Month: November 2015

Sameness or Surprise?

November 26, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

brenkee / Pixabay

My three most memorable hamburgers are:

The Kobe Beef Burger that I eat at the Issaquah Brew Pub every spring with my gaming buddies.
The burger I ate at Norma’s in Lacey, Washington, was by no means a gourmet burger, but it tastes great and had that 1950’s diner flavour to it.
This past summer I ate at a hamburger joint off the highway in Redding, California: Bartel’s Giant Burger. It too was a great burger–it was fast, served in a paper basket, but it was one of my most memorable burgers.

All three of these burgers are very good and all three are very different.

Sameness

TheDigitalArtist / Pixabay

Then there’s the approach to the hamburger that McDonald pioneered. No matter where you eat your burger, it will be exactly the same. This approach was obviously extremely popular and Americans believe that difference in hamburgers is a bad thing.

And McDonald’s is exporting this ridiculous idea. Did you see that commercial? I ranted about it a while back.

Craft Beer versus Factory Beer

harassevarg / Pixabay

This philosophy of marketing sameness for profit was also found in the beer industry. Since the lifting of prohibition, we were forced to drink just one kind of beer, the American Adjunct Lager. It’s fizzy, light bodied, has low bitterness and thin malts. This beer was made for mass production and consumption, not flavour–thank goodness that’s changed–if you want, you can get a wide variety of locally brewed craft beers all over North America.

The story of beer suggests that there is some resistance to the homogenization of experience, but we are still very comfortable with sameness. It used to be that all coffee was the same–cheap and industrial. The forces of sameness are still at work on us, it’s just that the product is a lot better.

Starbucks is the same whether you are in Seattle or Spain. A lot of people think this is a good thing–it’s called the Starbucks Experience. Of course, I don’t want a bad coffee experience, but this is not the same thing has having a different coffee experience.

Then there’s Kraft Dinner.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”By homogenize our experiences there no possibility of having a disappointing experience, but we will just as certainly not have a surprising one.” quote=”By homogenize our experiences there no possibility of having a disappointing experience, but we will just as certainly not have a surprising one.”]

By homogenize our experiences there no possibility of having a disappointing experience, but we will just as certainly not have a surprising one.

Is it worth it?

Ordinary Time

November 16, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

Bru-nO / Pixabay

Our culture has one way of thinking about time, so we could call it ordinary time.

We could also call it secular time, mechanical time, material time or dead time. Elsewhere, I’ve called it “zombie time” and for good reason.

Whatever you call it, it has the following characteristics:

It is homogeneous — a minute is a minute; one hour is the same as every other hour.
It is sequential — minutes, hours, days and years occur one after the other.
structured by progress — we are, things are, improving, evolving, getting better as time passes.
It has been emptied of the transcendent — there is nothing supernatural in our conception of time.

Killing Time

November 8, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

Bru-nO / Pixabay

In English we have only one word for time. The ancient Greeks had two because they understood time in two ways. First, there is chronos, or ordinary time, in which one thing happens after another. The other is kairos. We’ve mostly lost a sense of this kind of time, to our detriment.

chronos versus kairos

Chronological versus Kairotic Time

Chronological time refers to clock time–time that can be measured in fixed units–seconds, minutes, hours and years. Kairos measures moments of flexible duration. Chronological time is divided up into past, present, and future, but kairos is the present and has an eternal element. Chronological time is personified as Old Father Time carrying a scythe and an hourglass–it is a time that consumes all. Kairos time is personified as a young man, lithe and handsome–it is a time that suggests “ripeness is all” (Lear 5.2.11).

Chronological time, named after the titan who ate his children, destroys and consumes. All material things experience the ravages of time. In the Hobbit, Gollum’s riddle in the dark is about chronos time:

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

There is a monstrous quality to chronological time. Chronos time is made up of past that doesn’t exist anymore and future that doesn’t yet exist. Because its made of these intangibilities, chronos time takes on a spectral quality. To make matters worse, as Gollum says, it kills and consumes. It is a terrifying creature. Dead, but devouring and it never stops coming. There’s something hellish about the eternal monotony of mechanical time.

