For the last couple of years, I have wanted to do some reflection on the practice of songwriting and its connection to the traditional Lenten challenge to grow in one’s “prayer life.” In the course of reflecting on songwriting and/as spiritual practice, it struck me that while there is quite a bit of reflection on rock performance and the analysis of finished songs in discussions of popular music and theology, there seems to be a lack of attention on the practice of songwriting, particularly as it takes place in an “individual” or “personal” mode.

One recent exception is the work of John McClure who has reflected on “song-making” as a source of insight for theological practice. Some of this work touches on what is happening in the songwriter when she is writing a song. McClure writes,

[S]ongwriters are keenly aware that their craft is cathartic, educative, and integrative in relation to their own lives. Writing in and out of a tradition carries with it certain ways of externalizing and dealing with one’s experiences and ideas. Songwriting, therefore, involves a constant reeducation and maturation of the whole person within certain traditions of thought and practice. Writing changes the artist, providing healing, perspective, vision, and qualities of good judgment. Most good songwriters are aware that songs are doing this to them, and how songs are doing it. (John S. McClure, Mashup Religion: Pop Music and Theological Invention [Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2011], 21)

McClure makes connections between the practice of songwriting and the process of theological production, a kind of theological engagement that looks to popular music for “models and methods for how theologians might conduct their own work” (Gordon Lynch, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 40). (I took a stab at a similar kind of reflection in a contribution to the Rock and Theology project’s forthcoming collection of essays, Secular Music and Sacred Theology, probing DIY punk culture for insights, ethical commitments, and aesthetic options that have contributed or might contribute to my own theological work.)

Here, though, I am interested in the relationship between songwriting and the variety of experiences we have come to call “prayer.” Much of what McClure writes in his chapter on songwriting and theological production has relevance for reflection on songwriting and prayer, particularly the way he richly describes the various ways a songwriter “cultivat[es] a life of self-awareness.” McClure’s descriptions of songwriting practices sound an awful lot like prayer, and they ring true for me as I reflect on my nearly 20 years of songwriting experience.

The connection between prayer and creative activities may seem like an obvious one on one level. Creative people often say that that the creative life is, or can be, a form of prayer. Artists “find God” in painting, writing, dancing, playing music, etc. This is no doubt often true, and I have described my experience of playing music in this way over the years. But these claims, while true, are often quite vague and only focus on the positive dimension of these creative endeavors, and of prayer. Even McClure’s chapter on songwriting and theology only briefly mentions the need for perseverance in the practice of songwriting. What of the intense struggle that prayer often (usually?) is and that creativity often (usually?) is? In prayer and in the creative life, what are the practices through which we struggle against these difficulties? What exactly is prayer anyway, and what exactly is going on when one sits down to write a song?

I have struggled to write reflections about these matters over the last couple of years in part because of the very struggle I have had with writing songs during that time. For the past several years, I have had a sort of “desert experience” when it comes to songwriting, i.e. a multi-year “dry spell” where songwriting happens with little regularity or predictability, and indeed with long periods of “nothing.” A large part of this has to do with regular changes in life circumstances and the increasing fragmentation of life due to various commitments, relationships, family, projects, jobs, continued work in doctoral studies and academic life, etc. Strains on one’s time can mean, of course, less time for the creative space required for writing songs. Over the past year, I have gradually come out of this “desert” and am now in the middle of recording two new albums of original material. But as I have moved in and out of these periods where songwriting has been difficult or relatively “easy,” I can’t help but think that the problems and frustrations one encounters integrating “prayer” into one’s life are largely the same as those encountered when a songwriter is “stuck” somewhere in the process of writing songs.

I can anticipate a possible objection, one that might emerge, predictably perhaps, from those who would like to keep “spiritual” matters wholly separate from “secular” ones. That objection might go something like this: when a person is praying, he or she is not “doing” anything or trying to be “creative” or “productive” as one attempts to do while writing a song, but is rather “receiving” from “elsewhere.” There is perhaps some truth to this claim, but it could be questioned from two directions. First, the objection flies in the face of the experience of most songwriters. It is very common to experience songwriting very much as “receiving” something from somewhere outside of oneself. I have certainly felt this way over the course of my many years of writing songs. And I got a sense of just how widespread this feeling is during last year’s Lenten season while doing some unorthodox “spiritual reading,” taking in the interviews in the collection Songwriters On Songwriting by Paul Zollo. Leonard Cohen, for example, relays this experience over and over in his interview: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.” Also, from another direction, consider that across religious traditions prayer is not always experienced as passive and apophatic but as active and kataphatic, as in Ignatian prayer in which the pray-er is indeed also “doing something,” often something very “creative” or “productive.” There is often a very active attentiveness to life which is central to the practices of both prayer and songwriting.

