Meaning
Finding it, making it, trading in it. Plus: deathless boomer music
Earlier this year I was in a conversation at church about outdoor worship. For about ten months in 2020 and 2021, we had some kind of worship service outdoors as well as one livestreamed from our sanctuary. With strictly limited indoor numbers (zero until October of 2020, in fact, and never more than eight or ten afterward), most people who worshiped in person over those months did so outdoors. Some people were very fond of this experience and wanted to do it again. And these people tended to be surprised when I told them that some people really hated worshiping outdoors and never want to do it again. The key, I tried to articulate (to myself if no one else) is to get behind the experience itself. We can’t brand ourselves as “the church that worships outside sometimes” or “the church that never, ever worships outside no matter what.” You have to try to learn the meaning of that experience, good or bad, for people. To get to the desire behind the reaction.
The meaning for me was not being outdoors itself, and still less dealing with the little frustrations and indignities of recreating an adequate liturgy in the elements with no real infrastructure. Setting up and taking down chairs, the makeshift altar, the second-string piano, sound battling the wind, celebrant hosts just lifting off into the air, cold and heat and rain (that winter we had some actual cold weather here, apart from the blackouts, and I only remember canceling once for cold)—none of that was especially pleasant, but all of it meant, to me, that we were willing to endure some inconvenience, discomfort, and improvisation in order to worship. It meant that people were serious about minimizing transmission while also dedicated to gathering. And it meant that we could make ourselves visible to the neighbors and passing cars, a rare visual reminder beyond the presence of cars in our lot that things happen here. It was, for lack of a better word, validating for me personally and as a leader of this particular community. What we say and do is at least true and good enough to get people to sit and shiver or chase the shade for a while while we do it. I’m sure I’ll remember it with fondness for the rest of my life.
But the meaning and the experience were only incidentally related. I could do all the same things now and, in unfavorable weather, just find myself thinking “well this sucks.”
Where Shall Meaning Be Found?
I have never warmed to the expression “meaning-making,” which one hears quite a lot in the church and academic circles in which I have spent my adult life. It engages my confessional Lutheran antibodies. Meanings, like idols, are the continual output of the human mind. No one needs religion, or at any rate Christianity, to “make” meaning.1 My job is to declare meaning from outside, excavate it from the rubble of life’s facts, or more bluntly, to impose it on the chaos intrinsic to human perception and motivation. This meaning is, for a Lutheran at least, supposed to be theocentric and Christocentric: sin and forgiveness, creation/fall/redemption, righteousness by grace and sanctification of life flowing from it, all recoverable behind the kaleidoscopic refraction of life’s circumstances and events. “Your life is hidden with Christ,” the Apostle says, and both the hiddenness and with-ness are important. They argue against any idea of crafting our own structures of significance, to say nothing of simply adopting them unreflectively from the ideologies at work in our world (the extent to which these are actually two different things is, I’d say, limited).
But we can’t avoid the form of meaning-making. We can’t simply throw the Gospel like a proverbial rock at everyone’s heads.2 Functionally, there may be no difference between “making” and declaring, unearthing, or imposing. The meanings come unbidden and, like it or not, we must acknowledge and work with them. “Hold space” for them, as we say now, though I have never warmed to that expression either.
And however confessionally rigorous I’d like to be (which is more than I actually am), we can’t just ignore or avoid the meanings that people make for themselves out of the raw materials of preaching, worship, and their own lives. Grateful tears and silent anger after a sermon; joy and disappointment after an event; delighted and dismayed reactions to some liturgical experiment: all of it finds its way to our doors, and all of it is in a basic and banal sense “valid.”
Sometimes it’s about a kind of identity (you can get a decent sense of how much anti-Catholic polemic someone was exposed to at a young age by how they respond to certain perfectly traditional Lutheran practices), or about one’s own childhood and family, or the stage of life when one was raising children. We understandably want to repeat a pattern to extend and legitimate that pattern’s authority over our own lives.
For clergy (specifically me), there may be an element of ego defense in the brittleness of our priorities and judgments. I don’t want to open my understanding of the Sacrament to argument and revision all the time, so I fence it around with reverence. Take down those fences and scatter or diminish the contents and what am I? What have I done with my life? Or if we’ve journeyed away from some childhood orthodoxy, we don’t want to re-open that process. I once saw a colleague, doing a good presentation on Scripture in the first century, literally add a defensive and hard-edged “Mom” to a claim he was making about the Apocrypha (she was not in the room and I had no clear sense of whether she was still alive). It’s always worth asking: who am I defending, Jesus or myself?
Granting, then, that we will inevitably make meaning for ourselves, even out of the plainest declaration of the Word of God extra nos3 and the most transcendent celebration of the Sacrament, perhaps the task is to help ourselves and everyone else see those fabricated meanings as provisional steps on the way to blessedness. Since I’m in a T.S. Eliot-quoting mood lately, I’ll let him say it:
And what you thought you came forIs only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all.
