Unbidden Songs

I pulled out the old guitar last Friday for the first time since running my pick-holdin’ (right) hand through the table saw about a year and a half ago. In fact, it’d been so long since I played it that it required a considerable search through the house to find it (even something as large as it is still being subject to the darling’s stow and hide strategy, a la ‘where the hell’s my guitar?’ after wandering around). Over the months I’ve occasionally considered whipping it out to see what would happen, but the thought was too depressing, and I didn’t have a particular reason demanding the torment, like needing to play somewhere, so it sat unbidden in the closet.

But being ever the servant of Jesus and/or at least his church, and/or at least the kerygma, I began to wonder if I might not end the upcoming sermon bringing the body of Christ to an orgasm of the kingdom by singing and teachin’ ’em an old church camp song while strumming along—the Lutheran equivalent to pentecostalism, a spirit possession so violent as to drive some almost to clap. Thus the fetching of la guitarra.

I strapped her over my shoulder and, oh, baby, found myself in that familiar embrace of our twenty-eight year affair. I stroked her smooth lovely neck and caressed her strings, tenderly forming them into silent chords. I felt her full body hard against me and took a moment to stare once again at her comely shape, taking in her contours and colors while she waited unashamedly, her strings vibrating with anticipation from my fingers teasing her neck. The moment had come. I inserted my flatpick between thumb and index finger and prepared to make her sing out in ecstasy. I knew how to take her there.

The sense of touch is taken for granted until it goes away by, say, being run through a saw. The loss of it leads to new and usually not very happy surprises, with love-making in all its various guises being the most notably handicapped: I’ve learned that while I may be a left-handed writer, I’m a right-handed lover. My loving strum brought forth not a song of ecstasy but a painful doink-kersploing-twang-thunk perversion in which my darling la guitarra actually jumped away from me. It’s guitarese for ‘Jesus, what in the hell are you doing?’ (which I’ve also heard in other languages as well); the sound declaring the action being that instead of strumming I had actually snatched the top string with the pick and pulled it away from the body. This abduction led la guitarra’s string to snap back—doink-kersploing-twang—and that action turned my hand so that my knuckles smacked her right in the body—thunk.

And then there was the up-strum. Making love to la guitarra also consists of the old down ‘n up and is equally hard to stop once it’s started. I didn’t know that the pick had flown out of my hand ’cause, like I said, I couldn’t feel it and didn’t realize it until my fingers jammed into the strings. I had actually to look at my hand to see what was happening down there, and to check for blood because steel strings can cut skin. It took some time to find the pick. I took some adhesive tape and tied Mr. Floppy, my right ring-finger which still awaits being surgically rewired and so does what he pleases, to Mr. Happy the middle finger to get him out of the way. I reinserted the flatpick, had to aim it with my left hand since I couldn’t feel its placement, squeezed hard and started strumming again. It took some time to reorient because there is no tactile feedback and I could not tell where my hand was relative to the strings. After a while I worked that out, and eventually got to where I could strum two whole verses occasionally before the pick flew out of my fingers causing another sound wreck. I spent Friday night trying to solve the slippery fingers problem (go buy those finger condoms they use in offices for paperwork?), but things went okay when I practiced on Saturday. Good ’nuff, anyway; though in actual performance I sploinked the Big Ending and the pick flew into the baptismal font.

The kerygmatic occasion for all this effort was Isaiah 40—one of my top ten all time favorite chapters in the Bible, along with Jeremiah’s lament (‘you seduced me, you prick’), Job’s loathing of his birth and the speeches out of the divine whirlwind (‘too bad, deal with it’), Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, and some stuff in the new testament. The sheer grace of it is thrilling. Or at least so I planned for the folks at B’mont who are taking a vote to go in a new direction as a congregation and wondering what if we fail? Hence Isaiah:

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble. To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing.

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Yeah, baby: ‘They who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall rise up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.’

There’s the trick, though, eh? Teach me, Lord, to wait.

And there’s the whole song, a simple promise and a prayer, repeated three times, twice in C then with the big modulation to D on the last time so you know you really mean it, and ending with, as I said, a sploink into the baptismal font.

I set it up sermonically by talking about the darkness of uncertainty and those times when in my own midnight floor pacings an unbidden song begins to make itself heard from deep within. In time it comes to out-sing the fear of uncertainty. It doesn’t silence the uncertainty, it’s just stronger than the fear. And then we sang the song that out sings the fear.

Jesus I’m good. I ought to be teaching this shit at seminary.

On the 110-mile drive home I got to thinking about that unbidden song that sings itself into my consciousness. I got a bunch of ’em—snatches of liturgy or lines of church tunes (well, and other)—that seem to sing themselves at, say, just the right time to provide some energy, say, spiritual sustenance; as if they were part of a deep well of life-giving water come forth to quench the thirst, which Jesus said something about in John’s gospel. They come unbidden, but not unlearned. All of ’em come out of the faith communities in which I’ve lived my life. And all of ’em come out of worship, from cathedrals to church campfires to ecumenical prayer groups. The unbidden songs are accompanied by the communion of saints. My soul sings ‘Let my prayer rise before you as incense’ and hears their antiphon ‘the lifting up of my heart as the evening sacrifice’ in the candlelit sanctuaries of my past; and I light the cigar.

And with a mental sploink there came this realization that the unbidden songs are a gift from the spirit, don’t ya know, Larry? Welling up into springs of life a la Jesus.

Martin Luther began his explanation to the third article of the creed (dittoheads: I believe in the Holy Spirit. . . .) by saying, ‘I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or efforts believe in Jesus Christ or come to him, but the Holy Spirit has called, gathered, enlightened, and sanctified’ and yada yada yada. That’s the truth of it. Ya can’t whip up yer own faith, darlin’ because to do so is to create an idol. Whatever faith you got, that’s the gift you get. And if it’s faith, it’s too busy caring for others to worry about whether it has the spirit, baby, shake, rattle and roll. To us Lutherans the holy spirit is not so much the divine electroshocker as she is a woodlands fairy leading us through and herself hiding in the forest of humanity. On only rare occasions can you see her at work, grabbing her like a shadow fleeing the corner of the eye, ‘Aha! I’ve caught you, you little pixie!’ And in that moment there is only time for a ‘thank you’ and the return of a smiling wink before she disappears into the forest.

I called Erma before the traffic turned to shit east of Houston. She’s president of the Bethlehem gang who, as I mentioned, have this Big Vote coming up. I said, ‘Hey are you familiar with that prayer from the Matins service in the old LBW that goes something like “Lord, we don’t know where the hell we’re going, but we’ll follow you”?’ To my astonishment, not only did she know it but it was one of her favorites and we got all excited talking about using it in worship and for the meeting. Apparently there are unbidden prayers as well as unbidden songs that come as a gift when the spirit’s nearby.

That earned ‘er another thank you with a smiling wink before she flitted off into the forest, leaving me free to curse my way through Houston traffic singing ‘O Lord it’s hard to be humble, when you’re prefect in every way.’

Which, of course, is why she has a tendency to hide to begin with.