In the winter of 386 AD, the Imperial Palace in Milan echoed
with the footsteps of soldiers preparing for what should have
been a simple task. Empress Justina had issued her
command, arrest Bishop Ambrose, and hand over the portion
basilica to the Aryan priests who denied the divinity of
Christ. It was, after all, just a matter
of state policy. But as the soldiers approached
the great Church, they discovered something unexpected.
The building was not empty, waiting to be claimed.
Instead, it was filled, packed beyond capacity with the people
of Milan. Men, women and children had
streamed in throughout the night, and they showed no signs
of leaving. Inside, Bishop Ambrose stood
before his flock, but he was not giving a sermon.
Instead, something remarkable was happening, something that
had never quite been tried before in the Christian Church.
Ambrose was teaching his people to sing.
Not the complex, ornate chance that only the trained clergy or
Cantor's could perform, not the philosophical discourses that
only the educated could follow. Songs.
Simple, memorable melodies that a child could learn and a
grandmother could remember. Songs that told the story of who
they were and whose they were. Ambrose had written these songs
himself, and he taught the congregation to alternate
verses, first the right side of the sanctuary singing, then the
left. Today, M la Damas, their voices
began to rise. We praise you, O God.
The words were in Latin, but they didn't need translation.
They were the heartbeat of a people who belonged to something
larger than themselves. As their voices joins together,
something was happening that the Empress and her soldiers had not
anticipated. This was not just a crowd that
could be scattered. This was not just a Bishop who
could be arrested. This was a people who had found
their voice. Hour after hour, through the
cold night and into the dawn, the hymns continued.
Veni creator spiritus eterni rerum conditor.
Songs that reminded them that they were part of a story that
began before empires and would continue long after they fell.
Songs that connected them not just to each other, but to
generations of believers who had sung these same truths in the
face of persecution, doubt and despair.
The soldiers waited outside, but as the singing continued, their
resolve began to waver. These were not rebels shouting
angry slogans. These were their neighbors,
their family members, their fellow citizens, singing
together of eternal truths with such conviction that the very
stones seems to join in. Messages flew back and forth
between the church and the palace.
The Empress grew increasingly agitated, which she ordered her
soldiers to storm the building, which she risked the blood of
Milan citizens to enforce her will.
The captain of the guard shifted uneasily, knowing that many of
his own men had family members inside those walls.
In the streets, more and more people gathered, drawn by the
sound of voices that seems to carry beyond the stone walls and
into every corner of the city. Still, the singing continued, as
if the people had tapped into something that could not be
stopped by imperial decree. The Empress faced a choice that
would define her reign. Would she use force against her
own people, or would she retreat?
By morning it was clear that no arrests would be made.
The empress's edict was withdrawn.
The Church remained in the hands of those who had defended it,
not with swords, but with songs. Bishop Ambrose would later write
that it was during that long night of singing that he
understood something profound about the power of music and the
life of God's people. It was not enough to have the
right theology written in books that only scholars could read.
It was not enough to have beautiful liturgies that only
the trains could perform. The people of God needed songs
that would give them their voice, songs that would remind
them who they were when the world tried to tell them
otherwise. And so began a revolution that
would echo through the centuries.
The hymns of Ambrose. Simple enough for a child, deep
enough for a St., strong enough to hold a church together in the
darkest of hours. Welcome to the Imagination
Redeemed podcast where we follow the great stories further up and
further in in pursuit of the life of Christ.
Welcome to Imagination Redeemed everyone.
I am Brian Brown, joined by Matthew Clark and Terry Moon.
And we're doing something that we don't get to do very often
because our recording team is partially in Colorado Springs
and partly all around the country, Matthews visiting us
from Mississippi. And we wanted to talk about
music. And we just decided that was way
better with a piano and a guitar and our voices right here in
person. Yeah, yeah.
And we're going to talk about a category of music that we have
just made-up. And you made it up.
Fine. And I and until someone gives me
a better name, I am calling this category of music we songs and
let me explain what I mean by that and.
You don't mean tiny songs? No, no.
No roller coaster songs. OK, good.
We. Oh good.
Yeah, I like I said, like it it, it, it could use work.
We can workout the but we wanted to have a conversation about
something that we at the end some society feel very strongly
about, which is singing and which is not simply that we
don't sing enough as moderns, but also that there's a certain
kind of song that we could we would benefit from having more
of and knowing more of and singing more of.
So what this is, what this isn't.
We all care about having good music in church.
I mean, one of the things that, for better or worse, Christians
are sort of infamous for is is fighting over what kind of music
they're going to sing in church right now.
And quite aside from that, like we all get very excited when we
encounter a new artist, a new song, a new type of music maybe
that gets us really excited and seems to to speak to us.
And especially when we run into one that seems to be
contributing to that need. Right.
And in this episode, we're going to discuss why we need a certain
kind of song that's a little bit underrepresented among even
modern hymns and worship songs. And that's what I'm calling a We
WE song. What is a We song?
I am so glad you asked, Harry. I'm dying to.
