Dignify and Deploy 10: Artists
Author: Andrew Comiskey
October 23, 2022
John Wimber would’ve hated
that title. Not that he wasn’t a super-accomplished musician worth his weight
in gold as an arranger of popular music. He just didn’t care for the preening
‘creative’ who strove for personal glory rather than God’s.
John loved music from the
start and developed an ear for its poetic logic. As a child he was inclined to
rhythm and blues, and jazz, mostly black music. He learned sax and piano; he
could write music, sing well, and began to arrange pieces for various bands. He
possessed a musical sophistication beyond his years. After a host of gigs and
associations, he began to play and arrange music for the Righteous Brothers,
forerunners of ‘blue-eyed soul’ (jazzy white guys) who were cresting. At the
time of John’s conversion in the early sixties, his ‘Righteous Brothers’ had
two hits in the top ten and planned to tour with the Beatles.
John knew something of
popular culture—his gifts and discipline could’ve landed him a long run making
money. As an arranger, he did the hardest work behind the popular song. He was
its catalyst. Of note: his ‘arranging’ gifts gave him an innate knack for
bringing together each musical part deemed essential to create the best sound
(apostolic leadership, anyone?); it also primed him to distill the best words and
music to glorify God. John was a master artist who, to glorify His Master, made
beautiful music. More than that, he dignified persons around the world by
deploying them to pen and sing simple love songs to the Savior.
If Wimber was weaned on
jazz, Karol Wojtyla thrived on Polish romantic literature. Here dashing characters
overthrew Poland’s oppressors. Embellished historic accounts had a spiritual
core, e.g. the Church, who was decisive and often miraculous in affording
Poland hard-won victory over invaders. Jesus and Mary led the charge of Polish
revolutionaries who fought for national dignity.
Wojtyla loved this literary
spirit of Polish freedom, her fight to define herself according to the truth.
That carried over in to his love for theater, with which he ‘was obsessed‘ (his
own account). Teen Karol acted as much as he could in school and community
theater. He began to write plays as well. Later, in Krakow, Karol graduated to
the Rhapsodic Theater where a band of young dramatists wrote and acted in plays
as an eloquent weapon against Nazi occupiers. This ‘Theater of the Living Word’
emphasized the moral tension each person faces amidst such evil.
As an actor and poet in
this vein, Wojtyla honed a lens through which he saw each human person as a
player in his own spiritual and moral drama. An adventure—will one heroically
aspire and become free? Or will he settle for less, at the cost of his own
dignity? In this way, Wojtyla energized conversion. His summon to all people to
fight valiantly for freedom in the dignity of truth, regardless of cost, is
rooted in a prophetic, artistic soul.
“Father, help us to heed
the poet who sings and speaks to our deepest heart. Summon what is most true in
us and help us to fight for our good, and the good of others.
Come Holy Spirit, liberate
what is true and beautiful from what debases us. May we not settle but aspire
to the dignity of our sexual humanity. May we grow into ‘mature expressions of
the gift’ by helping others do the same. Deployed to dignify, we ‘harness the
John force.’”
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