The DOVES are excited about the release of our latest single, “Why Did You Hurt Me?” – the first to be launched on our brand new website! You can hear the track in its entirety (and get more info) at the “AUDIO” tab on this page. We’re in production of the video right now – our first video collaboration, with the supremely talented Joe Turner, through the auspices of his Epic Audio Recording Studio (EARS). Heretofore, I’ve been putting the vids together using iMovie, with my ancient but trusty and battle-tested MacBook. Joe – who is an extraordinary keyboardist, as well as producer, engineer, and proprietor at EARS – plays keys on our upcoming full-bore gospel recording, “King of Kings”, which is in post production as I type this. He also gives us Hi-Def capability on the WDYHM vid, which is a first for us.
Trena and I made the announcement of the song’s release last week on this site and on facebook. By the way, the song is one of Trena’s; and I should probably point out that it is neither directed to, nor about, yours truly. The release of new material is always a joyful event in the life of an artist; representing the culmination and fruition of a lot of effort, of which the initial moment of inspiration is just the beginning. The song has been getting a good reception. One of our close friends, whose opinion we trust and admire, said “Trena was made to sing that song.”
It is a song that, we believe, expresses a pretty universal feeling. Almost all of us have, at some time and in some way, had occasion to think or say “hey man – why you treatin’ me like that? What’d I do to you to make you treat me that way?”
Because it seems that it is part of living in this world that sometimes, despite our best efforts and intentions – and sometimes deliberately, because of our worst – we wind up hurting each other. It just seems that no matter what, there will be times when, either idiomatically or literally, the swinging of one person’s fist will coincide with the position of another person’s nose.
That being the case, the song takes on a rather urgent poignancy to us: because our joy over its release is tempered by the events in Charleston, in which nine of our brothers and sisters in Christ were slain in yet another recurrence of senseless evil – an act which has preoccupied the media for the last week; its examination focused on the same questions that these atrocities always elicit: “why?” “How?”
The DOVES are just a little musical duo, whose music is our small attempt to express our perception of the world around us. But since this is our first blog entry, on our new website; and since the timing of our new release has transpired simulatneously with what happened in Charleston, which is part of that big world which surrounds us –
it compels us to point out the following, with the hope that it is honoring to those who lost their lives, and to those who mourn their loss.
Because whenever an atrocity such as the recent church shootings in Charleston occurs, the same questions are always focused on the killer. “How could he have done it? What makes a person do such a thing?” I don’t know how a person can take a weapon, and murder several innocent people. But I know what causes it. It is the same impulse that makes us see another person as having no (or limited) value; especially in relation to ourselves. Fortunately for us all, that universal impulse is rarely expressed as pathologically as in the mass slayings we’re all too familiar with. But it is expressed in the banality of evil. The robber who slays the clerk, almost as an afterthought. The dreary litany of shootings listed virtually every day in the newspaper -- blessedly, only a few of which are lethal. It is an impulse as old as Cain. It inspires the entire history of “us against them”. It produces domestic violence, barroom brawls, and suicide bombers.
The Bible teaches that “murder begins in the heart” (Matthew 5:21,22; 15:19). It is from the “heart” of man – his central being – that hatred and anger spring. To be truly angry with someone – not merely annoyed; but to wish them harm – is to devalue them, if only for a moment. How can you wish harm to a creature of God, created “in His image” (that is, a creature who shares a likeness with its creator; the way your photograph is a likeness of you)? It is necessary to forget, or to deny, that likeness.
When an entire society forgets or denies both our likeness to God, and God himself; and that denial is systemized into its constructs: then that leads directly to the gulag. And to the gas chamber.
Is it any accident that as our society becomes more distant from the faith that informed it for generations, that incidents such as Charleston become more frequent? Along with the mundane mayhem that fills the ‘local’, ‘state’, and ‘national’ sections of the paper? So ubiquitous as to no longer be shocking?
They are the expressions of a completely anti-God state of mind.
Unless, and until, we are given “new hearts” (Ezekiel 36:26), then the same question will be asked, again and again: “why, why – why did you hurt me?”
The DOVES thank God for His forgiveness for our daily trespasses, which hurt Him and others. And for the forgiveness shown by the survivors, family, and friends of the victims in Charleston, which could not be more beautifully exemplary of their faith.