To understand the nature of God’s Love we clearly need metaphors. God’s Love, like many bigger, deeper things (Being itself, the reasons for good and evil, the destiny of our consciousness, to name a few) is beyond our full comprehension. To grasp some sense of their nature, big and deep things need to be symbolized; to be illustrated by poems and stories; by parables, analogies, poetry, narrative. Or by songs. This post is on music as a metaphor for how God’s Love expresses itself, and how that Love holds together the fabric of Being itself.
Think of some distinguishing characteristics of music. Music can inhabit anyone. It can be absorbed by anyone, even those without hearing. It won’t land the same for everyone — those differently abled in their hearing will experience music differently — but everyone can and does experience it. Music is as much felt with the body as it is heard with the ears.
And, when music arrives, it affects the body and the mind alike. The body can be incented to dance, or to head bang, or even to quiet itself and relax. And music carries emotional energies, both those of the performers and producers, which interact with the energies of the listener.
The emotional energy music carries and creates can manifest itself in memories. We’ve all had that experience of a song reminding us of a period in time, or a specific event that occurred in association with a given song. As a good friend said, “music is a time machine.”
Music can be, therefore, a carrier wave. It can carry emotions from one person to another. It’s really good at carrying Love, because Love is a universal. Love is needed by every conscious being, humans and animals alike. Love is capable of being found in everyone and everything.
Love never fails. William James said, “from nothing to Being there is no logical bridge,”[1] and he was right. The bridge is Love, not logic. Oddly enough, the Logos is discovered via Love.[2]
Every human being can create music (though clearly some more skillfully than others). And nearly every person can create Love. Love is free to give and one can, with practice, give it infinitely. Music can carry Love in all of its forms and permutations: friendly affection, spiritual joy, sacrifice, devotion, swagger, as well as seduction and all sorts of mating rituals and superiority rituals. And Love, like everything, has a polarity. Thus, music can also carry the antipodes of Love, such as betrayal, bitterness, rage, or even a simple lonely cry for connection.
The very first, most primitive music was The Blues. That is not to say primitive music followed the common I-IV-V 12-bar chord progressions or the AAB lyrical structures common to modern blues music. Rather it is to define The Blues as, essentially, music that is an assertion of existence. Those assertions can be railed at immediate things such as economic or romantic misfortune, or at deeper existential despair, and they can be assertions of life and of identity and of suitability for mating or of a claim to dominance, just as one finds in the cries of animals and the calls of birds. The Blues is a statement of existence; a hymn to Being itself.[3]
If you think about it, that makes sense: the first thing any animal that communicates would learn to say is “hey, I’m here” and “is anyone else there?” Even one-celled animals communicate and connect.[4] Or “I’m here and I can hear you say where you are.” I’m no biologist, but it seems reasonable to say evolution would favor organisms that can assert their existence, and connect with others for purposes of food, or defense, or reproduction.
As noted, The Blues is not the same as blues music. Traditionally, though, a look for the roots of modern music — rock and roll, hip-hop, dance music — works its way back to blues music. And blues music is a product of ancient call and response from Mali, folk songs of old Scotland and Ireland, spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, all forms that have their own roots and origins. It has incorporated tropical beats that came up from Africa through South America, Latina America, Hawaii, and all the native Americans. All of these forms, I hypothesize, have roots in an expression of life that started in life’s most primitive forms.
So why do I say Jesus was a Bluesman? What and who was Jesus is not just a question, it’s an entire field of endeavor. And the best, most honest answer is no one knows for sure, except through faith. The 1st century had any number of men who claimed to cast out demons, and to heal the blind, and to lead the Jewish people to victory over the occupying forces of Rome. And many of them ended up executed through Rome’s favorite response to sedition, the crucifixion.
By most accounts, even those that disagree with each other, Jesus was like these other traveling teachers, but also unique. The Gospel writers told of a Jesus who cast out demons for free, instead of for a fee. A Jesus who promised a return of the kingdom of God, but was puzzlingly, annoyingly mystical about how — and with who’s army? Jewish tradition held a messiah was a descendant of King David who would reestablish a kingdom of Israel and rule the Jewish people. The Gospel writers tell us Jesus taught he would not conquer by military force, nor did He aspire to political office.
