Memoirs of a De/Reconstructed Faith
Hannah Snavely (University of California, Riverside)
SEM Student News Incoming Associate Editor
April 4, 2021: My faith community gathered outdoors for Easter Sunday after a year of isolation. As a singer and pianist for the worship team of a small Protestant church near my university, I comprised one part of a multigenerational, interracial ensemble whose members came from a wide range of musical backgrounds. As the band played together again, I juggled the many skills I had not used since life became virtual: transposing on the fly, finding vocal harmonies for an unfamiliar song, improvising on the keyboard even though I could not hear the pitches I was playing through the speakers. I trusted that the lead singer would scoop the pick-up note, with which I would flawlessly harmonize. I anticipated that the guitarist would pause right before the chorus and then resume the animated strumming pattern. And I hoped the pianist would play the chord including the pitch I planned to sing. Since we rehearsed each song only once, it was my faith in the other musicians—and myself—that carried me to the end of the ritual. * * *Faith, and specifically my upbringing in Christianity, was the driving force that led me to pursue a career in ethnomusicology; today, faith remains the most nebulous and elusive component of my graduate school career. I obsessively seek to understand spiritual experiences through music. At the same time, university training accelerated the inevitable deconstruction of my beliefs, a trend common among young, educated, Christians in the U.S. today. I pulled at the illogical threads of my childhood theologies, particularly the narratives regarding human creation and death, until the entire religion unraveled. University “indoctrination” and “empiricism” further pounded the remains of that faith out of me, threw it on the ground and stomped again and again until it lay splintered and twitching, gasping for breath. I sat and mourned over the carnage for three years, attempting unsuccessfully to reconstruct my faith, to put the fragments back together. As ethnomusicologists, we rarely discuss faith unless we study religious music, focusing on how people express their beliefs through music. Even then, scholars often frame the faith of those whose practices they study within the contexts of communal identities (Ingalls, Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Sherinian 2018), deep listening (Becker 2004,77–80), or ritual theory (Hagedorn 200, 108; Bohlman 1996, 398). In Music as Social Life, Thomas Turino offers Mihaly Ciskszentmihalyi’s theories of flow, or a state optimal experience and being in the zone, to explain what happens to humans in musical ritual (2008, 4–5). Other times, faith is necessarily decentered for the sake of building compelling arguments that reach a broader scholarly audience, such as in Mellonee Burnim’s groundbreaking article on insider ethnography methodologies (Burnim 1985). Jeff Todd Titon went so far as to say that religious insiders’ work “could never be taken confidently as scientific and unbiased,” even though the social sciences claim to be open minded (1985, 23). It is implied that if we actually believe in the existence of a higher power outside of ourselves, we should not be considered serious scholars. I juggled being a practitioner of a colonizing, divisive religion and a “secular” scholar, and I was ashamed by either stance. As a result, I sought out ways to reconcile these two seemingly incompatible frameworks that currently comprise the core of my identity. I pored over—and still cling to—the recent work of ethnomusicologists who foreground their Christian faith and insider identity in their scholarship and imagine a world in which ethnomusicological inquiry contributes to ecclesial life (Butler 2019; Jones 2020), and that of outsider scholars who brilliantly build their arguments on the theologies of their collaborators (Sherinian 2014). I craved conversations about faith with the few other graduate students I knew who practiced a religion. I impulsively selected religious studies courses that could help me process my deconstruction and better comprehend how contextualized faiths intersect with power-laden issues of race, gender, sexuality, and language. I wove ritual theory into my master’s thesis because I thought that would be a way to “keep my faith” throughout the trials of graduate school. For the record, it did not work. As I transitioned to a dissertation topic devoid of anything connected to Christianity, I composed blessings for Sunday church services to connect with the Divine on a regular basis. And I still listen to worship music incessantly, not because it makes me feel like I am a “good Christian,” but rather because it is the familiar background noise that is perfect for writing papers such as the one you are reading right now.I impulsively selected religious studies courses that could help me process my deconstruction and better comprehend how contextualized faiths intersect with power-laden issues of race, gender, sexuality, and language. I wove ritual theory into my master’s thesis because I thought that would be a way to “keep my faith” throughout the trials of graduate school. For the record, it did not work.
