For All Who Truly Fight....

A heavy heart today, perhaps not a blogworthy sentiment.

Ach, it sucks, but I've been struggling with temptation.  Tiredness and self-pity provide gaps in the battlements of my soul through which the Evil One can shoot his arrows.   This year I first read about St Antony, the so-called Desert Father of the Christian faith.   I claim a real kindred spirit in St Antony, not because I presume to approach his holiness, but because I think I can feel coming against me some of the same attacks he faced in trying to stay faithful to Jesus Christ, and to his calling.  All sounds a bit melodramatic for a middle-class mama's boy in his suburban church, with his suburban life and suburban problems.  I don't care what anyone says - the spiritual battle is real.  It certainly feels real to me.  

I think that, me and God, we're winning the war.  But the battles are fierce. 

This from the Life of St Antony written in the 4th Century by Athanasius of Alexandria.    

But the devil, who hates and envies what is good, could not endure to see such a resolution in a youth, but endeavoured to carry out against him what he had been wont to effect against others. 

First of all he tried to lead him away from the discipline, whispering to him the remembrance of his wealth, care for his sister, claims of kindred, love of money, love of glory, the various pleasures of the table and the other relaxations of life, and at last the difficulty of virtue and the labour of it; he suggested also the infirmity of the body and the length of the time. In a word he raised in his mind a great dust of debate, wishing to debar him from his settled purpose. But when the enemy saw himself to be too weak for Antony's determination, and that he rather was conquered by the other's firmness, overthrown by his great faith and falling through his constant prayers, then at length putting his trust in the weapons which are 'in the navel of his belly' and boasting in them--for they are his first snare for the young--he attacked the young man, disturbing him by night and harassing him by day, so that even the onlookers saw the struggle which was going on between them. The one would suggest foul thoughts and the other counter them with prayers: the one fire him with lush the other, as one who seemed to blush, fortify his body with faith, prayers, and fasting. 

And the devil, unhappy wight, one night even took upon him the shape of a woman and imitated all her acts simply to beguile Antony. But he, his mind filled with Christ and the nobility inspired by Him, and considering the spirituality of the soul, quenched the coal of the other's deceit. Again the enemy suggested the ease of pleasure. But he like a man filled with rage and grief turned his thoughts to the threatened fire and the gnawing worm, and setting these in array against his adversary, passed through the temptation unscathed. All this was a source of shame to his foe. For he, deeming himself like God, was now mocked by a young man; and he who boasted himself against flesh and blood was being put to flight by a man in the flesh. For the Lord was working with Antony--the Lord who for our sake took flesh and gave the body victory over the devil, so that all who truly fight can say, ' not I but the grace of God which was with me.' 

                                    The Temptation of St Antony by the Glasgow artist, Peter Howson

In the prayer room

This year we ran a prayer room in a local high school.  This is a poem I wrote while sitting in there one day:

In the prayer room I sit
And the air prickles with promise.
The wind that sometimes bustles
Along these corridors of knowledge
Can't dismantle the rooms and walls we've made
To try and tame the million multiverses
About which scientists still scratch their skulls
And theologians think threatened thoughts.
But my prayers - feeble as they are -
Like new-hatched birds blinking and shivering with still-membraned eyes -
Can yet penetrate the thickest walls
And the heaviest defenses
To peacefully storm the Keep of No Hope
with trembling faith.

Pursuing the Pursued - Spiritual Hide-and-Seek and The Elusive Francis Thompson

Wow - it is much harder to find time to write now that I'm back at work, but I shall have a pop at it!  If this is a bit stream of consciousness, I apologise.

I'm sure I could expect a chorus of agreement when I begin by saying that some of the best things in life come along while you're on the loo.  In our smallest room, we have a selection of 'lavatory literature'.  Included are some childrens' books, anthologies and curiosities, a wonderful book called How to Read a Church which I bought on one of our travels in England, and a staggeringly hilarious book of geniune names from centuries past called Potty, Fartwell and Knob.  It's the most genuinely lavatorial book of the lot, as befits its lofty location.

We add and subtract to this loo library from time to time, and Hannah recently added a hitherto neglected favourite of ours: a BBC book called The Nation's Favourite Poems.  It might be populist, but golly, do jewels just pour from its pages!  (say that last sentence in a 'luvvie' voice, for maximum effect).

One evening, while, settling myself for a lengthly reign on the porcelain throne, I began to scan the index of the book, when one title caught my eye.  It was a poem called The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson.  I don't know about you, but when I come to read a poem, I long to find something that I can connect with - a word, phrase, sentiment which the author chooses that expresses something I too know, believe in, trust.   As the film Shadowlands put it: 'we read to know we're not alone'.  The spiritual promise of the word Heaven certainly drew me in... but perhaps also the roughness, the strength of the word Hound.   Anyway, I turned to it, and began to read.

