The Noble Character: A Tribute to Miss Jane - Part 4, Music.

This is a tribute to my dear friend Miss Jane. I’d like to tell you about her because, by God’s grace, she didn’t waste her life, and that’s probably the highest compliment any of us could ever hope to receive from anyone. This is partly about some of the events and people of her life, but more than that it is also about some of the things she taught me and how she influenced me, to the Glory of God. Thus, in reading about her un-wasted life, may you receive God’s grace to make the best use of yours.

During her decades as a travel agent and small business owner, the entire earth changed its orbit and started spinning in reverse. The amazing technologies of the 1900’s didn’t merely innovate travel, commerce, and leisure; these technologies established innovation itself as the new paradigm. Here we see another odd paradox for the giants of her generation: the innovations that made them powerful became more powerful than their inventors and swallowed them whole, like what might happen if a goldfish could birth a shark. The men and women who first mastered their creations could not have fathomed the implications their inventions would have on their grandchildren.

This is even more ironic when we consider those novel little companies whose very business drives them out of business. Consider the success of the great newspaper moguls of the early century whose empires were eventually driven out of business by the Internet for which they paved the way. They didn’t just offer information to the masses; they offered need of information. The Internet was born for the very purpose of supporting the speed and volume of information the newspapers instigated. Ironically, as we all know, our headline-lust has been helping drive paper-based news out of its own business. They’ve lost at their own game.

This is just one example of innovation-domination. On a long enough timeline, their success is the same thing as their demise. Miss Jane’s travel agency benefited from this type of success. She could not have foreseen that every travel destination she booked was helping make her business a bit more obsolete; she shrank the globe one customer at a time. Thus her occupation helped advance the world of travel while the job itself remained motionless. I like to imagine that her little office must have been a major pivot point for many great inventions and ideas, because, after all, Miss Jane was rich with many great connections and stories. Her travel agency was like the pivot foot of a basketball player – because the foot stays planted, the rest of the body is allowed to make giant turns around it. Miss Jane delighted in being the hub of all important movements while she stayed planted. That’s not to say she was a sloth – far from it, you will never meet anyone more active than she was. Rather, despite these baffling changes all around her, it never occurred to her to try outrunning her ancestors. For years, week in and week out, her life kept a happy rhythm, which she humbly counted as the measured pace of every servant of Jesus.

Let us pause here to wonder and pray about our individual roles in these historical shifts – these titanic changes. Let us not take for granted that all these changes are a benefit. Indeed, they are not all beneficial. For many of you reading this, your success with these innovations might well be the same as your demise. It is sobering how drastically the world has changed from the time of Miss Jane’s birth till her death: the technology, the political earthquakes, the reincarnation of old ideas; the shift from the Church occupying the center of all social activity, yet forfeiting it to a network of computer screens where everyone is “connected” without being in the same room. The 1900’s advanced so rapidly that it is as if the very story of human history saw its finish line and tried to outrun its own people to the end. In fast times like these, Miss Jane often went against the grain, believing it important to heed the old Wisdom of slow feet. (Please, dear reader, I want to help you see these things in their complexity to really help you understand the complexity of this dear lady.) Consider that, through all these changes, Miss Jane could speak intelligently about every current event. She stayed active in politics both locally and nationally, and she kept a thriving small-business in a college town with good relationship to young clientele. Yet she hardly ever saw a movie in her entire life. She refused to believe a computer was good for anything except flying rockets to the moon (and that may not be worth much either). And, most poignant of all, she would not stoop to call anything “music” which didn’t receive its blood and bones from fathers like Beethoven, Bach, or Handel. Everything in the world was evolving to handle the speed and change encouraged by her travel agency; yet her own roots were deep, and slow, and ancient. Hers was the tree’s life when all the world had gone to weeds. 

