Vivaldi, the Past, and the Future.

As I say in my “About Me” page on this blog, I am a historian by vocation at present.  I started in that work about eight and a half years ago.  I came to it with my own ideas, but convinced that history mattered if we ever wanted to understand our present.

I was more right than I knew.

Eight and a half years later, I can say categorically that it is impossible to have a fully-formed identity with no history.  There are a great many quotes and platitudes that tout the value of history and knowing it from the classic Baruch Spinoza quote, “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it,” to a more recent quote from Winston Churchill: “…the longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”  These quotes have been so frequently employed to justify a knowledge of the past that they no longer have any power to incite many people to explore their history.

I am aware that we live in an era when many of our paradigms and ways of thinking are changing, and that words themselves may not have the power to incite some of us the way they once did.  So, in this brief entry, I hope to convey a similar lesson through a very different medium:  music.

I am no musician.  What I know of music I learned from careful listening to a variety of kinds and a couple of general education classes during my undergraduate years.  Mine is a layman’s knowledge.  But I well aware that the opinions of layman can be (and often are) correct.

If you want to hear how the past influences the present and the future, I suggest you listen to these three pieces of music.  They are all related, and the first sets the form for the two that follow, on a variety of fronts.

The first is part of the famous “Four Seasons” by Antonio Vivaldi, written in 1723 (291 years ago).  It remains among the most famous and beloved pieces of “classical” music ever written.

The second piece is by the contemporary musical group Bond.  They are a group of classical musicians that have reinterpreted the classical music genre through another, more modern, genre.  Careful listening to the first piece will alert you to the relationship between this piece and the first one.  Pay attention to this video and the first one–you will quickly see how the second group is using the performance itself to demonstrate how they are choosing to musically interpret Vivaldi–it is an important part of the exercise! 

The final piece is by another contemporary musical group, The Piano Guys.  This third group is similar to Bond in that they are reinterpreting classical music, but the medium they use to do it and the means by which they do it is different to Bond’s.  Again, pay attention to the visual medium of this video as a comparison to the first (and the second!)

The relationship between the second and third things with the first is clear: there would be neither the second piece, nor the third, if there had not been the first.  The first is a necessary condition for the others–they would not exist without Vivaldi.

At the same time, though, the pieces are not the same.  Each of the other pieces has taken bits and portions of Vivaldi’s piece and adapted them for their purposes.  It is likely that Vivaldi would recognize some pieces of the works he helped to inspire, but not all of the pieces.  The differences and similarities are in this case helpfully conveyed by the music videos that accompany them.  The first piece is conveyed in the traditional setting for Vivaldi–a concert hall.  The second and third both make use of a supposed nature scene, picking up on the thematic  nature of the original.  Both Bond and the Piano Guys take steps to show they appreciate the historic nature of their inspiration, though they interpret that history in very different ways.

In sum, I would say that Vivaldi haunts the later two pieces.  Portions of his work are present, but the soul of the original work is not–it has been disfigured to suit contemporary audiences.  It is possible to enjoy all three pieces, but if you have a strong feeling about one or the other, it will likely influence how you feel about the other two.  Likewise, the one you encountered first is likely to influence your opinion.  Your other experiences (read: your own history) will likewise influence you.

What themes seem to reappear in your life?  Do you have themes in your life that keep repeating and you do not know why?  It may be that you too have a past event that is influencing your current experience.

If you know what those themes are, what are you doing with that information?

Is your past making your present interpretations of the symphony that is your life more hopeful, or is it inciting you to play the same sad song over and over?

My advice to you today is that you spend some time thinking about the repeating themes in your life: they likely have more influence than you know!  Nothing in our past can keep us from having our lives play out the hopeful notes of God’s great mercy, grace, forgiveness and wholeness, but sometimes we must discover ourselves through the themes we play.  My prayer for you is that your life in Christ is increasingly empowering you to take the tragic notes of your past and present and recast them in a song of praise to His glory, and that the triumphant notes of your past and present build to a crescendo of praise to the One who made you.

Do You Validate? (Don’t Call It Persecution)

For two years early in my seminary days, I lived in the Denver, Colorado area.  I moved there when I was 23, and my roommate was  a close friend who was also going to seminary with me.  We were both relatively new out of college, and didn’t have a lot of money. But that didn’t stop us from wanting to go where the people were and mingle and have fun.  In Denver, that meant the 16th Street Mall.  There was only one problem:  parking downtown cost money, and because of our budgets, we didn’t want to spend money we could use on food on parking.  We got word from a friend in the know that there was a local establishment right on the mall that would validate parking without needing to purchase anything, and we decided to give it a try.  On our first attempt, we drove into the parking garage, parked, and then walked up through the restaurant and stood in the bar area for a minute.  The hostess gave us the once over on the way through, and as we were about to walk out, we asked her, “Do you validate?”  She handed us a token for the parking garage, and we walked out.  She never asked if we had been customers on that night, she just handed us the token and moved on.  In some of the future instances, we were customers–we’d stop and eat on our way to other venues, but not always.  But whether we were customers or not, we never had trouble being validated.   We looked the part of customers.  We asked a simple question–and not one that necessarily implied that we were customers, and for the asking, we got what we were after.

Questions of validation in broader senses are almost always interesting ones.  Seeking validation, in the most basic sense, is asking someone else to verify the realness of our experiences.  We look to another to confirm something about us.  In the case of my friend and I, we were asking the hostesses and wait staff of the restaurant to validate an assumed event–something we had not experienced, but it looked like we had.  In other words, we were asking someone to validate us on the appearance of reality, not the actual reality.

In Evangelical Christianity in America, it is my opinion that a similar thing is going on, though perhaps we do not think of it in those terms–we want someone else to validate our Christian experience on the appearance of reality, not the actuality of it.  It is wrong.  And in our need for validation, we ask for trouble from the unbelieving world.  Often we find it.

