The Swelling Year: Watch this space

Having finished my Lent Poems project and finding the challenge of regular, disciplined writing to be of great value, I am now embarking on a more serious challenge, one which will take me a bit over a year to complete. You can read about it here at The Consolations of Writing, where you can also find what I have written so far. It'll be an unusual and difficult project so please feel free to cheer me along and offer thoughts or encouragement along the way as you see fit!

A Year of Writing Liturgically: a project in the making

The Hymn Revolution

You may or may not be aware, but hymns are back. This has been the case in the USA for a while, what with Indelible Grace Music, Red Mountain Music, Sojourn and, most recently, Page CXVI hitting the Christian music scene, along with the various Mars Hill Seattle bands who have helped resurrect "Jesus Paid It All", "What Wondrous Love Is This" and various other hymns which are now standards in churches across the English-speaking world.

Now, the return of hymns to worship services is one thing. Given that the shift has occurred mostly, perhaps exclusively, in evangelical churches, it is not so surprising that this should have happened. Hymns typically had more theologically solid lyrics than much of what has been sung in churches for the last couple of decades, and so a rediscovery of Isaac Watts, John Newton, William Cowper and Charles Wesley, among others, is really only to be expected in churches eager to boost the theology of their worship music. What makes bands like Sojourn so unique is the fact that, as well as helping get hymns back on the church-singing map (Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky is one of the leaders in the movement), they use their studio releases to help turn hymns into a credible musical genre for the twenty-first century.

Does that sound impossible to you? If so, it may seem highly unlikely that two nights ago a group of young Christian guys from Melbourne would have gathered on the stage of the Gershwin Room at the Espy Hotel in St Kilda to play, almost exclusively, eighteenth and nineteenth century hymns revitalised as swirling sixties rock songs. They call themselves The Anti-Fall Movement, a name that has unintentional echoes of now defunct hard-core band Against the Fall, but it would be wrong to think that they in any way resemble the latter band. Their SoundCloud page describes their music as "Gospel Blues Stadium Rock" and this, strange a combination though it might seem, captures their sound quite aptly.

Thursday night saw the launch of their debut album, "Away My Needless Fears", named after the Charles Wesley hymn which concludes the twelve-track album. Aside from Wesley, most of the hymn-writers are unknown today, and only two of the hymns played, "Green Hill" ("There Is a Green Hill Far Away") and "My Life Flows On" (more commonly known as "How Can I Keep From Singing?"), were familiar to me before I heard the album. In this respect, The Anti-Fall Movement stick fairly wisely to the same ploy used by bands like Red Mountain Music and Sojourn - in reviving now-unknown hymns, they avoid the awkwardness of trying to make well-known hymns seem new. (Bands like Page CXVI and King's Kaleidoscope manage fairly well, but it's still a challenging task. Think, for instance, of how the otherwise excellent Indelible Grace Music struggled to make Wesley's "Amazing Love" sound any different to the million other versions out there. And the next band to take on "Come Thou Fount" may as well give up the quest for originality before they even begin.)

In this regard, The Anti-Fall Movement are probably one of the most successful bands in seamlessly shifting hymns into their new form. Front-men Peter Carolane and Paul Davies are such slick song-writers, and so in love with the style they are working in, that the songs sound utterly assured in their new incarnations. In some cases - "When We Cannot See", "Take Them All", "The River" - it's hard to believe that they themselves did not write everything, lyrics and all (excluding, that is, the occasional "thee" or archaisms such as "it is not meet that we should fear"). The band also made the very wise choice of releasing the album on vinyl (it cost only $10 extra on entry to get both a record and CD of the album), a touch which is both in keeping with the retro-charm of the whole enterprise and also a completely sensible move artistically: there is a wonderful warmth to every track that can only fully be captured on vinyl. In the case of most tracks, listening to it on vinyl feels suspiciously like discovering a 60s classic that you never knew existed. I suspect that may have been their thinking.

