Earworms

Ever had an earworm?

No, not whatever it is that happens in Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan.

"It's in my head!"

But that moment when a song infiltrates your brain and you end up singing it again and again.  

Living alone, I suffer from a heck of a lot of them.  As a cyclist I sing a lot, and when a song gets lodged in my head, it's not easy to shift it.  And is it ever a good one?

Nope.

On Sunday morning I was sore afflicted by the theme tune from Rupert the Bear.  You know: 

"Rupert, Rupert the Bear, everyone sing his name!
Rupert, Rupert the Bear, everyone come and join in all of his games!"

And being me, a bit OCD, it wasn't just the chorus.  It was the whole song: "There's a little bear that you've never met before, who's a lot of fun…"  Oh dear.

"It's in my head!"

Double the trouble, because the theme tune from Rupert the Bear (The New Adventures Of, I think) sounds remarkably like a song from Come And Praise, the relevant (read: oh dear) songbook from my school assembly days.  The song in question: 

"There's water, water of life,
Jesus gives us the water of life…"

I'm not suggesting any infringement of copyright by either writer, just a certain kinship of chords.  More on that another day.

But back to my terrible crisis.  How to dislodge an earworm?  Chewing gum, they say, but I don't believe in clergy chewing gum around church on a Sunday like that Veruca Salt girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

An unpleasant gum-chewing spoilt child, yesterday.

Good news: In the end I dislodged the old song with… something more powerful!

Bad news: I dislodged it with a worse earworm.

So now I was singing "One Of Us" by Abba.

"It's in my head!"

"One of us is lonely, one of us is only waiting for a call… blah blah blah… one of us is lying, one of us is crying…"  I never said I knew all the words.

So, mixed result.  Rupert the Bear is gone, and in his place… Agnetha.  Or Anni-Frid.  Interchangeable, surely?

Ah.

But there's a happy ending.  Once the service started, the Gloria got into my head and stayed there, kicking out Anni-Frid.  Or Agnetha.  It was as if Jesus had stood up and addressed Abba, saying, "The power of Christ compels you!"  Not that earworms and exorcism have anything in common.

In Matthew 12 and Luke 11, Jesus tells a parable about a demon being driven out of a man (much like an earworm), but the story ends badly when the evil spirit, having wandered the world looking unsuccessfully for a new home, comes back to the gentleman in question to find that he hasn't replaced that spirit with anything new… and with no stronger presence to overwhelm either the man or the spirit, the end situation is worse than the beginning, because the spirit, finding the house (as it were) swept clean, moves straight back in and invites some friends.

The peril, says Jesus, of just trying to throw out bad old habits or demons or ways, unless we replace them consciously and deliberately with something - someone! - new and stronger.  Just as my earworms  went round and round, with an annoying one being replaced by another, no less annoying, so does life work.

That's why giving up smoking is so much easier if you have something to do with your hands to replace all that fiddling around with cigarettes.  That's why people smoking their sonic screwdrivers seems to be the future.

One of these will help you stop smoking.  And one will unscrew things, sonically.

If you want o dislodge a strong man, says Jesus, you need a stronger man.  He keeps on proving that by driving out illness and demons and doubt in the gospels, and still driving out addiction and idolatry and darkness today.  But he's equally clear that we need to keep something - someone - stronger in our hearts and heads, because otherwise the old habit will take hold again, perhaps more powerfully.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if we don't let Jesus into heads and hearts, we'll let someone or something else in instead.  G.K. Chesterton famously said:

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

G.K.: crazy hair, brilliant thinking on the human condition.

I'm glad the Gloria happened along that Sunday, because it gave Anni-Frid the boot.  I'm glad Jesus happened along when I was 17, because he's given - and still gives - the boot to all sorts of things I don't like that I give house-space to.

Life without Jesus revolves.  It's a carousel of one distraction or addiction after another.  Politically, that's why revolutions are called revolutions: they revolve one lot of sinners out of office and revolve a whole new set of sinners in.  And we wonder why the promises of the children of the revolution disappear.

It's because Jesus alone delivers, and he won't be running the world until he comes back.  But in the meantime, we can claim some space in our own hearts and heads by throwing out the old crap and refilling that space with Jesus.  Or else life is just a long and pointless series of earworms, and it'll be hello Barbie Girl before long...