When Jesus promises his disciples that they will be persecuted for following him, he does not mince words.  In several places (in the Beatitudes, for one), Jesus seems to indicate that suffering and enduring hardship and persecution is an accepted and expected part of being one of his followers.  Many popular modern Evangelical leaders have used the rallying cry of persecution to motivate their listeners, suggesting that fearing persecution is no reason to ignore God’s calling.  In so far as that goes, I wholeheartedly agree.  We should be obedient to our Lord, even if that obedience leads us to a place of personal suffering.  Many believers outside the United States experience persecution as a real part of their everyday experience.  The experience of believers in this country is, no matter what you think about it, usually not like that.

But those realities have led to a perverseness and idolatry in the way some of us talk about persecution.  When we speak of persecution, we should be speaking of something that is happening to us which is beyond our control and is coming on account of our faith in Christ.  We are not talking about something we have sought out in any way.   Note that in the reference above in the Beatitudes, Jesus calls blessed two distinct groups with respect to persecution:  those who are persecuted on account of righteousness, and those who are persecuted on account of him.  In other words, the persecution falls on people either on account of righteousness or because of their identification with Jesus.  None of these blessed sufferers in view in the text are seeking out the persecution which is finding them.  I think we should take it as axiomatic that if you can choose to have something not happen to you, it’s not persecution.  And that’s where some of the Christians I know are making their error.

When I was in high school, new in the faith and growing with my friends in our local youth group, we often questioned whether our faith would be able to stand up in the face of persecution.  We spoke in awed, hushed tones (rightly) about those who stood up for their faith and paid the price of their convictions with their lives.  We read texts about persecution, saw that it was promised, and wondered why it had not come upon us.

Then I participated in Campus Crusade during my university days, and we wondered the same thing, only now we had the additional knowledge of the sheer numbers of believers being persecuted and the number of places in the world where it was not safe to profess faith in Christ.  And again, we wondered why it had not come upon us, only now, as we dealt with professors who belittled our faith and mocked us openly in classes, we began to wonder if THIS was the promised persecution we had coming.

Then I graduated and went to seminary, and we met people who had suffered persecution of the physically dangerous variety, and our scrawny scraps with our philosophy or biology professor shamefully paled in comparison.  And then I stayed in seminary long enough to escape my peer group and attend classes with a much younger group of individuals, who arrived at seminary and had the same experience I had.  And I couldn’t help but wonder if we were misunderstanding the whole thing, myself included, because looking at that kind of “persecution” in someone else changed (for me at least) how it appeared.

American Christians are not usually under the constant threat of physical violence for our faith.  I should say, nevertheless, that I don’t think it is by any means easy to be a Bible-believing Christian in our culture.  But I also think that a big number of Christians in this country are desperately seeking to have their “Christian Experience Card” punched in the box marked, “Persecution.”  I say this because of the enormous number of questionable things we are willing to call persecution in the name of justifying ourselves with respect to the Scriptural guarantees that we will experience it.  At least one prominent Evangelical leader seems to be using the insecurity of young Christians with respect to their lack of persecution to motivate them to go onto the mission field.   The Christian life is difficult, but difficulty, testing, and struggling with our sanctification is not the same as persecution.  Persecution is something we can’t pick.  It is something done to us because of Christ and his righteousness, not because we take adversarial positions to our culture.

This came to a head with me recently when I read a blog entry from a pastor I greatly respect who talked about his decision to get involved on the front-lines of the abortion debate.  This pastor decided to go to local abortion clinics and speak and pray for the women who were entering the clinics, entreating them not to go through with killing their unborn children.  He memorably recounts an encounter with an older woman who took a swing at him at one point, ably demonstrating the seriousness of the issue in question–an older woman was willing to walk up to a younger man and try to punch him in the face.  But then this pastor repeatedly calls this experience persecution.  That is where I take issue.  If you go somewhere of your own volition, stand in a place where you know your opinion is unpopular, and you loudly advocate for that opinion, if you encounter some pushback, that is not persecution, it is the logical consequence of something you chose.  I am not saying that I feel that this pastor was wrong to go down to the clinics.  I am saying it is wrong to call the consequences of that decision persecution.  If he can stop the thing happening by making a choice to avoid a place, then it isn’t persecution.

The presence of conflict is not the same as the presence of persecution.  Even if the conflict is around a worthy topic.

When Christians who are not experiencing real persecution call any struggle they experience persecution, they are making a mockery of Jesus’ words and the millions of believers who are actually undergoing the real kind.  If you are not being persecuted today, feeling guilty is the last thing you should feel.  You should feel blessed, and you should do everything in your power to be obedient in your season of blessing to aid those who are being persecuted.  Prepare for each day as though persecution is a possibility, because it is.  But don’t go out of your way to call your struggles with a culture who doesn’t agree with you persecution.  It isn’t.

There is one other problem with us calling this persecution: it makes it difficult for us to have productive relationships with our “persecutors.”  In a culture that is increasing post-Christian, calling someone who disagrees with you “a persecutor” only provides an obstacle in your engagement of them for kingdom purposes.  Even if someone was persecuting you, calling them that is probably not something you need to do.  Jesus didn’t spend his last hours on the cross calling his murderers out–he prayed for them to be forgiven for their ignorance.  It’s an example worth considering.

Are you looking for validation in this respect in your Christian life?  Have you made the existence of persecution proof that you are a “higher level” of believer?  Repent today and come to the Lord Jesus thanking him for his grace and his calling on your life. It is possible to be a follower of Jesus without experiencing constant persecution!  Follow the LORD in obedience, being ready for persecution if it should find you.