Knowing most of the members of the band, I'm not without bias. But then I'm also a fan of what we might call the New Hymns Movement (a movement which, interestingly, the Anti-Fall guys seem largely unaware exists; Paul expressed surprise to me when I mentioned to him last year that I knew a few other bands that did something similar). Yet once you've heard enough of the bands that fit into this category it's easy enough to feel like it's hard to do something new in this realm. (See above note on the 7 billion versions of "Come Thou Fount".) The Anti-Fall Movement go beyond what you could possibly expect. You may well forget that you are listening to hymns. You may also forget which decade you are living in. You will probably forget most things other than the music and the wonderful truths that each word will fill your head with. And for that they stand out, not only for being, at present, the main Australian band doing what they do, but for making the form something new and compelling, and something which works so perfectly for them.

Easter Saturday: Stop

For most people, I think the individual days of the Easter weekend tend to blur together. For many of those who aren't believers, the days become a string of indistinguishable public holidays with chocolate. For those who do believe, Good Friday in particular proves a troubling day. Many of us wonder: do we simply make it another day of celebration, or do we dwell so deeply on the agonies of the cross that we end up despairing?

Something that I find helpful to do during the Easter week is to think through the processes that those in the story would have gone through. So Friday, for instance, would have been a day of mourning, even though we now know what they didn't - that Jesus rose again on the Sunday. But what about Easter Saturday? What exactly happened then?

A few years ago, I thought a bit about this and reflected on the fact that the original Easter Saturday was the sabbath day. We know that this was significant for at least some in the Easter story because the Pharisees wanted the body taken down before the Sabbath began. Also, we can imagine that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea needed to bury Jesus before the day of rest arrived. And the women who were to embalm his body had to wait until Sunday to do so.

What, I wonder, did Peter do that day? There is a significant silence in his story from Thursday night until Sunday morning, and we can only presume that he wasn't feeling too great, either about Jesus or about himself. I wrote a poem about this topic in 2009, which morphed this year into another one that you can find on my writing blog here. The main thing that struck me as I thought about it was the fact that Easter Saturday would have been a day of inactive waiting. It would have been a difficult, in-between time for all involved.

And isn't much of our life like that? Really, if we let Easter Saturday work on us the way that all days of Holy Week can work on us, we might find it to be quite a powerful day. Think of all the in-betweenness in your life; think of all your shattered hopes and painful disappointments; think of all your waiting. Then remember: God bursts forth from every devastating tomb that binds his people in death. Sometimes we just have to wait.

This is why I am fascinated by what Alain de Botton recently tweeted, even though I can't possibly agree with him: that "Christianity would have been truer and nobler as the record of a tragedy rather than of a miracle". Now, Botton tends to be rational on everything except religion, so it shouldn't be surprising for him to say something decidedly odd like this. However, he does have a point, and this is a point which he makes more often than he is perhaps aware. If we don't grasp that, on Friday and Saturday, it did all seem like a horrible tragedy, then we won't grasp how wonderful and extraordinary Easter Sunday was and is still to this day.

Is this what Botton is talking about inadvertently when he also tweets that religion provides an "outward structure to the inner life"? He says it like it's a bad thing, and has elsewhere commented (I'm not sure where) that organised religion makes people only experience the spiritual on set days of the year, suggesting that, for him, the inner life simply can't be structured outwardly. What Botton doesn't seem to grasp is that outward structures which guide our thinking about the inner life are highly valuable. This is why, for instance, it is good to have a day that reminds us to mourn over what Jesus had to do for our sin, because it is not something that we would necessarily choose to dwell on otherwise. We need liturgy, whether formally or informally, because it helps keep us on the right track in areas where we might otherwise stray into self-satisfied complacency.

And this is also why Easter Saturday is a good day - because, while many shops are open again, the day itself is a day of resting for most. Perhaps, in that time of resting, we can reflect on how resting might have felt without the hope of the Resurrection, and can therefore be thankful that we, unlike them, rest now with hope.

