Like Trees (Psalm One)
Renegotiations and Church Songs
The year was 2020.
Thus begins our journey. We have burned the maps, and we are off the trail. We’re disregarding the trailhead and we’re jumping through the foliage at around three years ago. Together we will stumble backward and forward through time as I regale you with stories of songs I have written and other tangential anecdotes.
Sure I contemplated beginning our journey back in the Summer of 2000, in the afterglow of Y2K, when we still lived in perpetual fear of the computers rising up and destroying us all. How naive we all were. The computers weren’t even sentient yet. If we only knew then what we… well, what do we really know anyhow? Regardless, it was in this very bosom of the turn of the millennium that I really started taking an earnest stab at songwriting while living in my parents’ basement and working part-time at an art supply store.
But we will not begin here.
It also crossed my unfocused mind to jump into the story somewhere in the mid-Eighties. The scene I pictured was the bedroom I shared with my brother on East Edgewood Avenue (you know the one). The colorful room slowly fades into view to find the imagination of a young artist exploding as he hunkers over his personal cassette recorder wielding a blue plastic nose flute, primed to belt out an original composition he has recently co-written with his cousin. This masterwork of songwriting that proclaims nothing less than the power of love will be documented, committed to tape spinning between two plastic wheels, to be played back as often as its legions of fans demand.
Tempting. But y’all aren’t ready for that.
I’m not ready for that.
Fear not, brave companion, we shall indeed return to both of these tantalizing stories in due time. But for now we will begin in the middle-ish with a song written three years ago, inspired by a Psalm written… ahem… a long time ago. It wasn’t the first song I’d ever written taking inspiration from text found in the Bible, but it was one that came at a time when the conditions forged the perfect catalyst for creating this particular kind of song for a very specific audience. As I’ve been looking back, connecting the scattered dots of my early memories, it’s been surprising to find that the jagged picture they reveal bears a more-than-passing resemblance to the songwriter that I’ve become.
We are who we are. We are who we’ve been.
Writing my very first songs did not come easy for me. I tend to get awfully precious with any creative work of mine. It’s fairly common for me to veer too far toward sentimentality or overwork things. Most of my early songs, in their recorded original form, are difficult for me to listen to today. The lyrical content can be eye-rolling; my vocals skin-crawling. I admire when artists can just close the book on a creative chapter, let the old thing be what it is, and be present to the new thing. But, that’s just not my style. I’m still trying to revitalize songs I wrote twenty years ago. Occasionally my tenacity toward pulling off the skin and rerouting the circulatory system of a song has resulted in an almost wholly new composition. Some of these have ended up being songs that I really love. So, that’s a win, right?
But I digress.
Writing songs, in my experience, is work, and play, and accident, and discipline, and pure joy, and utterly aggravating… and so on. It doesn’t often happen for me, but there have been a handful of times when a song just seemed to naturally spring forth or fall into my lap or however you want to think of it. The song, “Like Trees (Psalm One)” is one of those times. But we’ll get to that momentarily.
First, let’s get our pencils out and connect a few of those previously mentioned “scattered dots” to set the stage…
Singing songs for me is very - and I seem to be just now facing and befriending this fact - VERY enmeshed with my experience within Christian faith and the life of church community. I was born to a mother and a father who sang Jesus songs with their friends in the late-Sixties/early-Seventies in a folk group called The Messengers. They both sang with the church choir at the Presbyterian church in which I grew up, and played records at home and on the road by Christian artists such as Amy Grant and Randy Stonehill just to name a couple of personal favorites. This music was always around when I was young. I sang at church on Sunday mornings, often from the pews, sometimes up front with other kids, and occasionally as a soloist enthralling the congregation with yet another daring selection from that 1977 masterpiece, The Music Machine. Even back then, I was making bold choices as a performer. A performance such as this would typically happen during the “special music” portion of the service, which as far as I’m concerned will always be an official part of the Presbyterian church liturgy.
Let all God’s people say, Amen.
Then there was church camp!
The church camp in question, the ONLY church camp was Camp Olivet. There was and is no other camp.
Fight me. We are legion.
Camp Olivet is not a fancy adventure camp with all the bells and whistles one might imagine it to be. It wasn’t in 1963, and it hasn’t changed much in the past sixty years. There are lights in the cabins now. Can you imagine such luxury? Other than that extravagance, it’s as pretty humble establishment nestled among rolling hills of Springville, Indiana, hidden by the trees, guarded by the mighty Indian Creek. But for many who experience it, Camp Olivet might as well be Xanadu; the Garden of Eden reclaimed… with ticks! Good lord, there is A LOT to say about Camp Olivet. Again, have patience, fellow traveler. The future has reserved a lengthy post (or perhaps a series of posts) dedicated to Camp Olivet’s role in this story of mine. But let’s just say for now that SINGING was, and continues to be for me forty years later, one of my absolute favorite things about Camp Olivet.
