And The Beat Goes On

Pastor Page, January 23, 2008

So you’re cruising down the highway, with your windows open and the radio on, and there’s Willie singing about being on the road again (I know, I know . . . this is a public radio crowd, but work with me here), and you’re tapping your finger on the steering wheel, maybe bobbing your head a little bit, and the beat seems to seep into your bones, to become part of the forward movement, impelling you onward. “On the Road Again” is a classic road song, and country music is full of them, listened to it as it is by long-haul truckers in the blue-black of the night. Road songs are hypnotic as only the open road can be, with the lane markers passing . . . repeatedly . . . by and telephone poles passing . . . repeatedly . . . by, and the th-thump of the seams in the roadway . . . Six days on the road and I’m gonna make it home tonight.

Of course, all good music evokes a mood, or a time and place. It’s hard to listen to Edith Piaf without thinking of Paris’ green streets, or a salsa beat without dancing (or at least thinking about it, anyway). And although a waltz beat is for dancing, it evokes an altogether different kind of mood, as if you’re floating on a breeze, or maybe on the dance floor in one of those Rogers and Astaire movies, singing “Heaven, I’m in Heaven.”

Though we think about it most in terms of music, there’s a rhythm to everything in our lives, everything that comes at us sequentially, that is. In prose, short sentences indicate excitement or action, longer ones are reserved for thoughtful rumination. In film, short, choppy editing pumps up the adrenaline; long, swooping shots calm us down. Rhythm is obvious in the ebb and flow of days and nights, nights and days, and in the passing of weeks and months and years. Work imposes a weekly beat—rest then work, rest then work—to which we get physiologically attuned. If that cadence is interrupted, we can become disoriented and tired.

Our spiritual lives have a rhythm as well, and often in this consumer culture, it has a weekly beat, where we come to church to get spiritually “tanked up” on Sunday. And because that’s our only feeding point, Sunday worship grows in importance all out of proportion, so that if it’s not just so, if it’s not exactly the way we want it—or think we need it—we feel out of sorts, and if it continues like that, we seek greener pastures, some place where worship “feeds” us better.

How much better it would be if our spiritual rhythm, our holy beat, was just a little faster? What about twice weekly? Or even—gasp!—daily? First century Christians knew that daily was a good idea; many of them gathered for worship every day before work. As the early Church formed, this habit was codified as daily mass, and it continues to this day. Now, I know we Presbyterians aren’t about to have daily worship, but we can have individual devotions, we can let God feed us more often than once a week. That’s the point behind daily devotions and prayer, to quicken us and make us strong in the rhythm of the Spirit of God.