Old is good.
My grandfather was a great man. I would sit on his porch with him, at the end of his life, swinging on the swing that had been there forever. He would sit there, with his oxygen tank and cup of ice chips, while I asked questions about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness - and girls.
He was old.
On my shelves are dozens of worn, used hymnals. I collect them from used book stores, family and friends. I love the poetic words, archaic as many seem, and the times and places they represent. In my early days of faith, I would take the words from very old texts, and make up melodies and songs around them.
They are old.
I love to walk through antique stores with my mother. She and I have always seemed to have an affinity for finding obscure and aged items both interesting and inviting. Where I used to live, we would have a Mother/Son date in a large antique barn in our area. I love to find treasures from years gone by.
They are old.
I love stories about beginnings - Genesis, creation myths, ancient near-eastern narratives, old stories of the ways of times and places too distant for us to hear or see. To me, where we come from has everything to do with who we are, and instead of running from the past, I sometimes find myself running to it.
The past is old.
For many that I have met in contemporary and emerging Church contexts, old feels bad. Old is the antagonist in their story. Old is lame, gone, passe and even a formidable foe.
For me, old feels rich, mineable, important, primal, educational, in need of reform and even applicable.
For me, old is good.
To look back with desire for days gone by is nostalgia. It can bring a richness of memory, but a chain of unwillingness to move forward.
To look back with respect, nuance and admiration for the struggle of life that other’s faced, this is healthy memory. It can feed us on food that other’s have found substantial across the fields of time, present to us our tendencies to codify in glaring form, and yet do so in a way that propels us into our present and future with renewed confidence in God.
As for me, old is good.
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Transitioning to love the old.
In another post referring to old and older Dan wrote:
“For me, it’s like the teenager who can’t hear the Dad, but will listen to the grandfather. Then we mature, and the Dad starts to make sense - just when our teenagers are starting to disdain us…”
For me history has been like that, except taken a step further. Hymns and gospel songs were attached to the folks who were telling me that my musical leanings and expressions were not just invalid, but sinful based on style. This gave the music they loved an association that took me many years to overcome. Even now most gospel music as much as I may believe the writers truly love the Lord and wrote worship from their hearts stir the wrong response in me.
But time went on and I grew. Eventually I let those who could not get past a particular form of expression be left to their own arguments, since it neither enlightened them nor encouraged me to engage in the discussion. I guess I just walked out on it. Since then I have seen those who originally thought poorly of the style I loved embrace it. Now they stick to that style and reject the next one. I learned an important thing:
Change is hard for most people.
Fighting for acceptance of a style is inconsequential compared to Martin Luther’s Wittenburg Door posting, where he challenged the way the church was selling forgiveness to the highest bidders. This was an issue of heresy, and to stick with his beliefs cost him. Yet he purchased for us a new foundation to stand on, and we have benefited from it.
So I learned to let the small stuff be small stuff. I started looking again at the hymns and found that there was a richness in them. The writers of the time knew that many in their congregation could not read or did not have a bible. So the songs they learned defined their theology. Many songs had numerous verses that were whittled down to fit into today’s hymnals.
This engaged me as I had begun to write worship songs myself. I found that the typical verse / chorus / bridge / repeat verse / chorus / chorus format didn’t fit, because I wanted to make a more complete statement than that.
The I learned from one of Dan’s teachings about the Celts and how they integrated worship into life. Every part of life could become an acknowledgment of God. This was huge to me because I could see how my life and all of those around me became so swallowed up in tasks and work and chores that spiritual life got choked out.
So now this part of the old has become very important to me. It is a battle to pursue it, but my hunger is to get into a pattern of a life of acknowledging worship woven into all of my movements of the day.
Recently a friend wrote a new melody to an old tune: “Just as I Am” written by Charlotte Elliott. The hymn had not meant much to me growing up, because I always associated it with the Billy Graham meetings, and while I thought Billy Graham was doing a great thing, it was just part of that scenery for me and didn’t feel very relevant to life.
Then Robin (my friend) played this song with a new melody. I was in a place of being overwhelmed by life and had many things crashing in at the time. Those words sung in a new way, swept me into a time of surrender to the Lord.
This was where I was at. It hit me and helped me to find that place of surrender.
And so the old has become precious. Not all of it, but some parts that cause me to resonate in my life.
“Time tested” is a phrase we sometimes use and can use in this context. Much of the old has been established and tested by time, and found to have merit. We need not start making the wheel from scratch. It as been done before. It is worth looking to see what they have done, even if some of the wheel makers are not trustworthy. It is worth diggin for. There’s gold to be mined. There are others who can show us the way.
“Falling forward while leaning back”
This is how I feel when I read your article.
I love how the past you describe isn’t just a clinical archeological chunk of history- it’s a reflection of real people, real lives, and time tested truths. The cliché has been that sometimes you can’t move into the future without letting go of the past. This may be true in some circumstances, but in the modern and postmodern worship camps we have often tried to pick and choose what history really matters. But that is not reality. We don’t get to choose our history, any more than we get to choose our relatives. God places us in a stream of life that has been flowing for years- and will continue to flow long after we are washed into the expanse of water that allows us to go home to “the Emperor over the Sea” (1).
The past in Christianity (in general) has some beauty and some scars, but to truly learn and grow into the living stream of historical life God intended for the Church to be in our world, we must receive it all. When we have acquiesced into religious tradition without spirit-breathed devotion, and when we have laid down our lives as an ultimate act of worship- the real history of who we are can inform and reform us. But we can’t conveniently deny it when it doesn’t suite our tastes.
I love the family fabric you have described here, Dan. We are all part of that family, and seeing the way you view it shows us that history is in the making, even as we love our families and live in God-surrendered cooperation with them as we live lives of praise to God, as you have done with your mom. As you say, there is beauty in treating those who have gone before us with respect. And you have honored your forbearers as an example to us all.
(1) C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1954), 177
Great words, Kim - strong and hopeful and wise.
Robb, great words on the mining. Search my blog for the word “coal miner.”
Nice post Dan, one thing that strikes me so strongly about the “old” is that there is no depth to our current without looking into the past. I take far too much of the current for granted, without realising the sacrifice, creativity and pioneering that went into getting the current to where it is today.
Dan
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