And yet, the Jesus of the Gospels was a political force. And because he was a political force, he was crucified. And yet instead of being left for the vultures, he was placed in a tomb. And then the kicker: after three days, He walked out of it, intact in mind and body. And as bizarre as that sounds, people would give up their own lives rather than renounce their personal belief that it happened, and in many cases, that they had seen it in person. You needn’t treat the Gospels as historical facts to know something inspired early Christian martyrs and evangelists inspired in dramatic ways.
What that was is a matter for faith, not historians. But perhaps what got them truly inspired was, in essence, the Blues. A belief, sent by Jesus down the carrier wave of Love, that they could assert their individual existence. A belief, rooted in biology but suppressed for imperial and religious ends, that every single person mattered. A belief their lives had meaning beyond their mere subservience or their utility to authorities. That they could, through a metanoia, a change of mind, have a personal relationship with God. A relationship not intermediated by the religious elite, or by the Temple (a useful belief, given the Temple was destroyed). That belief, however rooted in basic biology it may be, was a revolutionary and dangerous thought.
We can tell it was a dangerous and revolutionary thought because it’s been fighting for its life ever since. The early Christian martyrs are notable not only for their articulation of Christian doctrine but for the fact they were murdered. The psychological forces that drove the Pharisees and the Romans to fear heresy and dissent are by no means exclusive to the Jews of that place and time.
Those forces, in fact, drove the worst of Christianity itself: the Crusades, the Inquisition, Imperialism, and in our time complicity in racism and civil rights violations, and religious violence such as the Troubles in Ireland. These forces drive homophobia , authoritarianism, and secrecy for horrible crimes against children. They drive radical religious fundamentalism across the fields of different religious traditions, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism included. Fundamentalism that goes beyond rightfully asserting difference, or asserting the rightness of their beliefs, to instead assert the unworthiness of persons who hold different beliefs.
These forces of Control and Fear that are always arguing some lives are expendable, that some people don’t matter, that freedom of thought must be brought to heel, that the personal relationship with God must take a backseat to adherence to doctrine. That a person’s cry of existence, a claim of the right to breath itself, is somehow conditional on that person’s behavior or their political allegiance. These are all forces lined up against Love. And so, Love impels us to sing the Blues.
Love asserts the primacy of God — of Being itself. It asserts the existence and the humanity and the worthiness of every soul. It expresses a longing to connect. It asserts that Being itself cares for even the loneliest and most unfortunate of us; that if we stand at the crossroads and fall to our knees and ask the Lord for mercy, that mercy will be given. The gospel writer who signed the name Matthew attributed to Jesus the proposition that “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”[5] That, to me, is the expression of a Bluesman
[1]William James, Some problems of philosophy: a beginning of an introduction to philosophy, (Longmans, Green and Co., 1916).
[2]The Greek word “Logos” famous from the opening to the Gospel of John, is difficult to translate in full. English renderings include “the Word” or “the Reason” or “the Plan” or, more robustly “The Word In Action.” See, e.g., https://www.britannica.com/topic/logos. What the author of the Gospel of John means to say, to his Greek audiences, is that the long-standing Greek concept of divine reason that orders all things, known and unknown, was manifested through the person and life of Jesus, the Christ, and that this was done as an expression of God’s Love. See, e.g., John 3:16.
[3]Both theological and biblically-oriented writers have highlighted this concept of God as “Being itself” — as distinct from a separate being, i.e., God is the ground of existence rather than one particular existent thing among others. See, e.g., Bishop Robert Barron, “Bridging a False Divide,” https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/04/bridging-a-false-divide; Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 15 (“Deus et esse, and the certainty of God is identical with the certainty of Being itself”).
[4]See generally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_communication_(biology)
[5]See also Ejaz Naqvi, “Sermon on the Mount By Jesus From a Muslim’s Perspective,” (August 27, 2018); online at: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/askamuslim/2018/08/sermon-on-the-mount-from-a-muslims-perspective/2/ (“the Sermon on the Mount is probably one largest single collection of teachings that could easily be taught at a Muslim congregation”).
