Music Brings Memories

Music can be a powerful tool to improve our mood and fend off depression.

Music can stimulate the positive emotions such as joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and most of all love. Music can improve blood flows, lower our levels of stress, and ease pain. They have proven that listening to music before an operation can even improve post-surgery outcomes. The benefits of listening to music, like meditation, can be a powerful tool for improving overall health and well-being.

From time to time in this section, I will share playlists and thoughts about music from the past that has made Life worth Living for me and music from the present that makes me want To Live Another Day.

Spirituality and Punk Rock

I recently spent what some people would consider a waste of time listening to an hour and 38 minutes of songs from the band, Rise-Against. I had never heard of the group before. A small introduction by iTunes of the album described the band as hard-core melodic rock and skate-core. being ignorant of those two music genres, I turned to Wikipedia and found that Melodic hardcore is a broadly defined subgenre of hardcore punk with a strong emphasis on melody in its guitar work. It incorporates fast rhythms, melodic and often distorted guitar riffs, and vocal styles tending towards shouting and screaming. Skate punk (also known as skate-core) is both a skater subculture and a subgenre of punk rock music. Featuring the fast tempos of hardcore punk, skate-core occasionally combines these with the catchy hooks of pop punk. Skate videos have traditionally featured this fast style of punk rock.

It is a reasonable question to ask what spirituality and punk rock have in common. I also read a devotional circulated by one of the priest at my church about how it was acceptable to shout at God. Isn't this what punk rock is representing to a certain extent?

I also read a devotional by an Episcopal priest about engaging in conflict with God in conflict when we hurt. Its lesson was that a deep prayer life is not one that is always in a state of happiness or optimism. A rich prayer life, the priest said, requires that we bring all of ourselves to God, including those parts that hurt, ache and have serious doubts or questions.

There are many examples in the Bible (Gideon, Jacob, Job, Lamentations, Jonah, etc.). People who question God naming their fears, their hurts and their hang-ups. Jesus Himself struggled with the suffering and sacrifice He was to make in Gethsemane and expressed words of abandonment on the cross (Mark 15:34). Over a third of the Psalms—the prayer book of the Bible—express lament, complaint, or struggle. The devotional pointed out we need to let go of the desire for clear-cut answers, we need to shout our pain to God, and we need to shout where God seems absent or uncaring. The musicians of punk rock are shouting their fears, their hurts, and their hang-ups. They may not know it, but they are wrestling with God. When you are wrestling with God, you need to have faith. And faith is also something I found in the best of punk rock. It may not be conscious, but faith in God’s goodness leads the musicians to call on God for an explanation when His goodness seems absent. Most of the questions raised by punk-rock seem to focus on such questions as: “God, where are you in this? Why do I see so much hurt in the world? Why, if you are good and love me, do I feel alone and you seem a million miles away?” Having faith is to having the confidence to shake your first at God and say, “This is not okay!” and trust that as in the lyrics of Good Left Undone:

What I took away from the songs of Rise Against was the need to resist superficial platitudes and explanations for suffering. It seems to me the punk rockers are saying, as Jacob said when wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." What Rise Against was saying is what Job 30:20 says. "I cry to you and you not do not answer me; I stand, and you merely look at me."

So listening to the music of Rise Against was not a wasted hour and 38 minutes. The music drove home to me that wrestling with God is hard, but that we do not invite God into our suffering if we pretend everything is okay.