Thinking Back on My Spiritual Odyssey Part 1

 It is really weird to try to express this in words, as it is more about my general mindset and how I choose to serve God in my Christian walk.  Anyone who knows me will attest I do things a bit differently - I have been scoffed at and hated by some, and admired by others, but many cannot figure me out.  I kind of like it like that in all honesty.  What brought this to mind was the other day when I was contemplating rebuilding a lost music collection, which is in four compartments - one is my vintage big band/jazz collection, second is a small classical collection of composers and works I like (I lean heavily toward 20th-century composers such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky), a third is my ethnic music collection (Assyrian and Armenian music particularly), and the fourth category is my religious/sacred collection.  The fourth is surprisingly diverse, as it contained many things - liturgical music from all Church traditions, vintage Southern Gospel and Black Gospel, and more traditional hymns but specifically things that reflected my own spiritual journey.  One of the items in my original collection was music that used to be part of the late Charismatic evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman's crusades - it was tasteful, featuring traditional piano and organ as well as an orchestra and large choir.  One of the choruses that she often used in her crusades was a composition by Eugene L. Clark entitled "Nothing is Impossible," and it was also featured in Benny Hinn's crusades for many years as he often tried to imitate Kathryn Kuhlman's style being he thought he was somehow her son by God's providential miracle.  The words of it go something like this:

   Nothing is impossible when you put your trust in God

   Nothing is impossible when you're trusting in his Word

   Hearken to the voice of God to thee,

   "Is there anything too hard for me?"

  Then put your trust in God alone, and rest upon his Word,

  For everything, O everything, yes everything is possible with God!

This was an older song that was birthed out of the Charismatic Renewal movement and was composed by Clark in 1966.  While largely forgotten today, the song actually has a good message.  For its time, it was considered "contemporary," but more so in the mold of other Christian hymnodists who wrote similar work like John W. Peterson and Bill Gaither.  It has frankly become one of my personal favorite choruses, both for its simple Biblical message as well as for its melody.  At both Kuhlman's and Hinn's crusades, this song was often the opening chorus to the massive crusades back in the day, and it was done with full orchestration and a mass choir.  While I find Benny Hinn's theology a bit suspect, I have to concede that the music in his old crusades was actually well-done, and the music at his crusades was never truly the issue.  In a 1993 crusade at the Mabee Center at ORU's campus in Tulsa, this song was used, with the mass crusade choir directed by Jim Cernero, and the one thing that always gets me in that recording is the end chorus - there is a slight pause in which the chord of the organ is heard, and it heightens the experience.  It's a detail that was probably lacking even at the time of the actual crusade, but I noticed it quickly.  You see, things like those little details make a big difference in the way one focuses on worship of God, and it is as if the Holy Spirit himself directs either the composer or arranger to include those little things as a reminder of why we are where we are and what we are supposed to be doing.  I notice it even at the Dominican parish in Baltimore I attend now - usually between the Communion hymn and the beautiful Salve Regina that follows it, there is a beautiful organ interlude that sort of draws the person to God and the Spirit's presence, and that is more powerful than many may realize.  And this is not exclusive to the music of the Church either - one of the things that made the late legend Louis Prima's live shows so dynamic was that he employed the same technique to his program on stage - the energy level is kept going, and it aids in making the audience experience more riveting.  Things like this separate the performance from the experience of the event, and it is one way God has gifted talented people with the ability to bring a new level of aesthetic quality to both actual worship as well as just the enjoyment of a stellar concert.  My sensitivities in this regard shape how I actually worship God in the Mass, or even in my old days in Pentecostal revivals and church services.  Many people don't understand this, but it does have a component I will get into shortly.

Also in my old Christian music collection was one album in the Maranatha Music series that I count as one of my favorites of all time.  First though, a little history on Maranatha.  Maranatha grew out of the ministry of Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in the 1970s, and was the birth of what is known as the "worship chorus" that would be used in so many Pentecostal and Charismatic churches almost to the exclusion of traditional hymnody.  It was a creation of the "Jesus People" generation of American Evangelicalism, and to be honest it was not really a bad thing at all - many of the enthusiastic young converts who created the choruses of the Maranatha catalog used actual Scripture as the lyrics and just composed a melody around it - a number of the early ones came in particular from the Psalms in Scripture, and some have actually become so commonplace that a variety of churches from high-Church Anglicans to rural Holiness-Pentecostal chapels use them.  One of these that got my attention early on was taken from Psalm 32:7, and its title comes directly from that - "You Are My Hiding Place."  The music that surrounds these lyrics pulled directly from the Psalms is actually very beautiful, and in its instrumental version it is particularly comforting and also does touch the soul in a profound way.  I am not exactly sure when the exact year was when this was released and began to be used in churches, but I am guessing by its sound it was early to mid 1970s.  Why this is significant will be the next part of my discussion.