Know a We Song and a We Song is a song that is intentionally
written to connect us to God and His people and foster the voice
of His people. Like instead of me it's we all
together. Yeah, because if all the Saints,
if all the Saints exist to praise God and worship does not
equal music, right. We can have all we can have
great conversations about what worship can and should look like
in all of our life. But the singing form of worship
that we do and singing in general is a specific thing that
that teaches us who we are, that trains us to relate to God in a
certain way, trains us to relate to the world in a certain way.
And we need more music that teaches us how to praise God and
that equips us to do it fearlessly.
Right. You are a music director at a
church. How many times have you heard
someone say some variation of Oh, you don't want to hear me
say? Man, I hate that.
Yes. And it's pretty much not.
It's, it's, that's a false statement.
I would like to hear everybody sing whether they can carry a
tuner or not. And the reality is that very,
very few people cannot sing. I mean, that's a very small
percentage of the population genuinely cannot sing.
OK, but if I were to tell you that if if you if I played a
note here on the piano, I couldn't match it, if you
started singing and I started singing with you, I would not be
hitting the same notes as you. Clearly I'm tone deaf.
What would you say to that? I would say God has commanded
you to sing anyway. I mean there are, I mean there,
there it really there are over 50 times in the Bible where we
are commanded to sing. Now, it doesn't say only the
people that can sing in tune should sing or only the people
that have, you know, beautiful like Taylor Swift kind of
voices. Everyone is commanded to sing.
And I believe that God really loves to hear those people sing
because it's singing engages your heart.
So if you're singing from your heart, that's what God hears.
So would you say that even if I don't know how to play the
piano, I have an instrument that God gave me?
Totally. Yes, we were.
All are. The human body is a musical
instrument. We have pipes.
We have, you know, the very breath in our bodies that fills
our lungs was given to us by God.
And that breath can create sound.
Yeah, simple as that. We were made to worship.
And I mean, I know several people who are professional
voice teachers. I know several people that run
choirs in high schools or middle schools where where actually
singing is is required. Everyone sings.
And all of them, every single one I've ever talked to,
remember by name the one person they met that one time who was
actually tone deaf. Yeah.
That's, that was, that's how rare it actually is and all.
And the thing I always heard from them was, well, no, it's
just no one taught you to use your instrument.
Yeah, I've, I've actually done that before.
Worked with a student who couldn't match.
Well, OK, I'll make it personal. It was my own daughter couldn't
match a pitch that I'm when I played on the piano and when she
wanted to learn to play the violin, I thought, oh man, I
don't think this is going to work.
But amazingly, when we worked on it together, I was able to help
her figure out how to slide her voice from low to high.
And then like, oh, that's where I'm stopping right there on that
note. It just took work, you know?
So I firmly believe that everyone can learn to sing.
Well, I would chime in and say like that is kind of my story.
I mean I sing a lot now, but I singing did not come easily for
me. I really had a lot of trouble
learning to sing. I wanted to sing and I enjoyed
singing, but it was it was not easy.
And I played guitar long before I sang.
So that was my first instrument. And then later I was like, I
want to be able to play these songs, but it was, it took years
and years for me to. It's inspiring, Matthew, because
I think you sing beautifully. Now.
That's. Good, I love it.
Wow, that's inspiring. Well, and as is the fact that
you learned the guitar first, like you showed yourself that
you weren't tone deaf, right? Like you knew, like I'm, I'm
playing a song and I'm playing the notes correctly and I know
I'm playing the notes correctly right from there, like learning
to control my diaphragm, my vocal cord, Like that's, that's
technique. Now that's, that's a
technicality. That's not a.
A binary can or can. And it was a process, a learning
process. Just like learning the guitar.
Yeah. And you know what?
Gosh, Brian, when I, when I stand up to help lead our
congregation in singing, I mean, I'm constantly aware of my own
limitations. I started out in life as a
violin violinist, so singing has kind of been, you know,
something that I needed to do along the way.
I mean, I'm, I've, I, I see my own lack of expertise in singing
like every Sunday. But what's wonderful, I hope is
wonderful. I hope it's an encouragement to
the congregation that, hey, if I can do this, you can't do.
That's what I'm hoping. You know it's not about
performing. Well, and another bad notion
that sort of mirrors the I Can't Sing thing.
I, I know a lot of believers that even if they weren't taught
this, absorbed this idea that if it is good, if it is right, it
ought to be hard. If something comes easily to me,
something, something's wrong. Like good is supposed like it's
like eating broccoli, like good is supposed to equal unpleasant,
bad is supposed to equal pleasant.
And this is how we, this is, this is our, our, how we develop
our moral intuitions. And that's, that's not the
picture that is painted to us by, by our forebears, by, by the
Saints. And Aquinas in particular talks
a lot about how well we'll know habits, everything you can build
skills, everything you can build through habit.
And when you get to a point where something is second nature
to you, not only is it not hard, it's often pleasant.
You're talking about spiritual disciplines now, Brian.
What if singing is a spiritual discipline?
