Chloe's Violin

My granddaughter Chloe is learning to play the violin.

Chloe is a really delightful child, full of passion and sassy.  She is beautiful, witty, and tempramental.  She loves music;  she always has.  She comes over to my house and wants to play on my guitars. I sometimes let her plunck on the cheaper of the two, and she would say "Grandpa, do you like my music?"

One day I answered "That's not music."

She got a look on your face like I  had just hit her in the gut. "Isn't it beautiful?"

"You are beautiful," I  answered. "That's just noise."

It's fun to watch Chloe, in whatever she does--laugh, dance,  beat on a drum, play the guitar. I could watch her for hours.  Everything she does is a dance to me, every word she says is music.

But plunking on my guitar is not music. 

Now, Chloe is learning to play the violin--and she's making music and it really is beautiful--sometimes.

I am a little concerned about that.  Can a little girl with such a fire for life channel that fire through a bowstring?  Will she be enthusiastic about it for a while, until it turns into work,  and then let it drop going back into the fantasy of pretend music, or will she go on to the place where she will make beautiful music as a virtuoso violinist?  Will the music she feels inside of her own heart go out to others with  the same zest she feels inside?  I hope so. But I know for that to happen, she must work long and hard,  disciplining herself to get the music out.

When we are young, we have music  inside--we all do.  We want to let that music out, but we do not have the ability.  We plunk tunelessly on guitars and pianos,  we make karate kicks at invisible opponents,  we run marathons in our imaginations or score winning touchdowns.  Other people call it "pretending" but it's not really a pretense. It is our attempt to display the image of God we know inside.  We were made to do great things, to master the universe, each in our own unique way.

But we find we can't do it without discipline.  At some point,  fantasy runs into reality, and we give up at the difficulty of living. Unexpressed, the music dies.  As we grow older, we forget the tune. 

There is a natural rhythm in live, a kind of "donut" of passion with a hole in the middle called "drudgery." We begin a new endeavor enthusiastically.  We are eager to pick up a musical instrument, take up exercise, or to begin a quiet time with God.  In our minds, we imagine ourselves to be a great musician,  athlete, or saint. That imaginary future success sustains us for a while, and we feed off the joy of the imaginary, but it isn't real. It's not even a real hope, but a wish,  so it doesn't last long.  After a day, a week, or month, we start to get bored with it.  Our passion goes on to something else.  We get bored, and what began as  music soon becomes a mindless drone.

But we keep plugging away,  not because we want to, but because we know we should.  We make a choice of passions. We are tempted by other things which promise a momentary joy, but we do not give in to them. We deny them, because we know that all temptation is a form of adultery, a call to cheat on our first love.  We keep at it, running laps,  scratching on the violin,  reading the Bible through the "begat" chapters and the endless complaints of the prophets,  until somewhere inside the drudgery we see the glimmers of real music and real joy, not the pretend joy of the beginning but the realized joy of knowing what we are doing and doing it well. 

I heard a statement recently about practicing music, that if you really want to be good at is you should practice two hours a day. The first hour is rote repetition, scales, skill building, while the second hour is pure joy.  We can't get to the joy part without the drudgery.  A ballerina spends hours practicing forms, bending at the bar,  starving herself,  building endurance,  so that she can perform magic on the stage.  A magician practices his sleight of hand until his fingers almost fall off, and until he can't stand to look at another card.  Then he starts to do real magic.  A saint gets callouses on his knees  in silence--fasting, praying, reading,  meditating, until he can come to that place of seeing visions of third heaven.  There is no easy way through the dark night of the soul, but there is a fiery dawn on the other side. 

So Chloe is learning the violin.  One day, it may sit alone in her closet gathering dust, like my guitar did for years, her mother's viola, or that old exercise machine we were going to use every week.  I hope not, though. I hope she will be wiser than we are while she is young enough to enjoy it; that she will work through the drudgery of discipline until the music she has on the inside can come out of her fingers and amaze the world. 

Derailing the Faith Train

My first effort to share my faith was at a Billy Graham Crusade in 1970.  A lot of my friends volunteered to sing in the choir, but since I had little or no interest in singing, but I wanted to go down to the crusade with them, I volunteered for counselor training which was being held at the same time as choir practice.  I was ushered into a room with several hundred other people and shown how to use a little booklet called  "Steps to peace with God." I have used that little book hundreds of times since. 

This book contains two illustrations that in  evangelical churches have become iconic--the "Cross Bridge" illustration  and the "Faith Train " illustration. 

The "Cross Bridge" illustration goes like this--a person wants to get to God, but sin interferes, open up a chasm between God and people  We try to build bridges to God with our good works--religious practices,  intellectual efforts, or whatever.  None of them work. So God builds a bridge to us--the cross of Jesus.  The cross enables us to reach God though Christ.  It's about the most simple way of explaining the Gospel I know.

