I guess it’s ’80s pop week here—more than a little odd for someone who never listened to the stuff at the time. Still, there were a few songs from that era I really liked anyway;“We Didn’t Start the Fire”was one of them, and this was another one.
For those who don’t know,kyrie eleisonmeans “Lord, have mercy.” Many don’t; I’ve seen people write that it means “God go with me,” and I’d always assumed that the songwriter thought that’s what it meant. In fact, though, John Lang (whowrote the lyrics)grew up singing theKyriein an Episcopal church in Phoenix, and knew the meaning of the words. In a lot of ways, that makes the song more interesting, I think; it’s still a prayer for God’s presence as we go through life, but Lang knew when he wrote it that it’s also a prayer for his mercy on that road, which we certainly need, both in the bright days and when our path leads us through “the darkness of the night.”
I appreciate Lang’s almost mystical sense of life in this song; in the context of an ancient Christian prayer, with the imagery of wind and fire which has been used of the Spirit of God going all the way back to the time of Moses, one can certainly understand it to refer to the work of the Spirit in our hearts, and the song as a prayer for his mercy as we seek to follow where he leads us.
My one quarrel here is the third line of the chorus:“Kyrie eleison—where I’m going will you follow?”I don’t think that really fits with the first line (“Kyrie eleison down the road that I must travel”), and taken by itself it gets matters exactly backwards; actually, when we start looking at things that way—”God, I’m going this way; are you coming?”—tends to be when we get into trouble (and thus need his mercy the most, of course). I suspect it was most likely meant to ask, “Are you going with me down this road you’re sending me on?” but that misses the fact that God doesn’tsendus, heleadsus. There have been times when I’ve sung this song, privately, as a prayer, but when I do, I reverse that third line:“where you lead me, I will follow.”That’s the orientation we need to have if we’re seeking to live under the mercy of God; his mercy isn’t simply something to which we appeal when we go wrong, but is in fact the light that guides us to go right.
Kyrie
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie . . .
The wind blows hard against this mountainside,
Across the sea into my soul;
It reaches into where I cannot hide,
Setting my feet upon the road.
My heart is old, it holds my memories;
My body burns, a gemlike flame.
Somewhere between the soul and soft machine
Is where I find myself again.
Chorus:
Kyrie eleison down the road that I must travel; Kyrie eleison through the darkness of the night. Kyrie eleison—where I’m going will you follow? Kyrie eleison on a highway in the light.
When I was young I thought of growing old—
Of what my life would mean to me;
Would I have followed down my chosen road,
Or only waste what I could be?
Courtesy of JibJab, I’ve had this tune stuck in my head for days now; so I decided to post an annotated version. Note: most of the links are Wikipedia, but not all.
Chorus:
We didn’t start the fire—
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning.
We didn’t start the fire—
No, we didn’t light it,
But we tried to fight it.
We didn’t start the fire—
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning.
We didn’t start the fire—
But when we are gone,
It will still go on, and on, and on, and on, and on . . .
