Interview with Leigh McLeroy, author of The Beautiful Ache, Part 3 of 3
This is part 3 of the interview with Leigh McLeroy, author of The Beautiful Ache.
GL: Leigh, my next question is going to irritate a lot of
readers and you will see why in a second. I know your gracious instinct will be to demur at answering or to
soft-pedal your answer because 1) you’ll see me pulling you into a controversy
and 2) you’ll know the potential to irritate believers with different
preferences.
But I’m not doing
this for the sake of controversy nor to get a few jabs in. Rather, I want
to press my serious question as part of doing life together. Doing life
together in the Christian community requires, in part, asking honest, hard
questions…pushing back with graciousness, seeking truth in love. So my goal is
not to irritate, even though my question will
irritate many. My goal is to engage the subject of hymns versus contemporary
worship songs with one specific thought in mind: in terms of character formation.
I suspect almost everyone would agree that the primary purpose of singing is to glorify
the Lord. As Louie Giglio memorably phrased it, “Worship is our response to God
for who He is and what He has done.”
But a secondary purpose of worship is to form us as believers. The liturgy—literally the work of the people—acts back upon us by shaping us.
For example, in your chapter titled “The Ache To Worship”
you tell how hymns were the soundtrack of your childhood, and how today when
you yearn for the Lord’s presence you’re as likely to sing “Come, Thou fount of
every blessing” as you are to whisper, “Dear Lord….” Later in the chapter you tell of the time
when you were in a cabin far off from civilization and felt pulled into
worship. And so you sang, from an
‘invisible hymnal,’ hymn after hymn until you were prostrate before the Lord.
Your experience speaks to me because I wonder if a little
eight year-old girl today, with whatever worship tunes are popular at her
church at the moment, will have those words etched on her mind and heart
decades later. Is there sufficient staying power in contemporary worship songs
to cause etching to happen?
Next, I want to push the question further. Leigh, I’ve known you for years and I can say
based on what I know of you that you—your character, your mind, your heart—have
been formed
by Scripture, by God’s community, by the Spirit of Christ working in your life
and….by hymns. Who you are, what your
character is has been indelibly shaped in significant part by hymns.
Let me put the two strands together. Even if contemporary
worship songs were sung long (I mean
long in terms of years, not repetitions in a single worship service) enough to
be etched in a person’s heart and mind, are they of rich enough, stout enough
stuff to serve well the task of forming
us. Will the little eight-year old girl at thirty-eight have been formed as
well by the contemporary worship songs of her childhood as she would have been
by the rich depth of hymns? Do the praise choruses and Top 40-like worship
songs inculcate theological truths as well as the great hymns?
Okay, what do you say to all this?
[Qualifiers- not for you to respond to, Leigh. Rather, these qualifiers are for clarity for readers who are puzzled by my questions or who find my questions disagreeable.]
1. I’m not saying that contemporary worship songs don’t teach theological truths; they do.
2. Not all hymns are great, and some are practically unsingable.
3. Some contemporary songs are good and will be durable.
4. Old is not necessarily better than new because the Spirit is always bringing forth “a new song”.
5. Hymns of, say, Charles Wesley are likely quite different from the ways that Israel sang the Psalter so I don’t think 18th century hymnody is a uniquely privileged genre of singing to the Lord.
6. Related, there is not ‘one way’ to sing. However, not all types of melody and lyrics lend themselves to 1) congregational singing and 2) character formation.
7. Emotion is an important aspect of singing to the Lord
because we are to love Him with our hearts. It’s not all cognitive. Likewise,
mind is an important aspect of singing to the Lord because we are to love Him
with our minds. It’s not all emotional. It’s both head and heart.]
LMc: Oh, Glenn. This is a huge
question, and one I’m not sure I can do justice here. Honestly, others have
spoken, studied and written quite extensively about this. Compared to them I’m
a pedestrian, and have only my opinion to offer – which as you know, can be a
dangerous solitary vantage point from which to speak.
Let me try to answer in part, at
least. First, I count it one of the richest blessings of my life to have had
not just believing, but church-going parents. The fact that they got my sister
and me up every Sunday morning, dressed and ready for church, is a testament to
their values, and was a gift to us. I actually remember as a kid praying for
flu or flood or something so we could
just stay home one Sunday and my dad could make pancakes! (It rarely happened.)
