Keep Your Eye on the Piano Player

By ART CULLEN

A couple church ladies recalled for wife Dolores how a mourner at a recent funeral saw a Cullen was playing the organ. “Must be a Democrat,” the person said.

Odd, because Dolores was not piping out Woody Guthrie. Sister Doris, her mentor at St. Joe, did not dig Joan Baez or promulgate that sort of music. Dolores matriculated to Clarke College where the nuns had her play guitar in church. It was a time and place. Time moves backwards, and the hymnal with it. She is trained to operate within the prescribed bounds. Dolores might play “Amazing Grace” with a progressive air, I suppose, but her political affiliation has little to bear on where C is on the pedals.

Outside the sacred confines she will delve into the deviant: Klezmer music on the accordion, jazz on the piano and Irish drinking songs on whatever instrument is available. The Irish write drinking songs and epic poems to explain their grief, because Great Britain didn’t know enough to keep their politics out of church and vice versa.

We fought a Revolutionary War in large part over freedom from the King’s taxation claimed by divine right.

The Crusades tried to use the military to impress upon the Arab nations why they should adopt the Christian ethos of love. Not a great blend of religion and government. One can hardly argue that a Middle East organized around theocracies is working out well. If you think that, I have a whole block of Jerusalem ready to be paved in gold for sale, cheap.

You would think we would learn over time.

Madison did. He wrote the First Amendment to keep religion out of government. The colonies were peppered with Puritan fanatics kicked out of England and ready to impose their strictures on others. The framers knew. It was all fresh in their craw.

Yet we insist on lugging our political baggage into the sanctuary, where it is often embraced and confirmed by the preacher who enjoys tax-free status. And then we burst forth back into the world to impose that strain of morality on unsuspecting innocents.

Nobody knows if Jesus registered to vote. They lost track of him from age 12 to 30. He might have been a Democrat. He certainly was a radical. The Beatitudes could be read as a socialist platform. He scorned the clerics and mocked the system. Jesus was a cultural critic, not a political actor. Leave that to Caesar, he advised.

But we just can’t.

I don’t know what the mourner meant. Maybe a compliment. Or, “She sure plays well for a Democrat.” They might fear that she could organize an organists’ guild that would strike on Sundays for higher pay and greater creative freedom during liturgical interludes. Trouble lurks where vigilance dares not tread.

Civic rot starts at the organist’s bench. Martin Luther’s insurrection blew up when they started singing his classic hit, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” first in the church, in defiance of the priest, and later taking to the streets in 1532 Schweinfurt, Germany, like rock and roll maniacs. So you have to watch the organist. Know your music liturgist. It can make all the difference in a world where politics and piety wear each other’s socks.

Art Cullen won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, is available for streaming on the Independent Lens series on PBS at (https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/storm-lake/). Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2022

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