write it

so at my very baptist university we had a week long university-wide conversation about art and how it is effected and effects faith.
we even had our very own dr. sloan give a lecture.
i was surprised.
i thought that, being one of his first public lectures, it would be something powerful, something enlightening, something uplifting...
and it was, but not in the way i had expected.
on the topic of biblical writing and poetry, sloan decided to pull from lamentations and the psalms.
lamentations is a sad, sorrowful, book of despair.
it's hard to read for most, and something i think most of us tend to skim over.
from my OT survey class i remember the discussion of how lamentations begins every verse or line with the consecutive letters of the hebrew alphabet.
some think this is a nemonic device since everything was committed to memory...
but as sloan pointed out, that would be really hard to do considering there are several lines beginning with a, with b, with g and so on.
most of the lines begin with a word we translate to mean 'how?', but it actually is more like an unpronounceable moan.
so perhaps, he offered, that this was not for sheer memorization but for survival.
that when we mourn, if we aren't tethered down...we can tend to allow that slow moan to turn into outright shrieking hysteria.
it is freedom to mourn and grieve, but in such a way that keeps it somewhat contained.
sloan laughed when he said that you must have lived many years if you had looked to the psalms for consolation and daily reading.
perhaps i have lived many years.
the psalms, too, are sad.
it's funny to read some of them since they start off with such, again, sorrowful words and yet end with a 'praise God!' or something. sounds like us sometimes. we can relate to someone else all the shit that's going on with us, and then at the end finish it with something ridiculous like 'but God is still faithful....yada yada yada'.
why do we do it?
sloan mentioned lots of other things too, things that i'm sure most people-like our own ken w.- know from their own long days of religious schooling.
he touched on the many places jesus drew from the psalms and how that was probably the collection of writing that had the greatest effect on jc.
and...the point of all this...sloan addressed how, back in the day, lamentations were used during worship.
the people were in a hard place...they felt alone and deserted and confused...and they used that honesty in worship.
i want us to use whatever it is...maybe we are in a moment of celebration or mourning...either way, i want us to use it.
ken has been asking for us to find heartfelt ways of worshipping...
and so i wonder, what if we could all jot down our thoughts and begin to form ways of using it in worship.
maybe a poem, maybe john or rodney or some other musician were to make it into actual music...
i don't know. i just want us to begin to use our lives to worship with.
i don't want to sing songs about things i've never experienced and never felt. some of them the rest of you have felt or gone through, but i haven't, and maybe some of you can relate to that.
anyways, something to think about i suppose.
let me know what you guys feel about it.