A number of years back I got into a conversation with someone about music and various preferences. I was making a point about what I gravitate to in terms of vocal sound, and the person, being untrained in deeper musical language, kept arguing with me about the validity of my point.
Eventually, I attempted using the word timbre, hoping to be better understood, or at least have my point and personal preference validated. (That did not happen.) I thought the word timbre might better articulate the elusiveness of what I was saying that I didn’t much care for, in either secular or religious musical styles. It was not about being on pitch. It was not about loudness nor softness, per se.
It was something something else, in terms of musical tone that I gravitated to (in contrast with musical tone/styles I tune out on).
Sometimes it can be hard to articulate something. Sometimes we try, and we are mis-heard. And we think, “that’s not exactly what I was saying, or meaning,” and we realize some things (and this piece may be an example) are so small and nuanced, yet so incredibly big of a thing. By nuanced I mean, we might state that in general, we don’t care for something. Yet we may find ourselves ten minutes later, at least momentarily, being OK with that same thing. At least in small doses.
It also has to do with timing and frequency. Some things are like salt…a little sprinkle might do its perfect work, but indiscrimenantly throwing salt everywhere can kill things. I know that, because I recently had several bags of old ice salt and, knowing salt will kill weeds (and also keep any good things from growing for quite some time) I sprinkled the bags into a small area I didn’t want to mow and maintain.
It did its work. Two days later, the grass was brown and killed to the roots. It could be years before something grows there again. The overuse of salt did its work in this case, but before I did it, I made sure I wanted to kill that soil’s ability to support green life, and I made sure it wouldn’t seep into the adjoining areas I was cultivating.
Sometimes we find ourselves saying, “I can’t explain, but I know it when I see it.” Or, “I know it when I hear it.” What I was trying to describe in that older conversation about music (but can be applied to other things) involved timbre and more subtle qualities of a singer’s voice.
We might think that salt will heal, but salt, especially when rubbed into wounds, sometimes just causes unnecessary pain and discomfort.
In today’s Church universal, there are a number of things being put forth in a number of ways. Sometimes true things hit us badly because of the timbre, even when technically, the message is on perfect pitch. And then there are the more obvious dis-timbrent (not sure if this is a word, I just made it up) sounds that both the believer and the incoming unbeliever may hear in some churchy setting (an actual church service, a church concert, a church social, a church outreach, or some conversation with a stranger who happens to belong to a certain church and speaks that church’s timbre of Christianese and various messaging).
Today, I am drenched in a spirit of sorrow for some reason. And everything from the time I awoke until now feels saturated and somber-ated (I just made up yet another descriptor) in the recognition of the presence of sorrow.
From a few social media memes I paused over this morning, to several concerning headlines (which will lead to increased sorrows, if they stay their course…), to my own personal thoughts of sorrow, to especially, continued reflections upon an encounter I had with others experiencing deep sorrow on Tuesday in the form of being contacted by a young couple to preserve the funeral flowers from their four-month-old baby who suddenly died, in what the young mom said “should have been the safest place in the world…the little girl’s crib.”
Some sorrows come upon us with suddenness. And others, trickle in. Day by day by day we “eat ashes like bread.” That phrase just entered my mind, as it was one of many this past week, as I listened aloud to the entire book of Psalms more than once through, with the timbre of the phrase and image itself prompting me to send myself a little email with that title, just to remember it. For whatever reason.
“Indeed, I eat ashes like bread
~Psalm 102:9
and mingle tears with my drink“
The message today was from the gospel of Matthew, involving the parable of the various seeds that fell upon various types of soil. (Matthew 13:1-9)
I entered church thirteen minutes late today, due mostly to an unexpected conversation with my neighbor. I tend to not always be time conscious, always thinking I will make up somehow for the lost time. I’m learning I need to be even more conscious of time, at times, for the sake of others. But, back to making up for lost time. In reality, life continually robs us of joys, and brings us sorrows, arising from lost time. As they say, life is short…it is but a breath. How many things do we regret as things we can never get back? And more importantly, sometimes we behave and act in ways that take away good that might have otherwise come to another, and when we realize the fruits of our actions it can be too little, too late.
