At Fordham University on Saturday, our venerable commencement speaker (and a recipient of an honorary doctorate) was the Irish president Mary McAleese. I was a faculty marshal, carrying the “mace” for the Graduate School of Religion, which meant, among other things, that I got to sit up on the stage and — with many other faculty, administrators, and newly-minted awardees of doctorates — process the full distance out of the ceremony to the strains of bagpipes. Pipes and Drums of Local 21, an ensemble out of Peekskill, New York, honored President McAleese and all of us with gladsome archaism for perhaps a full fifteen minutes as we all walked out from Keating Hall across Edwards Parade and into the end of the school year’s hallowed closing ritual.

Except the true “end” for me was a shocking one. Toward the terminus of the procession, Local 21 had split into two halves, flank-serenading each processant the final few steps as a “yes” to this end. Thus did happen the welcome calamatization of my spiritual nerves: walking through maybe 20 men at arms’ length, passing between drums close in on left and right, then pipes close in left and right, I had something like divine cardiac arrest: this thisness of sound and silence in time, this corporeal definition of power known as music, picking me through and up with the aural pressure created when snare drums on each side in perfect time beat so hard they are making a crack that must have been the original sonic inspiration for the very creation of gunpowder, and walking between the snares I felt an utterly new sensation, that I was walking through gunfire of the most blessed sort. Is it this pneumatokinaesthetic cocktail that makes drums and religion so central to military pageantry? But if it were the condition of the precisionistic bombast of the gunner, it would also be its undoing: the power of this sound is power but not violence. But then came the pipes, the bagpipes, to my right and left at once: such a cry, whine, bleat, visitation of the grave at dawn! Sore, sore harmony of tragic truths. Who would not fall into their greatest loss and taste the saving freefall when held between bagpipes at this volume and in this gracious skill?  “Where do you live?” I wanted to ask, and “Can I live there, too?”

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

When I first read Sarah McFarland Taylor’s Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology, about earth-centered ministries carried out by Catholic sisters, I stumbled over a sentence that has stayed with me for the past two years. Taylor is describing a “cairn of prayer stones surrounding a sculpted relief of the Virgin Mary” (p. 51) out on the reaches of a farm run by these “green sisters.” Her reason for discussing such phenomena is to argue that these women are reinterpreting Christian “stations of the cross” as “stations of the earth,” making the earth part of the basic Christian story of redemption.

Speaking of the cairn, Taylor writes on page 51 that “When the grasses are at their tallest in the upper meadow of the farm, one cannot find her.” Immediately this sentence stood as bearing theological importance.

It seemed to speak to what can happen in secular music in the fulsome grip of a musical experience, as a singular event or over a longer time of musicianship or fandom: when what is allowed to grow up grows profuse and thickety, and one can lose one’s theological bearings. At the Association of Practical Theology conference this weekend in Boston, one participant spoke of her son’s passion for Metallica, which he apparently referred to as his experience of God, and how that seemed to eclipse his interest in the church, and in his confirmation more specifically. Various advice was given about how to bring this son from Metallica to church rituals.

But, I wondered, why not let the thicket of music grow deep even to the point of not being able to find the normative ecclesial landmark? There are no doubt many factors to consider as a parent when talking through such a decision with an adolescent, but insofar as Metallica is teaching him to be the judge of truth, might that not be worth losing the ecclesial bearings for a time, so that “one cannot find her”?

No doubt all involved might need to find a way to mourn this not-finding. But helping one’s child to sit critically and contemplatively might be a way of finding and validating the courage to lose one’s bearings, a secular kind of mysticism today.

Tom Beaudoin

On the train between Boston and New York City

Or more precisely, are theologians who work theologically with popular music helping to create and inhabit a “court of the gentiles” for those participants in the cultures of secular music who do not belong actively to churches?

In a recent address (brought to my attention by my Fordham colleague, Fr. Claudio Burgaleta), the bishop of Rome, Benedict XVI, remarked on the importance for “the Church” to establish a new “court of the gentiles,” as a way of inviting in those who search for God but cannot commit to the God proclaimed by Christians. I could not help but wonder whether Rock and Theology and similar theological engagements with contemporary secular(izing) cultures are a contribution toward such a symbolic “court.” Some of our contributors and readers might indeed defend such an interpretation, on the grounds that we are so intent on thinking through the ways that Christian churches can interact with popular cultures.

Indeed, there is much to endorse about the idea of fostering such a “court,” through various practical-symbolic actions that churches could take to welcome a full array of those who cannot fully “believe.” Among the strongest benefits would be that of direct encounter with the “others” of “the Church.” In that encounter might lie mutual deepening, clarification, and courage for committing to reality – among both those in the “court” and those further on “inside.”

Among the problematic elements of such a call are the naïve repetition of a kind of replacement or supersessionist mentality, in which the Catholic use of the Bible simply takes over and cancels any distinctive Jewish meanings pertaining to the ancient “court of the Gentiles.” In this recent address, as so often in the theological tradition, “Temple” (or its “interior”) effectively becomes “Church,” and “Gentiles” become non-Christians or those not fully Christian. Apparently we are not yet fully within an era when such embarrassing and hurtful theological moves can be seen for what they are: clearly out of bounds theologically, and harmful to the public credibility of Catholic ideas. Moreover (but not unrelated), reviving this idea is tantamount to saying to contemporary society that those who cannot believe Catholic teaching ought to move to the back of the bus: show up symbolically to this select and demarcated “space” where you can say what you must say, witness to your own actions and beliefs, but your witness will never echo into the holy of holies. In that way, it is like the confessional box of which I write in my most recent book: that ironic but telling Catholic space in which one can speak frankly, but demurely. One can express one’s convictions and hesitations, be open about God, but that frankness will not be read back onto the church’s own “self-understanding.” The telling of truths cannot become part of the inner contestation of “Truth” itself. In other words, and to put it simply, a “court of the gentiles” seems evidence of that peculiar kind of Catholic thinking that manages to be both creative and patronizing at the same time.