Sometimes my spirit soars when I read a poem - and this is one of these.  Glory!  I love discovering a new creation.  I imagine it's something like a botanist feels on discovering a new species of plant, or a dinosaur hunter on discovering a whole new set of bones which suggest T Rex had feathers, or whatever!  The wonder!  But I think for me, the real joy in the slaking of the artistic thirst is in that sense that I am connected with another human being beyond my time, outwith my physical reach.  I want to leave art like that in the world.  I want people to listen or read or remember and feel "yes - here is someone who felt as I feel, and we share that now".  Is that a humble enough ambition?

Anyway, on to the poem.  I won't reproduce the whole text here. There is a link to the whole thing with explanatory notes here:

http://cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/hound.html

The poem tells of a man who runs from God, but God pursues him - the Hound of the title - although God is never referred to as Hound in the body of the poem itself.  It is starkly honest about our reasons for running from God.  For example, the fear that, should we choose God, we will lose what we already have:

For though I knew His love Who followèd,
..........Yet was I sore adread,
Lest having Him, I should have naught beside)

There are terrible admissions of the author's desire for God's followers to fail and somehow show God to be unworthy, all expressed in rich, deep paradoxes:

I tempted all His servitors but to find
My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him, their fickleness to me,
...Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
 
The protagonist then goes on to seek satisfaction in other human beings, and then in Nature, but ultimately, neither is capable of quelling his longing, or putting off the One who pursues him:

those strong Feet that followed, followed after
..........But with unhurrying chase
..........And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

In vain he tries to shut it out, but:

That Voice is round me like a bursting sea 

In the end, he capitulates.  And man, the words God speaks to him are like sweet, glorious arrows in my breast:

All which I took from thee, I did but take,
.......Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
.......All which thy child's mistake, 
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:..................................
.......Rise, clasp My hand, and come."
 
Those lines just DESTROYED me.

I hope you can see the majesty of this work, even from those brief quotations, which don't at all show the life-sweep of the poem in its full merit.  Go find that link and read the whole thing.  Do it now!  You won't regret it!

Thompson himself seems to me an elusive, almost mythical figure.  He was born in 1859 in Preston, Lancashire, trained in medicine, hated it, and promptly dropped out of society all together, living rough for a time on the streets of London.  He soon became an opium addict.  He sent some poems into a Catholic magazine (the implausably-titled Merry England) but having no fixed abode, Thompson gave as his address, that of the post office.  The editor, a Mr Wilfrid Meynell, was so impressed with the poems that he attempted to contact Thompson, but was unable to reach him.  The only way Meynell could get through to Thompson was by publishing his work!  Eventually an address was obtained of a certain local chemist, where Meynell discovered Thompson owed a large amount of money for opium.  Meynell squared the bill, and was pointed to a man selling matches in the street.  This man was Francis Thompson.

Meynell then took Thompson under his wing, arranging a stay at a monastery where he kicked his opium habit (althought his would be a lifelong struggle with addiction) and got to work writing and publishing poems.   It was during a stay in the Norbertine monastery of Storrington in 1889 that he wrote the Hound of Heaven.  The rest of Thompson's life seems to have been tough, if no longer materially, then certainly psychologically.  The details I could find online are sketchy, but he seems to have been an extremely sensitive, melancholic soul, prone to depression and periodic lapses into drug dependancy.  He died of tuberculosis on 13 November 1907.  He was 47.

Certain hints suggest that his struggles and failings were to some extent airbrushed out of his story by contemporaries.  One writer even claims that Meynell edited his poems to make them 'more Catholic'.  (Indeed, the version in the Nation's Favourite Poems is heavily abridged - I was surprised, although not a little delighted, to find an adittional 2 verses online!)

Books on Thompson seem fairly thin on the ground.  A recent scholarly monograph is, alas, way out of my price range.  So he remains a rather mysterious figure - and one that strikes me as having many of the hallmarks of contemporary tragic celebrity - middle-class upbringing, rebellious youth, near-destitution, drug addiction, 'discovery' by benevolent benefactor, spells in and out of the Priory, untimely death.  It's all rather rock 'n' roll, in perhaps the worst, and the yet most intriguing sense. 

In any case, the reality of his spiritual experience, as laid bare in the desperately beautiful Hound of Heaven, elevates him in my opinion, beyond a luridly tragic myth.

I know only too well the sobbing, petulant, ignoble, child in my own breast who tries to hide from God.  I ran and ran from God, but when I in desperation turned my head, he was right at my shoulder.  He'd been running after me all the time and I never knew it.

God, in his wisdom, allows us to play this game of hide-and-seek.  He patiently waits, like the good and patient Father he is, counting to one hundred, as we rush to fussily conceal ourselves, our true selves.  Thompson reminds us that we do our hiding in all kinds of places.   And not the least of these hiding places is our own mind.

