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Then, watch as she sings. She doesn’t look jubilant at all, at least
not at first. She looks mean. “I’m gonna lay down my heavy load” is the
first line, and she doesn’t quite seem to trust her own message:
casting her glance around the room, she seems to expect somebody to
stand up and say, “No you will not!” But nobody does, and the second
time she sings it, eyes closed, you can feel her imagining what it
would be like to do the thing she’s singing about. Yes, you can read in
her face, laying down that load would be awful nice. She allows herself
a smile.
Then comes the chorus, sung in a new key: “Now I ain’t gonna study!”
She shouts the last word as the tempo kicks up, as the choir of
suit-wearing black men behind her sings “No more no more no more!”
Confident that nobody in the room is going to get in her way, she’s
disregarding all the temporal responsibilities of a life that was
thrust upon her — a life as a member of a gender she never asked to be
a part of, as a color she never asked to be colored, in a country she
never asked to live in, during a century she never asked to see — and
suddenly whatever distance she experienced between her music and her
audience is gone, dissolved by the music. In the music, all the life
that her circumstances denied her can suddenly be experienced directly,
and within the circumscribed world of a gospel song — with a god on her
side, with a heaven in her future, and with an audience that loves her
— she is constrained by nothing. She claps, her feet move of their own
accord, her hands rise higher and higher in the air, anticipating the
song’s crescendos. Tharpe’s intensity, both in her voice and in her
long, fast guitar solo, is mesmerizing.
It’s an intensity that didn’t come free. Even without knowing the
biographical details of her life, you can tell that Tharpe brought the
capacity to feel and express this joy with a million unwilling
sacrifices. She can do this thing only because there are so many other
things she cannot do. In the second verse, she sings “I’m gonna meet my
loving mooother,” and on Tharpe’s face you can read peace, excitement,
longing, and the joy that is ubiquitous in all music of this kind. But
you know for a fact that she’d rather meet her mother here and now than
in the great beyond, just as you know she’d rather “lay down her heavy
load” here and now than in some future heaven.
But in old Christian music, there is always an implicit
understanding that this is impossible. Blues and gospel are, in this
way, twin musics: blues acknowledges the implacability of misery and
failure, while gospel acknowledges its ultimate impermanence. (Among
old blues artists, only Robert Johnson was metaphysical enough to
wonder if the doubt and helplessness of the blues might be the higher
truth.)
Now watch the Calvary Chapel praise band. Specifically, watch their
performance from Sunday, the 9th of November. Though I selected it at
random from a long list of online church services, it’s hard to watch
this without thinking that American Christianity is in a state of
extreme crisis.
Please note: I am not talking about the sermon that follows the
concert. Pastor Bob is probably the most charismatic and effective
preacher in America today, and his sermon is fine — or, if not strictly
“fine,” it’s at least got some verve. Even if Pastor Bob is a human
jellyfish and a charlatan, as future blog posts shall contend, you
can’t fault his congregants for digging him. The same cannot be said of
his band. It seems to me that the band, and the congregation’s reaction
to the band, suggest a moral and intellectual vacuity at the heart of
Calvary that nobody would ever suspect from watching Bob preach.
We’ll confine our discussion to the very first song, a ditty called
“Sovereign Lord.” “For You are the Sovereign ‘I Am,'” goes the refrain,
giving the singers a chance to impress the Supreme
Creator of The Universe by reminding him of his own name.
All of the lyrics to this song, as in so many modern worship songs,
are written in the second person. The singers address their god
directly, saying things like “You are deserving of all glory” and “You
created the heavens.” On the face of it, these sentiments are not so
different from those expressed in the short songs that pepper the
Catholic mass, but their aesthetic is a world away. In the Catholic
mass, when the congregation sings the “Gloria” (“Glory to God in the
highest/And peace to his people on earth”), they do it to a cadence
that suggests tradition and permanence, or at least pre-Renaissance
Europe. It is a ritual, and the words are sung with all the solemnity
that a serious ritual demands.
At Calvary, the band is trying to create the atmosphere of a rock
concert, and the singers mug for their tune as though Simon Cowell was
in the audience. Problem is, the words simply do not lend themselves to
the rock star treatment. What about the statement “You are the
Sovereign ‘I Am'”could make these singers look like they’re cumming in
their pants? (Pardon the crudity, but that’s what they look like.)
