Healing Service (download)

Here seems as good a place to start as any.

I don’t think I’ve ever (knowingly) written a purely autobiographical song.  I’ve taken debris from my life and inserted the appropriate details in opportune places.  I’ve written about things I’ve overheard, scraps of conversation I’ve picked up, details I’ve spotted in the periphery.  But I’ve never seen the need to force myself and my life into the songs I write. 

So, it goes without saying, this song is not about me.  

***

I wrote “Healing Service” as a sort of emotional travelogue, a charting of religious doubt and skepticism as it appears between two people.  I should tell you, I’m attached to the two people in this song.  You would be, too, if you met them at a cocktail party.

They met when they were considerably younger, and bonded over a general mistrust and doubt of God.  As the years pitch and reel forward, she begins to see the glory that’s peeking out from behind the seams of everyday life.  Belief in a higher power emerges within her.  In short, she finds faith, and he finds this troubling.

There’s a strange, unsettling sort of lopsidedness that occurs in relationships when one individual begins to outpace the other.  This outpacing can be in virtually any category - wisdom, physical prowess, comfortability in crowded rooms - but I can only imagine the hurt one would encounter if faced with the fact that the one person whom you trusted with your issues of doubt suddenly, improbably, discovered the wonder of true belief.

(We tend to define ourselves by what we don’t believe just as much as what we do believe.)

***

My mom took me to the healing service
I was eight and I was scared of God
I wondered if anybody else there could tell

And you were in a different city
At the same church watching people faint and cry
And wondering if anybody felt like you felt

We will be like slides held up to the light
We will be like sticks held over the fire
We will be like prayers tossed up to the sky
And we will be made whole, we will be made whole, we will be made whole

Forgive me 
If I seem skeptical of such a mystery 
And if my eyes don’t see the things that you see
I’m trying but I’m getting it wrong

So what if if the only miracle I’ve ever witnessed 
Is how you came to me from such a distance 
And how you’ve stayed with me for this long

And you can walk up to my house at any given time
And see the prayers I’ve sent to heaven, caught up in the power lines

***

Nine days before he flipped his Jeep and met his untimely end, Rich Mullins sang the following lyric into a tiny micro cassette recorder in an abandoned church: “I can’t see how You’re leading me/Unless You’ve led me here/To where I’m lost enough to let myself be led.”  The way his tinny voiced shook and cracked at this sentiment broke my heart when I was seventeen, and it still makes my knees buckle a little when I hear it today.

Forget about the dark context his subsequent passing lends the lyrics, and unpack it for what it is:  A throwing-up of the hands, a grand statement of “I give up” that carries with it knowledge of a deeper, richer truth.  That maybe, just maybe, it is at the end of our ropes that we will find grace to be the most present.  

I’d like to think that the hero of this song will, one day, be able to translate his fear of the unknown into acceptance of a merciful, extravagant love.  That his oft-repeated promise to himself, “we will be made whole, we will be made whole”, will come to be.

***

That lovely voice you hear harmonizing with mine is the incomparable Rachel Higuera, who has shown extreme patience and grace with me as we embark on the journey of Northern District.  We should have a myspace/facebook/etc up before too long.