Submission to God is a strange thing.  When we submit to God, it is a moment when we are both at our most humiliated and our most dignified.  It's our moment on our own cross of Calvary.  It is when we cry out, as Jesus did: "My God My God Why have you forsaken me".   It is at that moment of terrible emptiness that God rushes in like a torrent of passion and fills us to overflowing.

Somehow, we have to go through it - the grief, the loss, the tears of rage, the desperate pumelling of our puny fists on the opressive ceiling of our human understanding; but when, exhausted, we finally surrender to the Patient Pursuer of Peace, when we finally cry out: 'I am caught, I am caught!',  then God reveals just enough to make us collapse in loving gratitude. 

All which I took from thee, I did but take,
.......Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.

Are you on the run from God?  How long will you run, before you turn and run into His arms?
 

Toward an Orthodoxy of LIFE

John Wesley, as quoted by AW Tozer in the Preface to his marvellous book 'The Pursuit of God", asserts that:

Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions,yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is proof of this.'

If what Wesley says is true, then the church (at an institutinal level at any rate) has managed to get somewhat unbalanced over the years in terms of its mission and its raison d'etre.  If orthodoxy ought to be a 'slender' part of Christian life and faith, then it seems to me that we have somehow turned it into a most un-slender part indeed.  If Christianity were a delicious and deep-filled pie (and why not?)  then that which Wesley suggests should be a mere sliver, we have somehow expanded into a bloody great wedge.  In some cases, we have mistaken the slice for the the whole blessed pasty itself. My question, is, brothers and sisters: in our hunger for right belief, are our eyes bigger than our tummies?

Personally, I find the endless debates and anxieties about orthodoxy (my own debates and anxiteties very much included) increasingly hard to swallow.  In trying to live as a Christian, and help others to do the same, I get really down at times when I look at the history and denominational 'map' of the church.  This is not to say that I have figured it all out and can offer a perfect, off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all model of Christain life and fellowship which I'm ready to wheel successfully out where other, lesser mortals have failed.  (yeah, and I've also fugured out what kind of church JESUS would go to.  Clue: he wouldn't go to yours).   But in seriousness, the question I would ask, humbly, is this:  has all the breath and ink and pixels we as Christians have ejaculated into the world over questions of orthodoxy actually been that successful in bringing people closer to the transforming power and love of God?  

Another thing I'm puzzled about is this:  were (are) all the endless church splits, and sub-splits really about defending orthodoxy anyway?  Or were they just about an inability to love one another with the kind of love Christ loved us?  Were they about the pursuit of right doctrine?  Or were they just an acquiesence to kind of world-weary pessimism about the ability of human beings to just GET ALONG WITH ONE ANOTHER?  I don't know.  Perhaps a mixture of noble ideals and dirty selfishness - that's what life can feel like at times - praise God that he is able to lift us out of the mire of ourselves!

Orthodoxy - believing the right stuff - I think exists to provide the solid stage upon which the vibrant and exciting theatre of faith is played out.  Remove the stage altogether, and you have a hard time putting on a play.  But if the wooden boards of the stage itself, knots and repairs and woodworm holes and all,  become the primary meaning and focus of the acting experience, then it is a dull play indeed.  In fact it's just a bunch of people staring at the floor.  And what of the theatre-goers - those non-Christians who peer at us as we play out our part in God's story.  Will they see people nit-picking over the wording of creeds and arguing over the finer points of dogma, or will they see people living life, and living it in all its fullness?


I worry that when, as Christians, we are too concerned with believing the right things that we either then put our feet up in self-satisfaction once we think we've figured it all out, or else insist that others toe the line, which we insist is THE line, the one and only line, and and more right than anyone else's.  Both seem like blind, Pharasaical alleys to me.  I think we need to be more concerned with having the right relationships with the right people at the right times to right the wrongs of this world - and the world unseen.  This is what I mean I think by an 'orthodoxy of life'.  It's not (just) our belief that is right, but our lives which are right.  You're not a disciple of Christ because you believe the apostles' (or some other) creed.  Even the Devil believes the right stuff about God, as Wesley reminds us (and isn't that just DEVASTATING?  Even scarier, is that the Devil may even have a fuller understanding of theology than any human who has ever lived.  How else would he be able to lie so effectively?)  No, you are a disciple of Christ because you know him and love him and pick up your cross every day and follow him.  Belief is something you do with your brain.  Faith is something you do with your soul.


