I had brainwashed myself. I listened repeatedly to a disc of a fine choir singing mostly the music of Stephen Foster. The numbers extended from light-hearted to the yearnings for happy days. Long ago I was touched by Foster’s uneven experience of life. I used part of his story as an analogy at a niece’s funeral. The disc was resting in the sound system of my car and repeated itself as I drove from place to place. For no deliberate reason I found my mind returning, during the day, to the words of this or that Foster song. I arose in the morning and the music was playing distinctly in my mind as though I was in my car. It took some effort to shake the mysterious performances. The only way I could do it, was to take the disc out of the player, and permit my mind to file away the words and melodies. Discs of hymns helped me to my preferred emphasis.
I wanted to clear my mind in that I discovered years ago that I had developed a pattern of automatic silent prayer, praying without ceasing, and I wanted to retain the pattern. Also, I found myself repeating involuntarily the words and melodies of a variety of substantive hymns that I learned over decades. My mind would recall Scripture verses, without conscious effort on my part. I did not want these devotional aids to be lost to Stephen Foster. It may be that I have deliberately brainwashed myself for Christian words and music. If so, I want to keep that frame of mind – consciously not accidently. I remembered when my mind would fall to carnal topics that were, to matters of little importance, or to nothing at all. Then I became aware that my life had been so taken with Scripture and ideas cultivated for Christian ministry that they had become second nature to me. The new repeated themselves even as my breathing automatically functioned.
The Apostle urged his readers to have the mind of Christ. He was interested in one thing in particular in this passage – humility. For me to have the mind of Christ in humility would be to fulfill the counsel of the Apostle in the Philippian passage. How does one gain the mind of Christ? There must be some gift from God to be genuine, but that gift must be unwrapped by the receiver. Perhaps that is done by the occupation of the mind in sufficient periods of time, and in some repetition, that one finally copies the spiritual mind of Christ. The mind chooses, deliberately or by repeated exposure, the context in which it functions. This is a vital issue.
I have known men so sex drenched that they formed fantasies about nearly any female they met; men who attached a dollar value to everything they saw; men who could not go on without another drink, or smoke. Their minds ultimately crossed over into the familiar highways they created on the maps of their minds to desire and addiction. The only escape is to find another preoccupation that becomes sufficiently strong to create new behaviors, new contexts. This appears as pattern taught by the Apostle Paul in a preoccupation with music in Ephesians 5:19. We have a right to take over our minds and program them to the experiences/thoughts that commend us, that provide the hope we want to hold in memory. It is a context of peace and devotional habit. By choice or exposure, some context is going to dominate one’s mind. We can choose what that will be. The choice is vital. It seems to be a part of gaining full comfort of faith in life to death. We ought to analyze ourselves so to evaluate what level we have adopted the Christ model of the mind. Let a man examine himself, the Scripture enjoins. In self-evaluation, the Apostle directs the Corinthian Christians to take communion. It is important that the Apostle’s point is noted, so that communion is not taken unworthily. Christian life becomes different. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020