It grieves my heart that very few
children today would share in my experience not only of hearing great hymns
sung week after week – but of hearing teaching early-on that was way, way over
my head. I’m sure “children’s worship” has its merits, but so did hearing a
sermon I couldn’t begin to understand, and learning the discipline of sitting
quietly through it out of respect and, okay, a healthy fear of maternal
pinching, as well.
Will today’s worship choruses be
etched on the hearts of a generation of children? For better or for worse, I
believe they will. I base this solely on the unscientific proof that I can
recite a vast array of lyrics from very bad 80’s disco music without even
trying. Music has a way of infiltrating memory that defies reason – or even
choice! I never tried to memorize the words to a hymn or a Wham! song – but have managed to retain both. So maybe the
question is not will “etching” take place – but will it be true and worthwhile
and soul-shaping etching? Probably not a lot of it – because much of today’s
church music feels utterly void of mystery.
So many choruses and worship songs
today seem unchallenging, both poetically and spiritually. They state the
obvious, over and over, and then state it again. Can I sing along? Yes! Do I
enjoy singing along? Yes! Do I ever go home and turn a line over in my brain
wondering what it might mean? Rarely. I remember as a child pondering phrasing
from hymns like, “Lord let me never, never outlive my love for Thee,” from “O
Sacred Head Now Wounded,” and wondering, what would that be like? Or, “Let Thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my
wandering heart to Thee,” from “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” and
wondering first, “What’s a fetter?” then “Why is it goodness that might bind my
heart to God?” I love those words. They’ve done something to me over time that
I can’t imagine getting any other way.
I do believe there is music today that is touching deep chords like these. But it may not be congregationally “singable” the way so many old hymns are. Derek Webb’s music takes my breath away sometimes at its stark and challenging presentation of grace – and Rich Mullins’ poetry can still move me to tears. Chris Rice is another writer whose sense of mystery, creativity and rootedness (is that a word?) in Scripture resonates deeply with me. Some of these writer’s songs will no doubt stand the test of time. And they are shaping me today.
But generally speaking – not many
modern writers appear up to that challenge. The hymns are a treasure worth
revering and loving and revisiting often. I can’t say enough about what they
mean to me. A friend of mine, when she married for the first (and only) time in
her early forties, came down the aisle not to the bridal march, but to “The
Church’s One Foundation.” I love that…and I understand why. “From heaven He
came and sought her/To be His holy bride/With His own blood He bought her/And
for her sins He died.” Tell me that she didn’t understand, through this hymn,
that her marriage was an earthly illustration of a heavenly reality!
GL: I would love to
pursue this topic back and forth for hours more. Hopefully we’ll come back to this topic some
day in the future. [For readers curious about whether hymns can be sung today,
especially with ‘young’ people, check out the Indelible Grace
website. Countless thousands
of college students and many more post-college adults sing these hymns in
worship each week.]
Leigh, let’s move on to writing. You’ve been a ghostwriter and you’ve handled all kinds of written communication in various professional occupations. But this is different. The Beautiful Ache is your idea, your creativity, your stories, your writing. How on earth did you get a publisher? I have been told by people who published the book that Ben Young and I did that “distribution is key”. I.e., a name, a platform, a waiting receptacle of thousands who will buy it just because of the name on the book. Publishing is a business and writers who can basically guarantee sales can get book deals.
To my knowledge you don’t pastor a church of thousands.
So…how did The
Beautiful Ache get published? How long did it take from the time you
proposed it until you got a contract? How many “no’s” did you get along the
way?
LMc: You’re quite right…no church
of thousands here. In fact, I don’t even attend
a church of thousands! I was un-agented when I wrote my first book as
“myself” – Moments for Singles. I can
assure you I would never have chosen
to write a book about the topic of living the single life, yet that was the
first book I was asked to write as me!
“Moments” was one of a series of
“felt-need” devotionals planned by NavPress, and the editor of that series was
and is a long-time friend of mine, well known and respected in the publishing
business. He and the head of the ministry who co-distributed the book were both
represented by the same literary agency, and through that process, I met my
current agent. I got up the nerve sometime during the deal to ask him if we
might talk when the “Moments” assignment was over about some other ideas that I
had. Over the course of several months he pressed me to refine the concept for The Beautiful Ache, and his agency took
me on, which is something of a miracle, because I am basically an unknown,
unproven author. Then he shopped the proposal and some sample chapters, and we
heard plenty of “no’s” before Revell said “yes.” How many “no’s?” It seemed like a lot. Some
really wonderful people turned us down.
