Prelude to Series on Psalm 23

A personal story about evangelical praise songs.

Chant Music, Evangelical Praise Songs, and Me

From my mud-encircled tent that was pitched in a partially repurposed cow field, I made my way to the worship space in the rain. There was no point in running. It was a multi-day downpour across the Bourgogne region of France, and it was inevitable that I would soak to the bone. So I walked meditatively. I spent four days like this, well — more like two days like this. After two days of cow-patty hopping, I was invited to move to one of the bunk rooms after the young adult meeting had cleared out. I hadn’t planned my trip well.

This was 1998, and I was monastery-hopping around France, Benedictine convents, mostly. Websites barely existed then (hello, 1998), and anyway, I didn’t have money to travel to and then pay the hourly fees to use the internet cafés in the larger towns. I honestly cannot recall how I even discovered and navigated to new places. The network of French Benedictine nuns probably directed me. But that rainy morning in Bourgogne, I was headed from my tent to a candle-washed hour of chant music in the Church of Reconciliation at the Taizé Community. I would make the same walk two more times that day to join the monks singing the songs that had made Taizé famous: Laudate Dominum, El Senyor, Dona nobis pacem cordium, Bless the Lord…Nada te Turbe was my favorite. Of course it was my favorite; It was in a minor key.

Turn the clock back six years, and you would find me at another candle-washed hour of religious song — at Gordon, an evangelical Christian school on the North Shore of Massachusetts where I went to college.

I always say Gordon College was my accidental foray into evangelicalism. It wasn’t a great fit. But I did survive. And those four, extremely frustrating, beautifully marked, and intensely engaged years are a big reason I became an academic of religion. When I arrived at Gordon, I knew very little about evangelicalism. I was a wandering, enthusiastically educated New Englander and an ecumenically raised Protestant whose mother’s absolutely stunning relationship to music had shaped the deepest parts of my spirituality. I inherited so much from my mother.

My mother loved music — I believe music offered her a sanctuary of sorts, because she lived with an abundantly American, Scandinavian-immigrant spirituality. The hardcore Swedish Baptist preacher who brought my grandmother to the United States gave my mother her biggest life project: recovering from her religious background. She was (and still is) in a perpetual state of revelation — having little and big realizations about spiritual matters — while watching movies, reading books, going on walks. Her method is practical — she absorbs herself in details — of movie plots, novel plots, the intricacies of nature. The content of her realizations can be very different, but the thesis is almost always the same. She marvels at the good and beautiful surprises that were censured from her childhood — that her inherited religious perception concealed. She scowls at the ugly perceptions that come into clearer view. My decision to go to Gordon instead of any of the other, better known places I considered was inspired by my mother’s spirituality — by the intellectual seriousness and creativity that she used to patch her exploratory life experiences together.

During Gordon College’s orientation week, my mother’s daughter got on a bus meant to help us all church shop. I was headed to a Vineyard church, whatever that was. But getting on the bus, almost immediately, I sat in forced silence among a loud rabble of 18-year olds, a packed bus of white college students singing Christian praise songs: Our God is an Awesome God, Shine Jesus Shine, Lord Prepare Me to Be a Sanctuary. Even at the time, the moment felt like an immersion, like I had been plunged into something — but that something was totally foreign. I bet evangelical readers would say I was immersed in the spirit, or even that I was being baptized by the Holy Spirit. But I knew and loved the Holy Spirit. My holy spirit would not have felt foreign to me. No, this was something else, some other “holy spirit” — and this “something else” is what brings me to write today.

I want to talk about experience, spirituality, and singing songs.

Inside and Outside of Evangelical Praise Songs

The totally foreign moment on the bus, immersed in someone else’s praise songs was all the more striking to me, indeed I was dumbfounded, because everyone knew the same songs by heart, yet I had never heard them. I was a choir girl in every area of my life, so this unfamiliarity is quite a statement coming from me. In public middle and high school, I made it into select state choirs. At summer Girl Scout camps, I passionately memorized every song and performed them at the top of my lungs to my car-trapped parents on rides home. I was tapped to make the two mix tapes our family listened to on a road-trip from Boston to Florida. And (most relevant to this story) I was a church choir girl. In Christmas concerts and summer church plays, I was regularly given the solos. I was invited to sing the part of Amahl in our church’s Christmas play, “Amahl and the Night Visiters.” This was a big deal to me. Amahl is the lead part and the only child singing role among an all-adult cast. I’ve never actually written out my full childhood singing resume. So, you’ll forgive me if I too marvel that a song-soaked kid like myself had never heard the body of music that was sung by upwards of 25 college freshmen on that bus. That music was 1980s and early 1990s Christian praise songs. My unfamiliarity would, of course, change rather quickly.

Praise songs have got to be on anyone’s short list for how to identify “evangelical culture.” Growing out of the hippy Jesus movement of the 1960s, praise songs are related to the more defined musical trends of "Jesus Rock" and "Contemporary Christian Music" (CCM) that emerged during the same decades. But praise songs were generic, poppy, chant lyrics that would sweep across Protestant America to become the musical (and theological) vernacular of countless Christian and Christian-curious folk. The music grew along with mega-churches, but the sweep did not just happen in there. Even my stone-hewed, pungently incensed, iconographically busy, liturgically mystical Episcopal church in West Newbury, MA was ALSO incorporating praise songs into worship. Praise songs equally made their way into Catholic masses and the seeker-friendly mega church gateway events that pumped out the genre.

