Waking Up in a Concert

I went to see my favorite band over the weekend. Kings Kaleidoscope. They are so fun. They are multiple genres woven into one. Exciting, creative, and this beautiful meshing of theology and creativity that have drawn me to them since I came to Christ 14 years ago. They are the epitome of the theology of Christ that I have tried to embody in my own life and practice.

What I didn’t expect was the rush of memories as I was listening and watching them perform. Their music has been with me through marriage, the birth of my children, loss, depression, spiritual struggles, and whatever else you can imagine life throws at you. Their music this night brought up so many memories. And what I realized in these memories is that Christ has been with me through all of them. Every moment that I replayed in my mind as the music played, there was this palpable realization that Christ was there in the midst with me. Of course, this led to my weeping and my precious wife wrapping her arm around me.

It wasn’t a breaking down. It was a “wow, Jesus was really there when I was going through that.” Which I preach about, but to actually understand and realize it does something to the spirit and the body that just shocks the system. With the artwork playing on the screen and the music blasting…I wept. It was surreal. At the end they played this song with scolling images of the cross and crucifixions. The end was my favorite artist. On the left, Sadao Watanabe's crucifixion. I threw my phone in excitment and tugged at Holly to snap the shot. Because this shot made the feelings make sense.

And here is what I keep thinking about since that night.

I knew Christ was with me in those moments when they were happening. Theologically. Propositionally. I believed it the way you believe something you have been told is true and have decided to trust. But standing in that venue with the music doing what music does, bypassing the arguments, going straight through the defenses, landing somewhere below the level of thought, I didn’t just believe it anymore.

I felt the weight of it.

And those are two entirely different things.

The Subtlety of the Presence

One of the things I have noticed about how Christ shows up in Scripture is that He rarely announces Himself before the encounter is already underway.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus walked seven miles with Him before they knew who He was. Mary stood in the garden weeping and spoke to Him directly and thought He was the gardener. The disciples on the shore of Tiberias saw a figure in the early morning light and didn’t recognize Him until the net came up full.

He was there. Fully, completely, resurrection-bodily there. And they didn’t know it.

Not because they were faithless. Because the presence of Christ is often more subtle than we expect. It doesn’t always come with an announcement or a feeling or a lightning bolt moment of clarity. It comes the way dawn comes; gradually, almost imperceptibly, until suddenly there is enough light to see by and you realize it has been getting lighter for a while now.

The Emmaus road disciples said it afterward: did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road? (Luke 24:32) They felt something the whole time. They didn’t know what it was until afterward. The burning heart was the presence they hadn’t yet recognized.

That’s the retrospective realization. The going back over what happened and finding Him in it. The concert-floor moment of "oh, He was there too. He was there in that. And that. And that".

Art and Music as Periphery Notifiers

I want to talk about what music and art actually does for a moment.

Because I don’t think it’s accidental that this realization happened at a concert rather than in a quiet moment of Bible reading or prayer. Both of those are good and necessary. But music, and art more broadly, operates on a different frequency. It gets in through a different door.

Augustine said in his Confessions that his tears flowed at the music of the Church in the days immediately after his conversion, and he wondered whether such emotion was spiritually appropriate or dangerously indulgent. His conclusion was something like: the music carries the words into places the words alone cannot reach. The melody is the vehicle. The beauty is the delivery system and the soul, which has been armored against direct theological argument, finds itself suddenly undefended when the music starts.

I think Augustine was onto something that we have both overcorrected for and underdeveloped in the church.

We have overcorrected by making music purely functional. It's a warm-up act for the sermon, a mood-setter, a congregational calisthenics routine before the real thing starts. Then we have underdeveloped the theology of why beauty exists at all and what it does to us when we encounter it.

Hans Urs von Balthasar (my favorite) argued that beauty is the first of the transcendentals to capture the soul. Not truth or goodness. But beauty. We are arrested by it before we understand it. We respond to it before we have analyzed it. And in that arrest, in that moment of being stopped by something beautiful before the defenses engage, something true can enter that would not have gotten through the front door.

