Bach, Belioz, Bieber

Justin Bieber is not necessarily a high rating figure in the discourse  (fancy word for “conversation”, but perhaps with a bit more implied) of a cathedral faith community. Bach, yes, Berlioz maybe, Bieber perhaps not. At the moment the 19 year old Canadian fading heart-throb might be briefly considering entering a monastery, though perhaps that is a long shot: devotion to the daily offices of prayer and indeed the rigours of community living have not to date been the hallmark of his public persona.

In fact at the moment, if my internet feeds are to be believed, it may be lawyers’ chambers rather than the monastery that most absorb his attention. A photo of him leaning over and lobbing a large wad of saliva on the heads of his adoring fans is currently viral in pixelland.  Bieber’s image minders (and, more ambivalently, Snopes.com) are in full swing assuring the e-world the event never happened, but no matter what they say there is a tsunami of opinion, however misguided, that it did. Spin is everything, of course, and we will never know.

Or care? Maybe not. The fame of the “legend in their own lunch hour” (with apologies to Barry Sheehan) of pin-up pop stars is by definition not long-lasting. Donny Osmond and David Cassidy are hardly household names these days (though Cassidy’s fellow Partridge Family character Susan Dey was the unrequited love of my life for at least a year). Some stagger through life from catastrophe to catastrophe, including premature death. Others, perhaps against the odds, seize their lives and make something less ephemeral out of their fame—Shirley Temple is one of the better examples of the latter. Who knows what spitting (or not) falling star Justin Bieber or twerking falling star Miley Cyrus will make of their challenged lives. We could do worse than to breathe a prayer for them.

The last suggestion is less fanciful than it might seem. These fantastical media creations are human beings, trapped in savage attention cycles that they feed on as fast as the media feed on them (the classic “symbiotic cycle” of destruction). They are humans—and while the media speculate on whether Miley Cyrus is bitterly angry with Jennifer Lopez (I wouldn’t know either of them if I tripped over them) we the public feed the frenzy by reading the magazines and watching the shows. Ultimately, when a media creation lies dead on the floor of a lonely motel room it is at least in some small part us, the entertained, the speculators, who have blood on our hands, for we fed the troll-demons that killed them. This is, in my books, what St Anselm meant when he wrote “you do not know how great a thing sin is.”

But, momentarily, the greater issue here is one of contrast. Bach, Belioz, Bieber … the world of Anglican liturgy and music, even of preaching and teaching has often ignored the ephemeral (temporary) and rejoiced in high culture—an Australian former dean and retired bishop referred to this as “salvation by good taste.” I defend high liturgical and ecclesiastical culture to the hilt, but it must always only ever be as a vehicle of deeper gospel truths, the truths of hope and redemption that can transform the most frightened human heart into a home for the risen Christ. The ephemeral is terribly—well, ephemeral—but never let us forget that it is to the Justin Biebers and Miley Cyruses, as well as the august and distinguished purveyors of high culture, that we are called to reach.