I have never been a big fan of "praise choruses" being used in churches, and in recent years it seems as if Evangelicalism in general has been inundated with some bad ones - some don't even have real lyrics now, and are just repetitive grunts like "oh, oh, oh, oh - heaven!"  That, and the loud, cacophonic rock music setting many are performed in, frankly don't do a thing for me - I don't feel God's presence with that stuff, as it seems the gut-shaking electronic/artificial rhythms and repetitive childish lyrics are invoking more of a Pavlovian response than they are actual worship.  I also have a problem with equally bad music from some smaller Pentecostal churches, where bad singing and equally bad amateur musicianship seem to invoke the same Pavlovian response, all in the name of "worship" of course.  This is particularly true in the past 30 years or so, where weird stuff masquerading as "worship" has invaded so many churches.  The iconoclastic protest against "tradition" has in turn created its own sterile "tradition of men" that makes me feel like I am on a different planet than the Protestant churches I was part of years ago.  In a small struggling church, one can forgive an off-key singer or an amateur piano player who at least try to make a "joyful noise unto the Lord," but the bigger megachurches as well as the thousands of congregations that try to ape them throughout the country with professional stage shows and rock bands are beyond my personal comprehension.  There is no reverence, no sense of the sacred, and it is reflected often in the spiritual lives of people who attend such churches.  And, with COVID-19, it has made this more of a problem because in many "multi-campus" megachurches often the "pastor" is a video screen.  Church nowadays feels more like the mediocre pop concert rather than the house of the Lord, and it is a big factor in why I am no longer an Evangelical Protestant myself.  Despite the pitiful descent of so-called "worship music," there are earlier choruses that were actually quite edifying and beautiful, and many of them were recorded from Maranatha's record label.  "You are My Hiding Place" is the most profound of those to me, but there are others too.  The thing is however, choruses have their place when you look at it from the standpoint of liturgical theology, and frankly they are not designed for inclusion in the liturgy.  Now, for non-liturgical events such as parish missions and such, they work fine though, and no one would object to them in that capacity.  This forms the foundation as to why my faith life is different and it also has a lot to do with how I relate to God.

In my personal spirituality and faith, God to me is represented by two things.  First, he is King, and the liturgy (Mass) is a divine picture of the Kingship of Christ.  In that regard, I worship Christ with a fealty and reverence that says "I am your servant" and as a servant, I am also a warrior for truth to defend what Jesus gave us.  Second, Christ is like a best friend to me - many of my own prayers are extemporaneous conversations with the One who knows me best, and I talk to God often as if he is having morning coffee with me and it is deeply edifying.  Of course, I do more formal traditional prayers such as a Rosary everyday too, and I say the St. Michael Prayer both morning and before I go to sleep at night.  Any rate, a chorus like "Hiding Place" is what reflects with that dimension of my personal faith.  I owe that second dimension of my faith to a guy I knew years ago named Norman Tenney, who served as an associate pastor at a small Baptist mission in Graceville, FL.  Norman was a jolly, somewhat eccentric guy but he had a sincerity that drew people to him, and he was a good friend to me for years.  He taught me the practice of extemporaneous "conversational prayer," and it was one of the most liberating things I had ever come across.  We often get into this weird delusion that in order to talk to God we have to use a pious serious voice and say "Thee," "Thou," or Thine" repeatedly as well as putting an "-est" at the end of every verb and an "a-" at the front.  To be honest, the pious act always rubbed me wrong because in all honesty God knows us already better than we do ourselves, and when a person launches into one of those sanctimonious prayers peppered with Elizabethan English, I picture God rolling his eyes and saying "cut the crap, will ya?"  That may offend some religious scruples of those reading this, but think about it - God does put up with a lot of pretentious, sanctimonious crap from us, and in all honesty does that even make our prayers heard better?  According to Scripture itself, it doesn't - Scripture talks about contrition, honesty, and the state of the heart, and often our tongues and brains don't reflect what is truly in our hearts, and we don't fool God with that nonsense.  The same is true with corporate worship in our churches - we don't have to repeat a childish mantra over and over as a "worship chorus" and jump up and down waving our hands to impress God - he doesn't impress easily in all honesty, because he is the Creator of the universe we live in and nothing we can do will impress him, especially if it is done in the wrong spirit.  God is not looking to be impressed - he is looking to be adored and worshipped, and in a way that is honest and compatible with the person he created us to be.  Therefore, some people will worship quietly, while others may raise their hands and shout, but God is looking at the heart, and often the so-called "shouters" are performing and not worshipping.  Any type of music in a church that encourages performance over worship is not great, and for a performance a person would get more satisfaction at a concert instead.  And, the liturgy in particular is not about performance - at its center is Christ, the object and focus of our worship, and the music and everything else should point toward that.  AND, that is a jab against some liberal Catholics who try to use the Mass as a "social justice" platform instead of the worship of Christ - they are as bad as the megachurches in that case in all honesty.  It is time we get back to what matters. 

There is much more I can say on this, but we will pick this up next time as I see the potential for a series here.  Thanks for allowing me to share, and will see you next time.