Oh, Brother! Song is Your Religion

Silent Night. Holy night.

I’ve gotta get outta here. Now.

I’m shaking, and so sorry I’d paid any attention to this sudden urge.

On a lark, I’d checked the Yellow Pages for churches in my area. No way I’d find a Lutheran church this close to Mexico, right? But there it was, listed under Santa Fe. Curious, I headed out to see it.

What crazy urge had led me to believe I’d find a New England style-looking Lutheran church in New Mexico? This church was a brown box with cross on top. Yearning still, I walked inside the house of worship, hoping to rekindle a childhood memory of Christmas Eve’s past.

Forget dark ambience, all-wood vaulted ceiling, stained glass windows, and stubby pew pencils Lutherans were famous for providing congregations. The interior here was white-walled sterility.

Even the program was different. On the first page, the opening hymn had been scrapped, replaced by a song from some guy named “Paul Stookey.”

I sat to think a second. Could this be the same Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary fame? The famous Peter, Paul and Mary characters not in the Bible, ones I’d been forced to study in catechism class? Was there a cover charge at the door tonight I didn’t know about?

Sure enough, five minutes later, “Paul Stookey” stood before the congregation and sang. He looked like Stookey, sang like Stookey, thus, had to be Stookey. An actual celebrity was here among us, and he was Lutheran. I didn’t know Lutherans were allowed to become celebrities.

The wooden pew I sat in, the only truly authentic element I could spot from my boyhood church recollections, warmed me to the church’s modern thing going on. Completely scrapped hymns. Hip musicians. Hip songs. Relaxed dress code. Brighter ambiance. Bring it on.

Then the minister took over. Standing at the pulpit, he pumped out the day’s Bible reading, the Gospel, the Epistle – “Oh, brother on high,” this, “Oh, brother on high,” that. Trapped, I left his tiring, pious world for a far loftier one by humming “Leaving on a Jet Plane” for fifteen minutes straight.

After the minister left the podium, the congregation stood. All hands enveloped open hymnals while open mouths poured out the song’s first line, O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie ….

Tingles went up the back of my head. My chest constricted, as if the pews were grabbing hold of me and wouldn’t let go.

Above your deep and dreamless sleep / The silent stars go by. / Yet in thy dark streets shineth /  The everlasting light. / The hopes and fears of all the years / Are met in thee tonight.

Images poured in. Our Christmas tree. The dark Christmas Eve sky and all its stars. Siblings Don, Doug and Cathy opening presents beside me on the basement floor. Mom looking happy. Dad acting happy. Eggnog overflowing. All other days of the year forgotten for this one moment. As various reflections on Mom and Dad lingered, I realized how much I missed my parents, and how much I loved them, or desperately tried to.

My eyes welled from hearing the tune. I couldn’t let people see me cry. I must not let them see my cry.

I bit my lip. I stared at the walls. I breathed deeply. I reviewed the upcoming Sunday NFL schedule. I toured the inside of my bank.

It was the bank tour that did it. I needed every image of cold teller cubicles and financial offices to block my feelings. I’d won, although wondered why a tender melody should cause such turbulence.

Tired, wounded from fatigue, I hoped to rest during the sermon. But the minister pounded his “Oh, brother” message over and over again.

I shot back with multiple rounds of “If I Had a Hammer.” Unfortunately, humming “Hammer” was tiring, too. Wrecked, exhausted, I closed my eyes.

Go forward, go hide. Go fight, go rest. Go feel, go numb. Mom, Dad. Then, now. Block, release. Religion, self-determination.

I opened my eyes. It dawned on me the fire of religion had drawn out just about every conceivable emotion in me during childhood. Living in our suppressed family household, had religion been a good thing to experience after all? Even now? Something from religion had to have been good for me, right?

A book cracked. The man next to me opened his hymnal to Hymn number 646. “Silent Night.”  The “Silent Night.” I grabbed hold of the pew like I’d never let go.

Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright.

Just two lines, and  I surrendered the fight.

I give in to all of what “Silent Night” meant to me. Its timeless melody put my body at total rest, mind at ease, and eyes in a place to shed their load, and, for one moment, blended all the good I’d ever known about church into one experience of blessed musical sounds, not to mention a little revisionist’s history. It’s as if someone from the back row had been saying, “It’s the music, brother – it’s music!”

This was a personal essay based on an episode in my memoir, “Maybe Boomer.”

Photo:  Don Andberg

Remember This? “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and Enlightenment

I’ve done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day

 

It had been a long-awaited album. His last, Born to Run, was four years ago. I sensed pressure was on for a great follow-up to that great album. 

The first thing I experienced when the album came out in June, 1978, was the record jacket, both sides revealing a somber, skinny Bruce Springsteen (the pre-Born in the USA pumped up Bruce), standing alone in a cheap hotel room. The album name, Darkness on the Edge of Town, included  song titles like “Factory,” “Badlands,” and “Adam Raised a Cain.”

Bleak. I wanted Born to Run back before I even played one song of Darkness.

Of course, I was a very young man then, and probably the last to know just how naive.

I gave the album many listens. With each, I was taken to places like “Candy’s Room,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “Promised Land.” The entire collection of soulful, searching songs was speaking to me about greed, inequity, disappointment, desperation, identity, satisfaction, love and hope; in other words, what real life is made of, not Top 40 life, and certainly not my own.

I was confused by the chaos all these human issues brought to me at once. Nonetheless, I appreciated how Springsteen ached to tell stories, as if busting out in Darkness, trying to bust apart the chains of man’s pain, warning “in comfort danger dwells; only on the dangerous cliff edge does one’s true self reside.” But I wasn’t sure if that’s what he was really saying.

There was an emptiness in my life such that Springsteen’s edge was as close to any edge I could stand upon. I was living in Gaithersburg, Maryland, then, not the edge of urban life, life, or anything – only the fringes of suburbia. Somehow, Springsteen’s words eventually penetrated the edge of my consciousness:

– The dogs on main street howl, ‘cause they understand / If I could take one moment into my hands  / Mister, I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man / And I believe in a promised land.

– I take her to the floor, looking for a moment when the world seems right / And I tear into the guts, of something in the night.

– ‘Cause in the darkness, there’ll be hidden worlds that shine / When I hold Candy close she makes the hidden worlds mine.

– Some guys just give up living / And start dying little by little, piece by piece / Some guys come home from work and wash up / And go racin’ in the street.

– End of the day, factory whistle cries / Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes / And you better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight / It’s the working, the working, just the working life.

– Some folks are born into the good life / Other folks get it anyway, anyhow / I lost my money and I lost my wife /  Them things don’t seem to matter much to me now / Tonight I’ll be on that hill ‘cause I can’t stop / I’ll be on that hill with everything I got / Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost / I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost / For wanting things that can only be found  / In the darkness on the edge of town.

In time, I sensed a testiness of my own. Discontent with machine shop work, empty experiences, boredom, unfulfilled dreams. So, I began to write songs; eschewed folk guitar and formed a rock band; became a freelance artist; worked as agency ad man before eventually finding a teaching career.

This rousing, creeping, crawling and often raucous stanza of rock and roll impressed me. Perhaps only at the edge does one gain best perspective. Slowly protruding from my shadow, Darkness prompted a head-on collision with my own life’s chorus.