And so lately I have been pondering what sorts of songwriting practices or “disciplines” or “exercises” I might intentionally enter into in order to become more open, more attentive, more creative, etc. And I have been open to learning about such practices wherever I might find them, whether on blogs, or in books, or in conversations with other songwriters. Some concrete tips and techniques are interesting and indeed helpful. (The iPhone, for example, has been immensely helpful in helping me capture ideas as they happen and building demos with elegantly simple recording software.) Other “tricks” for generating song ideas, those found in books on songwriting, often seem too rigid and formulaic. The best advice I have found often comes in books about writing in general, such as Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. For me, the most helpful suggestions are not those that offer songwriting “tricks,” but those which help the songwriter come to see that the process of writing songs requires the carving out of time and clearing of space in daily life for attentiveness to life, an attentiveness that is the same, or at least similar to, that which is essential to prayer.

Reading quality interviews with songwriters, for example, often has the “feel” of spiritual reading that offers instruction or suggestions for prayer. Consider the following excerpt from an interview with Leonard Cohen in Songwriters on Songwriting in which he describes his morning routine:

I get up at 4:30. My alarm is set for 4:30. Sometimes I sleep through it. But when I am being good to myself, I get up at 4:30, get dressed, go down to a zendo not far from here. And while others, I suppose, are moving towards enlightenment, I’m working on a song while I’m sitting there. At a certain moment I can bring what I’ve learned at the zendo, the capacity to concentrate, I can bring it to bear on the lines that are elluding me.

Then I come back to the house after two hours, it’s about 6:30 now, quarter to seven. I brew an enormous pot of coffee and sit down in a very deliberate way, at the kitchen table or at the computer, and begin, first of all, to put down the lines that have come to me so that I don’t forget them. And then play the song over and over again, try to find some form.

Those are wonderful hours. Before the phone starts ringing, before your civilian life returns to you with all its bewildering complexities. It’s a simple time in the morning. A wonderful, invigorating time.

These reflections hopefully open up some interesting paths toward rethinking prayer from musical experience and vice versa. Prayer and songwriting are not the “same thing,” but they are also not necessarily completely different things. Prayer is not a completely unique category of activity relegated to some “spiritual sphere” but a practice embedded in the stuff of life. Can practices of prayer, particularly practices that respond to the “struggle” that prayer can be, provide insights into the practice of songwriting? Can attentive songwriting practices help to make one a “better” person of “prayer”? Perhaps becoming a better songwriter will help one become a “better” person of “prayer,” and vice versa, not necessarily because both practices are “the same thing,” but because of a kind of resemblance. Can we begin to explore and describe that resemblance? And what can that interaction teach us about the relationship between the “secular” and the “sacred”?

From their website: “The purpose of the CPF is to support Catholic conscientious objectors through education, counseling, and advocacy. Guided by a personalist philosophy, the CPF seeks to resist war by helping those who choose not to participate in it, one person at a time.”

If you’re not really into Catholicism, even of the lefty variety, but are into peacemaking, you might still be into this considering well over half of the members of the U.S. military are Roman Catholic. You can still take the records for free too, and you can still also not listen to them at all.

Friends,

While beginning work on my new full length Nonsubstantiation, I thought of you, and I thought of this season, and I thought maybe you could use a gift. What do you give someone who already has a bunch of Iafrate Xmas musics? More Iafrate Xmas musics. Here for you is a digital two-song single tho in the style of the old physical two-sided singles. The first track is “The Friendly Beasts,” a version to add to a long legacy of versions such like The Louvin Brothers, Johnny Cash, and The Sufjan. The second track is an instrumental version of the hymn “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” with interesting instruments. The songs were recorded this past week by David Klug. Aaron Crothers (Good Sport, The Emergency) played the bass guitar. And Karri Roberts provided the beautiful peacock painting for the cover. The single is free to download and it is available here. Enjoy it. A bunch of original songs from the same session are on the way.

Please check out my recent post over at Rock and Theology on Pussy Riot as well as the review I posted tonight of Mark Van Steenwyk’s new book That Holy Anarchist.

Also, if you have a sec and care at all, maybe jot down some ideas in the comments here about what you’d like to see on this site. My main method of connecting with folks has, sadly, been that website called Facebook. But I miss, in some ways, the blog format too. I may end up whipping up batches of links into blog posts with commentary, as I did at one time. I’ll also likely post bits of academic writing, book reviews, little thoughts, etc.

I do have some more reviews in the pipes, so look for those, including a review of the recent documentary Monsenor: The Last Journey of Oscar Romero (long overdue). And I have a few academic reviews pending which I will post here once they are published in their respective journals.

On the other hand, I may get rid of this domain and blog and put something else up. Or maybe keep this up but stop posting here while starting something new. I’m not sure this domain and the ideas connected to it reflect what it is I am trying to do these days. Some of the writings here make me cringe now. “CatholicAnarchy.org” may be just a step along the way toward other things. Bear with me if I decide to think out loud about some of these things. This site may end up being reworked and turned into my main online home. Again, your comments are certainly welcome.

Additional news: I recently submitted the final edits of an essay for a collection edited by Tom Beaudoin. The book grew out of discussions among the folks involved in the Rock and Theology project. My essay is titled “More Than Music: Notes on ‘Staying Punk’ in the Church and in Theology,” and the book should be out in the spring of 2013.

Thanks for reading.

