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In the American music of brokenness and sorrow, my church learns to long for God’s restoration.
I was told once that during Lent, you don’t sing songs with the word hallelujah in them. I had never heard of that tradition, though my church in Atlanta had been observing Lent for a while. But I liked it. It made sense. Lent is a season of intense self-reflection, repentance, fasting, low-key suffering, and lament. Songs about victory could run the risk of sounding impatient, even lazy and unwilling.
The hallelujahs will have to wait, as we have some things to sort out first.
Years ago, our worship band started opening each Sunday of Lent with a blues song: Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Blind Willie McTell, Bessie Jones, Blind Willie Johnson, Eric Clapton, and down to The Black Crowes—the real stuff. We called it “Blues for Lent.” These were songs of pain and frustration, songs with very vivid pressure points on the hurt that exists in the world.
At first, they were just a way to get people in the room, a “last call” for those in the lobby. They turned into these moments, though, when a very particular tone was set for the morning. These preludes reminded us that life doesn’t always go well, and that the world we share is stuck in a loop of brokenness and trouble.
Broken hands, on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,
Everything is broken
The origins of the blues are notoriously hard to pin down, but the music and sentiment were born in the fields of American slavery, where men and women sang as a way to tell the truth about their lives, the troubles they had seen, and bear witness to the persistence of their endurance. The blues have been called “chronicles ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
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