Forgive the small-town minister, for he knows not what he said
KeithHandy posted in Old skool on October 29th, 2005(A fragmented piece about music, religion, and ethical development.)
Forgotten Thing #1: When I wrote in my diary in ‘85 - ‘86, I occasionally referred to music as “something I use to get recognition among my peers”. I’m sure this was not really my sole motive for making music, but it’s interesting that I would have said something like that. I wouldn’t say that now, unless as a lame joke. It wasn’t entirely a joke then.
Forgotten Thing #2: It wasn’t just the PMRC; everywhere you went in the late ’80s you were exposed to a message that rock music was evil, and at odds with spirituality. You could reason it away, of course, but they were planting unconscious seeds. Especially if you had talent; now you had to feel a twinge of guilt about it.
Forgotten Thing #3: While helping to care for my dying grandmother, I was simultaneously working out four-part vocal arrangements for The Cathedral Room, at face value an attack on (parody of) religion — which some people could extrapolate to “attack on God”. Meanwhile, her minister was visiting to assure her that she was going to “a better place where there is never any pain or sadness”.
Not-So-Forgotten Thing #1: When she died, my parents were there to see her take her last breath. To my utter surprise, they were not sad. They said it was a beautiful and moving experience.
Not-So-Forgotten Thing #2: After her death, this same minister used the old “what if you died tomorrow” tactic to scare me and my family into taking his religious beliefs more seriously. My parents became regular church-goers. I only became more torn and confused.
Aside #1: The minister told us how as a younger person, he would occasionally “take the Lord’s name in vain” when accidentally hitting his thumb with a hammer. Excuse me, but I don’t think involuntarily yelling “dammit” as a reaction to sudden pain is on par with hijacking an airplane, strapping a bomb to yourself, or gunning down civilians, all the while shouting “praise [$deity]!!!”.
Aside #2: He also asserted that the Bible had always been a step ahead of science, as apparently it says somewhere in there that “the earth sits on nothing” (can anyone confirm this?), while for years scientists believed it was flat.
Not-So-Forgotten Thing #3: At the Grateful Dead concert that summer, I had my first prolonged panic attack. It was probably triggered as much or more so by the recent loss, the confusion, the total lack of a future as far as I could tell, the caffeine/sugar, and the horrendous sunburn, as/than the LSD that I initially blamed it on. I asked a security guard if he believed in Heaven and Hell. He said he sure did, and he knew where he was going, and did I? I could not reconcile with a God that would assign such polarized eternities to such a gray-shaded range of people and lives.
Forgotten Thing #4: When I visited a private counselor (who my mother had been seeing), she recommended a self-help book that addressed things like religious guilt. I even asked her about rock music. She brought up some examples of how rock music could be used in more positive way, but these still felt wrong to me — gospel music, people “rocking in the name of Jesus”, that sort of thing. A part of me felt that I might be the tool of an evil force for not being willing to swing that way, that I might one day have to choose between giving up what I loved and taking some rather heavy punishment down the road.
Not-So-Forgotten Thing #4: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead finished the job that the self-help book had started. For all the highly debatable tangents Rand went off on over the course of her career, I will always be grateful for what I took out of it, that it’s good, right, and ethical to be true to my creative vision and continue on with my music.
This is something I feel deeply — the mere idea of considering my work to be potentially “evil” is laughable to me now. I’m fighting for something I believe in, even if all that is is to do high-quality work in an era when utter shit is highly fashionable. This in turn inspires people — real people. It doesn’t appease twisted versions of God created by insecure, full-grown children with power issues.
In the end, my embracing of music as a Good Thing, and my view of religion as “putting words in God’s mouth” and “rejection of the mind you were given”, are both based on wanting to genuinely do the right thing, and I’ve gone through a lot to come to these conclusions. The stage of my life that tends to embarrass me most, my early twenties (early 1990’s), was an important growth period. The me before that was incomplete, probably making music for a good enough reason, but not having the right kind of conviction about it.
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Not-So-Forgotten Thing #5: My grandmother had always given us $2.00 bills in our cards for birthdays and holidays. I felt bad when I realized my cousin had kept them all while I’d spent them as money. On what was just about the one year anniversary of her death, working as a cashier, I decided to myself, “no matter what happens, the next time any customer has a $2.00 bill I will buy it and keep it.”
Within less than a minute, a man faced the top of his wallet towards me, so I could see as he was taking out, in what seemed like slow motion, a fresh, new $2.00 bill to pay for his small purchase.
All I can say for sure is that it was statistically improbable.
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