London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Depression and creativity

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There is a sorry myth that connects depression, or mental trouble more generally, and creative ability. Depending on what bits of cultural history people know, they cite Richard Curtis’ suicide (or Kurt Cobain’s), Beethoven’s choleric instability, Stephen Fry’s bipolar disorder, or the diagnosed ‘insanity’ of Wiliam Cowper, John Clare and Emily Dickinson. I think the whole thing largely goes back to the ‘tortured artist’ image of the late Romantic poets – those droopingly revolutionary young men who found the world as it is ineffably painful because of their infinitely heightened sensitivities.

Have you guessed I don’t quite agree yet?

One of the things that is often hard for people who haven’t at least ovserved mental illness up close to grasp is that it both is and isn’t part of who you are. One the hand, for pretty much everyone there was a time when you had never had depression (it seems to be very rare to suffer a recognisable form before teenage), and there are times when it is genuinely, fully absent. On the other hand, for a significant number (though apparently it’s actually a minority, showing how the more extreme cases have a disproportionate image) the problems never entirely go away – like a sort of semi-benign tumour, they exist in perpetual flow of remission and relapse with only arbitrary dividing lines as to whether you’re ‘well’ or ‘ill’; for some, at least treatment for depression and perhaps the state itself may become effectively permanent. And it looks conceivable that some people have an innate predisposition towards mental illness, though for others the causes are probably purely external.

Becoming depressed does, in my experience, have a connection with creativity. An entirely negative one. When I am worse, when I am quite seriously depressed, I do not write poetry like Shelley or Byron or Sylvia Plath. I do not write songs like Morrissey or Radiohead. I do not write musical outpourings of melancholy, nor yet do I compose eloquently distressed blog posts. When seriously suffering depression, the odds of me, or, I believe, anyone else creating anything of substance are practically nil. Because, like all other elements of life or activity, there doesn’t seem to be any point or purpose and it seems immensely difficult. Basic life activities like eating and buying food will eventually get done because hunger is still unpleasant even when you’re depressed. Songwriting? Nah. Even picking up a guitar and twanging a couple of notes is exhausting. Ironically, I suspect depression is one of the main reasons many depressed people do not self-harm or attempt suicide. (Yes, go back and read that sentence again.) It simply seems too much effort when all you really want is for everything to go away and yourself to conveniently pass out. Besides, what would a song about being depressed look like? The most characteristic thing about depression (though by no means the only part of it) is the lifeless, metaphorically grey quality of everything. Depressed people become zombified – voices toneless, movements slowed (this last is called psychomotor retardation and is actually a key medical symptom of depression). Its musical expression might perhaps be a succession of sighs accompanied by a drone. Words or melody would be far too vivid to actually convey it – like adding black pencil lines to Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire.

As to whether people inclined to be depressed are more likely to be inclined to be creative … well frankly that’s all speculation. I’m not going to get much involved, but it’s certainly clear that you don’t need mental health problems to create viable art. I suspect the explanation for the apparently disproportionate success of depression sufferers in the arts may be twofold: 1. The sort of people artists (in the broad sense) know, and the sort of pressures and prejudices they live with (or without) mean they are more likely to suspect and seek help with mental illnesses. Perhaps latent weaknesses are more likely to be expressed under their working and living conditions. 2. Art is often more successful when created from unusual or different perspectives. The perspective of the mentally ill is inherently and always different.

What I really want to do with this post is warn anyone reading it off glamourising mental illness or thinking that being depressed fuels creativity. Being depressed doesn’t fuel anything, it just makes everything more difficult. I say this from the clearer perspective of being in fairly good remission that enables me to write this sort of post at all.

What makes something interesting?

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So, here’s an observation on my blogging. When I wrote about music – music in the Christian community, as participated in by practically countless Anglo-Saxon practising Christians, not academic obscurities but how the every-week Sunday service works, could work, should work – I attracted a certain small number of readers and followers. When I – finally, reluctantly, with a feeling that it was somewhat irrelevant and unnecessary – I did a few posts relating to my history of mental illness, suddenly the level of attention shot up.

Why? Unless I much mistake, the number of people who take part in congregational singing of a broadly ‘worship’ nature is not going to be significantly smaller than the number of mentally ill Christians. To be honest, I suspect the number of practising Christians with mental illnesses is probably not that much greater than the number of people actively involved in creating / producing / leading / etc. congregational music. So I don’t think the answer lies with groups of people.

