Apologetics.com Neiswonger

Last night I was watching Stevie Ray Vaughn. First live at the Monterrey Jazz Festival in 82, then his triumphant return in 85. The first time, they nearly boo-ed him off the stage. When he came back in 85, he headlined the event to the cheers of adoring thousands. Really the two performances weren’t very different, but the people were. I would think that there were a lot of the same people in the audience for both shows. Those Blues and Jazz guys go to those events all the time. I don’t really get Jazz. I have friends that do, but it’s kind of either you get it or you don’t get it stuff, and I don’t get it. But Blues I get. And Vaughn had that peculiar talent, that spark of God, that went beyond what people were ready for. He was making strange sounds, making a plank of wood with metal strings beg for grace. You could feel it crying in his arms with that strange steamy brew of sublime betrayal and resolute passion of the ‘she did me wrong’ variety. “I really meant I was sorry, for ever causin’ you pain. You showed your appreciation… by walkin’ out anyway. And that’s a cold shot baby.” Now I know everybody doesn’t like Stevie Ray Vaughn, because some people have personal problems that I don’t pretend to understand, but the man could make it laugh and cry. He could choke and bend and hurt the guitar until it started to sing in steep falsetto and mumbling baritone from sheer frustration. There was something there, between the too simple lyric and the unforced rhythm, that cuts you. Makes you feel things a man doesn’t want to feel. Except when he listens to Bach, or Metallica, or that old hymn “O’ Sacred Head now wounded”, or, if he happens to scratch your particular itch, Stevie.

And that’s why we love the these things. They reach beyond our little day to day and hit us deep. Hang upon us with all the woe of the fall of Adam and breach the wanting peace of a soul self satisfied with mere functionality. It’s easier to live without beauty or to simply worship it as an end in itself. But what we can’t do is reconcile that inner tremble in the face of the numinous with an empty naturalism. The denial of the God who gives gifts to men is the denial of all meaning, the denial of all good, and the reduction of all things to the relationships of matter in motion. At the end of the day, everything that we are, everything we feel and touch and taste, all of our loves and hopes, are illusions to people that think this way. Nothing matters but the quiet of the grave to those that have hearts too small for their Creator. With Him lies our first and most important relationship, the primary personal relation, and because we are before everything else personal beings, the form of all our other loves take their cue from this one.

Our relationships, our children, our little graces from God who give us meaning, are slandered by some as accidental fabrications of some inexplicable impulse of the universe to create within itself conscious things made of meat and bone, that love us and are loved by us only as an expression of non-conscious instincts that target the survival of an unintended combination of genes, that are explained in terms of chance chemical reactions, that are explained by the laws of physics, that are then said to have no meaning.

As far as philosophies go, it’s worse than death. There is that constant progress of living in the necessary face of ultimate meaning while pretending not to have one. Telling ourselves again and again that we are just the dust from the stars that will burn out eventually. Praying for oblivion to no one in particular. Hoping to silence the nagging suspicion that we might mean more than that. That we might be something reconcilable with beauty and justice, human dignity and Divine grace. Because anytime we participate in one of the gifts of God, be it music, or film, or story, or morality, or law, or medicine, or sport we join ourselves in something that can never be explained within the narrow social constructions of modernist scientism or methodological naturalism; that in the end nature is all there is.

We are either more than we admit, or more than we can bear.

Neiswonger