Pulling out of driveway it was easy to tell the radio station I
had been listening to on Saturday night had changed genres. The
Sunday morning offering was the well-harmonized Southern Gospel
tunes I call “mansion music.”
To qualify as true Southern Gospel — detected
from my childhood exposure to Mull’s Singing Convention
broadcast across East Tennessee and beyond for decades — a song
must have four-part harmony and rhyme the words “story” and
“glory” at least one.
The songs must also reference the anticipated
life beyond this one — and how nice our residences will be then.
Hence, mansion music.
From a sociological standpoint, it is easy to
see why so many of these songs deal with the size and opulence of
the houses we can expect to occupy in glory. The music is rooted
in a time and place where simple, hard living was better endured
by such hope.
Many who sing and listen to this music today
are no longer in that economic class. Bill Gaither’s “Homecomings”
may sing about mansions in the hereafter, but the financial
success of his ventures allow for pretty high living in the
present world.
So for many of us, our daily commitments are
unmotivated by the prospect of a bigger house. We are pretty
comfortable with our physical surroundings.
Then what to we look forward to? What is our
eternal hope?
Stuff — many American Christians are
discovering — doesn’t not satisfy as well as we once believed.
(Even if some television preachers teach us to call them
“blessings.”)
If not the mansion, then to what do we look
ahead? The absence of suffering, peace, restored relationships?
Tours of massive, elegant homes in the U.S.
and castles abroad have intrigued me. But never have I desired to
live in one. If the hope of eternity rests in such, then my
interest wanes.
Being in the closer presence of God is much
more attractive than a bigger house. And a fuller, deeper, more
meaningful life rooted in love, compassion and generosity is a
more attractive goal for both present-day living as well as when
we wake up to sleep no more.
