What I learnt at the movies...
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That Grand Old Catch 22
The Spiritual Significance of Music Edited by Justin St. Vincent
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reviewer Jon E Clist
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“The spiritual significance of music is a subject so deep and full of subjective sinkholes it would require a book.”
Gerald Casale, Devo
The concept behind The Spiritual Significance of Music is simple enough; an array of artists, musicians and professionals brought together to provide commentary on the question “What do you believe is the spiritual significance of music?” Most of them have at it. Anyone who has had experience with a musician or creative will know that they have opinions in spades – a good thing, considering they are some of the world’s foremost voices. One of editor Justin St. Vincent’s masterstrokes was in taking steps to avoid TSSOM being some kind of onesided homily from the Christian Music Scene. To this end, the artists interviewed are from a wide spectrum of believers, atheists and cynics, with a few Satanists thrown in for good measure. The leading question too, is deceptively brilliant. St. Vincent gets no objections for leading the witness. It’s genius in it’s vagueness; there’s no mention of God, instead leaving the subject to come to their own conclusions on the meaning of spirituality itself, and introducing the question within a question. Many of the artists start there. “First of all, what is spirituality?” asks Sander Gommans of After Forever. The views of the artists are fascinating in their diversity; some discount the term in favour of a Powerful Emotional Response, others give names; whether that name be God, Allah, Yahweh, Satan, or some kind of universal force, “something substantial in the universe”. 30
As far as the link between spirit and music, the dialogue descends further into the rabbit-hole. Daniel Beddingfield refers to the sound of the “Deep hum behind reality…particle and wave…the excitement of electrons”, singer-songwriter Victor Crowl pays tribute to the “energy between the notes”, while composer Peter Davison brings the big bang into play. Of course, there is plenty of standard Protestant argument when it comes to God and music – “Music was created by God, as was every instrument to be used to bring Him glory” says Sonic Flood’s Rick Heil. Again, St. Vincent’s great masterstroke is at show here. The book is treated with great objectivity; every opinion gets its own weighting, and the reader is left with a challenging depth of opinion. One thing that becomes clear within TSSOM
is the chasm between the language used by the overtly Christian artists and the others. The Christian artists seem to be bound by a form of their own language, where ‘spirituality’ becomes ‘God’, ‘spiritual music’ becomes ‘Worship’. They argue over semantics (Petra’s John Schlitt – “I don’t believe there is spiritual significance in music, but I do believe music is a powerful tool for a spiritual end”). To a certain extent, this makes their view come off as a little narrow. As a person with spiritual beliefs myself, I stop short of advocating some kind of universalism , but I definitely think that our language needs to change when we’re exploring a matter so wide and expansive, otherwise we miss out on a powerful opportunity to grow our outlook. It remains however, that the dialogue within TSSOM is important.
The Bourne Identity A man wakes with no knowledge of who he is, where he has been or the events that lead him there. In many ways, he’s like a blank slate but as time passes the truth becomes clearer; he possesses a very specific, alarming skillset, there are enemies in pursuit of him and finally he realises the truth he’d been searching for. His previous identity is that of a high-level American spy, but something’s gone terribly wrong.
There’s a moment in the film where Jason Bourne begins to realise he’s willingly done horrible and immoral things, at the bidding of his controllers. He knows that he must face down the demons of his past in order to find a hope for the future. Even though we are not amnesia-suffering top ranked spies, there is a truth in the Bourne Identity that applies to us all. Even amnesia cannot hide you from your past, the life you have led and the things you have done and said. No matter how deep you bury your problems or mistakes, it is only a matter of time before they come back to haunt you. At some stage we all must face the demons of our past and truthfully deal with them in order to move on.
For Jason Bourne it took three movies for him to completely find out the true nature and depth of his past and those things that were not only holding him back from living a free future but also affecting those around him. Perhaps it’s a lesson we too can learn from the Bourne Identity. Perhaps we too need to take the time to step into our past in order to find out who we really are and take ownership of the things we have done. Only then can we truly turn our past into history, instead of it controlling our future. 31