What was Jesus' attitude to orthodoxy?  I think it was ambiguous (or was it? haha)   He upheld the Law of Moses and followed its signposts to holiness, and yet he downright broke the Law when, in the circumstances of REAL HUMAN LIFE, it contravened the higher, more essential Law of holy love for God and man.  And I think Jesus remained ambiguous about orthodoxy in order to teach us to lift our eyes to that higher Law - the one which Paul said was written on our hearts -  which isn't really a Law at all of course, it's a Person, a mystical encounter, a hyper-reality of love.  How can this be all about right belief?  Right belief may lead us to the water (and do so crucially) but it is not the water itself, and on its own, it certainly doesn't have the power to make us drink.   The Kingdom is surely a LIVED-OUT thing, not a codeified, abstract, mechanised, systemic thing.  It's a living, breathing, messy, paradoxical, glorious, long-suffering thrill-ride of a thing.  It's all our best dreams and all our worst nightmares all at once, half-told by our grateful sobs and wholly, and silently understood by the ever-patient ear, and the ever-loving arms of the Father of Eternity.


Tozer uses Wesley's assertion as a springboard for a call toward a more geniune thirst for the life-changing presence of God (at least that's what I think his book's about - I was dazzled by it and I need to re-read it).  Francis Thompson's poem, The Hound Of Heaven (subject of a future blog, because it's blowing my mind at the moment!) portrays the same relationship, but with God as pursuer.  Both I think, resonate with a generation which is just plain WEARY with doctrinal squabbling and is hungry and thirsty for true righteousness.


Is there a revival of mysticism happening right now?  I hope so.  I need one.  My own faith seems to insubstantial, so sickly, so fickle.  Oh, Lord, drive me, drive me, into your terrible and life-giving presence!









 
 

The Bible and the Person in the Darkness

I've been thinking a lot over the last few months about what I really believe about the Bible.  I've encountered very conservative, all-or-nothing, literalist interpretations, all head-in-the-sand stubbornness and exhausting argumentativeness.  Then there's the ultra-rational, 'it's-not-scientific-therefore-it-has-no-value-and-is-probably-dangerously-primitive' point of view which seems to me sad,  reductionist and banal.

NT Wright, CS Lewis and Tim Keller seem to be my preferred ploughers of more nuanced, humane and imaginitive furrows through the fretful field of Biblical bias.  I'm warming to Brian McLaren too at the moment, as I read his 'Naked Spirituality'.

Something he says (in a footnote) about Moses and the burning bush got me thinking.  It was to do with literal interpretation of events.  He basically states his position that it doesn't matter in what way the story is 'true', because whatever way you slice it, it marks a great watershed in our experience of the awesomeness, and yet the closeness of God.  And that got me thinking - I think as evangelicals we expect people who are not Christians to believe things which are, let's be honest, pretty preposterous.  And I think we have absolutely no right to expect this.  (obviously, people can believe all kinds of preposterous things without the influence of Christians, but that's beside the point).

So what comes to my mind at the moment is this: we cannot expect people to believe in the supernatural events the Bible records if they haven't sumbitted themselves to the Person of Jesus.  Without a direct experience of the living God, we are imprisoned by unbelief.  You can argue all you want with an atheist about the existence of angels, or burning bushes, or virgin births, but I just don't think that atheist will accept your reasoning without a direct and personal revelation from God. 

But when that person turns the handle to the gentle, persistent knock of Jesus on the door of their lives, suddenly anything becomes possible.  It isn't that brains and reason suddenly walk out as Jesus walks in.  That suggests to me an unnecessary dualism.  Rather it has something to do with the re-ordering (the re-creating actually) of our inner being which happens when we encounter Christ.  When the myth of self-centredness (the myth that 'the world revolves round me') - when this myth is debunked by our awakening to the conquering, self-sacrificing presence of a God who really does love and care for us - when this happens, and only when this happens, we can enter into the deeper mythology of the infinite-and-yet-incarnate spiritual reality which God inhabits, and into which he invites us to plunge.

I struggled to believe in the supernatural stories in the Bible before I had a supernatural encounter with God.  Now... what do I think?  I am more inclined to believe they are true.  What do I mean by 'true'?  Were they empirically true all along, or does their 'truth' need to be unlocked by my belief?  A rational voice says to me: 'believe that stuff, and you'll believe anything'.  In the words of Mulder from X-Files though, I WANT to believe.  More than that, I'm compelled to believe by what has happened to me.  I didn't break into my own life and change it.  No.  I cried out to the darkness and (who knew!) there was something there.  Not a watertight, abstract, all-figured-out, intellectual answer, like the one we so often hold out and with which we try to win minds to Christ.  But rather... something like a moment, a meeting.  A decisive moment, although it wasn't clear whether it was me making the decisive move, or the something there in the darkness that met me.  The only way it makes sense to me is that it wasn't a someTHING - a system, a rule, a product - it was a someONE: a Spirit, a Father, a Friend.  Systems and arguments and evidence can't forgive someone.  Only a Person can do that.

