The Familiar
I remember when I first listened to the Beatles.
I was in middle school band at the time, and one of the pieces we were playing was medley of a few of their songs. We played a lot of different music, but I knew that my parents happened to have a bunch of Beatles CDs in their music collection. So, one afternoon, I grabbed the album that had the first song, which was "Eleanor Rigby", and gave it a spin.
While that first song happened to be awfully morose, I soon found myself listening to other songs, which were more upbeat, and started sampling from all of the other albums. I was astonished by how good all of it was. My parents owned most of the collection on CDs. When I had worn all of these ragged from repeated listening, I turned to the vinyl collection in our basement to find the other remaining albums, and started playing the LPs on our turntables. Later, I bought all of the albums my parents were missing on CD.
My favorite was always the White Album. I uncovered this in the fall of 1996. "Ob-La-Di" was immediately a joy to hear, and it kept me exuberant for a solid month. I remember the haunting melodies of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and the cacophony of "Revolution #9" getting me into the spirit of the season around Halloween. "Yer Blues" and "Why Don't We Do It In the Road" struck me as oddly rebellious for songs from my parent's generation. (I was only 14, and still didn't understand the adult world.)
One song that struck me in a particularly odd way was Paul McCartney's bubble gum-y love song "I Will". I asked my mom about this one. She looked surprised, then told me that many years ago, when I was a young child, she used to sing this song to me when she was putting me to bed. The song resonated with me because it reminded me, perhaps subconciously, of a time from my past.
I didn't think about this until much later, but the reason I loved the music of the Beatles so much, and immediately, wasn't necessarily because it was good music. It certainly is good, but I took to it so quickly because it was familiar. In the 1990's, the music of the Beatles was everywhere. It wasn't topping the Billboard charts, but it's the kind of classic music that's always filling the nooks and crannies on the radio, people are playing the music in their homes, and parodies of the songs were even floating around what passed for the Internet in those days.
In short, it was music that I had heard before, long before I had associated all of those familiar melodies with the moniker "The Beatles".
There was another factor as well. I was keenly aware of how popular the Beatles were. If you walked into just about any social situation, there was bound to be at least one or two other people who would share your fondness for the music. This was a new experience for me. Prior to this, I had been listening to musical soundtracks, not Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the other music that teenagers were into. Suddenly, musical taste became a way to connect with others.
A few years ago, when I started to study Christianity, I remember instantly connecting with the words in the New Testament. Looking back now, I think there was a similar force at work. I enjoyed reading the Gospels because all of these idioms, expressions, and aphorisms (are those all the same thing?) were things that I had been hearing in dribs and drabs, in many different contexts, for years. They struck a chord with me for the same reason that the Beatles' music did: they were familiar to me, in a non-specific, general way. There were encounters with the church early in my childhood that I didn't remember until many years after this.
The social aspect was crucial as well. I was part of big community around this time, and I knew that many of the people I associated with and looked up to were active members in one church or another. Getting acquainted with the religion was a good way to find common ground with others, and potentially bond over the shared interest.
The first thing I did, after getting familiar with the structure of the Bible itself, was to start learning the language that the Gospels were originally written in: Koine Greek. It's neither the ancient Greek of the popular philosophers, nor ancient Greek, but a version of the language that was popular in the Hellistic world at the time. It uses the same alphabet, and in terms of vocabulary, there is quite a bit of overlap with the other versions of Greek.
I didn't get very far with this. I learned how to say a few phrases and some of the grammatical rules, but when I started reading, I found that knowing the Greek really didn't offer much additional insight into the meaning of the text. Some English-speaking Christians insist that you have to use the King James Bible, since this was the first translation into English, and it's the closest to the original Greek language. I guess only a heathen would be caught on Judgment Day with a NIV copy of the Good Book in their hands. I've never understood this position; if getting as close to the source as possible matters so much, why don't people just learn the original Greek and read scripture that way?
One reason I found studying Christianity so fascinating (unlike the Beatles) is that it was the first time I dipped my hand into the annals of ancient history. I had classes in high school, but I had never really spent any time reflecting on how people must have lived a couple thousand years ago. Suddenly, I find myself thrust back to the time when the Romans had an empire, and were occupying the region-formerly-not-known-as-Palestine, where many of the Jewish people were residing.
I never could make sense of the stories without understanding the historical context in which they were being told. Understanding the original language (or the ye olde confusing English version) gives you almost no additional insights. On the other hand, knowing the way the world was at the time Jesus had his ministry is mandatory to properly grasping any of it.
