Micah Tillman

It’s the hardcore genre of praise-n-worship, as opposed to the girly-man guitar-pop one normally gets in praise-n-worship.

Actually, I’m just kidding.

(Anybody remember ’80s praise-n-worship, back before the girly-man guitar-pop days?  Like “Awesome God” and “El-Shaddai,” and “Sing Your Praise to the Lord.” Okay, it looks like what I mean is, “Anyone remember when praise-n-worship was written by Rich Mullins and Michael Card?”)

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Today in church the choir were singing Rutter’s Requiem, for All Saints/Souls Day.

But before that, they sang a hymn Adam wrote, called, “What Comfort Can Our Worship Bring.”

The two parts that really struck me were:

Not just in joy is God made known / but also in our tears

and

. . . where praise is voiced in pain

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Both of those stand out for a phenomenologist, because they get at two themes that have been central to phenomenology since its inception in 1900/1 with Edmund Husserl’s magnum opus (though not his final word on the subject, by a long shot), Logical Investigations.

The first is the question of what constitutes the appearance of something.  What does it take to make something appear?  How do we go about presenting something to ourselves?  How do things become present to us?

The second is the question of expression.  What does it mean to bring something to expression?  What, exactly, is expressed in expressions (things, ideas, meanings, feelings, experiences?)?  Can expressions accurately express the world?

(And then you have to ask, since we use words to present things, exactly how does that happen?  That is, how is language connected to presentation/appearance?  See Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things, by Robert Sokolowski.)

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In the above excerpts from his hymn (which is beautifully worded — and perfectly scored by Blake Henson, whose site looks fantastic, btw) Adam is making two claims.

First, he is claiming that God can be made known through tears.  That is, tears can reveal something about God.  God can appear through tears, in some sense.

Second, he is claiming that praise can be “voiced in pain.”  Now, this might mean one or both of two things.

(A) It might mean that it is possible to give expression to praise for God when you are in pain.

Or, (B) might mean that it is possible to praise God through (by means of) expressing pain.

Or, because of the wonder that is poetry, it might mean both.  Or some third thing I’m not realizing at the moment.

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The first claim — about tears presenting God — is especially interesting to me because of the claims Sokolowski makes in Eucharistic Presence (which, you will note, I reviewed enthusiastically) about how the Eucharist can constitute a legitimate appearance of Christ, due to certain fundamental ontological/theological facts.

The second is interesting for much the same reason.  (How could Christ show up through bread and wine?  How could God show up through tears?)  How could praise show up through pain?

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Really fascinating stuff to contemplate.