“Oh, but you did. You turn on any of my crew, you turn on me. But since that’s a concept you can’t seem to wrap your head around, then you got no place here. You did it to me, Jayne. And that’s a fact.”—Malcolm Reynolds to Jayne Cobb, “Ariel,” Episode 9, FireflyThis is from the crowning scene of perhaps the best of the handful of episodes we got of Firefly, one of the best scenes I’ve ever been fortunate enough to watch on TV. To explain this line to those not familiar with the show: during the episode, during a raid on an Alliance hospital, Jayne tried to sell out Simon and River Tam, the ship’s two fugitive passengers (Simon, a doctor, is also the ship’s medic, and the one who inspired the raid), to the Alliance. Unfortunately for him, the Alliance officials don’t honor the deal and he gets taken as well, at which point he starts fighting to save himself (and the Tams). They make it back to the ship, and Jayne thinks he’s gotten away with his attempted betrayal; but Mal’s too smart for him, resulting in this (note: there are a few errors in the captioning):
(For a transcript of the episode, go here.)I’ve always been struck by two things in this scene. The first is Mal’s statement to Jayne which I’ve quoted above, which is strikingly reminiscent of the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:40 (though Jayne did evil instead of good). The point is of course different, since Mal isn’t (and doesn’t claim to be) God—but it’s related. From Mal’s point of view, it isn’t enough to show loyalty to him alone: you have to be loyal as well to all those to whom he’s committed himself. Any violation of loyalty to any of them—any betrayal of the crew bond—is a betrayal which he takes personally, and which therefore brings inevitable judgment.The other is what saves Jayne: repentance, as evidenced by the stirring of shame. Jayne’s not much of one to be ashamed of anything—if you don’t count his reaction at the end of “Jaynestown,” the show’s seventh episode, this might be the first time in his life he’s felt shame—so this is a significant moment; and at that sign that Jayne is truly repentant, Mal spares his life (though he doesn’t let him out of the airlock right away—perhaps to encourage further self-examination on Jayne’s part). In the face of repentance, mercy triumphs over judgment.
As I said last week, I’m on a bit of a Steve Taylor kick. For this one, I’ll let Taylor’s own words (in the booklet for the boxed set Now the Truth Can Be Told) explain my reason for posting it:
Ah, to have the Bible’s sense of balance.My goal with “A Principled Man” was to write a song that inspired me to live a principled life. The seed came from a “tree motif” in the Book of Psalms: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water . . .” (Psalms 1:1-3)But lest principles become an end unto themselves, we have in Ezekiel the dark side of the tree metaphor: “Therefore, this is what the sovereign Lord says: Because it towered on high, lifting its top above the thick foliage, and because it was proud of its height . . . I cast it aside.” (Ezekiel 31:10-11)This song still inspires me. May it continue to do so for all the right reasons.
What people don’t realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.
In his comments on the song inspired by this quote (video and lyrics below), Steve Taylor wrote,
The cost of discipleship—the ideal of taking up your cross everyday and following Jesus—makes it hard to believe, because Christianity demands things from us that we don’t naturally want to give. In the words of playwright Dennis Potter, “There is, in the end, no such thing as a simple faith.”
This is pure truth, at least as regards Christianity. In the broadest possible sense, believing is easy: everyone believes something, because we have to. We can’t ground our lives on reason alone, because a chain of reasoning requires a starting point; however far back you reason, that starting point recedes still further. We can’t use our reasoning to provide that starting point, because we’d end up with circular reasoning, however great the circle might be. Our reasoning has to begin from ultimate premises which we cannot prove—such as “There is a God,” or “There is no God”—but can only take as faith commitments. Once we’ve done that, we can interrogate those premises, and the conclusions we’ve drawn from them, and see if the whole thing is rationally consistent, if the beliefs we’ve developed are logically coherent with each other and accurately descriptive of the world as we know it; but we cannot remove the necessity of faith undergirding our reasoning. Indeed, even reasoning is in some sense an act of faith—faith in our ability to reason, and in the viability of reason itself. As St. Anselm put it, reason is faith seeking understanding.
That said, while believingsomethingis easy, believing inChristisn’t. Far from it, in fact. And this isn’t for the reasons atheists and others want to advance, about the problem of evil and the problem of miracles and suchlike; “scientific” objections like the latter are ultimately just assertions (no, sciencehasn’tdisproved miracles, you just want to believe it has), while philosophical and existential objections ultimately tell against atheists just as much as Christians. (If you think evil is a problem for Christians, just stop and consider the problem it poses for atheists. It’sa different kind of problem, but no less real for all that.) I’ve known people whose decision to believe in Christ rested on logical argument, but very few; and I’ve never known anyone who was actually driven to atheism by reason. (Thus the philosopher Edward Tingley, comparing modern atheists unfavorably to Pascal,writes, “Agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is.”) Rather, in my experience, the main reason people choose not to believe in Christ is because they don’t want to. As Chesterton wryly observed,
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.