I recently was in conversation over some topics and it was mentioned that we can know something by its fruits. This is true. But the thing is, anyone who truly gardens understands this hard truth: the fruit is the last thing to come from some seed.
Some seeds get planted and spring up in various ways–even taking deep root–and we might assume that means the plant itself is good, and is the result of a good seed. In life, for example, there are a number of things in personal lives, family lives, church lives, societal lives and otherwise of which we may not see the true nature of the fruit for years. Decades, centuries…even millennia may pass before we start to get the full taste of a tree’s fruit.
And this principle currently is making me recoil from things that even have a faint timbre of my recollections of other seed-plantings where I witnessed such a rotten–even toxic–harvest. A number of weeks back I started a draft title for a blog piece called, “What Ever Happened to All of the Children We So ‘Dedicated’ to Jesus?” I don’t know that I will ever write that piece, per se. Perhaps even some of the thoughts here are trickling out from the little capillary of thoughts at that time, seemingly meeting up within a bigger vein or artery in this expression, today.
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While (possibly) being in God’s time I seemed to have actually benefited today, theme-wise, from slipping in late to church, it doesn’t change the fact that some forms of lost time involve such sorrows and loss that there is no meaningful way to fully recover that which one has missed out on. And these form our deepest, most personal losses.
Losses of dreams, in particular, fall into this category.
Before leaving for church, after I browsed my phone, brewed my coffee, looked out back and saw my lovely, elderly neighbor heading through my yard to my chickens to bring them her occasional offerings of produce scraps, and opening my deck door in my pajamas, chatting and mentioning the flowers of sorrow that entered my studio this past week…I returned inside and decided that despite a variety of my typical morning weights, I should put on my worship playlist.
I say worship playlist because sorting through the nearly 100-ish favorites I’ve added this past year into whether they are more in the praise category (with messaging and timbre of horizontal relationships...”Come Let Us Go Up to the Mountain of the Lord”…in which we might exhort and sing to one another, or ourselves) or the worship category (vertical messaging and timbre directly toward God…“I Love You Lord, and I Lift My Voice…”) would be quite unwieldy at this point to separate the mix. What was started and named as my “Worship” playlist has mutated into a long list of music that even includes (just a few) more secular-ish songs that I consider laden with good spiritual content.
It’s just become a massive playlist of songs and hymns that move me or strike me in ways worthy of adding them. If I begin at the beginning, I almost have the sequence memorized. But sometimes, like today, I don’t want to start with that one. I’m not even sure where to start.
So, some days I will play worship roulette, so-to-speak. I will swipe hard downward on the playlist and then randomly use my right index finger to suddenly stop it. And like opening some Chinese fortune cookie, or the proverbial random bible flip where someone does that and reads, “Judas hung himself,” and then, hoping for further guidance they randomly flip again to a scripture that says, “Go and do likewise,” I did that thing.
This morning, when I put my finger to my screen to suddenly stop the playlist, my finger was touching between two songs: Holy Darkness and Let the Weak Say I am Strong.
It took me just a couple seconds before I became the tie-breaking arbiter of which song I should listen to. I chose the second.
And then, it wasn’t long before I was thinking about “Say to the weary one, your God will surely come…”
And then I did what I often do. I hit the loop feature. Yes, so I could fully absorb the ongoing timbre of the messaging as I drove to church. Then, I walked in late, just in time to hear a fragment of a song I’ve not heard before, and I was struck by the timbred message therein,
“When the night is holding onto me
God is holding on.”
I later looked up the song on my phone and quite honestly, though that line and my first hearing (emphasize first) of a couple other lines struck me well, upon reading the entire song lyrics it simply falls into the category of having a lot of fluff and repetitive fillers. Sorry to anyone for whom this is the preference of gravitation, in terms of worship and praise.