I’ve decided one of the advantages
of having an agent is you get to hear “no” second-hand, and he always made even
the “no’s” sound encouraging. I think from proposal to contract was probably
three months or so, then I turned the manuscript in five months after contract,
and it will be a year from final manuscript to publishing date. So as you can
see, this thing has been gestating a while. It’s not a process for the
impatient!
I can’t say enough about the folks
at Revell. They’ve been absolutely delightful to work with. I just turned in
another manuscript to them that will be out in Spring ’08…and now I’m working
on a couple of other ideas for proposals. Believe me, I understand that this is
a business…and it still stuns me sometimes that I’m in print, at all. I know
it’s not always about good writing, but about what is saleable. (So…if folks like
this book – they need to make some serious noise!)
GL: We’re circling back to our discussion at the beginning
of the interview about how you developed as a writer. If I may, I’d like to ask
you one final series of questions about writing as we conclude the interview.
After college, what steps have you taken to fan into flame
your gift? I suspect some of your
development has ‘just happened’ with living life but I also suspect that you’ve
probably put thought into how to deepen and broaden your ability to write
‘right words’. What has been helpful to
you personally? What other recommendations for aspiring writers turned out not
to be so helpful for you? If an aspiring writer comes to you and say, “Teach
me! Help me!” what would you tell him or her?
LMc: I could answer this in four
words, the brevity of which I’m not sure would satisfy you, or anyone else who
might ask this question – but here they are: Read. Write. Listen. Live. These
are the things that have been most instructive to me as a writer. So if you’re
running short on space, you can cut it off right here.
Reading, because it stretches me.
It is not passive, and yet it’s transporting. Emily Dickinson said, “There is
no frigate like a book to take us worlds away.” So my instructors have been
poet-ships like Emily, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert;
and writers of fiction like Marilynn Robinson, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling,
J.R.R. Tolkien, Wendell Berry (also a poet!) and even Garrison Keillor.
Non-fiction writers like Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Eugene Peterson,
C.S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Peter Kreeft, and Ken Gire.
(Almost everyone I just listed in the non-fiction category has written fiction,
as well.) These are only a few of the writers who’ve instructed me.
And writers write. They don’t talk about
writing, they scribble lines on envelopes and napkins, and they journal and
write real letters and blog. They capture words in their moments and days,
somehow, and save them up to use when their real use become evident. (This can
take years.)
They listen. They listen to their
lives (Frederick Buechner coined this phrase) to others, and to the voice of
God. (This is not the same as hearing voices!) Listening to other writers talk
about their craft can sometimes instructive…but not always. From Madeleine
L’Engle I learned the value of beginning badly – a very important lesson. From
Anne Lamott I learned that large tasks are completed in small pieces, “bird by
bird.” Dan Allender taught me that my own story is shot through with the divine
– even the parts of it I’d rather forget. Probably the most profound
instruction I have ever received at one time and in one place regarding writing
came from Eugene Peterson, in a lecture he gave several months ago at the Tattered
Cover bookstore in
Finally, live wide awake. Four
years ago I gave myself the exercise of writing 500 words each week about how
God shows Himself to me in the daily-ness of life. Some 200-plus essays and
over 100,000 words later, I’m convinced He’s a lot more evident than I ever
imagined, and hopefully – I’m more attuned to His presence in my own everyday
life.
Eugene Peterson said “Language at
its core creates and reveals, brings us into personal relationships,
establishes intimacies. We live what we speak. And if we don’t live the words,
the words die, and our spirits die. The salvation life is to be lived, not just talked about or written
about. Writers have a special responsibility to weed out inauthenticities in
our language, to detect and guard against “godtalk,” to defend us against the
language-deadening and speech-flattening effects of disconnecting God from
actual life.” To this, I can only add a humble “Amen.”
Leigh’s website for the book (here).
From Amazon buy The
Beautiful Ache.
Thought provoking dialog. I myself have been blessed since childhood by the richness of hymns and treasure the lyrics that were etched on my mind and heart. If I have anything to do with it, Charlie will be a hymn lover himself!
Posted by: Emily | February 28, 2007 at 06:46 PM