Worship in an Age of Sadness Part 7
Returning to apologize to Jordan
Below, I am going to try to wrap up my deep dive into Jodan’s book and tie up the loose ends from my detour into Rachel’s Cry. Reading Worship in an Age of Anxiety, I found myself loving the majority of the topic and the way that anxiety and other emotions are treated but got frustrated at the end. You will see that as my post unfolds.
Returning to Worship in an Age of Anxiety, Jordan discusses worship in chapter 6.
· One could walk into a modern worship service and conclude that feelings are extremely important indeed, that in fact almost everybody present does believe that a particular feeling reliably corresponds to God’s presence—and that the lack of that feeling reliably corresponds to God’s absence. This seems to be a binding reality after all, and thus people with anxiety are forced to determine what is happening here, and what it means—and often must make that decision very much on their own.
· As people heal from anxiety, they learn that their feelings are “just feelings,” that they do not constitute “binding realities.”
· It can be dispiriting when worship models the opposite—that there is a standard emotional script to connect with God—and that this script is buttressed by Scripture and reinforced from the pulpit, in the church’s teaching, by hundreds or thousands of other worshipers who seem to follow the script closely and find it life-giving, and by a wider evangelical world that asserts that these feelings are the way to experience God.
Editing the script
· The first way church music can more helpfully serve people who experience anxiety is by revisiting the emotional script.
· inside the church, at worship, there is a very distinct emotional script at play in many evangelical churches where God’s presence is discerned through a very specific emotional journey.
· Praise was understood primarily as a musical term, traditionally in the singing of Scripture songs “until there was deep inward resonance with the songs.”3 This deep inward resonance could have a number of outward ecstatic manifestations, including raising one’s hands, dancing, singing, or kneeling. It was the responsibility of the worship leader to intuit, understand, and facilitate the inward resonance of the worshipers in the room.
· The purpose of the flow of praise was to prepare people emotionally for worship, an encounter with God through the Word, prophetic utterances, and an interior work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart. Whereas praise was ecstatic, bouncy, and served to wake people up to the reality of God’s presence, the worship portion of the service invited people into deeply reflective times of introspection that had its own emotional contours. Praise invited joy; worship invited weeping at a newfound recognition of what God had done and was doing for the worshiper. Praise was congregational, everyone sensing God’s Spirit together; worship was individuals experiencing intimacy with God.
· in moments of worship inside the church, feelings really are determinative.
· we have to recognize that the script is incomplete. Intimacy with God does not have simple enjoyment or pleasure as the ultimate goal: intimacy exists to help give us the emotional security and sense of partnership we need to pursue fruitful activity. Intimacy with God must be at the heart of the emotional script of worship, but we must expand the sense of intimacy in worship to point to a secure, fruitful relationship with God.
Jordan struggles to come up with examples of songs that edit the script, even though he tries. He interprets “It Is Well With My Soul” the following way: The message is “Life is really difficult, and awful things have happened, but still I’m going to say that things are good because I know that objectively they are good.” Jordan continues that “this does not mean that there should be no emotional component to the song. The language of “safe” is particularly laudable in this song as it declares something that is objectively true but still has an emotional component. “I’m safe” is something a Christian should be able to say; we are safe whether we feel safe in the moment. It becomes a touchstone, a referent in difficult times” Jordan wants Christians to be able to both know they are safe but also feel safe.
The Psalms are Not Safe
The problem is that I may not know that things are objectively good. How do I know that? My bible tells me so. The amount of lament, uncertainty, and doubt expressed by the righteous tells me that they did not feel safe, nor did they know things are objectively good. They might have hoped in a future good, but they often lived in a world where they were not safe and did not see the good. In Federico Villanueva’s The Uncertainty of a Hearing: A Study of the Sudden Change of Mood in the Psalms of Lament, he finds that the emphasis “on the element of certainty and one-way view of the movement from lament and praise, has actually led to the devaluing of lament.”[1] One can extrapolate from Villanueva’s research that the Psalmist is faithfully longing, with trust, that God will grant consolation, comfort, and rest, but in the moment that the lament is occurring the certainty is not present in the heart of the Psalmist. One can extrapolate from Villanueva’s research that the Psalmist is faithfully longing, with trust, that God will grant consolation, comfort, and rest, but in the moment that the lament is occurring the certainty is not present in the heart of the Psalmist.
