Midlife Meditation

Just one of the many things I've had enough of: Calvary. I've had my fill. Sunday morning was Easter, the day around which the Christian year revolves. In the ancient church, every Sunday was supposed to be a little Easter, and Easter itself was, well, the big Easter. Most churches have allowed the Easter to seep out of the other 51 Sundays, but all of them still make a big deal about the Sunday that is above all other Sundays. Anyway, I went to church on Sunday, as I have every Easter Sunday of my entire life. I went to sit with my recently widowed mother because, quite understandably, it wasn't easy for her to be their by herself. My father (as you know already if you've spent any time at all reading my previous posts) was a United Methodist minister, so being in church without him was a hard thing for her. For my part, I'm a former minister myself. I've also been a church musician for more years than I was a minister. When I wasn't prea...

Have you seen the light? Yes, that's James Brown in the academic robe favored by African-American preachers, and he's calling out the question to John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues brothers. It comes in the midst of a stirring rendition by Brown, a church choir, a backup band, and a company acrobatic fan-waving dancers of "The Old Landmark," a gospel standard that inspires the brothers to put their band back together to raise money to save the orphanage in which they were raised. The movie is The Blues Brothers , and it's a shaggy dog of a film stuffed with amazing R&B performances, car chases, celebrity cameos, and occasional blue language. It manages to respectfully poke fun at Catholicism, full gospel Protestantism, neo-Nazism, soul culture, blindness, prison life, government bureaucracy, law enforcement, homelessness, and probably several other politically dangerous topics more successfully than any other Hollywood movie I can think of. See it....

  I didn't set out to be an internet troll.   It was early in 2007, years before I even encountered the term. I was music director of a large (by Northwest standards) United Methodist congregation in Vancouver, Washington, supplementing the income from my 0.8 FTE job teaching music in Hood River. Between those two jobs, I was on the road a lot. Early on, there were grumblings in the church that I wasn't doing enough "contemporary music" during the early service. It soon became clear to me that what these peoples meant by "contemporary" was Praise music, a form of simplistic, rock-flavored worship music that is heavy on praise (hence the name) and light on everything else. You won't get much theology from a praise chorus. You may get the feeling that the hymnal has been chucked in favor of the religious rack at Hallmark. Despite the word "contemporary," the musical style of this music is usually about 15-20 years behind curr...