No way. If this were a cartoon and this
would be the point where you say, what if singing is this?
Oh, there's nobody there. So, OK, so we've, we've we've
covered the sort of preliminary thou shalt sing and at this
point, the people who in who already agree with us are going
yes, and the people who want to learn to sing in and aren't
quite there need some training for feeling like there's some
hope. And and then there's still a
chunk of our listeners that are that are going OK, when are they
going to stop about when are they going to stop guilt
tripping me about singing? So we're, we're not, I wanted to
make sure that we, we covered that.
And I'm grateful to both of you for, for fleshing this out
because the, the, the, the imperative of singing is, is
worth an episode in and of itself.
We want to talk about a specific kind of singing, which frankly
is kind of the lowest bar of singing.
The the thing that's easiest to get you into and that as music
directors, as singer songwriters, as someone who
fools around on the piano, as churches, we can actually Foster
and make easier and help people build confidence, right.
So we songs we're going to, I'm going to I am going to totally
take a a leaf out of Matthew Melama's book over at our see
podcast. Matthew loves coming in with
lists and and here are here are the rules that I have just
made-up for this particular thing for defining this or or
something. And Matthew and I have some of
those same tendencies. So I'm going to let them loose
today. And we will talk through kind of
two big things and six total things that that define a we
song. But before we do that, I wanted
to get a few caveats out. First of all, we are not saying
these are the only songs worth singing.
We are not saying that every decent WE song necessarily nails
all six of these. And we'll talk about exceptions
along the way. And that's especially true in
this day and age where for better and for worse, like we're
like, you're often trying to make a living off of writing
songs that will work on the radio, it will work on Spotify.
And you are conforming your musical style to expectations in
that, in that arena, which is going to affect.
Thanks. And so you're, you got to kind
of give a little bit of a of, of grace and go, OK, well, that
that checks 4 out of the six boxes, but boy, it nails the
other four. And yeah, anyway, what we are
saying is that these are underrepresented in probably the
songs that most of us know, that most of us absent mindedly sing
when we are to ourselves, when we are doing the dishes.
Assuming I'm not the only one that does that.
I do dishes occasionally. But yeah, we're like we're
saying we need a lot more of these because otherwise we end
up with is an imagination that is individualist,
individualistic, short sighted, maybe even gnostic, not not
knowing what to do with sort of physical anything.
OK, so you're ready for the first thing on our list.
Go for it. OK, so I'll give you my two big
ones and then we'll break them down.
So first and foremost, a we song is a song about us, not a song
about me. It's a song about us, not a song
about me. It still might use the word I,
it still might be framed in terms of my personal story
relating to something. But a We song tells the story of
a people all. Right.
It reminds you who you are in relation to a whole.
They are often designed for corporate singing, like a good
pub song, but there are many kinds that are also designed to
be sung by a soloist, like ballads like you go to, you
know, any, any culture that has a strong storytelling and
singing culture is going to have one of the ways they remember
who they are is that they have, they've got different words for
them, but bards and minstrels and things like that.
That's what Matthew is. That's where you are, Matthew.
That's helpful. So we'll dig into that in a
second. I just wanted to get that, get
these two things out first. So it's a song about us, not a
song about me. And then second, it is written
to give us a voice in God's story.
In other words, it's written to empower you to sing, to do this
thing that comes naturally to a few of us and take some effort
in learning and overcoming fears for some of the rest of us.
All right, So it's a song about us, not a song about me.
And it is a song that empowers me to have a voice in in the
people of God all. Right.
All right, so song about us, not a song about me.
Principal. One of three.
It connects you horizontally. OK.
So that means I could be singing at church on Sunday or in an
arena at my favorite band's concert, and I feel a sense of
connection to the people on either side of me.
Now, to some extent, anybody singing a song they like
together does that, right? Like, you go to a Billy Joel
concert, you go to a Taylor Swift concert, right?
You have that experience. But a WE song is intentional
about doing that. You're not just connecting
because you both happen to know the song or happen to have been
influenced by that artist 40 years ago.
But the song is intentionally trying to do that.
It's locating your story, your story, as part of something
bigger. Yeah.
So that also means it can give you strength.
It can help you give strength to others through that community
and identity. What do you think of principle
number one? It connects you horizontal.
Yeah, so as you're talking, Brian, I, I'm thinking of a song
that I love that I think, I think it's, it really embodies
this quality really well. And and the song is Amazing
Grace. So Amazing Grace.
It tells a story of an individual person.
When you sing it, you're telling the story of God's grace and how
it. Affects your life.
So in that way, it's a story that is for anyone who has
tasted of God's grace. It's a universal story.
We've all experienced that. But the very, I think a really
cool thing is after three verses of telling the significance of
this story and who I am in this story, the fourth verse tells us
when we've been there 1000 years, we will be singing
together about this grace and it.
Shifts from eye to. Wheel Yeah, yeah.
So I I love that. And yeah, I mean, if you've ever
been singing sing song together Amazing Grace and got to that
fourth verse, like who doesn't cry when they sing that?