All of this I guess is a long way of trying to say: why should anyone believe in the Biblically supernatural if they don't believe in the personally supernatural?  Once the Person has been embraced, the rest starts to fall into place, starts to have truth, meaning, power.  Questioning the validity of the Bible's historical accounts, pithy explainings, poetical questionings, and prophetic reverberations somehow seems of secondary importance next their place within the power and the presence and the transformative yearning urging loving closeness of the Person, that is, Christ.  Why care for the Bible unless it show me Christ?  Why study the Bible unless it enlargen Christ?  Why argue about the Bible, unless it argue for Christ?  Why draw conclusions about the Bible unless it conclude for Christ? 

The irony of being an evangelical, is that in order to have a high view of the Bible, one must lower his view of the Bible, for the Bible itself bends the knee to the Person.  A merry dance indeed, it leads us!  But it leads us, ultimately, back to the Person.  All the angels and demons and burning bushes and talking donkeys and Virgin Mothers and wise men and prophets and the whole unlikely and preposterous cast of thousands and millions and billions who have lived and breathed and hoped and despaired and triumphed and failed and hoped again and faded and finally, or not finally, given up the ghost only to grasp the great white hope of heaven itself with the weak and broken and slippery butter fingers of humanity - all, in the end of the ends, which might just be a beginning, all bend the knee to the Person.  And so do I. 

That's where the Bible really gets going for me.  If you are skeptical about the Bible (and why shoudn't you be?) then open your eyes to the possibility of the Person about whom it is written.  And ask, seek, knock, DARE to cry out to the darkness!

The Smell of Fatherhood

I'm in an unreal place and time.  Our son Aidan was born just a little over a week ago.  There are a million things I could say about this miraculous thing that has happened to me, but I thought I'd write about something that took me by surprise just the other day.

We'd been through the Hoping (Hannah's heart and mine aligned with a new wonder) the Waiting (a tough and totally necessary lesson from God about not-having-to-be-in-control-of-everything-all-the-time), the Happening (wonderful, terrifying, bewildering, fascinating, transforming) and the first stages of the Adjusting (something like giving in to a very persuasive person who doesn't have to do any actual persuading).

Then the other day, something akin to normality returned when I left my new wee family for a few hours to take the bus into Edinburgh.  A humdrum journey on a humdrum bus with a humdrum driver and lots of other humdrummers lost in their thoughts and counting the humdrum minutes til their destination.   I was feeling groggy and attempting to slip into a commuter-coma, when something unexpected crept up on me - a sensation I imagine like the Flaming Lips' tried to express in their 'softest bullet ever shot'.  The sensation was this:  I could smell him.

Perhaps its because I devote so many of my energies to thinking, talking, listening and watching that I always seem to underestimate to power of smell.  As such I'm constantly being ambushed by my olfactory sense.  A smell can awaken emotion, nostalgia, longing, just as much as music can - perhaps even more.  Certainly there's something somehow more visceral, less rarified about the effect a smell can have.  I guess we tend to associate smell with negative feelings - the warning sign of gone-off milk.  The sad tang of disinfectant in old folk's homes.  Farts.

But the smell of which I suddenly became aware while slouching along on the 38 bus yesterday wasn't like any other smell I've encountered - consciously or unconsciously.  Of course I've smelled babies before.  It's a curious musty, high, sweet odour which all babies have.  I think this (allied with visual cuteness) is another of nature's ways of ensuring we fall, head over heels in love with them.  But this smell - this particular variety of the millions of subtle variations of baby-scent reverberating around the nostril hairs of fathers throughout the world - THIS smell was unmistakably the smell of my son.  It was as if, though he is only a few days old in the eyes of Man, it was as if his very presence was lingering, soul-like just above my skin.

The Old Testament repeatedly calls for sacrifices which produce a pleasing aroma to the LORD.  I suspect this is both symbolic and literal.  As the smell of roasting meat rises mouth-wateringly to the holy nostrils of the angelic realm, so the aroma of - that is the result of - righteousness rises from our acts of obedience and love to the nostrils of our heavenly Father.  Catholic and Eastern churches seem to understand something of this in their multi-sensory worship, even if their use of incense might seem churchy and affected.  I still remember it from my childhood - the soft clack of the incense burner as the priest swung it back and forth on its long metal chain, wafting exotic vapours over an expectant congregation.  Is God pleased with this pungency in worship?  Perhaps, yes.  Perhaps only when our love for our fellow man is equally fragrant.

All of this of course was far from my mind when I was gently jolted out of my mindlessness and surprised by the scent of my son.  I simply breathed deeply the smell of fatherhood.  From today, everything is new.