I think it lies with need. At the end of the day, most of the time, most people, even most songwriters or church musicians, are not feeling any sense of needing advice or reflections or ideas about church music. They’re just getting on with it, and probably quite happy with the traditions, genres or norms they’re working in. I may feel that there are problems with the writing and singing of music in worship as often practised today, but they don’t generally share those concerns and they’re certainly unlikely to pursue the arguments of someone suggesting they’re doing something wrong.

Whereas, anyone with a mental health problem, just like a physical one, knows something is wrong. You pretty much always know when you’re ill. But mental illness doesn’t have as predictable fixes as most medical ailments. It’s a bit like cancer (with better life expectancy, obviously): you try this treatment, that one, different people recommend different ones, there’s no definitive best one though you probably shouldn’t mix several at the same time, you may have remission, relapse, full recovery – you can’t really tell in advance, you just have to suck it and see. And one of the consequences of that is that a lot of the relevant people are open to new ideas, new possible answers to some of the questions, a lot of the time (I think we all suffer some levels of information or rather suggestion overload at least at times!).

I am profoundly grateful to God and my neighbours that the following has not been my experience. But it is also true that some significant portions of Christian theology, believers, leadership and spirituality have not dealt well with mental illness. It has been too often (to be honest, even once would be too often) said in my hearing that churches, expressed beliefs and leaders’ words and actions have added to the pain and confusion, the sense of shame, guilt or worthlessness of mentally ill believers, rather than affirming their status as beloved children of God regardless of their mental health and their ability to behave or feel like the majority of members of their congregation. Clearly, there are some Christians with mental illness who are more urgently seeking a new answer to the paradox of the thing they most follow and trust seeming to deny that the situation they are in should ever really be able to happen unless through either hypochondria or religious hypocrisy.

So perhaps I should try to keep writing about mental health and faith instead of songwriting. Because people are reading, and it seems for some people it is helping. But there’s a wider question here for the church rather than bespectacled middle-class bloggers.

Trying to impose my own agenda didn’t work. In the age of narrowcasting and vast consumer choice of media voices, you can say what you like but if it doesn’t form part of a conversation people are already engaged in, they won’t listen. No medium is unignoreable today. In which case, are we listening, as a church, to the conversations people are having? Are we trying to work out what we can talk about that is on people’s minds, that they are talking about, or are we trying to impose our own agenda? Because I know what happens if you write about songwriting when really you have an audience for posts about depression …

Mind your language

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I was in a Christian bookshop today, buying my next few months’ Bible study notes. As usual, they had some recently released worship album playing in the background. And in the middle of whatever it was, I heard this line:

Depression has no place in your presence O God

I very nearly walked straight out in silent protest. I seriously thought about saying something nasty to the man at the till when I did in fact, like an over-civilised person, go to buy my books.

Perhaps we need to dig back into what was going on behind that immediate shock and pain (I think my pulse rate may still be raised now. Or that may be from biking home).

I have suffered from clinical depression for about the last eighteen months. Not to a suicide attempts and hospitalisation degree, but pills and therapy and at times feeling really terrible and quite often feeling not within most people’s bounds of the normal.

Now let me make this clear: Depression is not necessarily a permanent part of me. Unlike the Type 1 diabetes I’ve been more recently diagnosed with, there’s a good chance that I may eventually completely recover from it. It is quite easy to make the case that it’s not intrinsically part of who I am.

But let’s look at that line again: Depression has no place in God’s presence. In which case, what do I do about praying while (as at present) I am still depressed? There are other things that I haven’t (yet, says the part of me that hopes) succeeded in removing from my life which I think probably don’t have a place in God’s presence. But I like to think that I can make a strong effort to, as it were, leave them at the door of the church. Not that I have to be in church to be in the presence of God, obviously, but spiritual ‘places’ can have similar properties. But. I know that I can’t leave depression at the door. It’s too deeply entangled. If it was that easy to be temporarily free from depression, I would have cost the NHS and my own back pocket a lot less money by now. So do I abandon the idea of entering into God’s presence unless and until I’m fully recovered from depression?

Here’s a further point: depression makes it very difficult to main a good spiritual life. If everything seems black, or grey and unremarkable, then perceiving God’s blessing and having an attitude of joyous thankfulness is well-nigh impossible. If, at an extreme, what you think you most want is to not be aware of anything, not have to bother about existing, any more (and that happens significantly more often than actually being dangerously suicidal, I can assure you), then eternal life doesn’t seem like much of a gift. And if you can’t get away from the voices and memories and images in your head that are about anything, past, present, future or hypothetical, that isn’t going to be positive or helpful, then prayer, worship, praise, confession, adoration, the whole spiritual shebang, is like swimming through treacle.

Under those circumstances, it wouldn’t really help to be given the impression that my current state of mind, or mental illness, is incompatible with spirituality, would it?

