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tanadrin · 7 years

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Where I grew up, people had this way of spitting the word “Christian,” wielding it like a spear. That’s not Christian. We’re Christian. Krischin. Krisschin. They didn’t mean “Christian,” they meant Like Me, for better or worse. Only Like Me is neutral, requires context, can even be bad if you happen yourself to be imperfect. That’s not how they meant it of course.

Krisschin meant deserving of respect. Krisschin meant reasonable, normal, relatable. They’re Krisschin meant they’re (possibly) deserving of human decency, and by elimination, everything outside that category you could deal with how you liked. The bare text of the Bible, was, of course, acknowledged, but the implicit undercurrent that ran through the word Krisschin was that these are the things that apply between ourselves. Love your neighbor (he’s Krisschin). Treat others (other Krisschins) how you want to be treated. Blessed are the meek (if they’re Krisschen), maybe, if you’re lucky.

I’m appealing to a personal narrative here to give weight to this perspective, but by itself it’s not remarkable. I shouldn’t find it insidious or even particularly interesting to note that assholes are everywhere, and religion is not anti-asshole insurance. Assholery is a function of the human condition, not of religion, and it’s not an indictment of a faith to say some people who profess that faith are dicks, either on doctrinal or organizational grounds. That has, in fact, been my relationship to Christianity for most of the time since letting my Catholicism quietly extinguish itself: there’s this book, with some nice bits and some weird bits, which inspired a religion, which has mostly nice people and a few jerks, like all groups of people everywhere. Surely all people are like that; there is no reason Christianity should be different.

Except. Except then I started singing Sacred Harp music.

Look, you don’t have to believe in God to sing Sacred Harp. You sure as shit don’t have to believe in Jesus. There are Jewish Sacred Harp singers--there’s a community of singers in Israel, even--there are nonreligious Sacred Harp singers, and yeah, there are Christian sacred harp singers of every stripe. You do have to not actively despise religion, which is a high bar for some people to clear (my SO for instance), so I think there are few or no Sacred Harp singers who don’t respect religion. But if you’re the sort of person (as pretty much everybody who sings this stuff is) whose first exposure to hearing Sacred Harp music was “...” “...” “...oh my god that’s amazing,” followed by “I want to do that!” then it doesn’t seem to much matter about your personal relationship to religion.

I have passed through my own various phases of irreligion in life; I started out believing God existed because my parents and teachers told me God existed, and much like F=ma and the conservation of volume, I had no reason to doubt them. I read PZ Meyers’ blog religiously (ha ho) for a while, and went through a phase where I thought on balance religion was probably a net negative for humanity, even if I was never a bitter anti-theist. I have identified as atheist and as agnostic, and I still don’t literally believe in the existence of God, but that feels much less important to me now than it did when I was nineteen.

Sacred Harp did two things for me. One, it gave me an emotional connection to the things it talked about. Catholicism, when you are ten, is a lot of people talking at you about what you should believe: your religion teacher, the priest, etc. It can feel very academic and abstract, and honestly, I never felt that transubstantiation or the wording of the Nicene Creed had a very strong effect on my life (btw, the current translation is shit: “all things seen and unseen” sounds way better than “visible and invisible,” though I know why they changed it. They’re wrong). When you are twenty-seven, and you sing in a chorus words by Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley that talk about grief and terror and hope for salvation better than anyone you have ever heard in your life, that can, uh, have an effect on a person. So yeah, it changed how I related to the topic. Not just the general idea of a benevolent God, but the specific idea that no matter how shitty or ugly or awful you feel in the moment, or even for your entire life, you can hope to be redeemed.

The second thing it did was make me angry at everyone who had ever presumed to teach me about religion in my entire life. More than that: it made me angry at the Krisschins, the ones I grew up around, and the ones I have encountered since. There is something to Christianity, something I never encountered in hours and hours of Mass, or in any religion class, or in any hand-wavy non-answer from the Catholic catechism about whether the Jews are going to hell, but which I do find in 285t, and 30b, and 168. It’s hard to put into words. Something like this: you are suffering now. It’s not your imagination; it’s real, and it’s because the world itself is fucked up and has been from the beginning, but it will be okay. Not now, not soon, and not maybe for a long time to come. But it will be, and when it is, all of this will be worth it, I promise. Only, because it’s music, and not just words, and because it’s music better than all of the shitty, anodyne hymns that passed for church music in Catholicism put together,it actually has weight to it. Even if you don’t believe it, you know Watts and Billings and all the rest did, with every fiber of their being, and that counts for something.