That Holy Anarchist: Reflections on Christianity & Anarchism
By Mark Van Steenwyk
Missio Dei
[Amazon] [Missio Dei]

Many readers of this blog are probably already familiar with Mark Van Steenwyk. For those who are not, he is co-founder of a church community in Minneapolis called Missio Dei which is rooted in the Mennonite tradition. As a grassroots educator, Van Steenwyk has been involved in “Christian anarchist” circles for years and has maintained a number of various online resources for Christians with similar commitments to find one another. He is now a contributing editor with JesusRadicals.com and a producer and host of their impressive Iconocast podcast.

Van Steenwyk’s connection with the Jesus Radicals community stretches back a number of years and he has regularly presented a “primer” on Christianity and anarchism at the movement’s annual conference. Those presentations were recently turned into a series of articles for the Jesus Radicals website, which in turn were compiled into the present booklet.

This primer on Christian anarchism is comprised of six chapters but it is a quick read at 71 pages. The first chapter is a brief but insightful statement of the politics of Jesus and his “un-reign” or “un-kingdom.” Van Steewyk presents a fine explanation of the view that Jesus’ mission was not apolitical but political in an entirely different way, pointing to the fact that Jesus’ followers were seen as politically subversive.

Chapter two offers some thoughts on the definitions of the terms “anarchism” and “Christianity,” helpfully problematizing each in light of the diversity of movements and ideas that fall under each term. In particular, he gives a good sense of the diversity of anarchisms and these anarchisms’ tendency to be more practice-oriented rather than theoretical.

Chapter three provides a survey of movements within Christian history that could be called “anarchic,” i.e. driven by an anarchistic impulse. Van Steenwyk notes the difference between being anarchist with regard to the government and being anarchist with regard to the church and its institutional expressions, a distinction that, in my experience, is often lost in “Christian anarchist” discussions. And he is honest about the “heretical” nature of various Christian anarchist groups which is refreshing in light of a trend among many current writers drawn to Christian anarchism who seem to have a simultaneous obsession with so-called “orthodox” theology.

Chapter four breezes through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures for signs of the anarchic impulse and, while it is necessarily brief, it does a good job of pointing to different voices in scripture to tune us in to the critiques of power that are contained within the Sinai/anti-monarchical and prophetic streams. He also highlights themes in the gospels and in Paul that can orient our reading of those parts of scripture from an anti-authoritarian perspective. Finally, he deals with some common objections to an anarchist reading of scripture and issues a call for an anarchist bible commentary (a great idea).

Chapters five and six deal with questions and tensions among Christian anarchist perspectives and this is where Van Steenwyk moves the discussion forward. In these chapters he addresses objections that Christians and anarchists alike often have with the idea of “Christian anarchism.” He raises objections to some examples of “Christian anarchism” that he rightly finds problematic, such as those that can’t quite get out of the domination trap in that they simply imagine God to be the biggest and most powerful “Lord,” or Christian anarchists such as Greg Boyd who argue against involvement in political movements. He rightfully questions patterns of homogeneity among Christian anarchists in terms of race and gender. And he issues warnings against the temptation to attempt to make Christianity and anarchism “fit” together perfectly in a “system” or the view that Christian anarchism must be entirely “biblical” and/or provide a perfect utopian blueprint. These are all important issues that I have not seen raised very often in much of the recent writing on Christian anarchism. In my review of Tripp York’s recent book on Christian anarchism, I stated that “What we need is an anarchist political theology that has learned from anarchism because it has been in real dialogue with it and has even been challenged by it, [...] an engagement that leaves the triumphalism of the past behind and seeks first the Kingdom wherever it is emerging, both inside the church and outside of it.” Van Steenwyk’s book is a refreshing move toward the kind of anarchist political theology I had in mind.

I only have two criticisms of That Holy Anarchist. The first is perhaps unfair given the stated origin of these essays: these chapters are very short. Obviously, as stated earlier, this is a collection of brief essays that were previously presentations that have been collected into a book, and so it reads that way. At many many points in the book, however, I found myself wishing that Mark had taken the time to expand these essays a bit more. As a “primer,” chapter one really could have used a richer description of the qualities of Jesus’ unkingdom, providing an intro that would then be fleshed out in more detail in later chapters. (Thankfully, Mark is working on a book called The unKingdom of God which is to be published in spring 2013.) Also, toward the end of the very good chapter on scripture, I was disappointed to see only a mere mention of the political dimension of the book of Revelation without any further comment. Revelation really deserved at least a paragraph or two considering its radical political message (especially for “witness”-oriented church communities) as well as its obvious potential for dangerous misuse by right-wing Christian groups. Finally, I noticed some typos and inconsistencies in formatting that will necessarily come from a DIY project like this, but overall the book is well designed and easy to read.

This is a refreshing little book, and though it is a short read, it is reflective of a move into a more mature phase of “Christian anarchist” discussion in that it does not proclaim to have final answers about authority and power and what ideas are “right” and “wrong.” Rather, it models the creative tension and messiness present in movements dedicated to following Christ and opposing domination, even the patterns of domination within our “radical”  “religious”  communities.

OH REALLY?