This article is not about music. Or about criminal domestic violence.
It is about a compelling expression of the Mercy season.
The playing field for this discussion is a singer named Martina McBride. I had not heard of her until I providentially stumbled onto her music last week.
I was drawn into several of her songs which are about criminal domestic violence - CDV for short. That theme is nothing new in the pop and country genres. What captured my attention was the lack of a raw edge to her songs.
Most songs about CDV shout about the continued woundedness or bitterness of the song writer or singer. Hers lacked that familiar toxic edge of pain and hate.
The second thing that drew me in was the breadth of her understanding of the subject. She dealt knowledgeably with predators who are alcoholics, and those who are stone cold sober but delight in abusive control and manipulation. She is ruthless about the men who just shut down and shut their wife out, causing a pain almost as visceral as physical and sexual violence.
She was frank about how deceived women can be about their men, as well as how many times they feel hopelessly trapped.
She sings about mothers who are abusers.
She sings about the neighbors and parents and school teachers who look the other way.
And she is totally in touch with the kids who try to maintain some semblance of life while having to balance on the edge of a cruelly sharp knife through no fault of their own.
She sings fearlessly about murder. And suicide. In adults and kids.
I have a deep familiarity with CDV and could read pages and pages of insight and pathos between the lines of her compact songs.
I marveled that she could capture so much in such a nuanced way and I assumed she had lived it all.
Wikipedia seems to contradict that assumption. According to them, she was raised in a nuclear family. Her dad built a platform under her music by fronting a band so as to give her a chance to sing. Her brothers played in her band for years. Her husband treats her well personally and in terms of her career. She has three kids and she pulled way back from her career for them.
A picture of emotional stability and good health.
I read further.
She is involved in many different organizations tackling the issue of CDV from various angles. Really involved. Not just tokenism for the cameras and the press releases. That is where she gets the knowledge of the anguish, the double binds, the hard choices and especially the crushed spirits, more damaging than crushed bodies.
She has spent a lot of hours face to face with tragedy - current, past and mockingly pending.
I listened to another couple of songs and finally found out why I was drawn to her.
She knows dignity.
She gives dignity.
Take "A Broken Wing." Martina is clear. He was wrong in what he did. She was wrong to stay in the abuse. No ambiguity in the song. This situation never should have been allowed to escalate to the level it did. It ended tough. Martina did not approve or disapproved of the choice. But she celebrated what she could, where she could. And she did it big.
I was moved.
Or "Independence Day." She did not approve of all the choices. But she gave a firm nod to the one small redeeming quality in the whole sordid story.
I drank deeply of her nuanced championing of individuals who most people would trash. Her ability to stand in the swamp of a dysfunctional life and extend legitimate dignity to shredded individuals is impressive.
The celebration of dignity came in a completely different key of music in "I'm Gonna Love You Through It." There are few things that rob you of dignity like cancer. Martina was able to capture the dual anguish of losing a sense of value and personhood when you have breast cancer, and for any cancer patient, feeling like a burden to the caregivers around them.
She trumped all that with an eloquent expression of dignity.
I pondered her all day yesterday as a metaphor for the Mercy season.
We are currently in the front end of the Mercy season. The dominant expression is a strong reaction to social parameters. Any standards are classed as intolerance of individual design and intolerance is framed as the greatest social sin. What has been played out in smaller sections of the culture is now mainstreamed.
Self-expression is the new right. Minority views must be defended because they come from the minority and therefore they must be right. The views of the majority are broadly assumed to be wrong.
So the secular culture and Christian community have had to respond to challenging new realities.
On one end of the spectrum we have polarization. On the other, wholesale accommodation. We have become a laughing stock of the world as different groups in the nation squared off over the issue of bathrooms. Both extremes create problems instead of solving them.
But we have the same in the church. There are those who hold a hard line on everything and define godliness as becoming a clone of some chosen role model. It might be a super saint of yore, or it might be the current pastor or ministry leader. It is appalling to me how many ministries are defaulting to heavy handed cult-like "leadership" styles these days.
On the other hand, we have the ministries who allow the most blatant sin even in leadership and decline to remove the sinner because it might wound him in the eyes of the followers to be exposed for what he is.
Those are somewhat easy positions to adopt. Either extreme will eventually cost you dearly, but in the short run, it seems easy to tamp down the reality of a culture that has lost its moral values.
Easy and cowardly.
It is far more complex to hold in one hand timeless truths and in the other complex human beings. How can you be in the presence of blatant, defiant sin without appearing to be approving of it? How can you attribute high value to the individual's original design, without normalizing brokenness? How long do you walk with someone, trying to show them love, while there are no apparent changes in heart or life?
Knuckle busting tough questions. And that is what the Mercy season is all about. It is not for the cowards. They run for the extremes and dispense deep rejection or embrace a total abandonment of values.
Let's be blunt. Martina has not stamped out CDV with her tool kit. I wish it were that simple that you could walk into hell with unconditional love and revitalize it in short order.
Takes more than love, my friend. Takes tons of skill, wisdom and enduring pain.
The Mercy season has already produced a bumper crop of compassion fatigue. Well-meaning people have embraced the wounded and the wounders with the best of motives and deep commitment, only to stagger to the sidelines, utterly depleted after a few plays.
Martina has been in the trenches for a long time. I love the fact that there is still fire and fury in her songs. "How Far" has all the passion of a big woman married to a gutless wonder who doesn't value the treasure she is and isn't willing to risk exploring reconciliation.
I wonder how she keeps the passion high when faced with so many people making so many wrong choices, in spite of the army of caregivers she is engaged with.
But passion for right is compelling, and it is a vital tool for the Mercy season. We are drowning in a sea of fear about championing what is right in the face of violent intolerance expressed by the champions of distortion.
Coupled with her passion, courage and compassion are eyes to see the good in broken people. That is a prerequisite for extending dignity, when there is no honor to be had. She is brilliant at this art also.
What are the tools she brings to the table in her battle against the root issues of CDV? I have no idea.
And I myself don't have answers for most of the tough questions that come my way. The Body of Christ as a whole is far behind the trajectory of the culture in terms of having a well-rounded tool kit for solving the dynamics of this season. And I find that to be tragic.
I simply know that I choose not to be on the two extremes. As I see the devastation in people's lives caused by the choices of the last 50 years, I hold my beliefs high. Something or another I am doing is working for me. My life has more sparkles than spankings.
But even though my beliefs and lifestyle are hugely different from most, I still get a lot of e-mails from people who don't feel free to go anywhere else with their messy messes.
And that to me is a compliment.
Martina's "Concrete Angel" has 26 million views on YouTube. I'm not in her league. But I am in the game.
Passion, courage and compassion with a strong side dish of dignity, served with honest assessment of the good the bad and the ugly.
That alone won't win the championship, but it is a rock solid formula for beginning to deal with the Mercy season complexities and catastrophes in a Mercy key of music.
Arthur Burk
June 14, 2016
How long is a pregnancy? In SLG, there is no telling. "