Alongside my various musical projects over the years, I have continued to write acoustic-based “solo” material on the side, putting out “lo-fi” four-track recordings on CD-Rs and cassettes. About five years ago I recorded a new collection of these songs but with a full band made up of longtime friends from various bands in which I have played. Inevitably, because I am who I am, my solo material picks through and plays with biblical and theological themes, though I would never call what I do “Christian rock.”

Last week I started recording a new solo record with the same group of people. This one, tentatively titled Christian Burial, is probably my most explicitly (but playfully) theological group of songs yet. While jotting down ideas for arrangements today, I came across a recent post by James K.A. Smith called “Poetry and the End of Theology” and it has been on my mind as I think about what I am doing with this new album. I’m going to quote the entire post, as it is fairly short:

Theology is not usually home to imagination and creativity. Indeed, the sober vocation of the theologian looks on creativity as a temptation, the lure of novelty as a dangerous seduction. The fuel of theology is not the imagination but the intellect. It traffics not in metaphors but propositions, those terse building blocks of arguments and outlines and doctrines. The republic of theology, like Plato’s city, is built on the exile of the poets whose “fictions” are a dangerous distraction.

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One of the mundane insights of my adulthood thus far has been that there are better and worse ways to conclude an ordinary day. One of the better ways is to end the day with a spiritual review of sorts, what Christian spiritual tradition (and the Ignatian tradition in particular) calls an “examen.” This is, generally speaking, a practice of carefully remembering a period of the day with the intention of noticing spiritually significant material — sins and graces, desolations and consolations, gratitudes and regrets — and paying more meditative attention to that material.

I am a naturally meditative person, and would walk around for hours each day thinking about life, if I could, so the examen appeals to me. But I also find that at the end of the day, there is particular benefit in my playing music as a kind of examen. I will plug in a bass (my Rickenbacker 4001 or Fender Jazz), and here go the headphones, pedalboard up, and then the attention can really begin. Even thirty minutes an evening feels like a descent into an unmistakable and unsolicited good. The day’s substrates can come out in hooks, tones, riffs, explorations, and even (I’ve learned) impasses, missed notes, sludgy playing. Sometimes I sense new dimensions of my day coming through in the playing. It’s almost as if I have to invent the truths of my day through the bass.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States