Can You Hear The Organ Playing ? A Rant on The Sound of A Declining Empire Denying Death

From Snood

It's Friday and I have a confession to make - I hate organ music. 

As I tell my 10 year old daughter "hate is a big word so be careful with it, you might hurt yourself or someone else".  I have evaluated my emotions against the Wikipedia definition of hate:

an emotion of intense revulsion, distaste, enmity, or antipathy for a person, thing, or phenomenon

generally attributed to cause a desire to avoid, restrict, remove, or destroy the hated object

and I am able to confirm that what I feel about organs and the music they are rumored to make is indeed hatred.

There - I said it.  That confession revokes my membership in both the wingnut right wing re-asserters and the heretical left wing re-appraisers in my denominational tribe.  It is ironic that the type of cultural colonialism that is organ worship is a place that unites folks who fight like mad about same-sex attraction and scriptural authority, but join together to often wax on and on about the transcendant beauty of organ music and traditional choral music.

This realization, something my therapist will be so proud to hear that I have voiced publicly, came about after I visited one of my fav echo chambers - T1:9, a site that is lovingly maintained by Kendall Harmon & a volunteer team around the globe.  A thread today on U2charist, a worship gathering I have been a part of & commented on before, reminded me that so much of the flailing around of my tribe is the death spiral of an "empire" enthralled with the sound of it's own fury.

The decline of that "empire" can be better understood in the context that Jared Diamond has laid out:

Diamond tells the stories of a few past civilizations that collapsed and rapidly disappeared -- the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico; the Polynesian societies on Henderson and Pitcairn islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean; the Anasazi in the American southwest; the ancient societies of the Fertile Crescent; the Khmer at Angkor Wat; and the Moche society of Peru, among others.

Diamond then offers a long list of other societies that followed a different trajectory and survived for very long periods in Japan, Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands, and Central and Northwest Europe, among others. So collapse is not inevitable.   Collapse is the result of choices.

Diamond asserts that collapse results from 5 inter-woven factors:

1. The damage that people have inflicted on their environment;
2. Climate change;
3. Enemies;
4. Changes in friendly trading partners;
5. Society's political, economic, and social responses to those   shifts.

It is hard not to review those 5 factors and sense that the decline of the Episcopal church in America is probably 20 years into it's descent.  An interesting choice - are we Tikopia or the Anasazi  ?  My own experience is that rather than engage, our plan seems to be to deny decline, deny death and find shiny objects to fight over as the organs play in our gorgeous buildings, all too often empty of live humans, but filled with history.

One of the dominant threads of modernity is the denial of death, something Ernest Becker wrote about in his book The Denial of Death.  Becker suggests that the denial of death is that most human activity,  ultimately concerning the denial of one's mortality. The full realization of one's own mortality is mostly unbearable, absolutely terrifying and horrific.

From PacoCam

There is tremendous irony to me  that a community who view as central to their faith story the idea of resurrection,  a people whose identity is forged on "re-living," a "renewal", or a" rising again" from the dead - that this entity can invest so much in denying death.

For me, the sound of the Episcopal "empire" in decline and death, once considered the "elite at prayer", is the wheezing air and empty hum of an organ.  And I truly hate it.

Comments

[Matt]

Bob-

It's been a while since I've stopped by the corner and I saw this post.

As you know, I am one of about 6 Episcopalians under the age of 35 who like organ music. And while it may not be the most effective evangelism tool our tradition offers, I think it is a central part of our history and tradition. We bemoan the colonialism of the Anglican Communion while lauding it's diveristy, all the while forgetting that it was precisely that historical colonialism which created the vibrant world-wide community that so many of us admire.

Lastly, like any good Episcopalian, I turn not to scripture or to any historical council, but to the cannon of C.S. Lewis to butress my point:

"If there is anything in the New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that your are obliged to take the sacrament, and you can't do that without going to church. I disliked their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on, I saw the greater merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually the conceit came peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize you aren't fit the clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conciet."
-Answers to Questions on Christianity

Hope all is well. Io Triumphe!

[John Wilkins]

brilliant.

I'm ready for a change.

If we're doing organ, lets to reggae.

Otherwise, let's expand our horizons.

[spankey]

I don't know who you are, or how I ended up on your blog, but thank you. As a perspectivist postmodern post-conservative evangelical catholic Episcopal seminarian I have come to grips with both realities to which you speak. 1- organ music will be played as the last Episcopal Church closes its doors and 2- we shot ourselves in the foot long before GC'03. While organ music probably isn't the source of our irrelevance, it certainly is a glaring example of our blind hope that human inventions will bring the church back to life. Let us come to grips with our current state of illness in the hope of being redeemed by the same Jesus Christ who on that first Easter brought a rag-tag group of depressed former followers of a nutcase back from the brink of death to become a rag-tag group of excited unformer followers of the Godman.

You have been added to my google homepage sir, thank you very much.