My Thanksgiving gift to my small cadre of readers is to recommend a book that has been a gift to me. It is a book called Better Off by Eric Brende.
Brende graduated from MIT and then spent eighteen months with his new bride living in a community of people who even the Amish think are quaint and backward. They had no technology, not even running water and electricity. His goal was to determine the amount of technology that actually enhances life.
The irony of writing a recommendation of a book questioning the value of technology on my laptop to post on my internet weblog is not lost on me. But this little snippet of Brende’s first experience attending the Anabaptist worship service of his new neighbors (he and his wife are Roman Catholics) and listening to their singing is so worth sharing that I’ll overcome my uneasy conscience, share it with you and pray that God will have mercy on my technologically-addicted Calvinist soul. I’ll have more to say on this topic, I am sure. But for now, I remain thankful that there are some of you who actually read what I write in these posts and that I have a laptop, the internet and other gizmos like my ipod and espresso machine to help me do it.
Here’s the quote, enjoy, and please consider getting and reading the book. Happy Thanksgiving.
(T)here was a long history behind the music, a history of precarious Anabaptist fortunes among religious enemies. Present company could not escape the memory of their predecessors’ suffering any more than they could ignore their uneasy relationship with the world around them today, a world that challenged them on almost every front. This strange melancholy chant perfectly expressed that discomfiture. The music eerily wavered somewhere between the harmonious and the off-key, yawning over the edge of tonality one minute, circling back for a resolution the next. (They) were not tone deaf. The course they charted among the hazards and temptations of modern society created dissonance.
Yet what the singers remembered was no less important than what they forgot: themselves. This music reached for something higher. (p. 82)
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