If you read my article on Saturday about depression, then you will recognise a mash up of two song lyrics one from an old hymn and the other from a contemporary worship song.
I really appreciated the follow on conversation on Facebook that resulted from the article. It seems that a significant amount of what I said resonated with others. There were however questions and plenty of helpful pushback.
One area of pushback was around my picking up on the line “behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face” from William Cowper’s God moves in a mysterious way. Observations included that we need to be careful of nitpicking at lyrics. This is of course poetry. I agree that there is a danger in this and have written previously about showing grace with song lyrics.
Then there was the comment that we need to put the line into the context of Cowper’s overall reformed theology emphasising God’s grace. Was Cowper saying something negative about God or was he highlighting his own struggle with assurance in the face of circumstances?
I have a couple of thoughts here -and please hear them in the tone of “this is why and how we struggle/wrestle with the issue” still rather than “this is badly and dangerously wrong”.
First, whilst we cannot be 100 percent certain of authorial intent, the immediate circumstances of Cowper’s penning the lyric might help. I knew that Cowper struggled through his life with what looks to have been clinical depression and maybe even CPTSD, I wasn’t aware until Saturday that one of his worst mental health crises happened within a few hours of the hymn being written and he attempted suicide. That does give some indication of how his mood might have affected his thinking. Though, a word of caution here. Yes our moods can affect our thinking but that doesn’t mean that we lose control or that we are necessarily wrong in what we think and feel when depressed.
Secondly, we want to be thinking about typicality. My experience of Christian faith started with a Wesleyan Mission hall, included some experiences of the Charismatic movement and then for a number of years I was in a conservative reformed context prior to returning to a more charismatic context. One observation would be that in some reformed contexts there can be an austere culture. This does give the feel both of a God who hides his smile and people/churches too.
Similarly, hence the mash up, talk of souls held captive by depression is reflective or typical of church cultures that see emotional health issues on terms of strongholds and deliverance.
In other words there seems to me to be a bit of a tie up between theological culture, the words we sing and maybe even the music we sing those words to.
So I think that more important than picking out a few lines of lyrics is the news to think through our theological culture. This is about more than bare doctrine, what do we think but about how what we believe meets up with how we speak, feel and act.
At this stage I want to encourage further thought and discussion about this, so please keep the conversation going.
Faithroots 