The singer's gift

My friend, a urology nurse, startled me today.

We had just spent some time singing a song by Patsy Cline, Walking after Midnight, in preparation for a party next month. I noticed that she could remember the words almost perfectly, not just to that tune but to almost any other song I'd suggest.

She explained she has this gift of remembering hundreds of songs, and she sings some of them with one of her patients as she is preparing his catheter.

Stan Rogers, Cline, Johnny Cash, old hymns. On and on they sing together amidst the necessities of aging life and failing body parts. The other nurses can only laugh in wonderment, as they pass by the door where notes drift out from the happy pair, lost in their songs together.

I’m trying to think of scriptural references here, to explain the Christian connection here, after two weeks and eight, 1,000-word essays in a theology class at the Atlantic School of Theology. Scripture, tradition, reason and experience _ the quartet of theological tools. I pray I won’t become paralyzed by fear of mistreating newly acquired knowledge in this search to be in relation to God, to Christ, to the Spirit _ to all and yet one.

“Really bad theology,” said the professor, “can destroy the world.”

By bad, he means theology that uses poor method, or makes assumptions. Now I must ask if I have ignored those who have come before, or skirted questions. Have I failed to provide backing of scripture, or been ignorant of positions of the ancient church? Have I abandoned either the human reason that allows us to grapple with truth, or the experience of God that makes itself evident in practices such as prayer.

Still, he said, go ahead Michael, layperson, and write, and do it with joy and care.

No pressure. Just relax, and dare to write The Days Inbetween now. Thanks, professor. And you thought Dumbledore was tough, Harry Potter.

So, I’m thinking my friend is a great singer, and that I can’t necessarily make people happy with modern notions of love when I want to evoke Christ.

The modern mind has to be bent, even to begin to shift into some habits of Christianity, because Christianity rubs against the grain in every way imaginable.

Christianity is the opposite of the patterns of modern brains in many respects.

My brain is conditioned to recoil at the poor creature reaching out his hand on Barrington Street at lunch hour; my brain is wired not to visit the sick in hospital, where my own oncoming infirmity and death might be evoked; my brain is patterned to buy another coffee, rather than drop one by the home of my neighbour.

On and on it goes, and along comes God’s intervention in the world.

Welcome now to Christ’s words in Matthew 25:42, “For I was hungry…I was thirsty…I was a stranger…I needed clothes…I was sick and in prison.” The bottom line: Christ is Lord and Lord is “least.” A scandal then, and _ really, if we’re being honest _ even more of a scandal now.

Our minds are wired for power, the professor argued. St. Augustine called it original sin, Darwin called it DNA. We recoil at the imagery of suffering, and to my opening image of the singing nurse. And yet, there it is. That’s the reality of nature. That’s Creation too. That’s Christ’s love in play and therefore incarnate in this is creator God’s love at one and the same time. The Spirit is singing.

Consider the scene from John 9:6-7: “Jesus spat on the ground and made clay out of spittle and put clay on the man’s eyes. And then said to him go and wash in the pool of Siloam.” Apparently, Siloam is still a place that can be located in Jerusaleum. If I get there, I can remember our God, also the Son of Man, spat on that ground to create the clay of healing. And then a blind man sees. It's precisely the kind of Christ parable that it seems is designed to repattern our brains, to challenge what the professor called "the will to power."

I used a lot of the little book Where God Happens, by Archbishop Rowan Williams in the past few weeks in college. He’s a wondruous part of our tradition. He notes that when Jesus tells his disciples most fully who he is, “many find it ‘a hard saying.’…his words are given to us to absorb and repeat so that we can speak for him to one another. Gradually _ and by the gift of the Spirit _ a new language will emerge for the new community of disciples: a language of great simplicity to speak to Abba, Father, a language full of surprises and daring images to speak to each other so as to echo what God has said (Bible and doctrine.)”

Williams, writing of the desert fathers and mothers of the earliest chuch, those who moved away from cities to live in communities and worship and sit in silence, says these ancients knew language was tricky and often instead sought “expectant quiet, the quiet before the dawn, when you don’t want to say anything too quickly for fear of spoiling what’s uncovered for you as the light comes.”

Thankfully (for me), he also wrote that words can be of use by times. “Speech that will affirm and open the way to life, for a speech that can be playful and not just useful…”

Or singing that can be playful and useful. Singing drifting down the halls of a hospital ward, that can have me seeing a reality that I’m just beginning to discern, by the grace of God. Images that break you open, little by little.