Now I am a rational person, and I don’t actually believe whoever wrote that song, or ad-libbed that line, had a crusade against mentally ill people. And, though I know counter-examples are fairly widespread, I’m prepared to give him/her the benefit of the doubt and assume they don’t think you can only become depressed if you are spiritually bankrupt to start with. The line I’m quoting came at the end of a list of things which the song says have no place in God’s presence – things like pain, illness, fear, etc. I assume (as I didn’t hear or at least didn’t listen to the start of the song and the end just seemed to become ever less coherent and ever more an abstract emotional outpouring) that the idea is when we stand fully, immediately in God’s presence in the resurrection, God dwelling among His people and being their light (see St Paul, Revelation etc.), all these things will be driven out of us by that pure and completely purifying presence. Which is actually wonderful and no cause for angsty posts like this at all.

But here’s the thing. I’m a Christian, and I’m doing fairly well with my depression at the moment, circumstances considered. And, it must be said loud and clear before I enf this post, my churches and my Christian friends and family have had no Job’s comforters among them about my mental illness. I have received great support, great advice, great testimony of living through similar times, immense love and understanding, and no suggestion that depression’s hold on me means I have inadequate faith or a lack of true spirituality. Unlike, sadly, quite a few, I have no reason to have a martyr complex about my depression. But I had an instant visceral reaction to the apparent idea this song presented that it took significant willpower to suppress; and it took more willpower to actually think about what might have been the intent behind the line and write a relatively balanced post about it.

We need to be careful what we say. We need to be willing to retract and rephrase and explain. Because like any other group of people, and I’m afraid the church is only another human institution, we are too given to having our own slang, which we understand and don’t even think about by long exposure, which can mean something very different to other people who aren’t used to it. We need to listen very hard to everyone that isn’t a member of our group because they may be hearing some very unpleasant things from us even when we don’t think we’re speaking to them.

After all, it may seem fine to go round proclaiming ‘Jesus is the answer!’. But not if the question was ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’

Is performance less than worship?

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Have you noticed how professional Christian musicians are almost anxious to make the distinction between ‘performed’ music and ‘worship’ music? It seems particularly like musicians (or their marketing teams?) who push at the edges of currently normal church style are keen to make it clear they’re not changing to producing ‘purely performance songs’. The implication is that music for acts of worship is as it were pure and the musician would be in some sense sullied by sinking to produce music to merely listen to, even (Heaven forbid!) to gig to an audience.

Now firstly, obviously, this is unfair. There is no reason why any musician should confine themselves to writing for one context, and I personally don’t see why the same person shouldn’t gig and lead worship in churches – obviously the two would look different, but all the more reason to acknowledge that you embrace both and therefore see the distinction.

And, for that matter, I don’t see that in the body of Christ where the nose cannot claim it doesn’t need the eye (etc., etc., – 1 Corinthians), it’s a good idea to treat Christian music for listening to outside of communal worship as ‘lesser than’ Christian music for singing communally in acts of worship. That way lie all sorts of dangerous misunderstandings of how being God’s people works, and a great deal of missed opportunities for humility.

But if that’s the case, is there any reason left for the anxiety? Well, yes, I think so. There are different requirements for gigs than services – at least congregational singing in services. Gig songs don’t have to be easy to sing along to, can be autobiographical or narrative of specific events without expecting similar events in the lives of most of the congregation, and are much less controversially open to substantial instrumental sections. Congregational songs don’t have to repeat their key points as much because people can generally see the words written down rather than just hearing them over the PA; and can generally afford to be less musically varied because people are actively engaged in them rather than just listening.

But, I think the heart of the problem that leads to the anxiety about being mistaken for ‘performance music’ is that a great deal of our new church music is very performance-like. Most of our name Christian artists, ‘worship leaders’ included, have their progress measured by album releases – of studio releases tailored to being listened to in private, with no evident space in them for congregational singing, and probably sounding very different to any likely church version. And unfortunately, those big name artists at their most public outings tend to sound a lot like they’re doing a gig. For instance, I’m always appalled when I come across a bunch of musicians providing accompaniment for church singing who can’t hear the congregation. How can you ever do that? I need to hear the congregation because I can’t possibly be serving their needs if I can’t respond to them. I always like being able to see the congregation as well – it makes my life planning songs easier if I could see how many mouths were moving the last time I did this new one.

