THE RHYMES OF GOD [F, 5-5-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THE RHYMES OF GOD [F, 5-5-23]

 

Bruce Springsteen said, “A young man with a guitar and a rhyming dictionary is very dangerous.” He would probably have written a song about it, but it’s hard to rhyme “dangerous.”

The human brain is set up, it seems, to appreciate rhyme, to want rhyme, to need rhyme, in certain situations, like songs, and poems, and rap.

Rhyme is especially important if we want to remember a song or poem.

Helen was trying to remember “The pig got up and slowly walked away…” but she couldn’t get the next line because she had remembered a word that meant the same but didn’t rhyme… “You can tell a man who drinks… by the company he chooses…” No, that can’t be right, because it doesn’t rhyme. No, not “drinks.” You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses…” That was when the pig got up and slowly walked away.

 

Some songs are easy to remember just because they really have only one line: I want to hold your hand… Sweet Caroline… I will survive… Or sometimes only one word…Amen… Alleluia… They don’t need rhymes; they are the exception.

We recently watched a documentary about Leonard Cohen and his song, Hallelujah. It took him 7 years to write it. It rhymes, often more through onomatopoeia than actual rhyme. At one point a friend talked of how Cohen tried to get two particular lines to work together. He used, the friend said, “180 different combinations.” They showed several of them. They all rhymed. What struck me, though, was that each rhyme changed the song, it's possible meaning. Grace and face and place and pace and ace, etc. will do that. No wonder the song took seven years.

We get most of our religious instruction, and thus beliefs, through hymns, the songs we sing in church and Sunday school. Sometimes we get bad instruction from those songs, as in Charles Tindley’s Leave It There. The chorus says, “If you trust and never doubt, he will surely bring you out. Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.”

Now part of that is excellent theology. “Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.” But not “If you trust and never doubt.” No one trusts without also doubting. Doubt is a part of faith. If we learn that it is wrong, sinful, to doubt, we’ll never have a chance to get “out.” [1] But Tindley needed to rhyme with “out.” We get a lot of bad theology because we need a rhyme.

Rhyming is dangerous, as Springsteen says, but I find that sometimes when I am looking for a rhyme, and can’t find one, I find a better belief. Like, “If you trust and never whimper, God will take away your distemper…” Or, maybe not.

John Robert McFarland

1] Tindley was a black Methodist preacher around 1900, and “out” was an understandably popular place in black theology, as in “come out the wilderness,” out of slavery, etc.