I can draw parallels from this second topic back to the first as well: for about a year after I discovered them, I listened to the Beatles almost exclusively. You could even say religiously. It was simply such musical perfection that I didn't want to pollute my ears with anything less than what was clearly the best. (Or so I felt at the time.) I would take one album and work through it track by track, becoming obsessed with one particular one for a day or two, before moving on to the next. There was always some of their music reverberating in my head.
So what happened? I ran out of music. I didn't advance through the albums chronologically, but the last one I happened to acquire and listen to was their final album, Let it Be. Even as I was listening to this one, it started to feel like I was trying to force my own enjoyment of music that wasn't particularly great. I read later that, by the time they made this last album, the Beatles were pretty frustrated with each other.
So out of necessity, I moved on. I started expanding into other music of the same era, trying to find a fresh source of the joy that the Beatles had brought me in other artist's music. It was around this time that I started listening to popular music; this was just in time to start hearing Hanson, the Spice Girls, and Matchbox 20. I stumbled through darkness for a while before finding the kind of music that I really enjoyed.
On a timeline, I was actively interested in Christianity, and tried to practice it one form or another, for just over a year. I ran into the same roadblock: after reading the Gospels for the 20th time, the writings themselves lose the luster they possessed when you're first getting acquainted with them. After having read dozens of books about Christianity, you stop encountering any new ideas. All of it becomes a well-worn path. And in the massive realm of ideas in this world, I felt claustrophobic in trying to keep the ideas from one book above all others, and to reconcile everything else with this one thing.
The best thing to emerge from my investigation of Christianity was an interest in understanding more about the past. There is so much to know about ancient history; for thousands of years, people have been living lives in situations strikingly similar to our own. Since they started to write, they've left us a rough record what they have to say, and what their own experiences were. They are remarkably like us; considering the viscissitudes of history, this should serve as both a relief and an admonishment.
I don't understand much yet. Just as I stumbled around listening to the Spice Girls when trying to find my own musical identity in the wake of the Beatles, I'm stumbling around in the dark, thumbing through humanity's collective past to figure out where someone like me is supposed to fit into this whole mess. Or, if nothing else, only to comprehend it.
There's an oft-cited quote by St. Augustine: "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page." On this point, I agree with him. But the world is full of books, full of ideas. All of them, in aggregate, are so much deeper and richer than the parables espoused by single holy book. In the grand world library, any one book is only one page. Despite his travels, why he chose to spend his life understanding the world through the lens of one particular page, I'll never understand.
I was in middle school band at the time, and one of the pieces we were playing was medley of a few of their songs. We played a lot of different music, but I knew that my parents happened to have a bunch of Beatles CDs in their music collection. So, one afternoon, I grabbed the album that had the first song, which was "Eleanor Rigby", and gave it a spin.
While that first song happened to be awfully morose, I soon found myself listening to other songs, which were more upbeat, and started sampling from all of the other albums. I was astonished by how good all of it was. My parents owned most of the collection on CDs. When I had worn all of these ragged from repeated listening, I turned to the vinyl collection in our basement to find the other remaining albums, and started playing the LPs on our turntables. Later, I bought all of the albums my parents were missing on CD.
My favorite was always the White Album. I uncovered this in the fall of 1996. "Ob-La-Di" was immediately a joy to hear, and it kept me exuberant for a solid month. I remember the haunting melodies of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and the cacophony of "Revolution #9" getting me into the spirit of the season around Halloween. "Yer Blues" and "Why Don't We Do It In the Road" struck me as oddly rebellious for songs from my parent's generation. (I was only 14, and still didn't understand the adult world.)
One song that struck me in a particularly odd way was Paul McCartney's bubble gum-y love song "I Will". I asked my mom about this one. She looked surprised, then told me that many years ago, when I was a young child, she used to sing this song to me when she was putting me to bed. The song resonated with me because it reminded me, perhaps subconciously, of a time from my past.
I didn't think about this until much later, but the reason I loved the music of the Beatles so much, and immediately, wasn't necessarily because it was good music. It certainly is good, but I took to it so quickly because it was familiar. In the 1990's, the music of the Beatles was everywhere. It wasn't topping the Billboard charts, but it's the kind of classic music that's always filling the nooks and crannies on the radio, people are playing the music in their homes, and parodies of the songs were even floating around what passed for the Internet in those days.
In short, it was music that I had heard before, long before I had associated all of those familiar melodies with the moniker "The Beatles".
There was another factor as well. I was keenly aware of how popular the Beatles were. If you walked into just about any social situation, there was bound to be at least one or two other people who would share your fondness for the music. This was a new experience for me. Prior to this, I had been listening to musical soundtracks, not Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the other music that teenagers were into. Suddenly, musical taste became a way to connect with others.