We would open up more practical and theoretical possibilities by opening up the ways in which God, approached as “the Unknown,” remains “Unknown” even to those who get past the velvet rope and bustle in and out of the inner sanctum.

What kind of therapy would this require for the theologically-minded who feel the urge to write Christian theology that usurps Jewish worlds or teaches itself to forget that it too is stuck mercifully with the “Unknown”? We could begin by asking that any time these urges, which have deep roots in theological tradition, arise, we ask why we think we need to repeat this dangerous game, recite again these tired divisions of labor.

In this way might we construct conditions for the new “dialogue with those for whom religion is something foreign,” to which Benedict’s recent address strikingly, and most welcomely, commits itself.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

I am working on a journal article on the emergence of what I characterize as a strong “secular Catholicism” in the United States, and that work has me thinking a lot about which realities theological authorities in church and academy are willing and able to recognize. I have been aware since the beginning of Rock and Theology that, for myself only, part of the theological significance of this project is its attempt to abandon itself to dealing with what is. To my mind, a lot of the Catholic theology being done today in the United States overestimates or almost willfully misreads what Catholics are willing to care about, consent to, find useful, helpful or interesting. It is not enough to claim that the academic theological vocation is a “prophetic” one — the usual backstop erected just in time — as an excuse for this disconnection from the lived Catholicisms before us. I see that part of what needs to happen, is happening and will happen among Catholic theologians in the United States is a profound rethinking of what it means to be a theologian in relation to an institutional church that is collapsing quickly. More people are walking out than walking in, and without recent immigrants, the decline would be even more evident. At best, the near-inevitable can only temporarily be forestalled. This is a genuinely “new situation” here in the States, one hardly admitted — much less negotiated or integrated — in polite theological circles.

Unless one wants to posit that all these “nonpracticing,” “recovering,” “fallen away” or “bad” Catholics are mired in a false theological consciousness, it will be of the essence of a truly prophetic theology to operate as if from within on what real, actual, living Catholics and others take to be central to their own lives, because such a placement for the generation of theology is the only path, positively, to a credible theology for the Catholic present in Western and secularizing contexts, and negatively, to check the incitement to negate the reality of people’s practices and the sacramental fetishism (read: fantasied overestimation of the stability, coherence and effectiveness of the sacramental system) that are part of the heritage of the Catholic theological tradition. It is for this reason, among many others, that I am grateful to the late theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid for valorizing the notions of obscenity and indecency for theology. By these terms, she means to bring in the riot of weirdness and uncontainable desiring life that are within each of us and within our so-regimented scriptures. Theologians have cast too many safety nets between our lives and those texts.

There are many things to surrender along the way of an academic theological life, but there has to be another role for theologians. We have strong incentives and pressures to a kind of premature theological mortality. Let’s not die young.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

When people ask me what “kind” of music I like, I tend to say something like “I like shit that’s good.” I’m not (usually) saying this in order to sound elitist, but just the opposite. When I was younger, I would probably reply that I liked this or that genre, at various points folk rock, grunge, hardcore, punk, emo, indie rock, alt-country, etc. Of course, I have always enjoyed music outside of these preferred genres, but I always felt that I could identify more with certain genres for whatever reason. As one gets older, I think, one’s musical tastes often broaden, become more “catholic” so to speak. I’m no longer comfortable identifying with particular genres — although I’ll always have particular affections for certain styles and sounds.

Negatively, this broader musicatholicity is due to a realization of the artificial nature of the boundary-drawing that genres represent, often driven by constructed racial and cultural categories in an attempt to make music easier to commodify. Perhaps the less we think of music as a commodity, the less we buy into these easily consumable divisions. More positively, this broadening of musical perspective is the result of what I’d like to call a deeper realization of the diversity of rock charisms that exist. While at one point I would have dismissed entire genres as “not for me,” I have come to see the world’s diversity of music/s, both within “Rock” and outside of it, as exhibiting unique “charisms,” i.e. secular-spiritual “gifts” or, more simply, certain sensitivities, types of perceptiveness, or “things they’re good at.” The wide range of musical families within that larger genre of “Rock” could be likened to the variety of spiritual families within Christianity, each bearing its own charism or gift for the church and for the world. What might these rock “charisms” be? Certainly the charisms are multiple within genres and overlapping among them. (more…)

Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx offers a striking analogy in his now classic work, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Sheed & Ward, 1963):

Just when a drummer is playing he is extending himself through all his bodiliness into the instruments grouped about him, so that these instruments dynamically participate in the very expressiveness of his rhythmic movement, making but one total movement which, arising from within the drummer, flows through the rhythm of his body, of his beating hands and stamping feet, and produces a varied harmony of percussion—so too the heavenly saving will of Christ, through his glorified body, makes one dynamic unity with the ritual gesture and the sacramental words of the minister who intends to do what the Church does (p. 77).

As a Catholic theologian, who also happens to play drums in a rock n roll band, and who, incidentally, recently wrote a book on the resurrection, I find this comparison startling and suggestive. Christ’s “glorified body” and the drummer’s body? But of course!

Speaking from experience, playing drums is a visceral transcendence. The body becomes all rhythm and all sound, rapt in a unified sonic event with percussive pressures felt by others from deep within. Having become wholly expressive from the inside out, from the limb to limb, the drummer’s body “disappears” into the play; and thus it becomes more completely itself. How very Eucharistic. . . .

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