I’ve got some threads to weave together here, and I’m not sure as I start just how they’ll go, but hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?

Thread One

The first thread is the experience of listening to the live Rich Mullins tribute concert recording that I wrote about earlier this week. To listen to it was an intense experience. While I didn’t break down in tears on the airplane during the listen, I did choke up multiple times. And where it got me wasn’t so much in my favorite songs; where it got me was in the moments where the audience (or, let’s call them the congregation) entered the mix and sang along. 2300 of us there in the pews at the Ryman simply knew the songs and the notes, and when the opportunity arose, there we were. The bridge in “Calling Out Your Name”. The chorus on Andrew Peterson’s “The Good Confession”. The call and response on “I See You”. The whole freaking chorus of “Step By Step”. Amazing, glorious music reverberating through the timbers of an old Nashville church.

A Brief Interlude

I’ve heard it said that if you want to put a finger on the things that are really important to you, the ones where you say yes, this is one of the important things I am built to do and should be devoting my life energy toward, look for where the tears and emotion come easily. And for me it’s really only one thing, and that one thing is people making music together. Not that I dislike being a solo musician. But where my heart gets grabbed before I even have a chance to think is group music - really, it’s people singing together. Musical theater. Audience participation with a band at a concert. Several people singing in harmony around a piano or guitar. Were I to sit down with you right now and just describe the experience at the end of the Ragamuffin concert of the congregation going from Step By Step into an acapella singing of the Doxology I would be choking up just verbalizing the memory. Whatever’s going on back deep in me, it’s that strong.

Thread Two

The next thread to pull on is the combination of my painful departure from the evangelical church and my strong reluctance since then to sit down at the piano and play and sing songs. I’ve been playing the piano and singing ever since I was old enough to play the piano. Accompanying family hymn singing when I was just learning to sight read, playing for church, teaching myself how to play songs that I liked off the radio. Learning all of the Liturgy, Legacy album after getting the sheet music for it. In my adulthood that primarily translated into leading worship at my evangelical churches. I was very good at it. And I loved it. Well, not all of the politics of it and not the endless rehearsals. But when things were really on? When the band is tight and the songs are good and the congregation is responsive? There’s nothing like it in the world. Church music was largely my life outside of work and family since college. And in 2020 when we left the evangelical church that all got left behind. And I’ve barely sat down and played and sang a song since.

It’s not that I don’t want to sing songs. I mean, there are some songs that I definitely couldn’t in good conscience sing any more. Rotten theology, manipulative musical choices, songwriters who have turned out to be better Nationalists than they are Christians… but there are still songs that I could want to sing. But since 2020 I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit down and try. It’s like it’s still too raw to be able to handle it. Could I make it through a song without just breaking down and weeping for reasons I can’t even articulate? Is that reason enough that maybe I just should, regardless? How do I carve out the space to have some room to process through all that? From a practical standpoint, my house is pretty small. I don’t really want my wife and kids to sit through nights of Dad just sitting choking out songs and crying on the piano bench. What will it take for me to be ready to start the healing process in this area of my self?

Thread Three

About the time I was listening to the Ragamuffin album, a piece from Crisanne Werner hit my inbox. I met Crisanne at a retreat several years ago that, even though it wasn’t advertised as such, ended up being a bunch of people all in stages of religious deconstruction and related grief. Crisanne has been writing about her experience since then, and her latest post is about coming to grips with starting to reconstruct. She talks about needing to enroll her child in a preschool run by an evangelical church, about it initially triggering all her anti-evangelical responses, and by the end of the year starting, as she said it, to “come to peace with evangelicalism”.

I am very happy for Crisanne that she has been able to start to find that peace; I am completely not there yet. Not even ready to start thinking about heading there yet. The darkness, harm, deception, hatred, manipulation, lies, and idolatry that drove me from the evangelical church are still, 6 years later, fresh enough offenses that I’m not ready or able to start getting over. I think I want to, eventually. But I don’t know how or when I ever will be able to.

Now what?

And so when I weave all those threads together I find myself at what feels like an impasse. How do I find the key to unlock the huge part of my heart that is my life with music when that musical life is so entangled with a religious background that caused so much estrangement and harm? How do I start to feel safe around the good songs, the non-problematic ones, when the very memory of playing and singing those songs is all balled up in the pain of where I came from? When and how does that reconstruction start? I’m not sure where that answer comes from. But eventually I need to get myself back to that piano bench and start to figure it out.