Theologian Scott Ellington also explores reading an uncertainty of consolation in the lament Psalms. Ellington writes that, “God’s absence and silence is, for the Psalmist, a crisis of relationship.”[2] He continues that the “silence and absence challenges directly the version of reality offered in the historical recitals and personal remembrances of the Psalmist.”[3] The lament Psalms are then Psalms mourning fractured relationships; or at least wondering if the Psalmist and their people still have a relationship. It is through Ellington’s lens that we can take a different approach to the question of certainty of consolation in the Psalms. Ellington holds that the Psalms show the presence of God while also recording “experiences of God’s absence in times of crisis and need.”[4] The Psalms then hold in tension “profound trust and grave doubt”[5] in God. The tension holds great significance as “relationship with Yahweh is not optional for Israel but is essential for survival.”[6] The certainty of consolation can deny the seriousness of the lament as it does not allow the doubt to reach the place of questioning God’s goodness, grace, and mercy. Further, it can deny the sorrow that the Psalmist felt as it puts the Psalmist at fault for questioning God instead of allowing the Psalmist to give authentic expression of their sadness. Ellington continues that some scholars mentioned defend the certainty of salvation (and thus consolation) over the professed experience of the one who wrote the lament. Ellington writes that, “to disregard or dissolve too quickly the tension between remembered presence and the genuine possibility that God is absent to save would be to fail fully to grasp the devastating power of these texts of lament.”[7] The crisis (perceived or real) that is expressed in the lament Psalm is rendered moot in the best-case scenario or blamed on the individual lamenting in the worst case.
The certainty of God’s consolation denies the ability of humanity to question God’s love, which in turns denies their sadness when God does not always bless them. Since they should feel God’s comfort and consolation and do not, then something is wrong with them, and they are not in right relation with God, and it is their fault. The preaching on the certainty of consolation and comfort denies their sadness as it puts their faithfulness into question.
Editing Jordan’s Script
Jordan discusses getting out of the anxiety-release-relief script in our worship, but he falls into the script that I have been working against when he talks about worship and the sacraments. Jordan mis-defines lament when discussing it in his chapter on a healing approach to Church music, by defining it only in relation to sin. He writes,
And continues by saying that:
Jordan conceptualizes lament as an expression of grief originating from human sinfulness and estrangement from God. He argues we experience sorrow in response to our human deficiencies in faith and righteousness while also saying that God is saddened by our sin also. While being concerned about the anxiety-relief-release cycle, there is a weird return to the sadness-relief-release cycle.
Reading Jordan’s book, I was impressed by the emotional acumen that Jordan showed throughout the book. He often discusses the right for congregants to express the full range of their emotions including sadness and grief. Yet, at the end of his book when he discusses how to create healing in our worship, he re-interprets sadness into only being related to sin. Anxiety is multi-faceted in his writing, but sadness becomes one-dimensional.
Conclusion
When talking about emotions, it’s important to make sure that other emotions are not downplayed. When talking about sadness, I need to remember that joy is a good thing. When talking about anxiety, I need to remember that since it is not directly related to sin, the other emotions are not either. I am walking a tight line where I might be too sensitive to people downplaying sadness or linking sadness to sin, but it is such a trope in Christianity that it has become tiresome. Even people who are doing deeply lovely work on anxiety fall into it. And I am not faulting Jordan because it is such a large part of the tradition that it is hard to avoid.
As my way too long detour showed, the Christian tradition is full of thinkers devaluing or undervaluing sadness. Augustine’s theology of joy needs to be preserved in parts, as the church should be more comfortable getting outside of singing doctrine and theology and just making a joyful noise unto the Lord. But it also needs to be reverse engineered to the point where congregants need to feel comfortable sobbing uncontrollably without trying to put their anguish into tears. Luther’s theology needs to be kept when it reminds the Church that Christ’s death on the cross is not just something that we read about and move past as quick as possible during Holy Week. We need to remember that it is a tremendous sacrifice that is worthy of mourning. We also need to not elevate it to the point where it negates all our feelings of sadness. Calvin’s theology of emotions needs to be taken closer to the way he probably intended, that we need to trust Christ with our whole hearts and draw closer to Christ, while trusting God’s love and mercy enough to voice our complaints. We need to avoid thinking that because God has a plan is sovereign that we just must sit idly by and just blindly trust God. We need to embrace Barth’s idea that meeting with God is truly an event, something absolutely in-breaking into our lives and that just because we pray or read our bibles it does not mean that we have meet with God. We need to learn how to encounter God through all our emotions, and read the laments and sad passages, along with the joyful ones, in a way that connects us with God. We need to remember that Moltmann’s theology of joy and the cross means that God cares about our feelings and not only meets with us but is also with us. God loves us to the point that God opens themselves up to be vulnerable with us.
It's easy to fall into the old tropes and traditions unreflexively. I am sure that I have misinterpreted or misrepresented things during in these posts. Hopefully someone will be kind enough to correct me and I will be gracious enough to accept those corrections. My next post will probably be shorter, and then hopefully I will return to the survey results. If you have not filled out the survey, please do. I am closing the giveaway at the end of April but will keep the survey open, so feel free to share it out.
[1] Ibid., 251.
[2] Ellington, Scott Arthur. 1999. Reality, Remembrance, And Response: The Presence and Absence of God in The Psalms of Lament. PhD thesis, University of Sheffield. 89.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 90.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 93.
[7] Ibid., 98.