A few years ago, when I started to study Christianity, I remember instantly connecting with the words in the New Testament. Looking back now, I think there was a similar force at work. I enjoyed reading the Gospels because all of these idioms, expressions, and aphorisms (are those all the same thing?) were things that I had been hearing in dribs and drabs, in many different contexts, for years. They struck a chord with me for the same reason that the Beatles' music did: they were familiar to me, in a non-specific, general way. There were encounters with the church early in my childhood that I didn't remember until many years after this.
The social aspect was crucial as well. I was part of big community around this time, and I knew that many of the people I associated with and looked up to were active members in one church or another. Getting acquainted with the religion was a good way to find common ground with others, and potentially bond over the shared interest.
The first thing I did, after getting familiar with the structure of the Bible itself, was to start learning the language that the Gospels were originally written in: Koine Greek. It's neither the ancient Greek of the popular philosophers, nor ancient Greek, but a version of the language that was popular in the Hellistic world at the time. It uses the same alphabet, and in terms of vocabulary, there is quite a bit of overlap with the other versions of Greek.
I didn't get very far with this. I learned how to say a few phrases and some of the grammatical rules, but when I started reading, I found that knowing the Greek really didn't offer much additional insight into the meaning of the text. Some English-speaking Christians insist that you have to use the King James Bible, since this was the first translation into English, and it's the closest to the original Greek language. I guess only a heathen would be caught on Judgment Day with a NIV copy of the Good Book in their hands. I've never understood this position; if getting as close to the source as possible matters so much, why don't people just learn the original Greek and read scripture that way?
One reason I found studying Christianity so fascinating (unlike the Beatles) is that it was the first time I dipped my hand into the annals of ancient history. I had classes in high school, but I had never really spent any time reflecting on how people must have lived a couple thousand years ago. Suddenly, I find myself thrust back to the time when the Romans had an empire, and were occupying the region-formerly-not-known-as-Palestine, where many of the Jewish people were residing.
I never could make sense of the stories without understanding the historical context in which they were being told. Understanding the original language (or the ye olde confusing English version) gives you almost no additional insights. On the other hand, knowing the way the world was at the time Jesus had his ministry is mandatory to properly grasping any of it.
I can draw parallels from this second topic back to the first as well: for about a year after I discovered them, I listened to the Beatles almost exclusively. You could even say religiously. It was simply such musical perfection that I didn't want to pollute my ears with anything less than what was clearly the best. (Or so I felt at the time.) I would take one album and work through it track by track, becoming obsessed with one particular one for a day or two, before moving on to the next. There was always some of their music reverberating in my head.
So what happened? I ran out of music. I didn't advance through the albums chronologically, but the last one I happened to acquire and listen to was their final album, Let it Be. Even as I was listening to this one, it started to feel like I was trying to force my own enjoyment of music that wasn't particularly great. I read later that, by the time they made this last album, the Beatles were pretty frustrated with each other.
So out of necessity, I moved on. I started expanding into other music of the same era, trying to find a fresh source of the joy that the Beatles had brought me in other artist's music. It was around this time that I started listening to popular music; this was just in time to start hearing Hanson, the Spice Girls, and Matchbox 20. I stumbled through darkness for a while before finding the kind of music that I really enjoyed.
On a timeline, I was actively interested in Christianity, and tried to practice it one form or another, for just over a year. I ran into the same roadblock: after reading the Gospels for the 20th time, the writings themselves lose the luster they possessed when you're first getting acquainted with them. After having read dozens of books about Christianity, you stop encountering any new ideas. All of it becomes a well-worn path. And in the massive realm of ideas in this world, I felt claustrophobic in trying to keep the ideas from one book above all others, and to reconcile everything else with this one thing.
The best thing to emerge from my investigation of Christianity was an interest in understanding more about the past. There is so much to know about ancient history; for thousands of years, people have been living lives in situations strikingly similar to our own. Since they started to write, they've left us a rough record what they have to say, and what their own experiences were. They are remarkably like us; considering the viscissitudes of history, this should serve as both a relief and an admonishment.
I don't understand much yet. Just as I stumbled around listening to the Spice Girls when trying to find my own musical identity in the wake of the Beatles, I'm stumbling around in the dark, thumbing through humanity's collective past to figure out where someone like me is supposed to fit into this whole mess. Or, if nothing else, only to comprehend it.
There's an oft-cited quote by St. Augustine: "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page." On this point, I agree with him. But the world is full of books, full of ideas. All of them, in aggregate, are so much deeper and richer than the parables espoused by single holy book. In the grand world library, any one book is only one page. Despite his travels, why he chose to spend his life understanding the world through the lens of one particular page, I'll never understand.