Where chronos suggests death, kairos suggests life. The present is the only part of time that actually exists; it’s alive, and if you are experiencing it, you are alive too. The term Kairos contains the idea that not all time is the same. Sure there is the regular and mechanical passing of minutes, but there are also immeasurable moments that catch us by surprise, that bubble up from within time or flow into it from somewhere, or somewhen, else. These interruptions of ordinary time by higher time suggest a link with the eternal–the “everlasting now” which is the time of heaven.

Hourglass or Lava Lamp

Clker-Free-Vector-Images / Pixabay

I want to suggest that when you think of time, don’t only imagine the hourglass of chronos, but a lava lamp of kairos time–irregular and surprising.

Our worldview both shapes and is shaped by our language. Because we have only one word for time, we are in danger of thinking and living under the idea that time is simply chronological.

I’ve had students tell me that eternity sounds boring? It certainly does if you think of it in terms of chronological–dead–time. If we broaden our understanding of time, we will not only have a more positive view of an eternal future, but we also will understand the importance of the living present, which as C. S. Lewis says, “is all lit up with eternal rays” (The Screwtape Letters).

Cervantes and Praise Songs

November 1, 2015 / Trent / 2 Comments

Donations_are_appreciated / Pixabay

I find it difficult to praise Him, while singing Hillsong’s “Praise Him.”

I’m reading Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel De Cervantes. I came across the passage today where the Cannon discusses the inferiority of the popular books of chivalry whose authors write “without paying any attention to good taste or the rules of art.”

I’m not sure if the views expressed by the canon are those of Cervantes, but they are close to mine when it comes to much of Christian art, particularly that branch that gives us the songs we sing in church each week.

Don Quixote on Art

In this passage from Don Quixote, the canon is speaking of drama, but his comments apply to all art forms, I think, including praise and worship lyrics. I have made some changes, that I am sure Cervantes would not object to.

The praise songs ” that are now in vogue . . . are, all or most of them, downright nonsense and things that have neither head nor tail, and yet the public listens to them with delight, and regards and cries them up as perfection when they are so far from it . . . . the [lyricists] who write them, and the [worship leaders] who [perform] them, say that this is what they must be, for [congregations] wants this and will have nothing else. . . .

Apparently there is no point to “go by rule and work out [lyrics] according to the laws of art” because these “will only find some half-dozen intelligent people to understand them, while all the rest remain blind to the merit of their composition. I have sometimes endeavoured to convince [worship leaders] that they are mistaken in this notion they have adopted, and that they would attract more people, and get more credit, by [writing praise songs] in accordance with the rules of art, than by absurd ones, they are so thoroughly wedded to their own opinion that no argument or evidence can wean them from it.

“I remember saying one day to one of these obstinate fellows, ‘Tell me, do you not recollect that a few years ago, there were three [songs sung in the churches] of these kingdoms, which were such that they filled all who heard them with admiration, delight, and interest, the ignorant as well as the wise, the masses as well as the higher orders?'”

“‘No doubt,’ replied the [worship leader] in question, ‘you mean the “Blessed Be Your Name,” the “10 000 Reasons,” and “Revelation Song.“‘

“‘Those are the ones I mean,’ said I; ‘and see if they did not observe the principles of art, and if, by observing them, they failed to show their superiority and please all the world; so that the fault does not lie with the public that insists upon nonsense, but with those who don’t know how to [write] something else.”

The song that inspired this post is Hillsong United’s “Praise Him.”

“Praise Him” by Hillsong United

I think I know a formula when I see it–it has that progression that almost all of the popular praise songs have these days. My problem with this song is the lyrics are so general. I will commend its writers that the clichés they employ are at least on the same subject, but they aren’t really about anything except there is lots of praising going on.

There is nothing in the lyrics that engage either the mind or the imagination. Without this engagement, even if the music is really excellent, the experience is, at best, only emotional. Under these conditions, my worship experience is about as meaningful as watching clothes tumble in the dryer.

I believe that we should bring God our best–not just our best music, but our best everything–this includes our lyrics.

I leave you with just a few lines of Josh Garrels’ song “Colors” which are about praising Him.

So let all the creatures sing
Praises over everything
Colors are meant to bring
Glory to the light

In my series The Poetry of Worship, offer ways we can improve the lyrics of the praise and worship songs we sing. More importantly, I explain why we ought to.