The reason for this is that the Christian faith isn’t designed to meet our “felt needs”; it isn’t, as so many atheists smugly assume, just a matter of believing what we want to believe. As Flannery O’Connor put it, it isn’t a big warm electric blanket, it’s the cross—and we don’t particularly want the cross. We don’t particularly want a God whocalls usto deny ourselves and take up our cross (which, you remember, was an implement designed to torture people to death) and then has the gall tosay, “My yoke is well-fitted and my burden is light.” We can’t get to the point where we want that until we realize that our needs go much, much deeper than what we feel on the surface; we can’t get to that point until we realize that the burden of taking up our cross is in fact light compared to the burden of our sin, and that Jesus’ yoke is indeed well-fitted, not to doing what wewantto do, but to doing what weneedto do. Getting there, however, isn’t easy; it’s far easier to turn aside and believe something else instead.
And before you start to object that the behavior of many Christians is another major reason why people turn away from faith, let me say that that’s just another example of the same problem: many of us in the church don’t want the cross either. Even for many within the church, it’s harder to believe than not to, and so it’s all too easy for us to choose not to. Instead, we find something else to believe in—a structure of behavioral rules, a set of political commitments, a system of how-tos for “the life you’ve always wanted”—and call that Christianity instead. The thing is, that kind of belief can build organizations, even big ones, and it can attract followers, even committed ones, and it can do a lot of things that impress this world—but what it can’t do is raise Christians.It takes a church to raise a Christian, and specifically, it takes a church that’s trying to be the church; and churches that take those kinds of approaches are trying to be something else. They are, essentially, counterfeit churches practicing counterfeit Christianity—and, in the process, stifling people who should be trading in slavery to sin for freedom in Christ, so that they wind upescaping one moldmerely to be squeezed into another. Follow that out too far and you wind up with the kind of thingTaylor satirizedwhen he wrote,
So now I see the whole design;
My church is an assembly line.
The parts are there—I’m feeling fine!
I want to be a clone!
You also wind up with the kind of church, and the kind of church member, that turns people away from Christianity, without those people ever realizing that it isn’t reallyChristianitythey’re rejecting.
The bottom line here is that true Christian faith is not just intellectual assent to a series of propositions, nor is it a commitment to pursue what we consider to be good and helpful behaviors (though in some sense, both of those are involved): true Christian faith is a belief in aPerson, and a commitment tofollowthat Personwhereverhe might lead us. To borrow from the old story about theGreat Blondin, it’s not just a matter of agreeing that if we get in the wheelbarrow, he’ll be able to push us safely across his tightrope over Niagara Falls—it’s a matter of actually getting in the wheelbarrow and hanging on. It’s a whole-life commitment, giving everything we have to follow Jesus.
The great offense of the Christian life to us is that it’s not about us at all—it’s not about our goals, our desires, our felt needs, and how to get what we consider to be “our best life now”; it’s not about making us better able to go out and be our best selves, so that we can take the credit for what wonderful people we are. Rather, it’s about setting all that aside and casting ourselves on Jesus, living lives of radical abandonment to the grace of God, letting him have all the glory for what he does in and through us—and letting him decide what exactly that will be, and where, and when, and how. This is the only way to real life, but it isn’t easy; in fact, O’Connor and Taylor are right: it’s harder to believe than not to.
Harder to Believe than Not to
Nothing is colder than the winds of change
Where the chill numbs the dreamer till a shadow remains;
Among the ruins lies your tortured soul—
Was it lost there, or did your will surrender control?
Chorus:
Shivering with doubts that were left unattended,
So you toss away the cloak that you should have mended.
Don’t you know by now why the chosen are few?
It’s harder to believe than not to—
Harder to believe than not to.
It was a confidence that got you by,
When you knew you believed it, but you didn’t know why.
No one imagines it will come to this,
But it gets so hard when people don’t want to listen.
Chorus
Some stay paralyzed until they succumb;
Others do what they feel, but their senses are numb.
