Charismania, truncation, and understanding

[aron]

I was listening to a Christian musician go over and over a verse from the Bible. It was in a "Praise and Worship" setting, and the musician, a keyboardist/vocalist with a band, kept repeating the same phrase about 25 times. But they would add things to "instensify" the verse and make the crowd hand-wave and arm-wave and stay engaged.

It made me think about the LC practice of pray-reading, taking one phrase and going over and over again, building "emotional context" or subjectivity into the word, but losing context in meaning, as the original sentence was once part of a narrative, with a beginning and an ending. In other words, there was a story there, once; now there was just a verse in a vacuum, filled with whatever imaginary things one might choose to put.

In this case, a phrase could be removed from context, with a few "special words" over-stressed, and suddenly a "hidden" meaning pops out! Suddenly we are ecstatic because "God has revealed His heart" to us. There's certainly a place for "Cry out and Shout, O inhabitants of Zion/For Great is the Holy One of Israel in the Midst of Thee"; but there's also context. There was once a meaning to the words, which conveyed understanding to the original intended audience. And, listening to that Christian musician, and the crowd focusing on a verse or two, and ignoring the rest of the chapter, much less the book, made me think that there was potentially a loss of meaning, a loss of understanding, associated with this kind of practice.

We've already lost so much by the intervening years; why lose even more by truncating the text into bites that we then re-configure according to our subjective and sensory leadings? Soberness is also called for, along with ecstasy.