And then, the heavy spirit upon me just continued. Immediately with my open ears, I heard something in the parable about the soil I had not yet heard so clearly and distinctly, internally, concerning that passage.
“Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.”
~Matthew 13:8-9
I thought to myself along these (now amplified) lines: I believe there is a direct correlation between our understanding of sorrow and our formation in Christ. The soil of sorrow and sufferings IS the deep soil, and that is the GOOD SOIL that yields. The rocky soil is the partial message of being victorious, joyful, healed and overcomers. Because when that is the over-sounding timbre of our message, and sorrow and sufferings come our way, we have no root. If we have not allowed ourselves to be formed by our own sorrows and sufferings, then how are we to receive and truly help another person who is in the midst of sorrow and suffering? Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with sufferings. Sometimes, I look about me or listen to the timbre of various Christian messaging (it abounds, from many directions and sources) and especially, methodologies of many sorts and I think critical thoughts toward others (and feel somewhat badly for that) such as, “you must not have yet suffered too deeply in life that you would say what you just said with that vocal timbre…” I am the foremost of sinners when it comes to over-talking at times, so with fear and trembling, I say, concerning having “listening ears” the proverbial saying that “you cannot be listening when you keep talking.”
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I think of a little book called “What to Listen For in the World” — one which I own but rarely take time to flip through and read the beautiful, pondering thoughts.
I sat in church, thinking all these thoughts and especially, thinking of the young couple that brought me their flowers of sorrow this week, to preserve…
I’m normally a bubbly, animated person who often likes joking, quick wit, a good story with lots of details…smiling with others, and more. In fact, sometimes I’ve thought less is not more, it is simply…less. Like in one of the good (anecdotal and humorous) stories worked into the sermon today about a lawyer grilling someone wanting them to just answer the question–yes or no–we are reminded that there is always more to most stories in terms of context, which helps us to better understand the specific impact of certain sorrows and sufferings.
In an age where minimalism is in and soundbites reign, and mantras such as “less is more” are the way to “hold space,” and content is low and now, even, artificially engineered….where church or church growth experts determine what will “work” to bring people in and keep them, we must recognize the pitfalls of shortcuts, spiritual “GMO” seeds and other ways that various forms of artificial means utilized in churchy places can circumvent or work against the deeper work God wants to do in and among us.
Why do people come to church? And why do they stay? Ultimately, we hope that people come to church to find God. In today’s plethora of seeker-friendly churches with seeker-friendly techniques, we might struggle, understandably, to know what it is that people come (and stay) for. God is not lost, but, we are lost.
People want something solid they can hold on to, some planting and watering of the seeds that God plants in the soil of our life’s sufferings and sorrows. They come, ultimately, to get answers to the bigger questions. These are ultimately questions of life and death matters. And while all humans want to know what will happen to us when and after we die, most of us, if honest, want more immediate answers to what forms of sorrow and suffering are before them in that very moment.
They might want to know things like, “How can I go on living today, tomorrow and the next in the here-and-now, after my little baby was found dead?”
And it is for that reason today, that this spirit of sorrow I experienced leads me to form this piece.
And to remind us that if we are to err on the side of the timbre of joy, or of the timbre of sorrow; or to err on the side of sound bites or err on the side of content, in whatever churchy place we are, we might do well to maintain a timbre that is more associated with funerals and deep content. Or at least, walk a line that we can easily slide from one into the other in terms of timbre, fostering an atmosphere where the Spirit of God can, hopefully, connect with each person present.
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Sometimes, as they say, there are no words. And like Proverbs 14:10 (NCB) says, “The heart knows its own grief best, and no one else can share its joy.” I could speak of my own particular moments of sorrow prompted by something in the past 24 hours–the quick, piercing reminder and ripping open of the scabs that I (and we all) cover over with anger, many words and ruminations, joking, sarcasm, TV, food, whatever friends and family we might have, work, activities…so much…
And so I think today again, of timbre. When one speaks to many on behalf of God, there are two pitfalls of possible erring of timbre. We might be too joyful, or light-hearted about things of God, or, we might be too sorrowful and somber.