Nothing better represents this contrast than Music. She loved her music, and it was old. More than old: it was Immortal. Her music belonged to that ancient class of wild, mysterious objects that can’t be changed by the generations – like mountains, or oceans, or stars. If her music was unchangeable, it’s because she believed it held as much mass and meaning as a mountain or an ocean or a star. It is not there to behold you; you are there to behold it. And it will scoff at your passing long after you’re dead and can no longer behold anything. Hers was so unlike the music of my generation, which usually has only enough mass to last about a decade. After that our music usually becomes a joke, something for the next decade of teenagers to mock. There was a time in my youth when other people’s music was my favorite joke (much like the way a new crop of weeds dominates another). It is the type of joke that invented the term “generation gap.” Since the 1950’s, each new generation of teens has weaponized their music to suppress and kill the previous generation’s music, making it impossible for a people to unite under a common tune. Innovation, it turns out, makes an equally cruel lord to music as it does to business. 

When this regrettable music divide happened in the Church, it fell with the violence of a divorce. We called it “Worship Wars,” and you know what I’m talking about. I’d like here to confess – as a representative of my generation, the generation borne of the wealthiest Church in world history and the Christian music boom of the 1980’s and ‘90’s – that even in my deepest sympathies toward hymnals and organs and all the classics, I wished earnestly to destroy it, or worse, to forget it. I didn’t care if the earth was wiped of its memory, as long as my side of music won the game. I think back now on some of the first “contemporary songs” that began to supplant the old songs, and we don’t sing them anymore. They’re a shameless self-joke, the yearbook picture of a pubescent boy doing his best to look tough. More than that, they’re a mistake; just consider how each “contemporary song” from just a few years ago is now called “old” and gets groans and protests whenever the tune is re-played. Just imagine that: a 4 year old song supplanting a 400 year old song, then destroying itself by the same mechanism it used to win the silly game it invented. How embarrassing. The Church’s Worship Wars were a fool’s quest. It is like ripping out your vegetable garden to plant rye grass, then complaining of a sore appetite. It is like demanding your grandfather’s inheritance before he’s dead. It is like selling your birthright for a bowl of stew. And we’ve literally applauded it.

But Miss Jane protested it. 

Yet she didn’t walk away from her church, even when she felt they walked away from her music.

At last, here it is. We’ve reached the tender nerve. Even now, it is a hard thing to expose without defensiveness from some, and attacks from others. Nonetheless, there she sits at her organ, stubborn as a gargoyle but soft as a willow, playing the songs she wished we loved. It is the thing I’ve come to admire most about her: equal faithfulness to the “old” music and to the “young” church. She never missed an opportunity to give us an earful about how we should play the hymns (“And please, without that dreadful guitar! You could make better music with a freight train!”), but the point is she was there to say it. She did not leave, though a flood of temptation tried to sweep her away. Miss Jane did not leave.

Dear reader, do take a moment here with me, and let’s humble ourselves together. Let’s sit one last time at the feet of an elder with whom we ardently disagreed, yet who never left our side. Let’s pass under her argument once more to test whether it holds any truth. And if it does, let’s believe it.

It seems to me that music is the audible soul of a culture. Miss Jane ached to impart a culture rich with heritage and lineage to young brats like me. She felt as close to her music as to her last name, because they’re both current and ancient. Her music gave her the same kind of stability as a good family name. How fitting then that she sang the songs in her last year that she had learned in her first. If you’re like me, you’ve switched music styles a dozen times since childhood, not unlike changing your name to make yourself more “unique;” not unlike getting a nose job because the eyes of other people are more important to you than your own dear face. Indeed, when your music is as ancient and sacred as a mountain, it will compose you. And, I now believe, that what she really wanted to ensure as she sat at her organ and pleaded the hymns was something less tangible but more essential than I ever stopped to receive: undying delight in knowing exactly who you are in Christ.

Thus, even when she couldn’t affect the music culture of her church, Miss Jane passed on to me (and I pray now, dear reader, to you) the immortal spirit of faithfulness to the Church – the Bride of Christ – that her music embodied. 

Faithfulness, after all, makes a music all its own, and it is the only fitting overture for the Wedding Day of the Lamb.