Unfortunately, our most hyped and most attempted to be emulated church music times are, I think, overly influenced by secular rock gig culture. If we really care about creating church music that’s not for performance, we’ll do more about opening up the song as we thought of it to local use (readily available sheet music and, if more than just the tune and the chords is ‘part of the song’, full transcript of those other parts too) and more about playing and singing to support, not drown out, the congregation, and maybe just a little less about big name appearances and overpowering volume of one voice against the voices of all the other supposed worshippers.

The difficulty of Christmas

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By way of introduction, here’s an anecdote: My church holds a Beer and Carols service in the function room of a local pub every Christmas, and I think this is wonderful. We do carols folk-style, with me on fiddle and usually guitars and mandolin, and lots of people come along because it’s an event at a great local pub, and get to sing songs about the birth of Christ and be around people praying and talking about God becoming one of us, and all of that’s fantastic. But …

I had a few conversations in the preparation for the event that could be condensed down to something like this:

Matt [our vicar]: We should get the kids to sing Away in a Manger again, that was great last time [when it was unprepared and my wife made me do it].

Me: Do we have to? I can’t stand Away in a Manger.

Matt: Ah, but you can’t approach it on a theological level, you have to just experience it.

Me: The tune’s a dirge, the words are pants and I don’t believe any child under secondary-school age can understand them. Plus they’re in bad English.

Matt: Yeah, but most people that come to this thing don’t want to engage deeply with with the theological meaning of Christmas, they want to drink some beer, sing some carols they know and engage in some nostalgia. You’ve got to give people what they want to some extent.

And this takes me to the heart of this post. I’m a churched, thinking, fairly well-read, ‘intellectual believer’. At Christmas, I want to talk about the significance of incarnation, and what points the Gospel writers were making by including angelic messages to women, or Zoroastrian astrologers, or the deaths of innocent children, in their accounts. I don’t really want to rerun crib scenes which I know owe more to uninformed later tradition than to either Biblical or historical authenticity. I also have knee-jerk political responses to some well-known carols:

O little town of Bethlehem …… How emptied of people, oppressed and divided by military occupation we see thee lie

Once in Royal David’s city … stood a big dock-off wall largely surrounded by abandoned houses and illegally settled land.

But, at Christmas our churches are filled with the unchurched as at no other time. And those people want a collective celebration of tradition and nostalgia that’s acceptable to their grandma and accessible to their kids. We should give it to them in large part because: a) we should love them as our neighbours b) if we give them an insider-facing discussion of things outside their usual frame of reference they’ll justifiably feel affronted and won’t come back c) if we give them an evangelisation package thinly wrapped in a couple of carols they’ll feel attacked and won’t come back.

But at the same time, we should discuss incarnation and those passages – all of them, not just the ones in the Nine Lessons and Carols liturgy – at Christmas, because Advent is different and if we don’t think about them at Christmas we won’t any other time in the year.

So do I have any helpful suggestions, or am I just going to complicate the hardest-work season of the year for pretty much anyone involved in a church by making it the most overthought as well?

Well, I think the church needs to rediscover the season of Christmas. How we interact with those we don’t usually have through the doors takes precedence on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, quite clearly. But those like me who need a bit more intellectual and spiritual meat out of Christmas can be told to wait for the (usually two) Sundays in Christmas, and to spend that time with the Incarnation once the congregation has more or less returned to being people who are comfortable with being in church and the God-chat.

Realistically, whichever the biggest Christmas service is (often Christmas Eve, or a carol service a few days earlier) is probably the biggest evangelism opportunity most ordinary local churches have. But it’s also a tricky one to handle. What we can’t do, for the reasons outlined above, is turn it into some kind of ghastly seeker service with an altar call. Let’s put it this way: if you do that, it won’t be the church’s biggest evangelism opportunity next year. We must allow the people in general to celebrate Christmas with us – and that probably includes syrupy Victorian carols (this year I got asked to play some of them slower … sigh), well-known readings in old translations and even a Nativity play unrecognisable to either Matthew or Luke. BUT. We also have to make it clear why we do all this – why it matters to us as Christians more, and in a different way, than to those for whom it’s chiefly comforting and artistically pleasant routine. Not just as an add-on, a few words thrown in near the end that don’t join up with the rest of the service; but it should be clear from how we do Christmas that we love all the old stuff, and the familiarity, and the tradition, chiefly because God loved us enough to leave perfect happiness and become one of us, a very ordinary human baby, to heal our relationship with Him, when we couldn’t possibly manage to reach out and heal it ourselves. And maybe that’s a message those of us in the running of Christmas – practising for two big services back-to-back and making sure we can play the descant verses, if they’re musicians like me – need to remind ourselves of, as well as our Christmas congregations.