Religion: The Language of Meaning?
A couple months ago, a Reddit “AITA” question about a Disney wedding went viral. The guests were left to purchase food because the couple had spent their whole budget on mascot visits. One hopes the question was fake and designed for the hearty laughs it provided.
But not everyone was laughing. One professor of religion weighed in:
"Many of the Disney fans I have observed in person and online find immense meaning in the parks. People don't just marry at Disney. They mourn lost relatives at Disney. They go to Disney to celebrate surviving cancer. They go there for one last trip before they die," wrote Jodi Eichler-Levine. "Religion is a way of making meaning in the world through stories and rituals...All of this happens at Disney. Cast members literally welcome you 'home.'"
Surely this is real, and the “Disney Adult” phenomenon is as heartfelt as anything else in this great spinning world. But is religion really “a way of making meaning in the world through stories and rituals”? That explanation might, I imagine, strike a practicing Muslim or a devotee of Athena or a Shinto priest as rather demeaning. I come back over and over to The Golden Bough by James Frazer, which begins as an attempt to explain why the priest guarding the sacred grove of Nemi gained his office by killing the incumbent priest after breaking a branch off the tree in its center. “It’s not personal,” I imagine the victor saying as he runs his predecessor through, “it’s meaning-making.”
This definition of religion as a meaning-making language that symbolizes personal transitions and interprets subjective experience could, I’m guessing, only have grown out of certain strains of liberal post-Protestant theology. It seems to me to be a projection of an imaginary common-denominator psychological spirituality, at once too broad and too exclusive. There are rituals and frames for experience that are not part of any religion, and there are religious practices that don’t have anything to do with cultivating this inner transformation.
My rule of thumb for telling the difference between “meaning-making” as such and “religion” is this:
If you take your dad’s ashes to Fenway Park for a game, that’s meaning-making.
If you buy your dad’s ashes a seat and a votive hot dog, that’s religion.4
It’s worth insisting on the extension of meaning into the world, I think, even at the level of a humble votive offering. I don’t think this is necessarily identical with a view that religion in general, or Christianity in particular, has to be costly or painful. Christians in particular need to be careful with what kinds of sacrifice we encourage and why. But a religion appropriates and transforms things—material things, not just inner movements. I remember traveling in Taiwan on the biggest festival day of “Ghost Month” and being struck by all the votive food and the little furnaces for burning “ghost money” (I gathered it is mostly strips of paper, not actual currency; piety has its limits) for the dead. Whether, or in what sense, anyone “believed” in the cosmology behind this ritual, still less what “meaning” it had for them, did not appear to me to be exactly the point.
Among the Meaning Merchants
I can imagine an unprepared observer of the Eucharist having an experience a little like mine in Ghost Month. There’s someone saying some words and lifting some bread up, then lifting up a cup, and saying some more words, and then everyone does something (most or all of them seeming to know exactly what) to eat and drink. Whether it would strike any such observer as profound or baffling or downright ridiculous would surely depend on many factors, but it would clearly be a thing that happens in a way that may or may not have anything to do with the subjective disposition of the participants.
If there’s a point on which I’m in full sympathy with the fussy, priggish liturgical ultra-trads (whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Anglican), it’s the necessity of form to prevent the officiant from becoming a mediator (or worse, merchant) of meaning. It is a real danger to imagine that we clergy are encountering a world so laden with alienation, anomie, and meaninglessness that our job is to hold it all forth, whisk it away, and, in a Gospel-based version of the old magic-trick “prestige,” return it in the form of meaning.5 "Here, have a verse for your wife's death. / Here, have a death for your life's curse," in Christian Wiman's savage shorthand. No mistaking, it can be a harsh and wintry psychological landscape out there. But it’s not often that I’ve felt my own meanderings or mental sloughs very well “seen” or described from the pulpit, and I can only assume my batting average is no better. It’s a precarious role.
But you can always give people something to do. Here, take and eat. Do this in remembrance of me. Shiver in the wind, shrink from the sun, nod to the passersby. Something I picked up from my internship supervisor is scooping a double-handful of water from the baptismal font and just chucking at everyone after a baptism. What does it mean? How do you feel about it? I dunno but you’re wet now bro. Is that enough (for my own role, for church, for faith)? No, certainly not. But nothing is, and at least it’s a place to start.
If you’re a new reader who came here because of my essay on four futures for the ELCA, you may find this much-briefer follow up on the “brand” of Lutheranism interesting. This newsletter is a little more typical of what I do here. I’ve written a lot about Luther and Lutheranism, though, so if you’re interested in that, I have something on the Heidelberg Disputation, on the future of seminaries, and on my one in-person visit to a churchwide assembly ages ago (I cringe a bit at this one but it’s not without something to say). I was ordained less than a year when I wrote my first reflection on ministry in the context of irreversible church contraction (this website was redesigned circa 2015 and all the dates got changed and the pullquotes were integrated into the text, which is why it seems weirdly repetitive at a few points). And I wrote a whole book about Luther’s “holy possessions” that define the church. Anyway, thanks for signing up. I do this once in a while.
