So; worship at church. You know, the singing bit. Ever wondered exactly what’s the point?

First things first, if you’re a Christian, there’s the whole ‘bringing glory to God’ thing. That’s obviously the point right? Sounds good? Well, yeah, but that’s a bit of an abstract concept; and kind of hard to relate to. And if you walk into church for the first time, there’s a fair chance that’s not your top priority.

And anyway, why sing? Why bother with music? Because, and let’s get it out there now: Worship is weird.

You walk into a church. You don’t really know what to expect. Up on the stage at the front there’s a drum kit and some guitars. Or an organ, or, I don’t know, a set of bagpipes. But one thing is clear; music will happen. Which I suppose is fair enough – maybe you think “Oh, it’s a gig.” Maybe you like gigs, maybe you don’t. Maybe the band at the church you go to are brilliant, maybe they’re not. If they suck it can get quite awkward for everyone. But whatever you think about gigs, and however much they can play in tune, this won’t be like a normal gig. You see, they don’t normally put the words up on a big screen at a gig and expect people to sing along.

We don’t do this stuff in normal life. Most people don’t live in a musical and most people don’t walk around singing all the time. I admit that just occasionally I suspect that my wife does live in a musical, but that’s another matter. Anyway, it’s your first time in church and now you have to stand next to strangers and try to join in singing songs which you’ve never heard before and which they all seem to know. This is probably not the most natural thing in the world. For some people this may be acutely embarrassing, and if that’s you and if you don’t bolt for the door straight away then you have impressive self-control. Or maybe you’re terrified everyone will notice you if you do.
And yet I’ve seen loads of lives change during worship at churches. Worship is a time when the normal rules of life that we think are so immutable, unchangeable, indefatigable, can start to slip. When suddenly this world and the next overlap; suddenly where there was only a wall there’s now the faint outline of a door. I’ve seen it happen. So much of what we say and do about God is theoretical; words, teaching, learning. Worship is the practical. We can go to church and just learn about God. But, sometimes, in worship – we can meet him; like he’s just walked into the room. When that happens, all bets are off. Anything can happen now. And it will be good.

Because let me tell you – I want to meet him. Yeah I want to know about him, I need to know about him, I can’t live properly without knowing about him; about what he said, what he taught; I need that for Monday, for Tuesday and every other day. But that’s what I need, not what I crave. It only takes a look; a glance, a touch. It’s him I want; to fall at his feet, to feel close, to see, to hear, to touch. It’s my heart, not my head, that wants this, like a starving man craving food… And my heart likes music.

Emotions are tricky and fickle beasts. But I like them. It’s true, I always have. Maybe you don’t, and fair enough, goodness knows they can be hard to follow and hard to deal with. But even the most robustly intellectual scientist you’ve ever met has them. I’ll talk about thoughts later, and how this is a great battleground in our lives, but the real deal; the real landscape of our lives is found in our emotions. How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? How much do you want to just feel OK today? How much is your day dominated by anxiety, fear, or loneliness? Or anger? How small do you feel – really feel – inside? How weak? Or maybe it’s been such a long time since you really felt anything, you’ve no idea if you even can anymore. Sadness has crushed you flat.

These are our emotions. These are the secrets of our hearts (yes, you have a heart. Even you at the back pretending not to listen – and I don’t mean the red pumpy thing. You know what I mean.) Most people will live their entire lives just trying to feel better; trying to stop the fear, the worry, from choking them, just by filling their lives with such relentless noise that they can’t hear anything that their heart is saying. Except in the mornings and last thing at night, when it all crowds in again, insatiable. We all have emotions. Our hearts are full of them. If we’re careful and scared we’ll have locked our emotions away in the dark recesses of our hearts where people can’t screw around with them. But music can get in.

Art is amazing stuff. Science is amazing stuff, I love it, and I currently work in a scientific discipline. I want to know, well, everything, really. But, well if I had to choose…. I wrote this when I was still a teenager, I think:

Science Vs Art

I know what this is!
says science
I know how it works!
I know how it’s made!

…the universe shrinks
and all within our grasp!

It hurts
says art
to be alone
and here I pitch my tent

So Art is where we, as humans, tend to try to work out all this emotion-y stuff. It’s a land of unmade beds, of dark skies, of beauty, of pain, of abstract colour and of a young man with dirty blond hair detuning his guitar and howling his agony into the microphone. Art is, to me anyway, about emotion. It’s about our hearts.

If you haven’t heard, music is art. I’ve heard that people have broken down in tears and cried out to God to help them when they heard that old random song ‘I Wanna Know What Love Is’ on the radio. I bet REM’s song Everybody Hurts has saved lives. Seriously. There’ll be songs that you know, I’m sure, that get to you; a word, a sentence, a melody, that gets right through the carefully arranged armour around your heart, like an arrow. Boom. If you’re like me you’ll seek these songs out, treasure them, and occasionally listen to them over and over again in darkened rooms until the magic wears off and you fall asleep. But maybe you don’t like this; the armour is there for a reason, after all. Either way, music can get through. Music can awaken long lost emotions, can stir our hearts and fan the flames of passion, love, and devotion.
It’s hard to have a purely intellectual relationship with God. He died for all of you, after all, and he likes emotions. He made them, after all. The bible is full of emotion; the good, the bad and the ugly (a lot of that’s King David). Shouts of anger, laments of aching pain and loss, joy, fear, wretched despair; it’s all there. God knows all about emotions. He knows all about yours, even if they’re deeply buried. When you meet him, things start to change. Never assume this will always be easy. But it will always be good. And he will heal; it’s what he does. He will bring healing to the bits that really need it; your heart.

I love music; I love the power of achingly beautiful songs of love and hope, of pain and joy and longing. I love sailing on that sea of emotion, of letting go and getting caught up in it all. Incidentally, and it’s something to do entirely with my personality, I can’t take any kind of emotional pain on screen or in a book (at all); my empathy settings are a little abnormal and screwed up and I can’t hack it one bit. But music, for me, does it; a really beautiful song can smash through my barriers, my tiredness and my grumpiness (there’s always a fair bit of that to deal with). Music can connect my heart to God. If I’m singing to God, If I’m forgetting about me, if I’m able to get lost, to get wrapped up in him in that song; that moment; well – it’s like connecting my heart to the mains.
Our hearts need God too. Our emotions do. Music is one way to connect our emotions to God. It’s only one way, mind, and it may not even be the best way. But it is a way, and it’s why I sing. I certainly don’t sing just to learn theology, as some seem to think. I sing because I’ve seen him, and that means just this – I can never ever be the same again. For all of time, I will crave Him – his presence, his voice, his touch, his smile. In worship that door appears, and sometimes, just sometimes, it opens a fraction.

And so I will be there, like King David, singing, jumping up and down. making an idiot of myself. It is weird, I know. But my heart wants him too much not to.