Either the singers genuinely are moved by this bizarrely circuitous
statement, or else Calvary Chapel has consented to begin its services
with a hideous little lie, just so some semi-talented housewife could
pretend to be Janis Joplin for a few minutes. You be the judge.
Just as the song is about to end, a blond woman sings the bridge: “Your
faithfulness is unending, for you reach the depths of me. You reach the
depths of me! You reach the depths of me!” Forget for a moment that
this borders on the pornographic, and forget the ungrammatical
construction (which seems to suggest that Jehovah’s “faithfulness is
unending” precisely and only because he reaches the depths of this
depthless blond hausfrau; an idea with the wild implication that prior
to the hausfrau’s existence, Jehovah’s faithfulness was severely
compromised). Instead, focus on how easily the song assumes that
Jehovah’s work with this woman is done. Look at how easily it assumes
that she is saved, automatically, and that her god has “filled” her
“depths” before she even began singing.
Those who know their Christian lit will note how shockingly similar
this is to another, older piece of verse: John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV. John Donne was a poet, lawyer, and priest who lived in the 16th
and 17th centuries, and whose work has never been out of print. You can
read his Holy Sonnet here. Pay close attention to its
language: this doesn’t just “border” on the pornographic, like
“Sovereign Lord.” It is pornographic.
When Donne writes “except that
you enthrall me, [I] never shall be free/Nor ever chaste, except you
ravish me,” he is asking Jehovah to rape him. And why would he need to
be raped? Why can’t he give himself over to Jehovah of his own free
will? Because he is a sinner and a reprobate, just as the Bible says we
all are, living in an evil world. Donne goes so far as to say he is
betrothed to the devil. And so before Jehovah can “fill the depths” of
John Donne, according to the poem, Jehovah will have to “batter,”
“knock,” “breath,” “shine,” “overthrow,” “break,” “blow,” “burn,”
“divorce,” “untie,” “imprison,” “enthrall,” and “ravish” him first. The
bodily, worldly part of John Donne is at war with his soul, and without
Jehovah’s violent intervention, Donne’s soul will lose.
This image of warfare is everywhere in the Bible, and the struggle of
war can be found in every corner of Christian history, from early
Christian martyrs through John Donne and his contemporary, John Winthrop,
through the congregations who listened to Jonathan Edwards preach his
famous sermon, “Sinners In The Hands of an Angry God,” a century later. And in the
black churches that birthed America’s finest music, struggle informs
every note the choirs ever sang. The contrast between the awfulness of
this world and the perfection of the next is what gave Christian art
its passion, its fire, its worth. And it was worth a lot. For all their
philosophical iniquities and misapprehensions about the nature of the
cosmos, “Holy Sonnet” and “Down By The Riverside” are beautiful,
powerful pieces of art.
Not so with “Sovereign Lord.” In this song and in all of the many
Pastor Bob sermons that we’ll dig our claws into over the coming
months, there is no intimation that faith requires any genuinely
painful sacrifice or struggle. Just ask and Jehovah is there, whammo,
like a genie out of a bottle — like Superman! — saving you and making
everything all better forever. Never mind that this is Biblically
inaccurate — never mind that in the Gospel of Matthew, 10:21, as in
countless other places, Jesus explains to his followers that they “will
be hated by men for my name’s sake, but he who endures to the end will
be saved.” Never mind that the notion of Calvary Chapel being hated by
anyone, or enduring anything more daunting than a pledge drive, would
be entirely foreign to the congregants’ sensibilities. The Bible is an
incomprehensible muddle of contradictions anyway, so Pastor Bob may be
right: maybe you’ve just gotta spread your legs for Jehovah and life
will be beautiful. Maybe the early Christians didn’t get the memo and
had themselves martyred unnecessarily. Maybe Sister Rosetta Tharpe
needed to lighten up. Life might be awesome in the Calvarian Utopia,
and I don’t mean to claim it isn’t. I’m just saying that in a world
where everything’s perfect, the music is doomed to suck, and suck bad.
— Brandon K. Thorp