Appreciation: The Broken Nostalgia Cycle
Some time last year, I turned one of my kids onto the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary tribute concert album. “People used to do this,” I explained. “They would get together and sing each other’s songs like it was a funeral. They would stand up in long lines of guitar players and trade verses and solos.” And the Dylan tribute was some kind of zenith of Tribute Concert Culture, the auto-mythologizing of the cohort that really did revolutionize popular music in a stunningly brief period. The names are big and they mostly deliver good to great performances (if you haven’t heard Lou Reed’s version of “Foot of Pride,” I urge you to fix that). I listened to it a lot when it came out, and then I listened to it a lot with my own kid who was the same age I was when it came out. And it occurred to me that we would shortly be thirty years out from the concert itself. Thus we needed a “30th Anniversary Tribute to the 30th Anniversary Dylan Tribute Concert.” No messing with Sinead O’Connor this time, but we’ll need to find people to replace Johnny and June, George Harrison, Richie Havens, Booker T., and plenty of others.
Around the same time, Spotify served up an ad for Dylan’s Heaven’s Door whiskey. And as the tribute album hit thirty years, Time Out of Mind turned twenty-five. In 1997 this was a revelation, a back-from-deaths-door masterpiece of mortality and regret. It was “late style.” And now it’s become nostalgia. I arranged the timeline in my head:
1972 - Dylan records “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
1997 - literally knocks on heaven’s door
2022 - releases “Heaven’s Door” signature blended whiskey
We’re way past “selling out” or even trading on nostalgia as traditionally understood. It makes no more sense to roll your eyes at Dylan hawking whiskey under the name of a fifty-year-old standard than it does to lampoon the Rolling Stones for still going on the road. They do it because they can, and because no one has managed to claim whatever kind of throne they hold. That I went to see the Stones in 1994 is my own fault; that I took my oldest to see them in 2021 is the sort of thing that could land you in Dad Hague.
Then I started seeing this broken nostalgia cycle everywhere. The second season of Russian Doll ends with a really artful sequence soundtracked with “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” a song that came out a few years before the main character (who is marking a psychologically significant 40th birthday) was born. It felt wrong and yet I couldn’t think of a less dated song that would have worked as well. Everyone, after all, knows that song. Peter Jackson served up like ten hours of the Beatles dinking around in the studio and a lot of people (including me) watched every minute of it. Last Night in Soho spun a decent yarn almost entirely out of an imagined 60s-London vibe, complete with obscure but highly period-specific songs. Top Gun: Maverick pushed it a bit too far by having the twenty-something pilots sing “Great Balls of Fire” in the bar. It’s a too-precise callback to the original film, with a song that was a childhood hit for the Boomer characters but would be little known among any of the new characters unless they’d seen Top Gun. They should have had them sing “Mr. Brightside,” a friend observed (our niece started singing this song when I repeated this joke; she was born three years after The Killers released it).
There are many names for this phenomenon of cultural stasis and many theories for how it has come about. I’m not going to make a case for any of them. It feels ominous that we aren’t producing new standards, even (perhaps especially) if it’s mostly because of the way markets are structured today. But, being perfectly honest: I enjoy it. I very much lament the death of a slightly older cohort of pop culture references—the show tunes, jazz standards, torch songs and Tin Pan Alley stuff—but the indefatigable persistence of music from an ever-receding slice of pop culture history is just plain fun. Maybe the recursiveness and repetition of these warhorse songs just gives the audience a sort of shadow or alternative narrative to enjoy, alongside or in place of the real show (I was in a friend’s basement in the early 90s when someone explained the meaning of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” to me; I played “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” all the time around the turn of the century with a now-deceased older friend).
Over the summer I was at a wedding with lots of high school classmates, at which the band wrapped up with Prince’s “1999.” We were, it occurred to me, the perfect age for this zombie hit: It was on the radio when we were kids in the 80s, we were twenty in 1999, and now for us the song is about retrospect, not anticipation. I did not party like it was 1999. But I could remember it, and for the moment, that was enough.
I am holding to my discipline of doing no research for this newsletter apart from looking up literary references I half remember, but I’m sure there’s good work on the origin and development of “meaning” as a philosophical and religious category, perhaps taking over from “wisdom” or some other desideratum.
Not my image but I don’t remember which theologian I’m stealing it from. Add a comment if you remember.
“outside of us,” a simple enough concept but I kept the Latin so you’d know it was important and official.
Assuming here some kind of shared social practice of votive baseball game offerings. That America never developed this form of civic religion is a real failure on our part.
I did at one point construct a theory of preaching around the 2006 Hugh Jackman-Christian Bale film The Prestige, which you should definitely watch if you haven’t.