The "Faith Train" illustration comes after the bridge illustration,  after a person has received Christ.  It is used to explain how we can know we have been saved.  It  consists of a train with three cars--an engine, a coal car, and a caboose.

• The engine is labeled 'Fact." The fact is that God has accepted us whether  we feel any different or not. 

• The coal car is "Faith."  Faith connects us to the facts and gives us something to hold on to.

• The caboose is "Feeling."  A train will run with or without a caboose. The fact of God's forgiveness coupled with  faith will get us to heaven, whether we feel anything or not.

As I said, I learned the Cross Bridge and the Faith Train illustrations while in my teens. I still think the bridge is for me the best way of explaining  how to receive Christ.  But lately I question the usefulness of the Faith Train.  Here's why.  

Don't get me wrong, I accept the basic premise.  We are saved though faith in the fact of God's grace.  But  feelings are not a caboose that is slapped on the back end of our psyche.  Salvation is more than a cognitive process. It is a life-changing, life rearranging  act of God, both initiated and manifested though actions, emotion, and intellectual assent.  Our whole self is involved in accepting the Gospel, not just our brains. It is an inner transformation, accomplished by God  through  the Spirit working in and through our minds, will, and emotions.  It not just a matter of our heads. It  also involves our hands and hearts. 

What we think certainly affects what we do and feel.  But the opposite is also true--what we feel and do also effects what we think.  Scripture supports this. Wisdom and knowledge begin with the fear of the Lord--an emotion.  God is defined by love--another emotion.  The idea that our devotion to God is brought about by accepting a fact alone does not reflect the truth. 

I do not deny that factual knowledge plays an important part. We must believe that the Cross and the resurrection really happened, and were not some metaphoric myth.  Our commitment to Christ will not last long if we do not believe it is true. The fallacy of liberal Christianity is that it is essentially non-factual Christianity. We cannot base our lives on something we only think may be true.  We do not buy insurance on the basis of a probable promise, or set up our retirement accounts on the basis of probable yields.  What makes us think that people will willingly give their lives for a Savior who may or may not be real?  If the Gospel may not be true, why  lay our lives down for it? 

 Faith in the reality of Christ keeps us going when our faith is shaky and our emotions weak. But emotions and actions keep us going when our faith is weak.  God works though emotion and ritual when our minds are unsure.  The idea that our intellect exists in a vacuum, unaffected by  our feelings is just not right.  Feelings are not a caboose we can live without--they are the blood, bone, and marrow of our spiritual nature.  Without our feelings, we will never possess absolute certainty, because absolute certainty is a feeling.

If we truly believe that faith rests entirely on fact, then why do we spend so much time singing in church?  Why do we quote St. Augustine's statement that we do not understand in order to believe, but believe in order to understand?  Why do we encourage people to evangelize their neighbors by being friendly, if faith rests on facts alone?  Without feelings,  faith is powerless and facts indecipherable.  Without feelings the power to obey is lost.  All our efforts to be good would be as  limp and useless as a sail without a wind.

Along with facts and feelings there is also action.  "Faith without works is dead," said James.  Unless we live out our faith and feelings,  then they dissipate into a mass of good intentions and remorse.  The spiritual disciplines are the reinforcers and concretizers of our faith.  The daily habits of the Christian life put that faith to work, and solidify the thoughts of our mind and the feelings of our hearts.  Faith without prayer,  feelings without worship,  and knowledge without study make no sense, and cannot last for long.  

Christians need emotional passion, intellectual study, and consistent action to keep assured of their salvation.  

A more accurate picture of the train illustration would be this--there are three engines on the front of the train--fact, passion, and action.  These three combine their strength and pull us forward.  When one fails, the other two are still with us.  Together they can get us much farther than any one of them can do alone. 

Faith and Passion

One of the surprising things I've found in our recent sojourn among the Lutherans is that we Presbyterians are not the only "frozen chosen."  Lutherans call themselves that, too.  All this time, I always thought "frozen chosen" was a distinctly Presbyterian epithet.    It's nice to know we are not alone in the freezer.

Now, some Presbyterians may take umbrage with this,  that Lutherans would call themselves the
"frozen chosen."   We seem to take a certain pride in being the frozen chosen--in living  out our faith without messy emotionalism. We even have an answer to that gentle insult--we may have a frozen faith,  but at least it does not spoil so quickly as some other Christians.   We have kept the faith for a long, long time.

Presbyterians are not really cold, nor are we unemotional.  People  often forget that most of the great revivals of American history, including those accompanied by  wild exuberance, by shouting, barking,  dancing and so forth,  broke out first among Presbyterians and were largely led in their early stages by Presbyterians.  Jonathan Edwards'  famous hellfire-and-brimstone sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", was originally preached in a Presbyterian church to Presbyterians, and if the folk tales are true that while he had to ask the congregation to quit crying so loudly so he could finish it,  those were Presbyterians he had to tell to be quiet.

