conclusion: i love EMS, so long as I'm not burnt out. and Jars so helps you not be burnt out...pretty stinkin' incredible show. BUT...I was absolutely furious at the tepid audience response. I have decided that it is a sin to pay someone stand up in front of you and pour out their heart and energy and emotion and just sit and watch and refuse to answer with the same heart and energy and emootion. The whole audience just stood there. And sat down on cue the moment a slower song began. It's like they were totally incapable of experiencing passion or emotion publically without someone telling them what to do: stand, sit clap, yell, sway from side to side, move around...but only on cue. And only when everybody else is too.
It's wierd. I guess I got pretty indignant...work makes me pretty hardened, pretty deadened, pretty numb. We work in an efficient health-care machine and we are expected to be clinical and detached. It's like working with inks or motor oil or concrete or manure--it gets under your fingernails and in your hair and imbeds itself in your skin and you start smelling like death all the time.
And then something like Jars of Clay or Kate York comes along and sings and dances over you like clean pure spring water and you know what it meant to fishermen and camel drovers and dusty-street-worn tax collecters to have their feet washed by a man who's eyes were everything not deadened and stale. You know you need it, just to stand and let something real and human and intimate wash over you so you can feel something again, anything again, like a real breathing person and not some machine.
It's just plain wrong to see something beautiful or heartbreaking and appreciate it detatchedly. There's no way to avoid it in the information age, with the overwhelming flow of more information than can possibly be attended to. But when you pay someone to come and strip themselves (metaphorically) naked on the stage and be intimately human in the most powerful manner possible, and just sit and watch, that's wrong. Dead wrong. Detachment will kill your soul so fast it's unbelievable. And a little salvation is right there saying, uncross your arms, shake your feet, stop looking for the right cues and right responses, and live in this beautiful moment. Breathe or dance or close your eyes or sign along or something, please give me a sign that your heart is still beating! Respond to beauty and sorrow, feel beautiful or broken yourself through identification with something human, participate somehow for the salvation of your soul...it may not feel safe because it requires creativity and initiative and risk-taking...someone may ridicule you, or despise you, or see you vulnerable, or worst of all you may see yourself in all your glory and weakness...
but the smug alternative is so much worse.
thought of the day:
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." --C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
6 comments:
Do you say it is a sin for a man not to feel the way you do?
I merely ask.
The music of the Jars may be heart-rendingly beautiful. It may speak to you directly, wash the stains of sin and selfishness away and let you into the presence of the One who is more important than anything in this world.
And He may have another vessel, another piece of music, another book, another man's words, to do the same for me.
Would I sin in not responding in a way you believe to be right?
I merely ask.
That would be the exact reason that I stopped going to Houghton concerts, other than coffeehouses, after my freshman year. They drove me nuts.
lol . . . .
That's interesting. I must say that I find myself on both sides of this idea at once. I cannot help but agree that beauty and art should move a person. There are also times when I listen to great music, like Shostikovich's tenth symphony, and others just don't get it. It doesn't speak to them. Perhaps it has to do with a lack of relelvant prior experiences.
But at the same time I cannot help but feel that I myself am often wrapped in "hobbies and little luxuries". I'd like to think I still risk and still love. But perhaps I don't risk much after all. Perhaps this is why I've been feeling detachted lately.
Last night I spent the evening in my room, alone. . . . Andrew was out with friends, and Nathan was with friends too. I found myself playing computer games, watching TV, surfing the internet, . . . doing chainmail. . . while wondering why I wasn't also out with friends. Yet strangely my emotions weren't stirred up by the loneliness. Of course my nature seems to be one that rolls with the punches even when it doesn't really need to.
Nice post . . . . we need to play miniatures again . . . .
David
wow . . . . I think you were swept in the moment, and now your spectators have nailed you to a cross . . .. lol
I'm sure though that behind all that is said is warm-hearted appreciation and good intentions. Such is true at least of my comments and most probably of Steve's also.
Can't wait to see you again!
David
Holcomb, you silly existentialist.
I know that feeling all too well. It killed me to have the Houghton CAB concerts so poorly attended and then when we did get attendance to have the crowd sit like mindless drones.
Nephew,
I must say, you have a way with words. I want you to know that while I read this I was awed by your passion. I feel your heart and the ache and pain of it when you are so filled with the passion of the Lord and want the world to know it and feel it too. How much Jesus must have felt that way on the cross. Feeling the pain of the whole world and yet being so full of love for us that He endured it all.
I was so moved by your words. I love you nephew.
Your aunt in Fostoria. :-)
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