Yeah. 'Cause I don't, I don't cry.
Out. Yeah.
Yeah, connect you horizontally. Well, I think, you know, I was a
worship leader for 10 or 11 years and I was not good at
writing congregational songs or worship songs.
And the stuff I love to write or most naturally write is are
these kind of folk songs. It's interesting.
I was thinking about the the sort of original concept of
sacred and profane. It doesn't mean that profane in
the sense of evil if it's not, It meant just what songs are
specifically used within a worship context and what songs
are just are not. And I felt like I spent a lot of
time, like a decade in the sort of sacred context, thinking
about what songs fit well in that.
And but the songs that I actually like to write are quote
profane songs. They're songs for that are
coming from a Kingdom context, a context of faith in Christ, but
not necessarily they're not written to be working in a
sacred context, Right, Right. And.
But they definitely work on your heart.
Right. But they they're still Christian
songs. They're still songs that I hope
and intend to, to invite into the body or to encourage the
body, but they're not being used in a worship service per SE.
Yeah, right. And but there still are these,
these similarities, like 1 when I was leading worship, one of
the big words that I felt like, felt like the Lord would have me
just kind of sit on a particular term for a year or whatever.
And one of the big words that, and it was a big learning
experience for me as a worship leader was participation.
And I just came back again and again to this idea of if you're
singing something that people cannot participate in, like
you're not doing your job in the sacred context.
Yeah, thank you for saying that, you know, thank you.
And maybe I'm getting off the the original question, but.
Well, I want to dig into that later, but keep going.
But there's there's an idea that a lot of the music that is
produced by the worship industry is actually for solo performers.
Yeah, right. And it features like an an
exceptional soloist. Like with a really high void.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And So what I found was I was
having to rework a lot of songs so that were actually
appropriate for participation. Yeah.
Which a lot of times. Tell you a lot.
Yeah. If someone wrote something
that's supposedly for congregational singing and you
have to fix it before it can be used that way, it tells you how
much the the industry has shaped that.
I was on the the Overthinkers podcasts a few weeks ago and.
And we were talking about this the.
We were we were doing the math at 60 plus percent of.
Well first of all, nearly all the main worship songs are
coming from 4:00 record labels associated with three mega
churches and then one other group.
And at least 60% of the songs, most of those are are owned by
secular record labels. And anyway we did the math and
at least 60% of those songs had had the fingerprints of a non
Christian music producer on. Oh, that's going the wrong
direction. Right.
And that that's not to say there aren't good people in that
industry doing their best, and that God can't work within
limitations, and that good, great songs haven't escaped that
factory and done good work in human souls.
But that's quite quite an assembly line to produce when
you are supposedly writing songs for corporate singing, when
there's that many boxes you have to check along the way that have
nothing to do with corporate singing before you have any hope
of your song making it into corporate.
Singing. Now take, take a moment and
think back to the story that you read at the beginning of this
podcast. How different is that from Saint
Ambrose teaching the women and the and the men and the children
a melody, a simple melody that they could remember and sing.
Yeah. OK, so we'll, I, I want to
circle back to style a bit more when we get to our second trio
of of concepts. But I want to get to the point
#2 because you're on the very verge of it.
So it connects you horizontally. And I encourage our listeners to
go check out our recordings from the past with Amber Saladin
because she talks, says some wonderful, wonderful things,
including it. Which one of your books does she
say this in? She wrote an essay in A Tale of
Two Trees, which is the middle book in the Whale trilogy that's
a great essay about, and she talks a lot about singing is
this physical, embodied thing, which that connects for me to if
we have a recording industry, it means so much of the song making
is disembodied. It's somebody else, somewhere
else recorded it and I'm just hearing a recorded voice and
it's a big deal to actually experience music in person and
you see the person and you are one of the people actually
making it. And what we're talking about
today, too, is not only embodying the singing in your
own body, but doing it together. And there's some amazing magic
that happens when you're singing in a room together, breathing
the same air, and your heart rate syncs up together because
you're you're singing that. That is.
There's no substitute for that. There is no.
Yeah, so, so like when you're at, I was going to rush past #1
but we're getting good, more good stuff is coming out.
But when, when you're at, you know, let's say you're a huge
Rolling Stones fan and you and you go to that concert and they
meant so much to you back in the day.
And, and, and everybody sings together, right?
The song that meant so much to them.
And, and you have that moment of just kind of euphoria of
togetherness and you, you can feel like even if you don't sing
at all, you're still yelling it out and loving it.
And you just go home with this almost transcendent feeling.
I just felt something profoundly right.
But essentially what that was was a glimpse into something
that that is fundamentally, I don't want to say fake, but
incomplete in that context. Because what happens now, it
falls off. You don't go home and write
music. You don't go home and make
music. You don't go home and you
probably don't go home after the first day or two and and sing.
And most importantly, probably that song meant something to
you. I mean, there's plenty of songs
that mean nothing. I mean, some of the best, best
songs you've ever heard on dance floor that everybody gets
excited about literally mean nothing as far as far as we
know. But I probably this the song
that meant something to you, connected to something
transcendent and we'll get to that.