Saying you didn’t like praise songs would be like saying you didn’t like soda. Yeah, maybe you wanted healthier beverages sometimes, and some people were dedicated enough to avoid it altogether, but for most of us, you knew a wet, ice-clinking glass of coke could be very refreshing. When I was in college, I eventually felt two different things about praise songs. On the one hand, I grew to hate them like I hated hall-mark cards and generic suburban malls. They came to represent the shallow spirituality on offer at Gordon’s chapel services (required three-times a week). The same college friends who joined me in rejecting praise songs were the same college friends who wrote poetry for the “Idiom,” read books like Wendell Berry’s Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, and followed (or formed) college bands that escaped the Christian campus to play Boston’s sticky-floored/grimey menued, underground music venues. Our scrutiny gave us a sense for revelation — for wisdoms that could overtake the culture, practices, and poetics that praise songs encouraged.

But on the other hand, one of my favorite places on Gordon College’s campus was associated with praise music. A room in a building that I cannot remember and that I still do not recall from the workaday week — at 10pm on Sunday nights — that room was transformed by a thousand-candle-lights and the acoustic talents of a few of our own guitar-playing students, the “praise team” that led us in singing praise songs for an hour. It was called “Catacombs.” It was otherworldly. It was simple and beautiful. It was meditative. It was soaked in spirituality that could reset your past week and spill serenity into the next. Unlike the bus, the Catacombs room was dark. Singing was much more mysterious and intimate. My spiritual experience of evangelical praise songs at Catacombs felt more like sitting in front of the fireplace in my family’s home — a Friday night ritual of eating pizza on a picnic blanket — especially effective as a ritual during the winter when I could pour these good feelings into the beautiful expanse of a home-based weekend.

These experiences of praise songs at an evangelical college and the chant music at Taizé came to my mind the next time I was “absorbed” in a candle-lit group activity. Unlike the rain at Taizé and the dark college room at Gordon, this thrid experience was virtual — I became absorbed reading an academic book written from a niche magic subculture in England. All these years later, I can still recall my own absorption in reading about dark rooms filled with candles and group chants. The groups were wiccan, and it all sounded very familiar.

Music, Psychological Absorption, and Cultures of Spirituality (Tanya Luhrmann)

Tanya Luhrmann’s Persuasions of the Witches Craft (1991) gave me a new way to understand the candle-lit hours of singing I was so drawn to. They were séances. And that séance on the bus — in the bright light of a mid-Sunday morning with boisterous classmates in a performative, socially awkward ritual of “college orientation” gave me not only my first exposure to evangelical praise songs, but also my first immersion in a popular rite of evangelical conjuring. The songs were unfamiliar, the aesthetics were grating to me, and the ritual was initially uncompelling, so I sat outside the event pondering it. But when I eventually journeyed to Catacombs, the dark, mysterious ritual at the start of the college week, I was feeling compelled by and wanted to experiment with this powerful magic.

Luhrmann got me thinking about how culture shapes the practices of psychological absorption that we call spirituality. She would later use a more precise phrase, “the cultural kindling of spiritual experiences” (2014). It is an exquisitely worded concept. On the academic register, the phrase signals the serious heft of thoughtful research Luhrmann does in cultural psychiatry, comparative phenomenology, and ethnographic participation. But the phrase “cultural kindling” is also just really catchy — poetic even — so much so that it inflects her most recent monograph title, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (2020) which looks at evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews.

Spirituality is thoroughly cultural.

Without having that framework to understand it at the time, I very much sensed the force of the cultural as I boarded that evangelical bus to become immersed in songs that signaled someone else’s holy spirit. My immersion was a cross-cultural event. Édouard Glissant might call what I felt the “shock of elsewhere,” although I couldn’t tell you where that elsewhere was. That’s the funny thing about being around people who were born more than once.

But as I experimented with the music of evangelical spirituality (praise songs) and later with a new brand of catholic, ecumenical, global chant music (Taizé songs) — I let myself feel the power of song and occasionally…eventually — become absorbed — something I would definitely have called then, and would still call now, a spiritual experience. Anyone who has been “absorbed” in more than one religious community may feel my same gratitude for Luhrmann’s psychological anthropology — for her serious effort to understand other people’s spirituality.

That first encounter with Lurhmann’s work on the psychological experience of séances was in a graduate course I took called “The Anthropology of Mind.” It was 2006, and I was both feet into my PhD in Hebrew Bible at Emory University with cultural studies as my outside concentration.

