I have been bemused while images of the past torment me, flashbacks of all-too-recent encounters with places, people, and things with which I should have never communicated. This morning I woke up and a snippet of song came into my head:
It is my sad duty to inform you of a four-foot restriction in humanoid height.
This odd little line is from Genesis Get Em Out By Friday , in the days when Peter Gabriel was the frontman and strange was the order of the decade.
Of course I can recite just about all of the lyrics for you, should you so desire, but at 5:30 in the morning, the intrusion of a secular song of a band and a genre that I have purposely avoided for the past few years was a most unwelcome visitor to my early morning mental fog.
Sometimes the past just won t leave you alone.
Music used to be an obsession for me.
I was once an owner of over 1,000 CDs, mostly of albums of progressive rock bands from the better parts of the last century. Having experienced a revival of sorts in my life, I destroyed all of my secular CDs, tapes, and records, but went through several different cycles of reacquisition of said albums and subsequent destruction of same, as I backslid and returned, backslid and returned, backslid and returned. It was not until around four years ago that I totally destroyed, once and for all, the last of my secular CDs and never went back.
Well, mostly. There was that time where I BitTorrented several collections of Genesis, Gentle Giant, and They Might Be Giants, but these collections were deleted shortly thereafter, as the guilt from the piracy and the burden that I was acting as a dog returning to its own vomit overcame my desire to keep the music around. At least I didn t spend another several thousand dollars in a desire to build my own earthly kingdom of music.
I have probably owned and destroyed some twenty to thirty-thousand dollars worth of music in my life. To say that I was obsessed is an understatement addicted would be closer to the truth. The change came when I looked at the cover of a boxed set that I had just tossed in the trash can.
I looked into the empty eyes of the lead singer, and saw in those dark, empty eyes something which I had not noticed before or something I knew very well but had denied in my obsession. The quiet voice asked: Tell me, are those eyes the eyes of one filled with the Holy Spirit, or ones of a man filled with something else entirely?
I knew the answer, and from then on, aside from the minor toe-stub of the aforementioned BitTorrent slip mentioned two paragraphs ago, I have only owned Christian, jazz, big band, or classical CDs.
The progressive rock, the depressing stuff that I had formerly immersed myself in, has been gone for some years, and the obsession has since been broken.
Many Christians don t see any harm in secular music, and after overcoming an initial desire to judge these as being bad , wrong , and immoral , I have since decided that others may have more liberties before God in the areas of entertainment or other believers take more liberties out of ignorance than I. As for me, my obsession with secular music was something akin to cocaine or heroin, so therefore, like a reformed alcoholic who can never taste the wine again for danger of return to his former habits, so I can never return to that music.
There s freedom, and then there s freedom. My land of freedom does not include secular music. I am no longer afraid of it, but I do not seek it out, either.
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