The other day this inspiring video showed up a number of times on my Facebook feed. If you don’t have the time to give it a watch, let me give you the Coles Notes here. A painfully, almost paralyzingly nervous singer auditions for X-Factor. So timorous is he in the pre-performance interview that the judges have all but written him off before he sings a note. It’s taken him five years , he explains, to overcome all the nay-sayers in his life who discouraged him from auditioning, five years to quell his self-doubt and steel up his courage to take the stage. The song he’ll be performing is one he sang at his Grand-dad’s funeral; his Nan is standing in the wings for moral support (cut to backstage shot of “Nan” looking on anxiously, squeezing the hand of the show’s tastefully attired MC). Even on the low-res medium of a laptop screen, the anxiety in the auditorium is palpable as the opening notes of Bette Midler’s “The Rose” peal out and he raises the trembling microphone to his mouth.
As might be expected, perhaps, the performance that follows is so startlingly beautiful, the voice so sonorous and the execution so passionate that the judges are compelled to sit up with new notice and the audience erupts with roars of delight. The camera pans across more than one face wiping away cathartic tears of satisfaction as this written-off “rough” suddenly sparkles with “diamond” brilliance.
If you’ve got the time, here it is for posterity’s sake:
The scene is moving, I’ll admit, and the last thing I want to do is be cynical for cynicism’s sake, but I’m not convinced. The “all-that’s-gold-does-not-glitter” theme has become too popular on these Talentj Shows—too guaranteed to go viral—for this nervous-wall-flower-turned-phenom story to be 100% All Beef, if you know what I mean.
I’ve sung nervous. And one of the unfair things I’ve noticed about singing nervous is that anxiety attacks the diaphragm, making it extremely difficult to practice the deep, regulated breathing necessary for singing. No matter how hard you’ve steeled yourself psychologically, physiologically your body betrays you. If Mr. Maloney was really as nervous as he looks at the 21 second mark, it’s highly unlikely he’d have had the breath to belt it out as passionately as he does at the 2:59 mark.
And then there’s the performance itself—from his comfortable handling of the microphone, to the careful annunciation of the consonants, to his singer’s posture, to the articulation of his mouth on the vowels, everything here looks to me like this diamond in the rough has been carefully cut by a professional voice coach. I mean, I’m not a trained singer myself, so my humble opinion is really just that, but my strong suspicion is that Mr. Maloney is neither nervous nor amateur, and that someone’s being taken in here—certainly the audience is, and possibly the judges as well (depending on how cynical you are about the staged nature of these types of shows).
But that’s not really my point today. What I’m thinking about is how compelling Mr. Maloney’s story has made his performance. He is, no doubt, a powerful singer; but powerful singers sing for audiences all the time, as well or better than Mr. Maloney, without moving crowds to tears. And if you’d watched this performance from the ### mark, without the story to set it up, you might say: “Hmmm... nice voice,” but then you’d move on. It’s not likely you’d share it on Facebook. Or cry.
It’s the story that evokes the tears; and it’s the story that gives the song context and power.
And bear with me, but I’m thinking about that as it relates to faith and theology. A lot of times, when we talk about the deep truths of Christianity they are disconnected from the story that makes them compelling. Take theological doctrines for instance. Often people have a hard time swallowing the doctrine of the Trinity because it’s presented like an abstract “blueprint” for some faceless Three-in-One God “out there” somewhere. But when it gets connected the Story of the early Christians, and their attempt to explain why, on the one hand, they worshipped a first Century Jewish Holy Man named Jesus, but on the other hand, they kept insisting that they were right in line with the Jewish Monotheism that Jesus himself taught and adhered to... that story makes the Trinitarian “song” compelling.
The Message of the Cross is like this. An a-historical doctrine about an a-historical “Christ” who died for my sins (in the abstract) can evoke assent, but is unlikely to evoke tears and more likely to evoke a lot of questions—how, exactly does a dying Jewish Rabbi atone for sins? But when it is connected to The Story—the story of a creator God who refused to turn his back on his creation even when they rejected him—who chose Israel to be a people who would draw the creation back to its maker by showing the world what life with him was supposed to look like—who agonized over this people as they failed in their calling, even to the point of their exile at the hands of a pagan Empire—who promised them return and restoration and renewal (and that their restoration would translate into restoration for the whole creation)—and who raised up from them a Messiah, his Son, our Lord, who lived out both the story of the creator’s rejection and the exile of the creator’s people through his death on the cross (and then inaugurated the promised restoration through his glorious resurrection)—when it’s connected to this story, that’s when the doctrine of Atonement really starts to sing.
And when that story is connected to my own story: of seeking and failure and longing for shalom, and of discovering through Jesus redemption from the ashes of sin—that, I think, is when the song has the power to evoke real tears of catharsis and delight.