So while intellectually I may think that Christianity is a two thousand year old diverse intellectual movement with murky origins sometime in the first few decades CE with as many disparate interpretations as there are distinct denominations (and there are many, even among pre-Reformation churches and heresies), and therefore despite competing claims to legitimacy no single authority to say what is or isn’t definitely Christian. On the other hand, on a gut level, it feels like someone ripped back a curtain and showed me a fiery luminous jewel, whose light is an abject love for everyone alive. And I look at this jewel at the one hand, and I compare it to the ordinary messiness of the human condition of which the Krisschins are only one not-particularly-terrible example, and I am so. Fucking. Angry.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that Christianity was not meant to rule. It was, it can be agreed, an initially small offshoot of an already minority religion, that only latterly became the faith of an empire, whose first bishops led their churches from basements and private homes, not from thrones which they sat on in glittering robes. No movement can endure the negative attentions of authority if it fails to mention the virtue it places on humility and respect; and no king can rule if he says to peasant whose throat he’s stepping on that he is, in the final accounting, just as wretched. I don’t know whether that shining jewel was the totality of what James preached in Jerusalem before Paul came along, and I don’t know for certain that the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch have no knowledge of it as they sit on their thrones. But if there is anything in religion you want to point to as self-evidently good, as a tangible and universalizable righteousness without arrogance or pretense, that is it. No utopian idealist, no flag-waving revolutionary, no prince however wise and no philanthropist however generous has ever promoted a cause more worthy to be cherished, more challenging to or more fulfilling of human nature, and its only competition in that respects tends to a diluted version of it (or the same light from a different direction).

I did not know when you said “Christian” that by it you could mean this jewel; no one ever showed it to me before. Having seen it, I don’t know how you could mean anything else. I don’t know what else, in comparison, could really be important, and spitting the word Christian until it becomes a meaningless phonetic hiss to cut apart the body of the human race, becoming obsessed with the doctrines and the failures that form a kind of klipah that obscures and is utterly opposed to that essential truth, which overthrows all the others, can be considered nothing but human failure.

Except it’s worse than that, if you actually believe. If you actually believe Jesus Christ was God, then you believe your God, ancient beyond time, wise beyond comprehension, good beyond anything any human being could ever aspire to, took the form of a human being and suffered and died for no reason other than love. Failure to endure the brightness of that jewel--turning aside for a moment, or for a day, or for a lifetime--might be ascribed to mere human weakness; but to valorize your failure as orthodoxy, as what your God wanted when he died choking on a hill outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, to despise or shun or judge or sneer at your fellow human beings and to call that Christianity, is the ugliest blasphemy I can imagine. Your God died because he loved everyone alive without reservation, and how dare you spit on him like that.

I’m a big believer in calling yourself what you aspire to be. A rationalist is someone who aspires to be more rational; an artist is someone who aspires to make beautiful art; the best we can hope for, if we want to be a good person, is to aspire to do as much good as we can. If you call yourself a Christian, and you do not at least aspire toward that kind of abject love, whatever my intellectual knowledge about the messiness of real-world religious movements and the scotsman fallacy say, in my heart of hearts I will believe you to be a hypocrite and a liar.

I will feel more genuine respect for any random selfish asshole who thinks they got theirs, so fuck everybody else, than I will for someone who uses a word that should mean “aspiring toward abject love stronger than you can imagine” to mean “condescends toward people who are different from me,” “silently judges people a bunch of Italians in funny hats told me are going to hell,” or “clutches my pearls every time someone with skin darker than Pantone 2309 comes within fifteen feet.” And I have no respect for doctrines, which, claiming that love as their wellspring and their heart, as the example of all that they aspire to, betray it with a laundry list of bullshit they have furiously rationalized to themselves and their followers.

Something’s shifted in me, has been shifting for a while; I have felt the urge, driven by Sacred Harp, more and more to find some way in my life to give expression to religious modes and thoughts, emotionally, personally, the space for such things is inside a Catholic church, but there’s too much there that feels like a lie, and not a comforting one, an ugly, crass lie where we have taken our worst failures and renamed them holiness. Protestantism has no particular connection for me, emotionally or intellectually, even the liberal denominations that people like to make fun of as not believing in anything (say what you will, at least they’re not hypocrites). So I guess for now I will continue to what I have been doing semi-regularly for the past year, and once a week I’ll go out on Thursday nights, and I’ll sing.

#boring personal stuff

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