Despite this dramatic uprooting from my family traditions, my local faith community grounded me, a fresh-out-of-undergrad transplant from rural Pennsylvania, in my new California home—and it has quite literally saved me multiple times over the past three years. Please do not misunderstand me; there are very few churches I could walk into right now. From where I stand, it is extremely difficult to have faith in a God that, as Alisha Lola Jones notes in her recent monograph on Black male gospel performance, humans inevitably racialize, gender, and sexualize (2020, 33). But as my mental health deteriorated over rigorous coursework and self-imposed high standards, my weekly connection with a faith community of prodigals, misfits, artists, and dreamers provided me a home and offered an alternative narrative to that of an equally judgmental academia—a story of resurrection, peace, and assurance for broken and suffering communities. * * *The last week of classes, the end of May 2021: a fellow graduate student asked me, “What is a spiritual experience, and how is it different from an emotional one?” How could I explain transcendent experiences to someone who has never had one? I responded: “It’s kind of like flow, but more intense, and there’s a shift in consciousness. It’s hard to describe in words.” I thought a moment more, and confessed: “It happens at very particular points in music. I stopped having spiritual experiences once I began to develop my ‘ethnomusicology brain.’ I noticed that when the lead singer leapt an octave, the drums played a particular rhythm, and the tension from the bridge broke into the chorus, everyone really got into it. It wasn’t some Divine being, but rather the music that created the spiritual high.”She asked, “It’s just musical form?” “Yup, that’s pretty much it,” I replied. That’s it? Really? I desperately want to believe that sonically-induced and embodied faith is more than just a cognitive shift generated by musical form, but rather an encounter with a Divine being. * * *April 2018: the last time I had a vivid, life-altering spiritual experience while musicking. It was my senior year at the Christian undergraduate college I attended. The ethnomusicologist in me is embarrassed, ashamed, to talk about it. You heard God speak to you? Ridiculous. The small, shy religious practitioner in me whips out a defense: Some things in life can’t be explained through empirical evidence and music theory. The two voices ceaselessly squabble; neither ever has the upper hand. Enfleshed and performed doctrines remain dissonant with rationality. The beauty is that I, as a faithful ethnomusicologist, have the opportunity to reconcile this rift by putting the ineffable experiences into words—spiritual, emotional, or otherwise—that occur in music, and (occasionally) experiencing them myself.* * *June 7, 2021: I write this three days after completing that rite of passage called “Qualifying Exams,” knowing I have only received a handful of small research grants and that COVID-19 still has most of the world on lockdown. I hope for a job eventually, but the market is nonexistent. I trust that students and professors actively support one another, and yet everyone is drowning from overwork, unable to come up for air. To say it is hard to have faith during a year like this is putting it mildly. As current academic conditions seem hopeless and my anxiety increases, the most I can do is simply show up. It is the same for my relationship with the Church and Christianity: all I can do is arrive and join my community in ritual. That is all the strength I can muster right now. Though, frankly, my faith in the narratives of hope, wholeness, and communion is much stronger than my trust in some individualistic, elitist echo chamber. I do not know if I will ever be able to make my faith and ethnomusicology compatible with each other. I belong to and betray both religious and scholarly traditions. And I think I am finally okay with that. Instead, I simply arrive and remember what I do know about faith, religious or otherwise:Faith is still showing up even when I have nothing left to give. It is being present even when I do not want to be, even when I do not actually believe anymore.Faith is the strengthening of my confidence as I persevere over every hurdle adulthood throws at me. It is fully committing despite my doubts and fears.Faith is trusting that change will come, and that change is good. It is about releasing control and embracing the thrill of the unknown, with the hope that others will come through and graciously cover my blunders.Faith is musical form finally registering as spiritual experience; and it is almost believing, for the first time in years, that God will transform me.
Now, in the liminal space between coursework and dissertation research, it is time for me to find some faith again.* * *
June 6, 2021: My faith family plays together to welcome Ordinary Time. The music builds—higher, faster, louder—and I join the melody an octave above as the four chords swirl in pulsing waves. For a moment, I surrender. References
Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bohlman, Philip V. 1996. “Pilgrimage, Politics, and the Musical Remapping of the New Europe.” Ethnomusicology 40 (3): 375–412.
Burnim, Mellonee. 1985. “Culture Bearer and Tradition Bearer: An Ethnomusicologist’s Research on Gospel Music.” Ethnomusicology 29 (3): 432–47.
Butler, Melvin L. 2019. Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hagedorn, Katherine J. 2001. Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Ingalls, Monique, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Zoe Sherinian, eds. 2018. Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide. New York: Routledge.
Jones, Alisha Lola. 2020. Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sherinian, Zoe. 2014. Tamil Folk Music as Dalit Liberation Theology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 1985. “Stance, Role, and Identity in Fieldwork among Folk Baptists and Pentecostals.” American Music 3 (1): 16–24.
Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.