Nevertheless,  we must painfully admit that there are good reasons for calling us the "frozen chosen."  Presbyterians are in general a reticent and reserved bunch. Our dispassionate approach to preaching and worship is shocking to the unaccustomed.  Baptists, Pentecostals, and  African Americans with whom I currently work cannot fathom why Presbyterian do not shout with joy before such a wonderful God as ours.  Frankly, I wonder why we don't sometimes myself. 

In the face of the omnipotent,  majestic, and overwhelming  Lord of the Universe, why are we so unemotional?   Where is our joy in His presence? Where are our tears of fear and awe? Where is our zeal in praising Him?  Aren't our detractors right to wonder why we don't shout for joy?

Emotional reticence was not the way of our Presbyterian ancestors.  One cannot read Calvin, Luther, Knox, or the Puritans without being struck by the passion in their prose.  We cannot listen to "A Mighty Fortress" or read Knox's "Last Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of Women" and think of them as the products of talking heads in an effete university.  These were men of flesh and bone and fire. 

Our emotional reticence does not come from the Bible, which tells us to shout with joy , to weep before the porch and the altar, and encourages us to bring even our worst fears and anger before Him by the example of the Psalms, but is a product of the Enlightenment reason-worship, Platonic dualism, and Victorian prudery.  It is a denial of both the full image of God, which includes His passion, wrath, and delight, as well as of total depravity, which  posits that our heads are as fallen as our hearts.  Furthermore,  our tendency to look upon the emotional excesses of other churches with distain is simply the instinct found in every sinner to spot the mote in another person's eye while missing the log in our own.

The truth is that it does not matter how right our doctrine may be if we do not marry it with spiritual passion.  Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence argues successfully that our ability to understand emotions is a better predictor of success than our ability to reason.  Gestalt psychology, for all its faults,  demonstrates successfully that showing emotion intensifies emotion, that laughing makes us happy, crying makes us sad, and arguing feeds our anger.  The  Old Testament writers in expressing praise used words denoting outward actions not inward feelings--brightening the face, shouting,  even leaping for joy. They understood that we cannot separate having feelings from displaying our feelings.   If we know it, we should show it.

As I said before, Presbyterians are not unemotional people--we are very emotional at times.   But we are sometimes reticent to show them,  so we lack their power.  We'd love to be swept away in praise to the Lord, as were Paul and the Puritans--we really would. But we fear  embarrassment and so we do or say nothing.  We wait for God to excite us,  overwhelm us, empower us,  but when the chance arises, we don't want to show it until we are sure. Uncertain of its propriety, we wait for an awakening of soul that never comes.

C S Lewis wrote of the lion Aslan  (who represents Christ) in The Chronicles of Narnia that he is not a safe lion, not a tame lion, but one that is good.  We among the "frozen chosen" are looking for Christ to be both tame and good.  We want God to bless us, but we do not want to risk becoming foolish while He  does. Our shyness keeps us from embracing His lovely wildness; our fear of uncertainty keeps us from leaping out in faith; our aversion to embarrassment keeps us from  childlike glee.  We will not ride the winds of the Spirit until they are safely in a bottle.  Bottled wind, in the end is nothing but stale air. 

This is not intended to take anything away from Presbyterians (or the Lutherans either).  The historic Protestant traditions have made vast contributions to Christian life and thought. We make the best teachers, the best administrators, the best scholars.  But is it so hard to imagine that we can be more than just scholars, or that the Spirit of God is more than just an intellectual ideal?  Is it possible that we can not only reason like Paul but dance like David, as well?  We have our theology down cold, but  we need more than a cold theology. Revival is more than this. It is being swept away in the wonderful God, in the passion of Christ,  and in the power of the unpredictable winds of the Spirit. 

 I believe that we will never be revived if we are not wiling to release the power of Spiritual passion--to cry over our sins,  to shout over our salvation, to dance with joy and prostrate ourselves in sorrow. As long as we play it safe and keep our feelings to ourselves, our energies  will forever be wasted in the senseless pursuit of composure.   Church will feel like a duty,  worship will feel like a funeral, praise will be joyless, love will be mirthless,  repentance will be tearless,  evangelism will be mere news without  goodness,  charity will be cheerless, and hope will be hopeless.  Our heads may be the rudder of our lives, but we will not get far without the winds of Holy Spirit passion.  Without the fire,  the truth we offer  the world will be as appealing as a frozen steak on a plate. 

Revive us, o Lord. Fill each heart with Your love  Let our soul be rekindled with fire from above.  Amen and amen.