But it wasn't actually written out of out of an embodied shared
experience. It might like Amazing Grace be
writing out of a a universal shared experience.
And there's there's something good about that.
I think a a good we song more often than not is going to have
that embodied component to it either because like with Amazing
Grace, like we all, we all know this song and this song has
shaped all of our faith, or because it's come out of our
particular church, our particular congregation and our
experience. We wrote this song because we
were grieving together at that one time.
And we remember this through this song, remember the
faithfulness of God. So many of the Psalms are like
this, right? So that's different when you
have the life of a community that is giving birth to bards
who are writing songs from and for the life of that community.
To tell their story. And pouring it, pouring them
back into the community who then sing those songs.
And, and that's, that becomes something that's
intergenerational in a way that even even most of the best pop
songs won't be. And they're, they're real
because they're coming from an embodied experience.
We're doing life together. This song is coming out of our
experience doing life together. So when we have that euphoric
moment of, oh, when we've been there 10,000 years and we're all
belting and we're all excited and half of us are crying,
that's coming from our real life together.
And as soon as we stop singing, we're going to step back into
that real life together. And so it's powering our real
life together. That's a step further than I
always use Taylor Swift as the example because she's such a
good voice for the experience of the women of her generation.
Yeah. This is what the women of her
generation tell me. But we've, you know, we've got
really thoughtful women on our team that that have unpacked all
this for me and believed to see a good episode on Taylor Swift a
couple years ago. But like she's, she's singing
things you've felt you've experienced, right?
But you've experienced them alone.
Now you're in an arena and you're and you don't feel alone,
right? What if this was singing?
What if the music was things that we experienced together or
experienced separately and then brought us together and kept us
together? That's another level.
Can I tell a story? Yes, you can tell a story.
Please tell a story, Sherry. Just a couple of weeks ago in
church, we so we had just had some very, very difficult things
happen in in the news. Everyone was kind of upset.
We knew we were all coming, you know, together to worship
together. And in the meantime, we're
processing like, how do I make sense of this world that I'm
living in? And it just happened that that
Sunday I had planned to sing. It's a new song.
We'd never sung it before by actually, it was the would Drake
sessions when Wendell Kimbrough recorded it.
And the song is Grace will prevail.
And that was so meaningful on that day.
Just, you know, the words talking about the darkness and
how we encounter these difficult things in life.
And yet we all believe we're reminding ourselves through this
song, grace will prevail. That was a really powerful
moment of worship for me. You know, I felt like it brought
our congregation together. We're telling each other this
story. We're reminding each other of
the truth. There we go.
So yeah, let's go to point #2 because that's good transition.
Well. No, because that's a, that's a,
that's a great example of something that was written in.
It's written to be timeless, right?
There's that universal sense to it, but that means it meets us
everywhere. I think it was TS Eliot that
said, like, if you want to write something that's universal, you
don't do it by being so bland that it applies to everyone.
You write about something that is so personal that everybody
goes, I've been there. Yeah.
And Jonathan Rogers talks a lot about that writing concretely
that you that you start with with these really specific
concrete things. And the more you do that, the
more universally it will apply, which is kind of
counterintuitive, but in your experience it it plays out that
way. If you talk about the idea of
sadness, people go, OK, nice. If you talk about I'm sad and
here's what it feels like. Or here's a natural thing that
happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wait, what's your second point, Brian?
I wouldn't know. Chronologically.
Oh OK, so tell us the story of the Saint Brendan.
The song about Saint Brendan. So this was so our our Celtic
pub night a couple years ago. We sang the song Saint Brendan's
Fair Isle and I know a couple of other people who have written
ballads of Saint Brendan, their own retelling of this famous
Irish St. So that's a that's a good
example of the chronological component of of a wee song.
Another is just the more the more abstract God was faithful
in the past, so he would be faithful now, right?
So many of the song Psalms do this and I keep coming back to
the Psalms. But but Saint Brendan is a good
example of 1 where huh, for for it's kind of a it's kind of a
weird story. There are odd elements to it and
there's definitely some parts where you're like, surely that
didn't happen the way that the ledge of the dragon, right?
But but someone writes that song and generations and generations
and generations later, people are are still singing it.
I had a conversation on this podcast a couple weeks ago with
Gustav Hoyer and Benjamin Harding and we were talking
about this and, and Gustav made the point that yes, there's this
particularity to our experience in the here and now, but really
there's nothing new under the sun.
So they're like everything that is particular to us and that we
feel is distinctive does connect to the always does connect to
the eternal, does connect to the last generation and the one
before us. But it's on us as a generation
to tell those stories, to create that art.
Otherwise there's a void in our in the church's cultural memory
where our generation was. And, and Gustav said said it
better than I'm than I'm saying it.
But this idea that when you write a song, you're being a
missionary to our great, great grandchildren, people that we
will never be able to share the faith with and disciple
individually, but might sing that song, but might sing John
Newton's amazing friend. Just like the people that wrote
the song about Saint Brendan that we're singing now.
