I conduct most of my theological writing with rock music cranked very loud in my headphones. While I am learning which kinds of rock and in particular, which artists and albums, are most conducive to theological invention, I am also aware that this practice relates me to that which happens when I walk through the city with music jacked into my ears. A reframing occurs, quotidienly revelatory. I am almost never disappointed with the reframe by having the experience of the music angularize the people, the smells, the paces of the city, setting a gladsome percussive and melodic atmosphere that becomes a way for things to make new sense. Many of us have these experiences: Jack a pair of headphones into your ears and press play. Doing nothing abnormal, step through your daily routines. Experience the world now keyed to a melody, paced to a rhythm, played to a soundtrack. These practices may also become theological acts: This is not only how many younger generations around the world today live portions of each day, it is how I imagine – weakly, but imagine nonetheless – that we can talk of God experiencing the world: as set to a soundtrack that is the melody and percussivity of [grace / creativity / givenness / desire], chorded by the good creation proleptically worked through in our secular/sacred figures of salvation.

This kind of theological disposition is the fantasy of getting inside God’s headphones. It specifies the task of theologians as playing along with what we can only call “what we think we are hearing.”

For many years, I thought Yes vocalist Jon Anderson was singing the phrase “stumbled syncopation” in their tune Our Song. It turns out he’s actually singing “stuff of syncopation,” but the “misrecognition” on my part has been a helpful one in denominating the work of the theologian who is a “secular” musician—I emphasize—in the very doing of theology. This is a stumbled syncopation. Even an “impossible” one. But—a syncopation nevertheless.

Tom Beaudoin
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York