My son accuses me of only listening to songs that are depressing and gloomy. It makes me sad that he would think that.
Chalk that propensity up to years of listening to folk singers and singer-songwriters, many of whom major in angst and world-weariness. No, I can't blame them. Really, it's deep childhood trauma, the emotional scars of two events. One, our dog, Pug (haunting name, isn't it?) died on Christmas Day. Imagine that, a day on which the Incarnation is celebrated and our dog chooses that very day to "decarnate" himself. Well, or something like that. I was four, and you can imagine what I suffer from these 49 years later.
And then there were my three wicked step-sisters --- no, really just sisters, though the idea of stepsisters just sounds more wicked, doesn't it? Before I had any dignity, that is, about the age of four, they dressed me up like a girl and paraded me around the neighborhood. Have I forgotten? Not on your life. And yet, by God's grace this has not created any gender confusion but only contributed to this melancholia of which I write.
Oh, melancholia. What a delicious disposition. It's coming on Christmas. . . and if I had a river I'd skate away. . . at least that's what Joni Mitchell says in that kind of but not really Christmas song called, in true holiday fashion, "The River." On the day after Thanksgiving I pull out all my lyrically saddest or most musically morose songs --- all my Joni Mitchell sound-a-likes --- and play them over and over again on long car trips to wails of complaint and gnashings of teeth from the rear quarter. I love it. There is nothing like a sad Christmas song to cheer the heart. Give me a minor key, anytime, an unresolved coda, a santa-brought-no-gifts-wife-left-dog-died-got-fired sort of faux country song, and I'm happy. Sorta.
This Christmas I'm off to a particularly good start. The Moravian Star I always hang over the side door lights up just fine indoors but won't light up outdoors. Peters out just across the threshold. It's inexplicable. Spooked. Gremlin-ized. I'm afraid to task my son with it, as he may well make it more aerodynamic and yet still not solve the lighting problem. (He's an aerospace student/pilot type.) I'll make it fly --- one kick and I'll put it in my neighbor's front yard, and then we'll see if it lights up.
Got my daughter a Charlie Brown Christmas tree with one sad ornament on it. The acorn don't fall far from the tree, does it? Sad, sad tree, and she's so happy with it. I may even get a big tree and decorate it Charlie Brown style. Very feng shui. It takes a lot of effort to be lazy and call it simple. One ornament. Just one.
[Dad, what are you writing?
A new blog post.
About what?
Joy and happiness.
No you're not! It's you. It can't be.]
You see what I must put up with. My melancholia is not respected, not taken seriously. I am the butt of jokes, at the forefront of derision. That makes me sad.
I am predisposed to words like bittersweet, ambivalent, or even adjectival phrases like happy-sad, as they all seem to be saying two things at once. Keeps people hopping when you talk like that, and it suits my inwardly smiling melancholic disposition to find sadness inside of happiness, to be both-and not either-or.
But speaking of words, and getting to the point of this meditation on my melancholy, there seems to be a bias against the melancholic, a sense that it means someone who is depressed all the time. Dig a little, though, and you see another definition, an older one: "pensive contemplation." In that, I hear the Psalmist and Jesus, something to aspire to and not avoid.
When David declared in that most melancholy of psalms that "I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof (Ps. 102:7, NIV), he wasn't simply depressed but both burdened and comforted --- he laments his sin and that of a nation and yet is comforted by assurances that God is faithful and compasisonate and will "rebuild Zion" (v. 16) and "respond to the prayer of the destitute" (v. 17). He lay in a state of "pensive contemplation." And when Jesus said "blessed are those who mourn," which is a state, as John Stott reminds us, to aspire to, a burden over the sin both without and within, he did not fail to promise that those who aspire to such mourning "will be comforted" (Mt. 5:4). There is deep joy and hope and promise wrapped in a holy sadness over sin.
I can't play the truly sad songs, the lyrically nihilistic or musically chaotic. I can't play them because they aren't true, beautiful, or good. They embody the despairing sadness of a people without faith, hope, or love. That's not me.
The melancholy songs speak to me because they carry the weight of sin and yet are better able to hold the promise of joy than the light and happy fluff. A pensive contemplation is a posture that often suits me. The deeper trauma that affects me is not sibling devilry or the loss of childhood pets but the trauma of grace. From that, thank God, I will never ever recover.
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