While on another day I will surely eat my own words here, much like eating ashes like bread, when I might speak of Jesus winking at me through some little, fun and light-hearted coincidence, and I might speak with joyful timbre….I think it does us all well to be reminded that on any given day, and in any assembling of people…there are those among us that walk in carrying deep wounds, lacerations, piercings and scars, and those that cannot remove their battle attire too easily for even a few moments.
It is like…it is like they are sitting in their own personal funeral-sorrow among us. There has been a loss. Or worse, a series of losses.
And do we hear and do we speak accordingly?
I know that I have often failed to immediately pick up on someone’s loss, and to respond with the proper timbre.
Even at funerals, in the awkwardness of being present with death, sorrow and suffering, people often see those they have not seen in years. There is the hushed catching up, the occasional laugh that rises above the low murmur of timbred speaking taking place…and even, we eat together. We commune over food because, life goes on in the land of the living, even when every where we look around us is death.
And so I wonder today. Like in the book of James that speaks of the postures of those assembled and those who enter–the timbred postures if you will–if someone enters who is deeply suffering, what is the timbre that they hear? Not the pitch. Not the melody. Not the words, per se. But the timbre of it all.
The assembly of believers is not, in my opinion, to be primarily flavored by the latest worldly techniques used by worldly motivational speakers. It is not the time for only a few to be having some type of experience that others cannot be easily led to enter into, in participation.
I could be wrong, and surely am on some points here.
But I’m wondering what would it be like if Christians considered the gathering to be led and entered with a constant recognition of the need to maintain a healthy amount of funeral timbre? In everything from the preacher’s tone to the careful and intentional responses of others in various ways in the service to be one of a slower, thoughtful, intentional and considerate timbre?
I am not suggesting a gathering that lacks hope, joy or expressions of positivity, humor and fun–not at all. (See earliest main point of elusive things that are hard to articulate.) And I am not wanting to be overly critical, for surely every part of orchestrating a Christian gathering of any sort requires a number of skills and giftings, and these are certainly not my forte. It can be easy to critique others in a variety of settings–people who have stepped forward to serve the body of Christ in deeply sacrificial ways that bring their own strengths and weaknesses and broken places to the table.
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Nothing distracts me more in a service than the use of techniques that may be well-intended to keep everyone on the same page and following along, but through which the timbred vocalizations hit my ears as distraction, and give me cause to stumble in my thoughts about why others think it is OK to do whatever it is they are doing. There is plenty of time to have a solo-God-experience when alone; when we come together as one body, we are a collection of people in a corporate assembly. While we can and should be having some personal, individual experience, I believe we should be careful in that not to distract others from having their own experience. If that half makes sense.
I acknowledge that some people these days respond to church trends of many sorts that offput me, and that I do not understand why. I struggle to give space to these things, while maintaining my own ideals.
Today I’ve thought a lot about sorrow, and other things, to the point that I might even be too bold in saying, “If you don’t understand, first, sorrow…then you may not fully understand the gospel.”
