Music Musings

FREUD: You like music.
LEWIS: Very much so.
FREUD: Sacred music, no doubt?
LEWIS: Actually, I hate hymns.
FREUD: Really?
LEWIS: They're like dipping a chocolate bar in sugar. Unbearably cloying. Hymns drive me out of church early every Sunday. I leave after communion and head across the street for a pint. There, I'm happy to listen to any music playing... My objection to church music is that it trivializes emotions I already feel.

This fun little piece of dialogue between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis is from a play by Mark St. Germain called Freud's Last Session. I haven't seen the play but, shoot, I want to. The play, according to Dramatists Play Service, "centers on legendary psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud who invites the young, rising Oxford Don C.S. Lewis to his home in London. On the day England enters World War Two, Freud and Lewis clash about love, sex, the existence of God, and the meaning of life, just weeks before Freud took his own life." 

I especially like this little piece of dialogue from the play because Lewis' words describe exactly the way I feel. Not entirely about hymns, necessarily, but certainly about contemporary Christian music. It's been a while since I could honestly say "I like 'Christian' music." I'm fully aware of the fact that it's probably just me being the reactive, rebellious twenty-something I am. But seriously. If I'm on a road trip and I'm losing the radio station I was on and I start scanning for new ones, most of the time in about three seconds I can tell you if it's a Christian station or not. I listen to some Christian songs and facepalm at the theology and messages in some of them. I sit and genuinely wonder why the blazes Christian artists feel some inner need to "Na Na Na" and "La La La" for half the song. The songs do sometimes seem to "trivialize emotions I already feel." I'm just really usually not a fan.

So you can laugh with me at the irony that, for the last couple of weeks, I've been filling in part time as a temporary DJ for my college radio station, 94.3 FM or The Fortress, home of all your latest, greatest Christian hits. 

I know, I know, I'm whining. So I'll quit and tell you about what happened on my road trip a few weeks ago. 

I was coming back from Virginia to Indiana after the conclusion of my summer internship at the American Shakespeare Center, and I hadn't been able to find my GPS before I left. (To an utterly directionally challenged individual, this is terrifying.) I was instead trying to use my BlackBerry's Google Maps App, which completely drained the battery before I'd completed three of what ended up being a twelve hour trip. Fortunately I managed to stop and write out some directions, but had no way of anticipating the intense storms and long (barely marked) detours all along my chosen route home. Long story short, I ended up badly lost several times, stressed, frazzled, and exhausted. So when I began losing the radio station I'd been listening to as I drove down some back country road that I only hoped was going to get me somewhere relatively close to home, I flipped the stations hurriedly and frustrated, and landed on something random. It was a somewhat upbeat sound--a mandolin or ukelele maybe. And then I heard the words.

I had no way of knowing
Just how hard this journey could be
Cause the valleys are deeper
And the mountains are steeper than I ever would have dreamed 

But I know we're gonna make it
And I know we're gonna get there soon
And I know sometimes it feels like we're going the wrong way
But it's just the long way home

I think I laughed out loud. Here I was, very lost, tired of sitting, with my contacts getting fuzzy, and some guy with a mandolin on the radio was serenading me with the story of my trip. But it was comforting. Mandolin man had taken the time to write a song for me about the long way home. Obviously he was a Christian artist (didn't take me long to figure that out) and was figuratively talking about life while I was thinking about my literally long way home, but that didn't end up mattering. He reminded me that life was going to go on even if it took me all night to finally figure out how to get back to my house, and that my problems (dagnabbit--I missed a turn... again) are not at all as big as they seem when I'm sitting in the middle of them.

It wasn't until the next week or two that I looked up the lyrics and found out that mandolin man was actually Steven Curtis Chapman--go figure. I used to listen to some of Chapman's songs all the time growing up. The Christian music fixture actually came to Quito, Ecuador (of all places) during my growing up days and held a concert for some of us overseas people down there, and I met him in person.

So, for all the complaining I've done about contemporary Christian music, I guess I really shouldn't. Because, I guess, what if--even just that one time--some song really does do some good for a poor lost, frazzled twenty-something or a hurting forty-something or a melancholy tween? Life is a lot bigger than my occasional facepalms.