Body first, mind and feelings follow
The modern church has written a lot of these massive anthem songs. You know the ones—stadium-shouters, Christian versions of “We will rock you.” They use words like glorious and majestic, words that I have no idea the meaning of. I’ve long avoided them, but they follow me around and I think I’m finally ready to be friends.
We’re doing one this week at church. As I listened to the recording my mind’s critic took the song to task: it’s too big, too long, too anthemic, too… much. Then my mind’s conscious (not to be confused with the Holy Spirit) fires back with its rebuttal: the song is good, people worship with it, stop being so critical. And so the battle rages between what I’m thinking and feeling and what I want to be thinking and feeling.
There’s one way to end this kind of nonsense, and it’s not more mind-chatter. Like Solomon, when he settled the dispute between the two women claiming the same baby, it is action that reveals the truth.
So as the song played I picked up my guitar and started strumming, started singing. Something happened inside me. Light came in through my hands and mouth and dispelled the darkness in my mind. Words in the song took on new meaning and feeling. Springs of tears bubbled up out of the desert of disconnectedness.
It’s hard to criticize what you’re participating in.
My experience is what Brennan Manning in Abba’s Child calls the “triumph of doing over being.” It’s true that who we are is more important than what we do. But it is our action, our proclamation, that makes alive in us the truth of who we are in Christ.
“Why are you downcast,” David told his soul (and you can bet he told it out loud), “hope in God, for I shall again praise him.”