And then there was the college campus community that welcomed me in from the winter of discontent that was my post high school years.
Halfway through my six year stay as a meandering art student at Ball State University I ended up enmeshed in a community of students who liked to play cards, pull pranks, and sing songs about Jesus. In hindsight, I suppose there may have been a few similarities to Camp Olivet that drew me to these particular folks. There was something about singing songs in the same room with these people that lit me up. It felt a little reminiscent to being at a packed club, seeing a band that I love, and singing along with every song. I tasted a little of that magic. The songs were new (not really, but to me they were). The singing was expressive, and formational, and bound everybody in the room together.
And I was inspired!
I was inspired to finally learn how to properly play that mostly-neglected guitar lying under my bed that had been paid for with the blood of an under-appreciated French Horn. With my cheap acoustic Epiphone in hand, I wanted to get up in front of these freaky Jesus people and lead them in a holy holler of harmonious hullabaloo (trademark pending).
From this moment forward I would relish the opportunity to lead praise and worship songs written by people I’d never met while concurrently attempting to write personal songs that sounded more like Tom Waits than Chris Tomlin. The songs I was writing reveled in wordplay, wrestled with faith and doubt, and quite often focused on the seedy underside of the human experience (or at least my human experience). A few years later, following a few sour experiences with the church and other personal tragedies, my songwriting delved even deeper into the abyss of darkness and longing.
I continued to write songs and perform the occasional set at a coffee shop, small club, etc. But leading, and singing songs in church was losing much of what it had meant to me. I spent about ten years in the wilderness as far as church life was concerned. During that season, the times when I did find myself singing or leading songs in a church, it felt like something foreign to me. Most of the time I experienced congregational music as either rigid and lifeless or else just trying too damn hard. I was also becoming much more critical of lyrical content of church songs. I mean, the theology behind some songs just makes my teeth curl.
And we all know what teeth curling leads to, don’t we?
That’s right, it’s a slippery slope, fam. So… yes, I started to wonder if church wouldn’t be better off without congregational singing at all.
Smash cut to the Trump administration. How about that for a transition? Speaking of the abyss of darkness and longing. 😏
Anyhow, as I was saying before uttering the name of he-who-must-not-be-named, I was about a year into a masters program at Christian Theological Seminary (CTS) when my family and I stumbled into a weird little church community, only a couple years old, practicing in the Anglican tradition. My wife and I immediately felt at home with The Table. One of the many things that endeared us to this church how we experienced liturgy and the Eucharist with a vibrancy that we hadn’t even realized we were longing for. We were singing songs that felt at once new but ancient; formed by the sacred and the historical.
Ugh. It feels like I’m gushing more than a little. But I can’t emphasize enough how, for the first time in a long time, I felt something inside me respond to songs I was singing at church. The lights turned on and I could see how the songs fit in the Feng shui of a liturgy that all points to and responds to the sacrament of holy Eucharist. Singing the songs binds us together as we give thanks, petition, lament, and celebrate the life we share. The songs are a lot of other things, but it doesn’t get much better than that.
So at long last, after years of disinterest, I could once again imagine myself leading a congregation in song singing. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too long before I was invited to do just that at The Table. Under the trusted tutelage of Fr. Ben Sternke, I cautiously accepted the role that slowly expanded until I was eventually handed the directorial reins of the music department of our church’s liturgy. Serving as the Director of Liturgical Arts at The Table has been a slow and steady growth marked by plenty of “aw shit,” and met with a whole lot of “hell yeah!”
Meanwhile, lest we forget, I was still under the unrelenting thumb of a masters program.
During my stint at CTS I was met with the diverse perspectives and worldviews of colleagues, professors, and the manifold voices between the pages of stacks of books. They would all feed and get filtered through an ever-evolving relationship with the sacred texts that had always held some sort of position of importance in my life and faith. Ya know, that thing called, uh, The Bible (or Sixty Six Sacred Books Guaranteed to Ruin Dinner and Divide a Nation). Most importantly, I was developing a deeper appreciation for how playful, provocative, and uncontrollable these texts can be. Approaching them with anything less than curiosity, openness, and an awareness of my own assumptions and limitations was a foolish endeavor.
From the first semester, I had opportunities to write songs through interaction with biblical texts. First, as part of a sermon I presented in a class on the Book of Revelation. Then, as a project for a class on the book of Job. Yet again, in a biblical storytelling class where I was working with a controversial passage from the Gospel of Mark. I would hear the call to engage creatively with a piece of biblical text and would answer by reflecting on it, poking at it, and wrestling it into a melody that I could sing over some clumsy guitar strumming.
In February 2020, I was invited by my colleague and future collaborator, Kaitlyn Ferry to attend a Lent-themed songwriting retreat conducted by United Adoration. I attended this retreat with two of my friends from The Table, and it was a little bit of a Revelation. Being with other writers and musicians in a retreat space, talking about art and the importance of art in the church, sharing what we had all created together over the weekend: I think it somehow gave me permission.