Want somebody to remember this? And by golly, in Colorado
Springs in 2023, there are these goofy people, most of whom
aren't Irish, who are singing about Saint Brendan's Fair Isle.
This is wow. Yeah, this, this makes me think
of a couple of things. One, if if I'm thinking of Ruth,
Naomi Floyd, who's a brilliant musician herself and composer in
the jazz and Blues arena. And I've heard her speak several
times on how Blues and jazz music kind of created this, this
fabric for for a displaced and an abused people to have some
way to understand themselves. And then that got connected to
Christianity. And this became this whole genre
of music that enabled a people to sometimes even things that
were encoded into the music or into the lyrics that were like
secret codes to like recognize one another in a dangerous
situation where they or to recognize something that they
were going to do together. It's so wonderful to hear her
talk about this. It's fascinating, and she has a
lot of insight because she spent a lot of time studying it.
So I think about how, like, you could go a whole podcast just
into how the African American music tradition and Christian
music tradition works. But what it made me think of,
too, is in the music I've been spending the most time with,
obviously the last few years is my own music.
Because when you make music or record, you listen to it
billions of times, and by the time the album comes out, you,
like, hate your own. Yeah, but for me, I was, I was
looking at Psalm 137, which is this Psalm where the exiled
people of God are having to decide whether or not they're
going to continue to sing the songs of their homeland now that
they're displaced, or if they're just going to give up and be
absorbed into the Gentiles and lose their identity.
In they don't know anything about that today.
Right. And so like that was very
resonant for me. I felt like, OK, am I just going
to say, OK, I'm just going to kind of dissolve into the flow
of the way things are? Or am I going to take my harp
off the Poplar tree? Even though everybody is saying
yes, sing those little cute songs about Zion, you're
homeland, you're never going to see her.
It's not even real or and you have to decide.
And so there's a, you know, this song says, I'm just saying that
like the first verse. Our captors cracked their whips
and grinned. Down by the rivers
Babylon? And even that song is coming
from because I grew up in Mississippi and I love Blues
music and Blues rock, and so that has that kind of down.
By the rivers. It kind of has a call and
response which and then on that same album, that song has a kind
of sister song. That is the response to that
song, which asks the question, how can we sing the Lord's song?
How can we sing these we songs here when when all that makes us
us is being picked apart and dismantled and and all the
threads are being pulled in the out of the fabric and then the
the last song on the album. Says the endless voices
whispered that our hopes are only dreams, Then no deliverer
is coming, So you got this idea of like,
we're going to make up our minds.
Yeah, we're going to do this. But it it's very much in that
whole middle album in the Well trilogy is kind of about how do
we live as a people when when the face we met at Jacob's Well
seems to have kind of receded in the darkness has come and we
feel like we're in exile and we're not sure if all this is
really true. How do we keep reminding one
another that this is real and to to keep singing that song?
And it takes a decisiveness, but I think songs themselves are
part of what helped us do. Totally.
We can't live this life alone and it's the community that
encourages us. And singing is one of the most
powerful expressions of of community.
I remember the first time I heard you play, I think both
those songs in in person and you were talking about the actual
story of the people of God in Babylon that had inspired that
song. And I remember you saying that
the the people who made that choice were the people tell that
tell the tell the the last. Story Yeah, yeah, there's a guy
named John Oswalt, and he's an Old Testament translator and
scholar. And I heard him tell this at at
her retreat. And he explained that the people
are taken into exile and then eventually you've got Cyrus.
And Cyrus gives this edict that anybody who wants to go back to
their homeland and worship their own gods, that they can go,
they're free to go. And he said, as far as we know,
was it was the remnant of Israel.
They were the only ones who responded to that edict.
Nobody else went home because everyone else had been absorbed
and assimilated. These Israelites were the only
ones who actually still had enough of a distinct identity.
As a people. As a people, they that they even
could respond to that. And part of the idea was that
why did they how did they maintain that identity?
And part of it was that even though their tormentors made fun
of them by the rivers of Babylon and they were tempted to quit
seeing singing the songs of home, they picked up their harps
and they said, may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.
If I fail to sing the songs of Zion.
I will not do that. I'm going to keep these songs
going even though it seems totally pointless and stupid
because how could they have known or anticipated that edict?
But when the time came, they were ready to go.
Like because they had kept singing the songs of home.
May it be so for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. And which, which brings up an,
an important point, I think that the chronological element to
this, I mean, first of all, it, it can mean, it does mean a lot
of the time that the, the song has a narrative structure like
that. And you know, one of you'll see
this with a lot of old hymns. Why are there 6 verses or 8
verses or 10 verses? That's shortened it down to four
people. People will get bored.
You're literally cutting out the middle of the story.
Right. But so there is that element to
it a lot of the time. But even when there isn't,
there's, there's that sense of I'm telling a general story.
There's, there's a number of different hymns that are that,
that use Marshall imagery, military imagery, following God
as captain and not the army and things like that.
