Rock Psalms

“O Sing to the Lord a new song …”  Psalm  98

My friend David Morgan once served as the Associate Pastor of Richmond’s Second Presbyterian Church. Now and then we talked about contemporary rock music, its social and cultural contexts, and the “messages” we heard in the songs we heard on radio. These were not long discussions, laden with sociological reflections; more like quick conversations when we’d bump into one another at Presbytery. But something David said all those years ago has stayed with me. His comment was that many of the songs played on the radio were like contemporary psalms. I readily agreed, thinking of records like Chicago’s “(I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long,” “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas, or Eric Clapton’s “Give Me Strength.”  But that’s not what David had in mind.

David was thinking more of the way that song writers (and by extension, singers) expressed romantic love in religious terms. Secular love songs described lovers and romantic relationships with concepts and vocabulary that had once been attributed to the Divine. The first example that pops to mind right now is Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of my Life.” Jesus used to be the Light of the World, but now it’s my lover. Lifting the objects of romantic love up onto heavenly pedestals, worshipping the ground they walk on, building one’s whole world around them, or singing,

You’re my soul and my heart’s inspiration
You’re all I’ve got to get me by
You’re my soul and my heart’s inspiration
Without you baby, what good am I, what good am I?
…Well, it’s not difficult to hear similar words from a psalmist of old, or from any pious heart, singing or praying, “Lord, you are my soul and my inspiration; you’re all I’ve got to get me by.” More than just a curious parallel, when we expect our best friend or lover to be what only God can be for us, we are misdirecting our faith and deepest love, and worshipping idols. Even given poetic license and our natural propensity for hyperbole, those whom we love most deeply cannot be gods for us. If we have placed them on pedestals too high, they and our relationships to/with them are doomed to fall and fail.

I think the term David used when describing these writers/singers was “frustrated hymn writers,” and I take that to mean that with little understanding of the meaning of true worship of the One worthy of that worship, we look for more accessible objects of devotion: for the adolescent, a girl friend or boy friend, and for those of us beyond girls and boys, lovers. Please don’t take this as a sermon or a judgment. It’s just a cautionary reflection on how love songs can cross some poetic boundaries, especially for the theologian in us.

Two songs from the early “Celebration Rock” era illustrate some of the ambiguity of pop music and theological/romantic lyrics. Think of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” Those who knew the singer as a devoted Christian artist assumed her song was a contemporary psalm, with the object of the second person pronoun being God. Other listeners could hear the song from a secular point of view, with the “you” in the title referring to a lover. I suppose the same could be said for Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Some who paid attention to the lyric might have heard a song about one person promising to be another’s redemption or salvation, but some of us heard two Jewish singers singing a contemporary parallel to the 69th Psalm: “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck…I have come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me.” Once again, we return to the theme that gave “Celebration Rock” such staying power: we all hear in the music what we want or expect or need to hear. Those who come to the music (or the radio) with ears listening for what the Spirit might be saying will hear something different from those who are casually tuned in for pure entertainment.

[Two contemporary radio personalities have taken giant steps beyond the limited syndication that "Celebration Rock" enjoyed. John Tesh and "Delilah" have added a more generally "spiritual" take on music and culture, and have enjoyed great success with loyal listeners who appreciate their words of wisdom, guidance, and comfort in "prime time." "Celebration Rock" was more focused theologically (produced as it was as a Presbyterian media outreach), and as a non-commercial, "public service" program with a comparatively minuscule budget, the program was on only 30 or so stations at a time, and that time was fringe broadcast time on Sundays.]

Another hit song comes to mind, and there is a little twist on the theme here. Mr. Mister recorded a song entitled “Kyrie.” Anyone with some knowledge of liturgical worship would recognize the word as part of the phrase “kyrie eleison,” “Lord, have mercy.”  So the song is clearly a psalm-like prayer-song that sings the refrain, “Lord, have mercy along this road that I must travel.” Yet I heard a Richmond deejay confess after he had played the song, “I don’t know what that title means…I guess that’s the name of his girlfriend.” So, the twist was that a religious lyric had been interpreted as a romantic relationship.

God is love, but love isn’t God. At least not love as soft as an easy chair.

Next time, some thoughts about those “Celebration Rock” staples that were religious songs by so-called secular artists… reflections on the Lenten series of CR programs called “A Hit and a Prayer.”