This post is about reflecting on music

I’ve started a new practice recently. When I get goosebumps at a song or super drawn into a song or music video, I stop to reflect on why. Is it just because I love the music or is there something about the lyrics or video that really speaks to me? It started with Julien Baker’s video for Appointments, I reflected on it and realized the beauty of the dancers but their lack of actual interaction with others reminded me of my social anxiety; the beauty in humanity but the difficulty I have in interacting with it. 

Then Silent Planet’s firstwake. \\caught in the cyclical narrative of violence that invokes your name to justify genocide// is the abuses of violent Christendom and the difficulty we have in escaping the cycles of violence. Then Chance the Rapper in Jamila Wood’s LSD, \\grass is greener in pasadena or catalina by the water where the overlap between bullet holes and backpacks couldn’t be farther. and i’m supposed to father my daughter [in chicago]?// Lamenting violence in the lives of children and the inability to escape it. But Counterpart’s Bouquet, \\i find it hard to feel alive while my heart beats in borrowed time// I really just get down with the sick beat.

This has flowed some from my current seminary class, Spiritual Formation. In fact, it is the reverse of what I’ve been experiencing in my class. I have found in my spiritual life that I feel most worshipful when I attain the knowledge of our hope in Christ, but I resist feeling the Holy Spirit. So I have been spending more time in contemplative prayer, putting away relying on my knowledge and focusing on listening and experiencing. So in the music I tend to listen to, I focus more on the feeling the music invokes but don’t take time to reflect on the knowledge behind the tunes. I’m trying to achieve a balance between knowledge and emotion. Maybe that balance isn’t necessarily achievable, it’s probably similar to trying to balance a teeter totter, you keep going back and forth from the center of balance, but I can try to get closer. As my walk with Yahweh goes further and further, I want to be intent on listening, on feeling, and growing in knowledge.



Here's a gif. A smooth dismount and remount:

via GIPHY