And, and, and those don't refer to a specific time and place and
they don't have a specific beginning, middle and end, but
they describe what it is like to be God's people being faithful
to him in the face of, of, of strife.
And so they, they need it can't make none of them I both of
those two categories. They can't just be, you know,
the old joke is 711 songs, 7 words, 11 times.
Because they, because they, they need to breathe.
They need, they need, yeah, lyrical space to paint a
picture, right? Right for.
You. Yes.
Keep going. Keep.
Going let's, let's do point #3. So it connects songs about us,
not songs about me. They connect us horizontally,
they connect us chronologically. And finally, the most obvious
one, especially with religious we songs is it connects us
vertically, vertically connect us to God and, and specifically,
I mean, any worship song is designed to do that, but a we
song does it specifically by connecting us to his story.
It's not simply generic. I don't I love you Jesus type
lyrics or God, you're so pretty and awesome and make me feel so
nice inside. As appropriate as I'm I'm being
sarcastic, but those are appropriate at a given in a
given situation. But but for a we song, it's it's
it's a little bit bigger than that.
It's not just the abstract idea of God somewhere off in the
distance, nor is it simply God as a almost romantic love
figure. It's, it's, it's God as, as the
one who has been faithful through the ages, It's God.
It's, it relates us as individuals to his story and
actually equips us to relate to his story in the face of our own
insecurities, in the face of our own.
I don't know what to do tomorrow.
I don't know where's the next job coming from or who am I
supposed to be? And all these, all these kinds
of questions. It locates our individual
questions in the larger story of God himself.
Yes, the people of God, that's the horizontal component.
The people of God over time, that's the chronological
component. But also all of that is part of
the great creation, fall, redemption, restoration, meta
narrative of Scripture and of God's people.
Yeah. So connects us vertically.
Any thoughts on? I feel like that's maybe the
most obvious one, but any any thoughts on that or favorites
along those lines? How about this?
Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation,
O my soul, praise Him, for He is Thy health and salvation.
Join the greats throng, psaltery, organ and song,
sounding in glad adoration. Praise to the Lord over all
things He gloriously reigneth, Borne as on eagle wings safely
His Saints He sustaineth. Hast thou not seen how all thou
needest hath been granted in what he ordaineth keep.
Going. OK, next verse, praise to the
Lord, who doth prosper thy way and defend thee.
Surely His goodness and mercy shall ever attend thee.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, who with his love doth
befriend thee. Praise to the Lord, O let all
that is in me adore Him, all that hath life and breath.
Come now with praises before him.
Let the Amen sound from his people ago again.
Gladly, forever adore him. And we always sing Amen at the
end of that, because you just said let the Amen.
Yeah, got to put his Amen on it. Yeah.
Unpack that like you're looking at you're looking at the words
and I'm not that there. There are so many.
It's hey, on some level, that is a That is the hymnity world's
version of a praise song. Oh totally.
It's telling you there's lots of verse starts with praise.
Praise. The Lord Praise to the Lord.
But it but it gets into a lot of specifics that locate you.
Yes, it names him as the King of creation, the one who provides
for us, who prospers our way, who defends us, who sustains us.
Like it's naming all of these things that God does for us.
Surely his goodness and mercy shall ever attend thee.
You know, it's calling us to ponder who God is and what he
has done. I think that's that's, gosh, we
need to be reminded every day, you know, who, where we are in
in the story and how he really is big enough to take care of
our our needs. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm, I'm thinking of you. You mentioned the narrative
aspect. So we've got the chronological
thing, but but also like the way so much of how Scripture
communicates who God is, is, is this relational, this cumulative
relational experience of like, well, what have we seen him do
in the past? What are the mighty acts of God?
And that's not an abstract thing or it's not even really a
conceptual idea. It's like, no, these are
specific things that he's done. Like what?
Well, like when he got you out of Egypt and he parted the sea
and he, you know, all these things happen.
And so I think a lot of times that connects very specifically
to story points, narrative points.
How do you know? I was having a conversation with
somebody about the specificity of Christianity and saying like,
well, there are a lot of things you can talk about that could
kind of apply to any religion. Well, why do we make this
concrete, specific claim about this God?
Right. And I think part of the answer
to that is when we're looking at the story, it's not just any
story, even though lots of stories may have elements that
relate or connect because Jesus is the logos and he, but he is
also the narrative of the world. And so of course, people that
don't know him are also going to pick up on patterns, narrative
patterns. Sure, that happens.
But when we're talking about Jesus, Jesus has a very
particular outline. He is a specific person who has
done specific things. And so when we sing, it's nice
to include very concrete details about this story, because I'm
talking about this very specific God, not just any God.
Right. And and this actually, yes, I
love this verse that says he has borne us on eagle's wings
safely. His Saints he sustaineth.
Hast thou not seen how all thou needest hath been granted?
In what he Yeah, yeah, We're remembering the Saints that he
has sustained. Yeah.
Actually, you have a song kind of like this, Matthew.
Well, a song I really like. I was thinking about a song that
I haven't been playing, but it's kind of one of those ballad
songs. OK, It's the it's the title
track of the middle book, A Tale of Two Trees.