The retreat began with me co-writing a stupid song in seven minutes about a thermostat. The song has been hailed as nothing less than “musical gold” by United Adoration leader, Rachel Wilhelm herself. I came home after the first day of the retreat and labored late into the night, working The Great Litany from the Book of Common Prayer into a ukulele-accompanied melody. My friends and I even co-wrote a song inspired by the BCP’s collect (a prayer of intent and focus of worship) for the fourth Sunday in Lent which we led at The Table the following Sunday.
Then came the novel Coronavirus.
Y’all remember how that shit went down, right?
As things shut down, and things got dicey, our church exhaustingly discerned how to best live and meet together during those early uncertain times. We settled, as many folks did, for meeting in the structure preordained for these times - not unlike that mighty ark commissioned to Noah - that holy chapel of social distancing known as ZOOM!
What is simultaneously the best thing and the worst thing? The answer is Zoom… Zoom is the answer. Do you understand what I’m saying here? Very good.
I had spent a couple of years cultivating a team of musicians who I got to lead with Sunday after Sunday. Now, all at once, I found myself sitting on my sofa playing liturgical hymns and songs of prayer into a microphone connected to a laptop displaying a checkerboard of digitally broadcast faces. I couldn’t hear any of the voices belonging to these faces staring back at me. I could only hear me singing. Of course, you can imagine how awful that must have been.
It was weird.
But we were making it work the best we could. We were constantly asking ourselves how we could best care for each other. We were trying, often failing, learning from our mistakes. And then there was the toll on our mental and emotional health that most of us were definitely not prepared for.
What a time to be alive.
Meanwhile, I was also just trying to wrap things up at CTS. I was thinking about the role the creative process plays within biblical exegesis, and how such playful engagement honors the text, and I was working on a thesis proposal that would argue as much. You know, real masters-level, intellectual shit. My friends and I had recently co-written a song at retreat and shared it with the congregation the very next day. Now, thanks to a global pandemic, I was flying solo on Sunday mornings, leading songs before a computer screen. If there was ever an excuse to take some chances with church music, the stakes here were pretty low. Anything out of the ordinary or slightly innovative might be welcomed with open arms.
That’s when the heavens opened up and a single concentrated beam of radiant light descended playfully upon God’s servant like a laser pointer before a bewildered, battle-ready house cat!
I happened to notice that Psalm 1 was on the docket for one of the upcoming lectionary readings. Were the Psalms not a collection of hymns, laments, and praises written to be put to music and sung? That’s only kind of a rhetorical question. I think they were. Let me know if you have evidence that suggests otherwise.
It occurred to me that if I was going to interact with the Bible in a way that might produce something meaningful for the people at The Table to sing together, I might as well start with the Book of Psalms…
And I might as well start at the beginning…
I spent some time with the words of Psalm 1 and let a simple 3/4 strumming pattern guide the melody. The music remained rhythmically and melodically simple (something that I would wrongly abandon in subsequent writing sessions. I’m still learning how to write for congregational participation). There’s a sneaky Dmaj7/F# in there that gently lowers the verse’s opening D chord into a G. That one’s for the nerds.
Psalm 1 employs imagery of flourishing trees planted along running water to describe those who meditate upon and delight in God’s law:
They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.
In contrast the Psalm ends by describing the wicked who are rather like chaff blown by the wind.
Lyrically, the Psalm reminds me that the heart of God’s law is justice for the poor and the powerless, the end of oppression, and the “blowing away” of the oppressor.
The song unfolded pretty quickly and has remained pretty much the same every time we’ve sung it together at The Table.
Like Trees (Psalm One)
Like trees along the river Whose leaves never wither So are they who meditate on your law All the day and into the night Bearing beautiful fruit in due time So are they who meditate on your law On your law so good and so sweet On your path of justice set our feet All oppression shall be driven Like chaff tossed to the wind But, oh, I will delight in your good instruction With their branches that reach toward the heavens Resting in the blossom of your presence So are they who meditate on your law Sending roots that twist into the waters And stretch outward to heal one another So are they who meditate on your law On your law so good and so sweet On your path of justice set our feet All oppression shall be driven Like chaff tossed to the wind But, oh, I will delight in your good instruction
Since writing “Like Trees (Psalm One)” I’ve written thirty-seven songs reflecting on selections from the Book of Psalms. This practice was something I personally needed during the time of isolation in 2020. It was connecting tissue for me with our church in a time when almost every post of connection felt so remote. As our church began meeting in person again (first outdoors, then inside, and eventually in our current worship space in downtown Indianapolis), I got to hear these songs being sung together by a cacophony of voices belonging to people I wrote them for. Singing together, and collaborating with incredible musicians in the same physical space each week has become even more sweet.
Remove singing from church altogether? What a ridiculous notion.