Some get trampled by the pious throng—
Still, they limp along.
Are you sturdy enough to move to the front?
Is it nods of approval or the truth that you want?
And if they call it a crutch, then you walk with pride;
Your accusers have always been afraid to go outside.
They shiver with doubts that were left unattended,
Then they toss away the cloak that they should have mended.
You know by now why the chosen are few:
It’s harder to believe than not to.
This might be from a beer company, but it’s still right on. I grew up around the Navy, so I know our military’s far from perfect, but still: we should be proud of those who served, and those who are serving now; we as a nation owe them far more than we could ever repay, and we should never forget that.
One of my very favorite songwriters is the Scottish folksinger Dougie MacLean; this isn’t his best-known song by any means (that would be “Caledonia”), but I think it’s the one I like best. This particular version benefits from the wonderful Kathy Mattea on backup vocals—they’re friends, and it was recorded during a joint studio session. (I’d wanted to post another video from the same session as well, of Mattea singing lead on Dougie’s song “Ready for the Storm,” but embedding is disabled on that one.)Turning Away
I’ll chase the light at four o’clock Until I glow, until I know I’m draped in color like the trees; It’s beautiful to me.
I stare into the setting sun On 35, until I find A way to let it seep into my soul; It’s beautiful to me.But You call me with a light more bright than anything I’ve ever seen—
Flash for a million miles or more Until what is dead is swallowed by life; Flash for a million miles or more Until my whole life is clothed in eternal light.
Tonight the stars are whispering A mystery while we sleep— It’s more than just another wish for peace; It’s beautiful to me.But You call me with a light more bright than anything I’ve ever seen—
Chorus
Bridge In a moment we’ll all be changed, And this dim reflection will fade away Compared to the light that You offer us And the glory we’ll see on Your face. You’re beautiful to me; You’re beautiful to me.
Sixth Street, sun is going down; Pavement’s cool underneath. A vagrant, so they say in town; Seems like mercy can’t compete.
Sleeping in a doorway Near the docks of Oyster Bay. Thirteen years of carrying shame, Never hearing the voice of the One who took his blame. A whisper— He raised his head . . .
Surrendered out, do you believe, Are you ready to ride the train? Abandoned not by love, you’ll see, If you’re ready to ride.
A one-piece paper suitcase; A past whose future was foretold. A life not made for dying; Instead the mystery began to unfold. Unfolding— He raised his head . . .
Chorus
Bridge Born into despair an orphan child— Will You care for me? And like the train that saved me, Adopted in by love eternally.
Opening His arms, He wants you rich, you poor, you black, you white; Receive His love that runs so deep and high and long and wide.
My thanks to Bill for directing my attention to this song; he posted the video and got the song stuck in my head, so I went out and bought the CD (which was dirt cheap on SecondSpin, at least). I’ve been thinking about the lyrics off and on ever since. It’s not the greatest lyric I’ve ever run across (it seems to me the bridge gets a little muddled for a moment), but I love the song’s central image, which I think the video captures quite well. In particular, I think there are two things this lyric gets at which we too often forget.One, we are the vagrant in the face of God’s mercy and grace; as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, we are the beggars at the foot of God’s door. We none of us earn our way to God; we can only accept his unearned (and too often unwelcome) invitation. By mercy and that alone we live.Two, God’s invitation to us isn’t to some private little one-on-one thing, it’s to ride the train. When you get on the train, you share the journey with whoever else is on there, and the train goes where it’s going to go; you have no control over where it’s going—that was determined by the one who set the route for the rails—or who your companions are. You’re all in the journey together; your only choice is to take it or get off. It seems to me that’s a wonderful metaphor for the life of faith. It’s not like driving our own car, because we don’t have the freedom to pick the route or set our own speed—God does that—or to make the journey on our own, because we become fellow travelers with the rest of the people of God, whether we always appreciate that fact or not. The train, the church, is going, God knows who and where and why and how fast, and he simply invites us to climb aboard and take our part in what he already has in process.”The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace . . .”