You guys, this Anthropology of Mind course met once a week in a perfect poetic setting — a truly freakish old building, the main fixture of a satellite campus where the show, Stranger Things, filmed its Hawkins Lab scenes. I never did audibly hear any invisible noises, but when I was in the clattering, metal cage of an elevator going up to and down from class, I often wondered how many patients screamed in there. The building was an old state psychiatric hospital, and our seminar room centered a perfectly collegiate table in a much larger space, how large, I could not begin to say. But I can say that the room was littered with what felt like 1970s lab equipment and paraphernalia. I might have seen one of those wiry electronic bands that probes the exotic brains of hospital patients, or I might have imagined my way there from a stray red wire. It was the kind of room that established an intense mood precisely because you did not critically engage its numerous, strange details. It was 2005. And at the time, Luhrmann was writing about cultural practices of psychological absorption and the subsequent “rationalizations” people make about those experiences. I loved her so much that I went looking for more — and I found her early writing on American evangelicals. Her essay, “The Art of Hearing God” (2005) was about people belonging to Vineyard churches — that was the brand of church I visited when I got off the evangelical “cultural immersion” bus. I had no interest at the time in pursuing anything related to evangelicalism. But I will never forget the effect of reading Luhrmann — her intellectual seriousness about experiences I was actually just trying to move beyond made me feel like someone could put words to the submerged plate tectonics inside me — what I have now come to understand as my practices of multiple religious belonging & misfitting.

Depression, Evangelical Therapy, and the Old Testament Psalms

I had a favorite evangelical praise song — “As the Deer.” This one praise song was a big reason I would sneak into the dark anonymity of Catacombs at Gordon College. I considered the dark hour successful if I got to sing it. We almost always sang it. But I was anxious until I heard “As the Deer”’s familiar prelude of chords.

As the deer panteth for the water
So my soul longeth after Thee
You alone are my heart’s desire
And I long to worship Thee

You alone are my strength, my shield
To You alone may my spirit yield
You alone are my heart’s desire
And I long to worship Thee

At the time, I had no poetry or analysis for this fact — simply — I was deeply moved by these words.

Well, at the time, I was at least aware of why I loved the deer in the first lyric. Even today, nature imagery still holds powerful sway over me. From childhood, I felt the mysterious enchantment of the universe, and I had put some thoughts to that enchantment by the time I was in college. The natural world repeatedly overcame me with a calm sense of power — while staring out at the ocean, while hiking in the woods, while fishing on a trout river, while breaking my strength to get to a summit, while fingering rocks in the tide pools near my house, while listening to the fog horn that sounded every night of my childhood, while watching raindrops engorge at the end of a needle, while jogging through a field of purple loosestrife on the way out and back from Kettle Cove … being outdoors entwined me — with home — and with the far-flung creative powers of the star-birthing nebula. This powerful “home/away” enchantment was one of the ways I measured spiritualities, and for me, most spiritualities did not measure up! Having visited upwards of 100 New England churches and various meeting houses with my family, I felt I had a pretty good basis for knowing the options.

But the spirituality of music? This spirituality measured up. In fact, when I read J. R. R. Tolkein’s Silmarillion, which opens on the words “The Music of the Ainur” (like a Psalm), I seized on its account of music, singing, solos, unison, harmony, and Great melodies in the primeval universe. I inadvertently invented my own cosmology to entwine the ancient universe and music (a cosmology to which I would later add “string theory” from my college major: Physics).

So yeah, at Catacombs, I was definitely going to love singing about a deer drinking water!

But the singing and nature imagery do not fully explain to me what was so compelling about this song. If I am being honest with myself (unashamed of my shame), I loved longing with the song’s theme of longing. Quickly scan the lyrics again, and you’ll see that every phrase vibes: panteth, longeth, desire, long, yield, desire, long (one last time). I was drawn to the singer’s intense desire for a rarefied mode of “worship” — an absorption so complete that it could not be mocked by the disaffected grunge aesthetics of my (beloved) Generation X, an absorption so transcendent that it graced the elite logic of my New England public schooling, or… and this is a big deal now that I think of it … an absorption so cloistered that it inoculated both me and the universe from infectious modern terrors…pestilent AIDS, percolating greenhouse gases, a looming nuclear race, warming zones of a cold war, and so many extinguished spirits — from Martin Luther King to Anne Frank. Omg, the extinguishing holocaust…the fucking Holocaust.

Longing itself was palpably and sincerely existential to me. I loved to feel longing — to feel existential pining. As it turned out, “As the Deer” was my most cherished praise song because it enshrined my most sacred desperation. And that psychological desperation finally broke into feverish depression some odd years later.

When I first fell into my mind’s unlit chasm that had no bottom, I fell and fell and fell. I happened to be surrounded by well meaning evangelicals at the time — some prescribed me prayers against demons. Some told me they were praying for my spiritual healing. Some gave me the names and telephone numbers of Christian counselors. One Christian counselor decided after one session that I needed to stop drinking; Never mind that I drank alcohol probably twice a month. All of them prescribed me to pray with the Psalms. The Psalms, those Hebrew poems of the Old Testament that offered apparently timeless comfort, guiding the faithful out of deep isolation, sorrow, and hurt. But those Psalms never worked on me — they felt so abrupt. I could not thrust my feelings across their poetic bursts from suffering to praise. Their poetic force was too…forced…to romance such a flight.