The year was 2001. A traveling worship band took the stage and began singing to the Christians gathered in the large sanctuary of First Baptist Church in Nashville. I was there with my girlfriend, a country singer, and when the band's song became familiar enough she raised her hands, closed her eyes, and started singing along. Everyone else did too, so there were nearly 1,000 hands raised, 500 voices singing, 1,000 eyes closed.
Before I speak of the epiphany that came moments later, I feel compelled to explain just how uniquely qualified I was to receive it. First, my depression. One effect of the illness was that it had long cleaved a separation between Everyone Else and myself. This was mostly terrible and painful, but at the same time it allowed me to look at people around me as others, the way a traveler might look at the natives in a foreign country. (How come they all know the language of happiness and I don't?) Such a feeling of separation, which morphs into opposition when it's at its worst, was necessary for the type of epiphany I was about to experience.
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Secondly, I had been a songwriter for seven years. In my early teens, songwriting was the way I coped with my depression; it was the only way I knew to keep in touch with the self (if there is one) that lay beneath the sadness. My dependence on songwriting only grew greater as years passed and I signed a staff songwriting deal with one of the biggest publishing companies on Music Row. On the day of the worship service, songwriting was my sole coping mechanism, my sole source of income, and perhaps my sole source of confidence. Depression had clouded most of my identity, but I was still a songwriter, goddamnit! And seeing as how songwriting had seen me through some tough years, I figured I must not be all that bad of one either. Or at the very least, I was equipped to recognize a bad song when I heard one.
It seemed like a typical worship song to me, and after multiple repetitions of the chorus, everyone was back to the routine of singing along with hands raised and eyes closed, as if they'd been taught the song at birth. For a chorus or two, so was I. I was hanging in there, trying to worship my Creator as best I could, sad creation as I was. ("But that isn't the Creator's fault!" said the Catholic voice. "If you're unhappy you're just not trying hard enough!") I sang like I'd sung to Him hundreds of times before. I sang to get closer and I sang for some relief and I sang to praise.
I knew I was being a bit harsh on the writer. But come on, it was garbage. It was throwaway stuff. I looked around to see if I could spot anyone else who might feel the same way. We were in the songwriting capital of the world, after all. Maybe I'd see someone with her mouth agape, or someone holding his ears and crying. But what I saw were hundreds of my peers with closed eyes and raised hands singing those absolutely nonsensical words.
It was then that I felt the opening of my first true and conscious schism with religion, and with my religious self. The sight scared me. "This is not good. This is dangerous. This is really weird. These people are singing words that literally make no sense; which would be fine if they were singing along to some dumb song on the radio, but they're not just singing along to some dumb song on the radio, they're offering this nonsense directly to God. Giving it as a gift! How can they do this? How could they not think before they sing? Doesn't God deserve better? Something that makes logical sense at least? Sweet as the singers are, might God be holding His ears and weeping right now?"
When I got done looking at the crowd I thought of myself, and I saw myself as one of those people and it frightened me. I had sung a million songs like this without thinking. Maybe not as horrendously nonsensical as this one, but close enough. And if I had sung songs like this without thinking, what else had I done without thinking? What else had I been taught to do that I had never questioned? What did I believe, what had I professed, that I didn't actually understand? How come I am singing nonsense with all these other people? Such profane questions got my good heart to racing, and for the first time in my life my Catholic voice had no good answers.
On the way home I told my girlfriend what I had experienced. She told me that I was missing the point; told me I was being a dick. The point, she said, isn't really the lyric of the song, but how you feel when you sing it. If you feel good; if you feel like the song brings you closer to God; if you are praising God with the song, then it isn't really important if the lyrics make sense or not. God sees your intentions and blesses you. Amen.
I could see her point. And I didn't judge her. If she'd thought the whole thing through and found no trouble with it, then good for her. May she go in peace and may God forgive her for singing shitty lyrics. I was not at peace, but I could tell the conversation felt dangerous, even sinful, to her, so I dropped it. Relieved, she turned on the radio and started singing along to some country song, while I stared out the window knowing I could never just sing along again. The thought frightened me. A lot. From then on I'd need to know what I was singing and why.
The Catholic voice got me to go to church and sing a few more songs. But its power faded. The questions the horrible lyric provoked were seismic enough to shake my religion, and when those led to bigger and tougher questions, my religion crumbled. Within a year after hearing the song, I stopped singing worship songs, and I stopped calling myself a Christian altogether.
In the aftermath of my apostasy, I read book after book after book. Had anyone cared to ask, I would've openly admitted I was using the books to help me figure out how best to live my life without a god. I still use books this way. One of the books that hit me hard and true was Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which Kundera writes that "metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love." When I think back on that poor songwriter and his god-awful song, I wish I could tell him the same kind of thing, but about similes. Because similes are dangerous. Similes are not to be trifled with. A single simile can lead a man right out of church.
I can remember a specific chapel service in the late 1970s, when I was a college teacher, in which I was sitting beside a fellow faculty member who during a prayer simply laid his hands, palms up, on his lap. I remember the almost disgust that I felt seeing him do that.
We were singing one of those, and suddenly I found my hands lifted in the air, and it was as though I was watching myself rather than doing it. I had never, in 36 years of my life, lifted my hands in song until that moment.
Depending on the kind of service and who was present and the nature of the music, I would guess that over time at Bethlehem you might have ten to thirty percent of the people lifting their hands in worship.
Hymns can be sung with just as much inauthenticity as worship songs. Organs can be played with just as much hypocrisy as guitars. Hands can be kept down for motives just as defective as motives for lifting them up.
Today could have been the day
That you blow out your candles
Make a wish as you close your eyes
Today could have been the day
Everybody was laughing
Instead I just sit here and cry
In the arms of an Angel far away from here
From this dark, cold hotel room, and the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage of your silent reverie
You're in the arms of an Angel;
may you find some comfort here
And you probably don't want to hear tomorrow's another day
Well I promise you you'll see the sun again
And you're asking me why pain's the only way to happiness
And I promise you you'll see the sun again
And as I float along this ocean
I can feel you like a notion that won't seem to let me go
Cause when I look to the sky something tells me you're here with me
And you make everything alright
Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain. I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
but I always thought that I'd see you baby, one more time again, now
Oh Lord there's just so much to be done
Oh lord, so many souls to be won
Oh lord, this world is falling apart
Dying for love from a broken heart
Here am i, send me, though there's really not that much I can do
What I have seems so small, but I want to give it all to you
And can you tell me, doctor, why I still can't get to sleep?
And why the Channel Seven chopper chills me to my feet?
And what's this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means?
God help me, I was only nineteen
And wherever you've gone
And wherever we might go
It don't seem fair... Today just disappeared
Your light's reflected now, reflected from afar
We were but stones, your light made us stars
A letter to you on a cassette
'Cause we don't write anymore
Gotta make it up quickly
There's people asleep on the second floor
There's no aphrodisiac like loneliness
Truth, beauty and a picture of you
Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you, now you got someone to blame?
You say one love, one life, when it's one need in the night
One love, we get to share it
Leaves you baby if you don't care for it
Yes we'll be movin' on, with no sad good byes
But it's only the deepest part of our love, that will keep us together
But while this cold wind blows, and tears fill your eyes
I'm counting the days, and learning the ways of a broken heart
Farewell my companions, my friends and my workmates
Farewell to the paydays, the pints, and the crack
Oh we gave them our best years, now they've paid us back
By making us yesterdays men sure as hell
By making us yesterday's men 152ee80cbc
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