Kings Kaleidoscope was the vehicle. The theology in their lyrics, the creativity in their arrangements, the sheer beauty of the thing they were doing; it got past the arguments and the theological propositions I carry around all day and landed somewhere undefended. And in that undefended place the presence of Christ became suddenly, overwhelmingly, palpably real.

Art and music are periphery notifiers. They don’t create the presence. They alert you to what has been there all along. They are the burning heart you didn’t know you were feeling until you stopped to name it.

He Was Always Already There

David knew this from the inside of his own life.

Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. (Psalm 139:7–10)

Every memory I replayed in that venue; every hard season, every moment of depression, every loss, every confusion, David’s Psalm was true of all of them. God was there. His hand was there. His right hand was holding even when I couldn’t feel it holding.

The concert didn’t put Christ in those memories. It revealed that He was already in them.

Which is a different thing entirely and it is the more important thing.

Because if you go looking for Christ in your past and you can only find Him in the obviously spiritual moments. You know, the prayer times and the church services and the mountaintop experiences...you have missed most of where He actually was. He was in the ordinary ones. The odd weekday mornings and the arguments that got resolved and the ones that didn’t. The nights when the kids were sick and nobody slept. The moments of beauty that caught you off guard and where music got through the defenses.

He was there.

Jesus told His disciples on the night before the cross: I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth… I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. (John 14:16–18)

I will not leave you as orphans.

He means it literally. Orphans are children without a present parent. Without the daily, ongoing, here-in-the-house presence of the one who is responsible for them. Jesus is promising the opposite of that. Not a God who visits occasionally or a God who shows up for the major events and is absent for the ordinary ones. But a God who is with you the way a parent is with a child. Present in the background of every day, available in every moment, and never having left even when you stopped noticing He was there.

And then at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the last words Jesus speaks before the ascension, He says it one more time with the fullest possible sweep:

And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:20)

Always. Notice it isn't sometimes or even in the spiritual moments. Not when you are praying correctly or believing sufficiently or living faithfully enough to merit the presence. Always. To the end of the age.

Which means every memory you have, every single moment of your life from the day you came to Christ to this one, has had that promise operating in it. He was there always. In the depression and the joy. In the loss and the birth. In the marriage and the conflict. In the concert and the ordinary and the moment you forgot He existed for a little while. Always.

What the Concert Did

It didn’t give me new theology. I already believed the right things about the presence of Christ.

What it did was let me feel the weight of what I already believed.

And I am convinced that this is one of the things beauty is for. Not to replace the theology. Not or substitute feeling for truth. But to make the truth land in the body the way it was always meant to land. Not just in the mind as a proposition to be affirmed but in the chest as a reality to be inhabited.

Augustine wept at the music because the music carried the truth somewhere the argument alone couldn’t reach. Gregory of Nyssa described the soul as drawn toward God by desire; by beauty, by longing, by the epektasis of a creature endlessly stretching toward the one it was made for. Hans Urs von Balthasar said beauty arrests us before we understand it and in that arrest something true enters.

Kings Kaleidoscope was doing all of this on a Saturday night in a venue somewhere and I was standing there being arrested by beauty and fourteen years of Christ-accompanied life passed before me like a film and I understood for a moment (like really understood, not just believed) that He was in every frame.

Holly wrapped her arm around me. And I wept because it was true.

Not just because I had been told it was true. Because in that moment I knew it the way you know something that has gotten past the defenses and landed somewhere real.

He was there. He has always been there. He will be there to the end of the age.

And sometimes it takes a concert for the knowing to become feeling and the feeling to become worship.

That is not a failure of theology.

That is theology working exactly the way it was always supposed to. Working in the periphary. Working in art and in music to remind us of the truth...He is always there and we are with Him.