Your Neighbour's Hymnal: What Popular Music Teaches Us about Faith, Hope and Love (review)

John Cassian, meet Elton John.

Jeffrey F. Keuss, professor and associate dean at Seattle Pacific University, has, in Your Neighbour's Hymnal, suggested that the life and writings of the former have a surprising lot to do with the music of the latter. Specifically, he argues that the experience of listening to the likes of "Tiny Dancer" parallels an ancient pattern of mysticism, seen most clearly in the life and writings of Cassian and the sixteenth-century mystic St. John of the Cross.

The pattern consists of three movements of the soul: purgation, illumination, and unity. Purgation—the process of being emptied of that which lacks purpose, meaning, and depth—has a sort of auditory equivalent, Keuss suggests, in those moments where one becomes "lost in a song." What follows is a time in which monastics would commit to learning the paths of holiness as revealed in scripture, making sense of them in relation to the community around them. This illumination, as it is called, takes place in the journey of the modern-day sonic mystic, when, after that initial experience, listeners move beyond themselves, purchasing more of an artist's albums, going to shows, and following tours. Finally comes unity, the movement of the soul in which one's life becomes bound to others in the context of community. This, Keuss suggests, takes place with the likes of live performances, when, gathered together and moved by the music, the individual, the other, and the sound are welded together.

What Keuss has done with Your Neighbour's Hymnal is something akin to the cultural exegeses of James K. A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom. Smith's most striking illustration of the fundamentally spiritual—or liturgical as he prefers to call it—nature of all cultural activity is his comparison of the architecture, practices, and ethos of a typical North American shopping centre to that of a church. Keuss, while he has chosen instead to liken listening to, say, Elliot Smith through headphones to the experience and practices of a Carmelite monk, has served to continue that discussion, and contribute new insights to it. His suggestion that the ubiquity of iPods is a mark of spiritual hunger, for example, is a particularly striking and urgent reminder for the church.

Still, while I would not dispute that the local classic rock station plays songs no less spiritually informed and significant than the "faith-based" programming being broadcast a few digits down in the FM dial, and while I would agree that listening, singing along, attending concerts, and purchasing MP3s are no less acts of faith than what takes place in sanctuaries on Sunday mornings, I am hesitant to use the language of mysticism as Keuss has. It serves its purpose in exposing and explaining the religious nature of cultural practices involving popular music, but to what extent does that diminish the uniqueness and particular urgency of congregational life, spiritual disciplines, and monastic traditions? When we call the modern remix of The Jackson 5's "ABC" a "truly sacramental engagement," as Keuss does, how does that shape our understanding of the means of grace that the church has traditionally practiced?

To his credit, Keuss, unlike so many academics, has not been holed up in his office parsing obscure Greek nouns (that is not to say Your Neighbour's Hymnal suffers from a lack of accuracy or scholastic credibility); the book is, in a very real sense, pastoral. In its introduction, Keuss—who has himself served within the context of congregational ministry—suggests that the studies could prove helpful within the context of church groups (which, if we are honest, are, more often than not, more conversant in the language of Top 40 than that of the Christian scriptures). His most basic premise, reflected in the book's title, is that the categories of faith, hope, and love are not exclusive to Christianity...