The Stooges' 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' as Archetypal Worship Song

So messed up
I want you here
So messed up
I want you here
In my room
I want you here
Now we're gonna be
Face-to-face
And I'll lay right down
In my favorite place

And now I wanna
Be your dog
Now I wanna
Be your dog
Now I wanna
Be your dog
Well c'mon

Now I'm ready
To close my eyes
And now I'm ready
To close my mind
And now I'm ready
To feel your hand
And lose my heart
On the burning sands

And now I wanna
Be your dog
And now I wanna
Be your dog
Now I wanna
Be your dog
Well c'mon





As someone who hopes to lead others into worship of the living God, I'm always on the look out for songs that really capture something of the attitude, heart-motivation, and experience of true worship. There are quite a lot of these type of songs out there - and some of them were even written by Christians.  Sounds facetious, I know, but there seem to be a whole load of 'secular' songs which seem to 'hit the spot' just as much, if not more, than 'Christian' songs written specifically for the purpose of worship.  Because I spend so much time listening to music (mostly, but by no means exclusively, during my two daily 40 minute commutes) and because I am cursed/blessed with an analytical mind, I'm always thinking: what does this song say about worship?  Is the singer articulating a worship attitude or impulse - perhaps without even knowing it?  Or: is this person perfectly aware of their worshipfulness (to use Han Solo's term) but not aware of its misguidedness?  We all worship something, whether we believe in God or not.

And so on to The Stooges.  I don't know much about Iggy Pop's religious affiliations, but you can bet your life he believes in rock 'n' roll.  To a lot of people he IS rock 'n' roll.  Mike Watt of the Minutemen speaks in hushed, reverent tones about Iggy, as he saw things playing bass for him in the reformed Stooges.  The way he speaks about him, it's like Iggy's his spiritual father.  Watt comes across as one of the most passionately humble dudes on the planet, so I listen when he speaks about something.  There's a sort of awe there - in the way a religious person might be sort of in awe of a great leader or a prophet.  I think it's based on Iggy's totally uncompromising hardcore devotion to the art of rocking.  Hard.  Whether you think this pursuit dubious or nay, it's safe to say that few can match Iggy Pop. So perhaps then, if Rock is Religion for Iggy, his songs are worship.  The infamous track in question is case in point.  Disclaimer: Now, I'm NOT saying that we should be singing I Wanna Be Your Dog in church this Sunday.  I'm not saying there's much holy, good or pure about the Stooges. But what I AM suggesting, is that the primal simplicity of Iggy & Co.'s tune displays a certain elemental impulse toward worship which the church would do well to pay attention to, REDEEM and impassion our current worship climate with. We're all worshipping SOMETHING, and God can redeem ANYTHING.  Ok, let's jump in:

So messed up I want you here - Is there any greater or more succinct articulation of the attitude of worship than this opening line?  For me as a Christian, these seven words pretty much sum up my conversion experience, and my subsequent opening up to the intimate Presence of God in my life.  Alone and without the 'other', we are messed up.  Without our Father, we are Orphans.  Messed up is what the world is.  'Here' is where that messed up world is.  In worship we say to God - I want you here.  We long for the Real Presence of God in the midst of our mess.  Right off the bat, Iggy is desperate.  Desperation to me is a key part of what compels us to worship.

In my room I want you here - This to me speaks of the intimacy of the worship-seeking heart.  Jesus said: But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. (Matthew 6:6).  We have to invite God into 'our room'.  For Iggy, here's something gloriously teenage about this too - Iggy doesn't say: 'in my house' - he says 'in my room' - a teenager's cramped, stinky but sacred space within an (indifferent?) parental home.  He wants the object of his worship to come in to his Sanctuary.  Into the place where no-one else is permitted.  It's clearly sexual, but then the worship-metaphor of sexual intimacy is a rich one in Bible terms.  The Jews are thought to have seen the sexual love and desire of the Song of Songs as a picture of the longing and desire which the soul has for God.  The worship experience is 'like' the sexual experience - filled with longing, desire, playfulness, vulnerability, giving and taking, and, if you're lucky - ecstastic satisfaction.  Iggy's sexual longings might be debased, immoral, even perverse.  But what is the impulse to worship, but a redeemed version of this - a sanctified desire, with all the intimacy and ecstasy, but none of the fallen twistedness and misdirection?  I want you here.  The Presence, the Holy Presence of God is the only thing that will quench our thirst for something beyond ourselves.

Now we're gonna be Face-to-face  Whenever the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance to the tent, they all stood and worshiped, each at the entrance to their tent. The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young aide Joshua son of Nun did not leave the tent. (Exodus 33:10-11)  Over the years, many people have marveled at the intimate relationship Moses seemed to have with his Creator.  Many people will also hold these verses up as contradictory when contrasted with other verses which say no-one can 'see God's face' (Exodus 33:20, 1 Tim 6:16, John 1:18).  I think this is to misunderstand the meaning of the phrase 'face to face'.   To me this is just one of those paradoxical truths of Scripture.  Of course, none of us can 'see God's face' and yet, God chooses to reveal himself.  God chooses to make himself vulnerable, approachable, intimate with us.  Jesus is of course the ultimate expression of this - that looking into the mirror of another human face, we should see the face of the Almighty.  That we should see the compassion in the heart of God, through the compassion in the eyes of Jesus. 'Face to face' for Moses, and for us, then, stands for the intimacy with God we can find nowhere else but in worship.  And equally for the intimacy without which true worship (as opposed to empty ritual) cannot take place. For Iggy and the Stooges, of course they get this intuitively.  The desire for intimacy, for the Presence of the Beloved, is about as elemental as it gets.