And it basically like kind of walks through the I did a whole
album actually called Bright Came the Word from His mouth.
It's a nice concise title, but it's a Bible walkthrough.
So the whole idea of that album is like, let's let's walk
through this story and talk about some specific things.
But in a tale of true trees, I, I frame it as two family trees
and how these family trees kind of, and it talks about there's a
dream that I saw two family trees.
They grew from very different seeds.
One stood tall with flowered crowns and one was bent and
bitter. The bitter tree bore sour fruit
that made the people eating do wickedness upon the earth until
they grew to love it. The flowered tree put out its
leaves, which perfumed faintly that bitter breeze.
The bent tree's branches shook like snakes and did their best
to kill it. But the sweet up the sweetness
rose again, like children rise from water cleansed.
And though the thorns tore at their flesh, they would not stop
their singing. And it goes on to kind of tell
the whole story. But yeah.
He's got away with words. Yes, you're a great storyteller.
So I do love that idea of connecting us vertically, but
part of like all these things work together because you can't
do the vertical thing in some abstract sense.
Like it has to be rooted in history and narrative and time
and all these things have to be included.
And it's sort of one perhaps useful analogy is, yeah, I've
seen Christian traditions that put a lot of emphasis on sharing
your testimony, right? Sometimes to the point where
like if you haven't had terrible trials that the Lord has brought
you through yet, you feel like you're a third class Christian.
You go to summer camp and everybody's crying and telling
their and it's like trying to one up each other almost.
Now there it's it's incredibly important to practice the
personal, the spiritual disciplines that that equip you
to remember the faithfulness of God in your own life and to be
able to to share that witness with others.
However, we songs give you a multi generational dimension to
that. You know it's not it isn't just
let me tell you the story of when I was struggling with long
division. It was.
Wait, wait. You mean we're not the first
people to have struggles in the world and like, like have need
someone to come and help us? We're not the first people.
OK, so that that reminds me of this really neat quote that I
love. It's a by John of Salisbury, and
he writes, Bernard of Shark used to compare us to dwarves perched
on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more
and farther than our predecessors, not because we
have keener vision or greater height, but because we are
lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.
So you we have stories that we can sing about that are stories
from the past, and they're our story too, because they're our
God. It's it's stories about our God
and about his people. And if you have a posture
towards the faith that is obsessed with the current and
the new and the recent and doesn't know what to do with the
past, you are you're you're cutting yourself off from all
of. That you're.
This this immense store of how God has safely sustained his
Saints, Yes. Like the story you read of Saint
Ambrose from the very beginning? Yeah, that's our story too.
Yeah. One of the things that that
helped me a lot, I read a book years ago by a guy named Joseph
Atkinson, one of the it's called the Biblical foundations of the
family or something like that. And one of the things he brought
up in there was the idea of, of the Hebrew has, we have an
individualistic imagination in the, in the West, the modern
West. But he said, but for the Hebrew,
they didn't think of themselves as individuals.
He says they had a corporate imagination.
Yeah. And so, you know, it's kind of
funny to us when we read language like in Christ, you're
in Christ or we're in Christ. He's like, that's an indicator
of a corporate imagination. And so he said, you know, to be
in Abraham, to be in Isaac is this idea of like, I don't have
any way of comprehending or understanding myself apart from
the family that I belong to, the thing that I'm inside of the
story that surrounds me. And then that led me to think of
the idea of just like a simple kind of word trick that helped
me is that they have strandedness and that we live in
a culture, I think, where so many people feel stranded.
And a strand is like if you have a fabric and you remove one
thread from it, then that strand is stranded and they actually
belong in the story. They belong woven into the
fabric or the context or the text or the texture or the
textile. Tapestry.
Or the tapestry of of reality. And this is what the Bible is
doing. It's saying, oh, actually this
world came from somewhere so beautiful, so good a life that
the Trinity was living together that then overflowed into the
cosmos. And God created all this because
he wanted to expand the family. And it's all going somewhere.
It's going back to that beautiful face in the Beatific
vision where we're going back to the one who smiled us into
existence and he's waiting to receive us home.
Wait a minute. So you're woven right into this
fabric, but if you don't know that story or you've been
truncated from, you've been cut off from that fabric and you
become stranded, like that's such a desperate and sad and
frustrating existence. Songs and stories and the way
that we worship together help us help weave us back into that.
Wait, are you saying that not only chronologically are we
connected to the Saints from the past who share our story, but it
goes as far back as being connected to the Trinity?
I am saying that, Terry. Wow, that is worth pondering,
yeah. Well said.
Well, let's pause there and continue in our next episode and
then and we will continue looking at how this all plays
out. We've looked at how we songs are
focused on connecting us to God through his story, through his
people over time and through his people right now and into
eternity. Now it's in the next episode, we
will look at how we songs are written to give us a voice in
that story. So particularly focused on
lyrics so far, we'll focus a little bit more on music and the
rest of our conversation. Oh good.
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