problem with it!

In contemporary culture, emotion is important. We’re told to read it, explore it, own it, express it. Not to do these things is to be repressed. We don’t just need intelligence, we need emotional intelligence. How I feel is what really matters, and trumps almost everything else. Even in science, those interested in cold cognition are increasingly interested in emotion (or its proxies). How we feel is as cool a subject of study as how we think. Not all emotion is good of course. There are good and bad emotions, and the aim of modern life is to maximise the good and minimise the bad. Happiness good, sadness bad. Guilt bad, the satisfaction that flows from being self-justified, good. The “right sort” of emotional state is an objective for life. It’s healthy to pursue feeling good.

So it might be argued that it is just as well that there are churches that seem to focus on meeting this need to feel good. A recent article on the BBC website (“Hillsong: A church with rock concerts and 2m followers”; 13^th August) left me feeling that I needed to think about emotion. It ended with a quote from a young man who, for various reasons, had left Hillsong. He clearly still felt warmly towards. He was quoted as saying: 

“The music is so beautiful and uplifting and it makes you feel better. I don't think there's anything in the Bible that says we can't feel good.”

If you’ve never heard of Hillsong, it’s worth knowing that it is a rapidly growing group of churches, originating in Australia. It is perhaps best known for its music, and it has given to the church at large songs that are probably now sung somewhere every Sunday (you’ll find lots of examples on YouTube). The music and vibe attracts a mainly young audience to its large weekly gatherings, with stadium-sized conferences running more occasionally. Hillsong’s weekly live audience runs into the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), with many more watching and listening online.

The thing about music, particularly well written and well played music, is that it is a brilliant way to induce a mood, evoke an emotion, create an atmosphere. And I don’t have any problem with that. I like music, of all sorts (and play music of some sorts). It’s clearly important in church too. Christians have always sung together, taking much of their early material from the Psalms in the Old Testament, Psalms which themselves had been sung for millennia by Israel. Some of this singing is sad and poignant. But much of it is joyful and uplifting. Indeed this upbeat note is probably where the balance lies. After all, the instruction in Psalm 100 v 1 is to make a joyful noise, not a mournful one. And in the New Testament the instruction is to sing out of thankfulness; I’m assuming that this means it will be will be on the up side rather than the down. And I don't really see a problem if this really does help us feel better. So in one sense Hillsong aren’t really innovators in giving church music a key, upbeat role. But here is my problem: don’t we need something beyond feeling better, feeling good? 

Singing, particularly singing together, is powerful. But powerful enough? Maybe it would be a good idea to know why  we’re singing, and to know why we're singing what you're singing. Singing, and the feel-good factor that it can engender, doesn’t ever seem to be the primary objective in Scripture. There is nothing in the Bible that says we can't feel good. But there's lots in the Bible that suggest there are things that need attention before we get to feel good. Maybe if simply feeling good is our objective, we're missing something important. Because when singing to feel good becomes the objective, the song is all that there is. Maybe that's when the song becomes hollowed out, and becomes less than it could be. 

Something else of interest recently happened, this time among the ranks of Hillsong musicians. One of their more accomplished writers and performers decided that Christianity just may not cut it for him anymore. Posting on Instagram (since removed, but picked up by others), among other things he wrote:

“This is a soapbox moment so here I go … How many preachers fall? Many. No one talks about it. How many miracles happen. Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send four billion people to a place, all ‘coz they don’t believe? No one talks about it. Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet—they can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people. But it’s not for me.” (quoted more extensively  here)

There’s a familiarity about this; these are issues that have been, and are, discussed, widely. They are questions that have answers. The fallibility of Christian leaders is well known and often reported (sometimes gleefully); there are websites and blogs dedicated to it. But then who was he following, or being encouraged to follow? We’re all fallible, and we all fail. That’s why the Gospel focuses not on a man, but on Jesus (who while a man, was also God). The role and reality (or otherwise) of the miraculous is another often talked about subject (some Christians seem to talk about nothing else). But miracles in the Bible, are relatively rare and usually serve a particular purpose. And that purpose is rarely evidential. Contradictions? While the claim is often made that the Bible is "full" of them, it has consistently failed to stand up to scrutiny.  The problem of suffering is a key, important and difficult issue for many, but hardly a new one. He also says: "Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion.” I admit I’m not entirely sure what this even means. But a cursory read of this blog (and much more besides) will show that science is no competitor to faith, at least not the kind of faith the Bible talks about. So what’s going on?

Could it be a simple as this: if the music’s all you’ve got, then when the music stops you’re in big trouble. If all you have is a good feeling, an uplifted mood, based on feel-good songs, this will be a  fragile and temporary state of affairs. It will not be enough to effect a fundamental change in life-direction; it will not stand the test of time, nor stand up to a skeptical and hostile culture. Maybe, after all, life is not primarily about how we feel. It has to come back to what we know. It is true that the philosophically sophisticated puritan theologian Johnathan Edwards said: “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections". But the same Psalmist who tells us to make a joyful noise, immediately sings: “Know that the Lord, he is God” (Ps 100:3). Scripture doesn't make the sort of rigid distinction between feeling and knowing that we have tended to in Western culture. Throughout Scripture knowing and feeling are linked and are not two rigid and separate categories. So all knowing and no feeling is no great improvement on all feeling and no knowing.

But it does seem to be clear that feeling (and singing) need a proper foundation. They need to spring from right knowing. To focus only on how we feel is to focus on the wrong thing, to have things the wrong way round. If we make how we feel our primary objective, we short-change ourselves. So, as Alistair Begg said once, “Don’task me how I feel, ask me what I know”. He, incidentally, is also a Scot.