From Madonna to Lady Gaga and Black Sabbath to Bathory, popular musicians have used Christian imagery for a lot of ends, from serious artistic critique to easy shock value. But on her 2021 album “Sinner Get Ready,” the noise musician Lingua Ignota subverts Biblical language in a way Catholic listeners may find not merely shocking, but spiritually resonant. More importantly, her work illuminates the variety, complexity and difficulty of traditional Christian symbolism from a perspective that’s too often ignored, but vital for Christians to listen to.
“Lingua Ignota” is the stage name of Kristin Hayter and a Latin translation for the “unknown language” invented by medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen. A typical track finds her classically trained mezzo-soprano voice wavering queasily between registers, one moment soaring like a church cantor’s and the subsequent exploding into apocalyptic black metal screams, throughout hypnotic yet disorienting echoes of church organs, power electronics and what some might consider just “noise”—a rollercoaster of enchantingly expressive music that challenges the bounds of conventional “music” and goals to present voice to Hayter’s own experiences as a domestic violence survivor.
On her 2021 album “Sinner Get Ready,” the noise musician Lingua Ignota subverts Biblical language in a way Catholic listeners may find not merely shocking, but spiritually resonant.
Lingua Ignota’s work draws heavily upon her survivorship, and she or he’s used her platform to boost money and awareness for domestic abuse prevention. Oftentimes, she does so through use of non secular imagery and symbolism: Hayter grew up Catholic and has repeatedly expressed interest in and fascination with Christianity.
To this end, her lyrics are highly relevant for believers. Quite than straightforward autobiography, Hayter frames her experience of trauma through the language of Christianity. On “The Order of Spiritual Virgins,” the opening track to her album “Sinners Get Ready,” Hayter finds empowerment through assuming the role of a wrathful Old Testament God: “Hide your kids, hide your husbands/ I’m relentless, I’m incessant, I’m the ocean/ And all who dare look upon me/ Swear everlasting devotion.” But by the subsequent track, “I Who Bend the Tall Grasses,” she is a supplicant, beseeching God to smite her abuser, in language that recalls the desperate pleas of Job or the Psalmists: “Glorious Father, intercede for me/ If I can’t hide from you, neither can he/ All the time your voice bites the back of a chilly wind/ And the tall grasses bend for you…Just kill him/ you’ve to/ I’m not asking.” Elsewhere, perhaps most disturbingly, she casts her abuser as God, and herself as a sinner pressured to repent: “No wound as sharp as the desire of God…He’ll take your legs and your will to live /When you don’t confess now.”
Because the religious person experiences God in silence, yet feels compelled to voice their experience, Lingua Ignota seeks to present voice to the language-defeating experience of trauma.
There’s more at work in Hayter’s religious language, though, than the fruitfully provocative questions raised even by merely connecting her experience of gendered violence to the church’s traditional metaphor for God, that of an all-powerful male figure. The assorted roles she inhabits might be seen as modulations of an prolonged metaphor around which the entire album coheres—a metaphor she alludes to in a sample from the History Channel series “Alone” at the top of “The Order of Spiritual Virgins.” In that sample, a person talks about his experience of silence, enjoyed alone in church: “I just love to listen to the dead silence…within the silence you may hear your departed mother sing a hymn in church from 30 years ago, that’s what you get out of the silence.” But moderately than remaining silent, he hums that hymn—Alan Jackson’s interpretation of “Standing on the Guarantees of God.” Because the religious person experiences God in silence, yet feels compelled to voice their experience, Lingua Ignota seeks to present voice to the language-defeating experience of trauma.
In her seminal work Metaphorical Theology, the feminist theologian Sallie McFague points out that the standard structure of a metaphor is to light up something “lesser-known,” like an abstraction comparable to love, with something “better-known”—specific, concrete and sensory, comparable to a rose. There is clear utility for metaphors in Christianity, then—they supply a way for the faithful to discuss that ultimate unknown, the transcendent God. Thus Christians have traditionally sought to grasp the character of “God,” a reality beyond human comprehension, through the lens of something comprehensible: a “Father.”
Catholics cannot accurately speak in regards to the nature of God without speaking about trauma, specifically the trauma of violence.
Yet Lingua Ignota reverses this structure, using language in regards to the transcendent God to grasp her concrete, human experience of trauma. This seems to me a mode of non secular language entirely appropriate for Catholics, whose belief centers on the Incarnation—a transcendent God, the final word reality through which all things “live, move, and have their being,” becoming fully embodied in a specific person’s traumatic experience of political violence. This belief would appear to imply Catholics cannot accurately speak in regards to the nature of God without speaking about trauma, specifically the trauma of violence, and that we would judge the accuracy of our language about God by its applicability to the experiences of those that have survived violence.
This raises questions on which voices are given prominence within the church, and that are dismissed or neglected. How might the church’s traditional metaphors for God resonate (or fail to resonate) with the experiences not only of ladies, but of L.G.B.T. people, who’re 4 times more likely than non-L.G.B.T. people to be victimized by violent crime, or of those subject to non secular and racial violence? And where they fail to resonate, is there room to forge recent metaphors that higher capture the experience of those that, like Jesus himself, are marginalized and victimized?
Where they fail to resonate, is there room to forge recent metaphors that higher capture the experience of those that, like Jesus himself, are marginalized and victimized?
Some might dismiss the concept of finding recent metaphors for God, fearing that private experience and subjectivity will move the church away from its root beliefs. Yet as McFague points out, embracing varied metaphors for God shouldn’t be lazy relativism, nor does it mean assigning equal value to anything that is likely to be said. As a substitute, it’s an act of humility to query the constraints of the church’s traditional language and an act of charity—indeed, solidarity with Christ—to expand that language when needed to account for the experiences of those probably to suffer violence.
“Sinner Get Ready” is a strong, viscerally-felt reminder that our willingness to discuss trauma and take heed to those that are surviving is a measure of our willingness to experience the fact of God beyond words. It’s also a reminder that our words and metaphors can at times turn into idols, and are in constant need of renewal from the margins.
