Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Good and Evil

Gospel reading: Luke 24:13-35
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)


I must be preoccupied with music lately. Last week it was John Fahey. This week: Yonder Mountain String Band.

My son, Alden and I went to a concert last week. Yonder Mountain's instrumentation is pretty straight ahead bluegrass: upright bass, guitar, banjo, and mandolin. But if you go to one of their concerts expecting Lester Flatts and Earl Scruggs - well, for one thing, you will have forgotten your ear plugs. The instruments are acoustic, but Yonder Mountain isn't timid in their amplification of those instruments.

So the question arises: Is the Yonder Mountain String Band a bluegrass band? An old time string band? A rock and roll band? Something else entirely? People of good will disagree.

It's helpful for us to have categories to drop things into as we sort through what the world brings our way. But it always seems like the world's most creative people explore the edges or maybe the heart of the category they find themselves in. Sometimes we feel the need to create a new category. Bluegrass itself was a new term for what Scruggs and Flatt started to do in the 1940s. It's hardly an ancient form. But it's a form we can argue about what belongs rightly within it.

What does all that have to do with good and evil?

Only this. When good and evil become clear categories that describe people rather than actions they are dangerous concepts. And they are dangerous because they drain from both goodness and evil their subtlety and elusiveness. And they almost always allow us to place ourselves and our friends in with the good.

What's fascinating about Kathleen Norris's chapter this week is that she expolores the subtlety of evil through characters like Jeffrey Dahmer, the mass murderer who cannibalized his victims and stored their hearts in his freezer. Norris refers us, faithfully, I think, back to Jesus' teaching that the roots of murder are right there in our anger.

Jesus blurred some very useful moral categories (murder, adultery, etc.) not in order to let us all of the hook. But to remind us that we're all on the hook. The good and the evil in this world are both things we all participate in as we go about our lives. And like all of life, we participate in good and evil in ways that are always matters of degree, never pure forms of either.

Now back to the music. The best artists are never satisfied to simply occupy a place within a genre. They push at its edges. They explore the energy it arose from. In fact, it may well be that the best artists in any genre don't really believe in genres.

And so it is with our moral lives. Goodness is a lived reality. In fact, maybe goodness is an art. The old categories like murder and charity are necessary and useful. But the best in goodness comes about like the best in music. It always happens in the moment. Goodness isn't a designation for people. It's a way of being that we're always working at. And the moment we think we've mastered it the music of our lives loses its soul.

And here's a little taste of Yonder Mountain for anyone who wants one:
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Again, this chapter and the concept of music being fluid remind me that doing good (or evil) is a choice I make daily....many times.

Lally

p.s. The You Tube is pretty cool.

April 12, 2008 at 2:13 PM

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