(Many years ago, I and others were very negatively impacted by a promoted “move of God” that in my estimation was borne of false seed. The fruit promoted was that of “holy laughter” and there were particular means of transference of this thing, along with the idea that God was throwing some “party” where people could create-and-transfer this “thing” like the passing of “fire,” that caused the appearance of drunkenness, silliness and other absurd behaviors such as barking and crowing, touted as “manifestations” of God’s Spirit and attributed to God, rather than man, and man’s manipulations of the people of God. These proved in both short and long-term fruit, in my estimation, to be dangerous and destructive in numerous churches and sadly, in individual lives. I sometimes wonder these days how a whole generation of children — many raised in these church settings — has birthed such variety of sorrowful things and ungodly fruit. Many a heart of parents my age find themselves pierced with many pangs. Where did we go so very wrong, we wonder… And again, I think of that movement and those churchy trends… Why anyone who had been deeply formed in Christ with seeds planted in the good soil–the soil of sorrow and sufferings and the truths and purposes of the gospel and healthy Christian living–would accept this thing or the proselytizing thereof, confounds me to this day. This is a tangent inserted at the end here but somewhat related. I do believe the tentacles of this weedy-seeded movement, and others, are still reaching into today’s Church. And for that, I feel concern.)
And without using this phrase with God’s name glibly (in vain), as some do in a jesting way, I say it with intention,
“Please. For the love of God, let us conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of this gospel.”
Ultimately the gospel is about both sorrow and joy. And we know that ultimately, joy triumphs, for those who seek God. But in this world, sorrows abound.
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Lord Jesus, I pray you would better train my own timbre, apart from the pitch and melodies I sing, so that I am able to employ the right timbre in every situation.
He Will Come and Save You
Say to those who are fearful hearted
Do not be afraid
The Lord your God
Is strong with His mighty arms
When you call on His name
He will come and save
He will come and save you
He will come and save you
Say to the weary one
Your God will surely come
He will come and save you
He will come and save you
He will come and save you
Lift up your eyes to HIm
You will arise again
He will come and save you
Say to those who are broken hearted
Do not lose your faith
The Lord your God
Is strong with His loving arms
When you call on His name
He will come and save
He is our refuge in the day of trouble
He is our shelter in the time of storm
He is our tower in the day of sorrow
Our fortress in the time of war
Songwriters: Gary Sadler / Bob Fitts
He Will Come and Save You lyrics © Integrity’s Hosanna! Music
Psalm 102 (NRSV)
Prayer to the Eternal King for Help
A prayer of one afflicted, when faint and pleading before the Lord.
1 Hear my prayer, O Lord;
let my cry come to you.
2 Do not hide your face from me
in the day of my distress.
Incline your ear to me;
answer me speedily in the day when I call.
3 For my days pass away like smoke,
and my bones burn like a furnace.
4 My heart is stricken and withered like grass;
I am too wasted to eat my bread.
5 Because of my loud groaning,
my bones cling to my skin.
6 I am like a desert owl[a] of the wilderness,
like a little owl of the waste places.
7 I lie awake;
I am like a lonely bird on the housetop.
8 All day long my enemies taunt me;
those who deride me use my name for a curse.
9 Indeed, I eat ashes like bread
and mingle tears with my drink,
10 because of your indignation and anger,
for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside.
11 My days are like a lengthening shadow;
I wither away like grass.
12 But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever;
your name endures to all generations.
13 You will rise up and have compassion on Zion,
for it is time to favor it;
the appointed time has come.
14 For your servants hold its stones dear
and have pity on its dust.
15 The nations will fear the name of the Lord
and all the kings of the earth your glory.
16 For the Lord will build up Zion;
he will appear in his glory.
17 He will regard the prayer of the destitute
and will not despise their prayer.
18 Let this be recorded for a generation to come,
so that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord:
19 that he looked down from his holy height,
from heaven the Lord looked at the earth,
20 to hear the groans of the prisoners,
to set free those who were doomed to die,
21 so that the name of the Lord may be declared in Zion
and his praise in Jerusalem,
22 when peoples gather together,
and kingdoms, to serve the Lord.
23 He has broken my strength in midcourse;
he has shortened my days.
24 “O my God,” I say, “do not take me away
at the midpoint of my life,
you whose years endure
throughout all generations.”
25 Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
26 They will perish, but you endure;
they will all wear out like a garment.
You change them like clothing, and they pass away,
27 but you are the same, and your years have no end.
28 The children of your servants shall live secure;
their offspring shall be established in your presence.
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