Sorry for the interruption …

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If you wondered where I’ve been for so long, I’ve basically been mad busy (and also trying to get back into my fight against mental illness). One of the things I’ve been mad busy doing has been putting more energy into my main band, Ragdoll, including our new website! Maybe you’d like to check it out:

www.ragdollband.co.uk

last.FM

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Just attempted to (I think it worked) upload the EP to last.FM. Prize to the first person who can convincingly show they’ve scrobbled it!

Another hat

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I’ve dropped some sidelong hints in this website (and for that matter in the songs I write) about my beliefs and theological thinking differing from the evangelical with a dash of charismatic superchurch concensus the vast majority of ‘worship music’ (whatever that might mean … ) emerges from. And rather, at least at this time, than try and write a theological tract, I thought I’d give a slightly more general indication of where at least some of my thought goes by letting you go and listen to the first time anyone has ever persuaded me to give a full sermon. (This may prove to be a watch this space rather than a one-off, but much exploring still needs to be done there) It might make clear some of the reasons why I wrote so strongly about lyrics the congregation can sign up to, if it gives you an idea of what I do or don’t sign up to in contrast to some very good contemporary Christian songwriters. Here’s the link:

http://www.home-online.org/2012/10/the-good-book-martins-talk-audio/

Why I am not a worship leader

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Anyone (if there is anyone) who has read most of my blog posts, or taken a look around the rest of this site, may have noticed a conspicuous absence for the general area I’m putting myself in. It’s the phrase ‘worship leader’, and it’s absent for the good reason that I don’t like it in general and particularly as potentially applied to me. Why not?

Well, it’s largely to do with the definition of ‘worship’. Now, I’m willing to accept the use of the word to indicate in general what a lot of Christians spend an hour or two doing in a church on Sundays. It’s not a very accurate description – because actually any well-constructed church service includes adoration, praise, the reading of Scripture, teaching, confession and intercession as well, and a large number include Communion as well. But it’s well established, and I can perhaps see that from the New Testament on, it has been used as a catch-all term because it’s arguably the most important element. But if that’s the definition of ‘worship’ you’re going to have, then musicians aren’t generally worship leaders aren’t they? That title would belong in general to the ordained ministers, the preachers, the pastors – whoever actually leads the whole event, not just the bits of it that consist in (largely congregationally sung) music.

The problem is the relatively recent and minority use of the word ‘worship’ to mean precisely that congregationally sung music element. ‘The worship team’ is used in some churches to mean ‘the band’, perhaps a word that couldn’t apply to any secular item seems more comfortable to a mentality of not just being not of the world but also not being in it more than you can help. People will talk about ‘a time of worship’ to mean basically some songs back-to-back, perhaps with little instrumental segments or the lead singer praying on a mike in between. So why am I so evidently riled by this? Well, I think as a term it’s both too large and too small. Too large because of the implication that no worship takes place in the rest of what we do in (or perhaps even out of?) of church, which is a terrifying concept – that we might become incapable of that emotional and conscious attitude to God without the prompting of a particular kind of music. Too small because I think church music should be capable of engaging in all the elements of devotion listed above. If we call our music ‘worship’, what odds are there that we will actually write, or choose to sing with our congregations, songs of sorrow, pleading, confession … ? But we should, so let’s not have a name that puts us off. In Stuart Townend‘s oft-repeated turn of phrase, we have too many songs about our experience of God and not enough about God Himself. Let’s not adopt terminology that reinforces that lamentable trend.

The other reason I suppose I don’t like the term is because it seems to puff up those of us who may be, at least part of the time, up the front of a church with a guitar and the vocs mike that’s turned up the loudest. I’ve already said that in my eyes the term belongs more validly to those who actually lead entire acts of worship, and that’s certainly a good reason for not seeking to promote ourselves to that status. But also, it adds a considerable sheen of grandeur to what I see as basically making music and hoping to help others worship God through that. It implies a placing of the person in question in a metaphorical spotlight if not a literal one, and I don’t like that. Church musicians lead congregations not perform to audiences, remember, and the role of singers in congregational singing is to provide a lead for the congregation to follow, not a performance for them to listen to. I have wide enough experience to be used to singing in congregations where there is no vocal lead, only instrumental accompaniment, and I see bands with miked singers as in a continuum with that. I’m always upset when I can see some of the congregation sitting in slightly surly silence during songs – I think that automatically means as an organiser (not necessarily a singer / instrumentalist) I’ve done something wrong.

So I stick to labels I think are objective: singer, musician, songwriter. Those are objective; I do indisputably do all the things those names imply. But at least unless Kingsway put me under contract (their website refers to their artists as worship leaders), I will stay away from being a worship leader where possible.