Good Friday: Via Dolorosa

I

In the garden you

Sweat in drops of blood, you who

Made the earth blossom

II

And then a kiss

Betrays you with the violence

Of a close friend’s sword

III

By dark, the council

Meets and seals your fate. You let

Your own reject you

IV

While, by firelight,

Your close friend lies, denies you

To keep himself warm

V

In the morning sun,

Amid the screams, the prefect

Washes his hands clean

VI

Scourges eat your flesh

The soldiers taunt you, laugh and

Crown you now with thorns

VII

On your back you bear

The curse of all the world. You

Fall; it crushes you

VIII

A stranger by the way

Shares the weight of the cross, but

Cannot drink the cup

IX

Women weep, lament

But do they cry for you or

For the brown, dead tree?

X

The nails are hammered

You fill your lungs with anguish

While night takes the crowd

XI

But one sees through it:

A thief who sees your kingship

And dwells now with you

XII

Then, last words to she

Who gave you life; the Life, you

Now prepare to leave

XIII

With a cry, you give

Up your spirit; It’s finished,

You proclaim, and die

XIV

Down we take your body,

In the thrall of darkness, to

Its tomb in the garden

Lent #5: Busting Eternity, Breaking Our Minds

This Sunday, something quite amazing will happen. Much of the portion of the world formerly called Christendom, and a good slab of the part that was formerly not, will join together to celebrate an event which defies all logic, science and expectation: the resurrection of the dead.

We will give each other hollow chocolate eggs, or perhaps painted egg shells, representing what? The emoty tomb, and new life. But whose new life? Jesus', of course. And that in itself is problematic, because the resurrection of Jesus is one of the least understood, least examined and least accepted truths in human history. There have been numerous credible works done on why it almost certainly happened, and I have read many of them. But ask me, arme with a lie detector, whether or not I live like it happened, and I will admit, shamefacedly, probably more than a bit anxiously, that I don't. And nor do most of us, Christian or otherwise.

This Sunday, however, we won't just celebrate Jesus' resurrection, though that alone should be challenging enough for us to remember. No, the New Testament made something abundantly clear in how it spoke of Jesus' resurrection: that, if Christ, the true human being, was raised from the dead, then we too would be raised. And, for the early church, this was a deeply transformative belief because it meant that they no longer held on to this life, but to the life that was to come. This is one if the central concepts if the letter to the Hebrews which I am currently reading in my own devotional time: the life to come in Christ is so glorious that we should willingly endure all things in this life in order to make it to the finish line, found in Christ. This idea pervades much of what the Apostle Paul wrote too - and it is something which I am deeply, deeply reluctant to do.

Now, there are multiple reasons people might have for denying that Jesus rose from the dead, most of them variations on the theme that 'the dead simply don't rise from the dead'. Tom Wright has commented in his wonderful work on this topic, 'Surprised By Hope', that this may be a legitimate response but it needs to be made knowingly, consciously, not as a default or passive response.

I personally do not have that option. I have looked at the evidence and have been convinced. I have known the risen Christ and had Him dwell in me. The evidence makes no logical sense of our scientific categories, but it stands there on its own merits, demanding to be heard.

Wright, at the end of his discussion of the topic, issues this challenge:

In so far as I understand scientific method, when something turns up which doesn't fit the paradigm you're working with, one option at least, perhaps when all other have failed, is to change the paradigm - not to exclude everything you've known up to that point, but to include it within a larger whole.

This Easter, confront with me this truth: Jesus rose from the dead, and so will we. Don't dismiss it as blind illogic; a belief which has transformed much of the world at least deserves to be examined on its own merits. So confront it as truth, and see what happens. You'll need a new paradigm to contain what happens, if it even can be contained. It will mess with your head; let it. It will throw your whole life up into the air; let it. The early church, for centuries, let this truth transform them, and they said that the life they gained was far better than the one this paradigm shift forced them to accept. Listen to them. It will hurt, and I will certainly be hurting this Easter. But I'm going to ry and let it run its course in me and see what happens. I may lose everything, but I may also gain so much more in the other side.