And I'll lay right down In my favorite place -  People get their knickers in a twist about the 'correct' and 'appropriate' posture for engaging in worship.  Even the word 'posture' makes me moan.  'I have very bad posture!' declared Kurt Cobain gloriously in 'Pennyroyal Tea'.  Our obsession with looking like we have poles stuck up our jacksies surely must be the enemy of worship.  Iggy, one of the most physical frontmen in rock,  gets this, and, letting his backbone slip, he lays right down in his favourite place.  Does this sort of physicality make us feel uneasy?  Can't the position and the posture of the body be redeemed and expressed just as much as the position and posture of the mind?  Some of my most wonderful experiences of God have been when I've been flat on my back on the floor.  If what the Bible records is true, people used to fall down to the ground all the time when the presence of God came. It's an expression of submission.  It's an allowing of the good and powerful God to take us over.  Our deep-seated fear of losing control, losing face, and losing our stiff posture of judgmentalism has all but eradicated intimacy in many expressions of corporate worship.  Thank God for the charismatics (and for Iggy Pop) who teach us so much.

And now I wanna Be your dog - The hook line of the Stooges' song, and perhaps the least palatable to our Christian ears.  Surely being someone's 'dog' carries with it a distasteful if not wholly masochistic tone which, when it comes to worship, is best left behind with the flagellations of medieval history.  Well, yes and no.  Far be it for me to suggest any kind of abusive power relationship between us and God.  Jesus taught us to call him Friend, not Master.  This was no doubt astonishing to his listeners - used as they were to an image of God as unapproachable, all-powerful and dare we say it, angry and punative.  Well, to be honest, when I read a lot of the Old Testament, I can kind of see where they might have got some of that from (although I must add, I can just as easily see where the roots of Jesus' portrait of the Father come from too).  In any case, I think we are left with a picture of God which I can only describe as an "AND YET" picture.  He is all-powerful AND YET vulnerable.  He is mighty AND YET meek.  He is destructive AND YET restorative.  He is just AND YET merciful.  More of those paradoxical truths we have to learn to live with, for fear of underplaying either attribute through tempting, yet ultimately impoverishing compromise.  Anyway, back to Iggy.  It is often said that the Kingdom of God turns the world back to front - therefore could we be God's dogs? Perhaps this takes things a step too far.  But worship to me has to be about submission.  It has to be about the willingness to serve.  It has to be about the awareness that we are NOT the Master - we are NOT in control - but HE is.  We have to be willing to be God's dogs, even if, in the end, he makes us his Sons.  In the story of the Prodigal Son, the younger son, after a debaucherous life of which even the illustrious Mr Pop would have been proud, makes a decision to return to his father.  But his attitude is astonishing.  He's willing to give up his sonship.  He's willing to become a servant in order to even just get close to his father again.  He's willing to become a dog, just to know the kind hand of the Master on his life again.  As the Psalmist writes: Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked. (Psalm 84:10).  So back he goes, and of course his father will allow nothing of the sort.  He is fully reinstated to full sonship, receiving even more than he had ever imagined.  When we come to worship therefore, are we willing to be God's dogs?  Are we coming because we expect God to bless us because we deserve it?  Or are we so aware of our own sinfulness - clinging to our ragged clothes like pig crap - that we throw ourselves upon God's mercy with a whimper and a howl?  This isn't about debasing ourselves - we've done that already, before we even thought of turning back to God.  This is about recognising that ALL of our worth comes from our Father - all of our identity and status and being comes from Him whose outrageous love calls us in from the dog house to the best place at the table of heaven.

Well c'mon  - the way Iggy sings this...the way his voice cracks... man, surely our 'call to worship' should have something of this passion and urgency.

