We are in the car listening to Underoath’s album Lost in the Sound of Separation. Caleb knows this is not the kind of music I like to listen to, but says I should still be exposed to it. He keeps commenting on how cool the drumming is, so I try to pay special attention to the rhythm. Though I don’t understand it, I can appreciate the intricacy of the beats. I have a harder time enjoying the hard screamo sound.
We read the lyrics of one of the songs: confusion, brokenness. Caleb’s impression (he has read through the lyrics to all the songs and listened to the CD many times), is deep angst (remorse, regret) over sin and the brokenness it causes.
We near the end of the CD; the music takes on a different character. No more screaming desperation—instead, the lyricism of sadness. My heart hurts. This beauty, flowing from sadness and despair, is inextricably linked with the darkness it wars against. It is Galadriel: though she expends her power to aid the ringbearer, the fires of Mount Doom that break the power of Sauron cause her also to “fade and go into the West.” Intertwined with evil, her beauty fights against the very fabric of its own being.
Complete change: the dark beauty and intricate percussion give way to the simple repetitiveness of a ring shout.
“Good God, can you still get us home,
Good God, can you still get us home,
Good God, can you still get us home?”
The ring shout, a chant of slaves working day
after day
after heart-wrenching day
with no personal gain from their labor, and the hope—the possibility—of freedom like a faint pin-prick of light in an entire universe of blackness.
This ring shout, a chant of sinners working day
after day
after heart-wrenching day
to pay up for their sin, yet accomplishing nothing. So enslaved to sin that they wonder if even the Lord Almighty, the completely powerful God, “the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 40) is able to free them.
The climax: a juxtaposition of hopeless ritual, melodious despair, and the inhuman torment of a scream. Fighting each other, these sounds work together to show me not only the complete hopelessness of the lost without Christ, but also the utter depravity of my own little white lies.