Monday was the feast
of Saint Efrem, often known as “the Syrian,” and sometimes as “the
Hymn-writer.” He was a fourth-century deacon famous for his ability to compose
poetic texts about Christian truth that could be sung to familiar tunes. In his day, just as the Faith and the Church
were coming “above ground” without fear of official persecution, there was the
threat of false teachers and their false doctrine leading souls away from the
truth.
One of the biggest
threats then was gnosticism, an approach to religion that is based on
knowledge, often secret knowledge.
Gnosticism survives to our day and is an attractive misrepresentation of
Christianity, but also shows up in a Jewish context, or a seemingly
secular-but-spiritual guise. It is
particularly popular with folks who make movies, and want the aura of
Catholicism or Judaism, whether to advocate or malign it, but do not know or do
not desire to know the true content of God’s self-revelation. From what I understand of it, the recent film
Noah was a textbook example of this
theatrical form of error.
Anyway, Saint Efrem was
gifted at producing songs that rejected errors and misconceptions, and laid out
the liberating truth of salvation in Christ Jesus in a way that left little
room for misinterpretation or manipulation.
The people who learned and sang his hymns were thus freed from the
threat of deception, which is the true freedom of the sons and daughters of
God. Singing these songs not in church
during the liturgy, but in their homes and as they went about their daily
tasks, fortified people’s faith, and helped them internalize the more complex
terms and concepts that are essential to right belief.
I preached about Efrem
briefly on his feast, pointing out the genius at work in him. You must sing what you believe, I said, or
you will wind up believing whatever you sing.
After Mass, a parishioner with teenage kids approached me in the
sacristy to reinforce the importance of what I had said.
So many of us, not
only our kids, sing along with all sorts of music that is anything but
liberating from sin and fortifying in faith.
Myself included, we convince ourselves that by some act of intellect and
will we can prevent the horrid texts we sing from affecting our belief and our
behavior. Sex and violence are but two
symptoms of the bad theology and even worse anthropology that is conveyed by
much popular music. Tell, me, is a
twelve-year old singing along with every word of a song, capable of preventing
those words from influencing his thoughts and actions? I doubt it.
I wonder what makes us adults think we are.
Now, I get all warm
and happy inside when I hear on the radio a song from my earliest days of
listening, back when I got my first clock radio (analog clock, AM only). I was only seven, but many of the words come
back to me immediately; they are still in my mind. So… what all do these popular songs of the early
1970’s keep with them in my
mind?
The other night as I
was preparing dinner (I have a seminarian to feed!), my inner Alabaman was
coming out: I had the online radio tuned
to a bluegrass station. It so happened
that all the songs were Gospel songs about sin and salvation, prayer, life,
death, and even the saving blood of Jesus.
Now these were not hymns for church singing, but heartrending ballads or
toe-tapping hootenanny songs. What would
be the inner and outer disposition of someone who grew up singing that when
they were at parties and barn dances, and listening to (doubtless AM) radio in
the truck or the kitchen?
Saint Efrem
challenges us even now. You must sing what you believe, or you will wind up
believing whatever you sing.
Monsignor
Smith