Now I'm ready To close my eyes
And now I'm ready To close my mind - here Iggy's worshipful impulse gains momentum, and threatens to totally consume him.  Now of course we can worship God with our eyes - reading the words, looking at creation.  Of course we can worship God with our minds - understanding His words, meditating on His laws.  But what I think we can get from Ig here is the experience of stretching out to God with our souls.  'Let go your conscious self - reach out with your feelings' (another Star Wars quote, this time Obi Wan Kenobi instructing the young Luke in the ways of the Force).  As Evangelicals (that's me!) we can sometimes be deeply afraid of this type of thing.  The idea of closing our minds  brings with it the threat of our greatest fear - that we will abandon our Evangelical convictions about the Bible, and about doctrine.  It's almost as it we need to keep one corner of our mind permanently switched to Red Alert, lest anyone or anything threaten to undermine it.  This is a huge area I'm grappling with, and to which I can't do any real justice here, but I think mental anxiety (which quickly turns to emotional anxiety) is one of our biggest problems as contemporary Evangelicals.  The power of both the charismatic and contemplative paths of Christianity has been to get us to 'chill the heck out' about our fear that core doctrines will suddenly be swept away, and to let God's Holy Spirit hook us by the soul.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in worship.  The hymns of old were (and are) great at bolstering up theology and even at engaging 'mind-worship', but they can (and do) become the enemies of 'heart-and-soul-worship' which, ironically, is what a high view of the Bible requires in the first place.  Anyway, the point is that sometimes oor heids can get in the way of worship.  So too our eyes.  When we close our eyes in worship, it can help us be free from the terrible self-consciousness which makes us slaves of comparison with those around us.  Finally, note that Iggy says: 'now I'm ready'.  I think for the first couple years of my Christian life, I simply wasn't ready.  But at the right time, and through the right people, I LEARNED to worship in spirit and truth.  All the elemental impulses of worship were there, but I didn't direct any of them toward God.  Like Iggy, I directed my worship to rock 'n' roll, and to members of the opposite sex.  I submitted myself to unholy desires, and God taught be to submit myself to holy ones.  Iggy was ready... (for what, I will let you use your imagination) and so there came a time when I was ready for the real deal.  Is the church ready to worship God for all He's worth?

And now I'm ready To feel your hand  - another expression of (presumably unsavoury) intimacy from the Igster, but again, one whose impulse can surely be redeemed.  One of the problems with worship is that well, you know, you might just actually encounter God.  We're scared witless by this idea.  Again, we're both right and wrong about this.  Encountering God - feeling His mighty Hand on our lives - is a terrifying experience.  But it is also a wonderful and wholly necessary one.  Are we ready?  Despite what I said above, I don't know if anyone is really ever ready for God, although perhaps at some elemental level, we were born ready.  Maybe it's better to say - no-one ever FEELS ready for someone as awesome as God.  But we can all make that leap anyway - we can all jump in and see what God will do.  We can all, and must all, relinquish our control and dive into worship, tentative but expectant that we WILL feel/know/be transformed by... SOMETHING.  And we have to be willing to name that something God.


And lose my heart On the burning sands - ok, confession time.  If you've read this far (have a medal!) you can see I'm just riffing freely using the Stooges as a springboard for a whole lotta stuff.  But here, I don't really know what Iggy's on about.  I wonder if he just needed something to rhyme with 'hand'.  But there's a good case to be made that this is the greatest line in the whole song.  It's a powerfully sexual image - orgasmic allusions in the climactic finality of the word 'lose' allied with the more obvious animal passion of the 'burning' heat.  In any case it's the last line of the second verse, before the chorus kicks in one last time - so it's the climax of the song lyrically and structurally.  If we are again to attempt to redeem Iggy's sensousness and make it holy, perhaps we can say that it represents the final climax of the worship experience - the real connection with the object of worship Itself.  Losing is a key concept in the New Testament - losing our life to find it - God losing his sheep/coin/son/Son only to find it again.   Losing our heart on the burning sands of God's love is the focus and aim of all our worship desire.  To be consumed by the heat and the passion of God until our heart is lost and found in him.  Anyone who has worshipped God, truly worshipped, will know what I'm on about.  Is there a better way of putting this than Iggy's messed-up, punked-up, loved-up capitulation to the power of the object of worship?  Perhaps only in the Bible.  Check out how David encountered God in worship
⁷ “In my distress I called to the LORD;
   I called out to my God.
From his temple he heard my voice;
   my cry came to his ears.
⁸ The earth trembled and quaked,
   the foundations of the heavens shook;
   they trembled because he was angry.
⁹ Smoke rose from his nostrils;
   consuming fire came from his mouth,
   burning coals blazed out of it.
¹⁰ He parted the heavens and came down;
   dark clouds were under his feet.
¹¹ He mounted the cherubim and flew;
   he soared on the wings of the wind.
¹² He made darkness his canopy around him—
   the dark rain clouds of the sky.
¹³ Out of the brightness of his presence
   bolts of lightning blazed forth.
¹⁴ The LORD thundered from heaven;
   the voice of the Most High resounded.
Now in all humility, ask yourself:  is the above vision of the Lord, coming in power to a believer in worship, responding in power to the worship impulse of a broken human being - is this closer to the wimpy expression of worship in most contemporary churches, or is it closer to guts and glory of The Stooges? To reiterate my disclaimer: I'm not saying we sing 'Be your Dog' next Sunday at church. But I think that if we want our worship (and our churches) to be truly transformational, we've got to allow ourselves a little bit of David-vision and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of Stooges-passion

Why not think it over as Scott Asheton's fuzz guitar solo fades into the distance...