2nd post

I'm quite happy to be off of LJ.

I was reading blogs before I ever heard of LiveJournal, so this is a more natural environment for me.

The reason I wanted to post was that I went to a Southern Baptist church today.

Wow, it was so good. The music was so emotional. I think it's true that what the arts in the United States need is an underpinning of religion.

There was no organ; it was a simple rock band. The instruments were played by teenage parishioners.

It was beautiful, sweet like Appalachian honey-dew.

It was truly religious; it probably goes without saying that there was nothing annoying or preachy about it. (The change was probably more in my head than in reality; I was never open to this music before and now I was listening to it with an understanding of the feeling behind it.)

The kids were not attempting to self-consciously create something --

(I just want to say here right now -- there is a possibility, however slight, that I had previously simply ignored this Christian pop-culture parallel world out of an intentional ignorance...)

-- more pure than secular pop music.

I found this religious music so satisfying because it sounded like emo. Really. But it was motivated by less cynical emotions (not to bag on emo, but I think wrist-cutting depression is the reason this subgenre is so Bad and Hated). I find that God is a sufficiently deep and authentic motivation for emo melancholia. Come to think of it, it reminds me of the very traditional music of religious melancholia that is so deep in Eastern tradition.

Western religious music is traditionally more heavenly. But this sweet gritty Baptist emo-country-folk (with electric guitars) was more sweet than Eastern holy music, thus fitting nicely into the Western tradition. But it hit me on a gut-punching visceral level, not unlike mind-damaging Muslim wailing, the heavy metal of religious sounds.

In Hinduism, bhakti is a type of worship about separation from God. How bittersweet it is. On how sometimes it is more beautiful than connection. I disagree, but appreciate the sentiment. And I appreciate a musical understanding of how tough it is to find God, sometimes.