I Love Rock-n-Roll....And Home

My spiritual life has always had the feel of journey about it. The phenomenology of that journey is that of always traveling but never arriving. And if it’s true that you can take a person’s spiritual temperature by the music they listen to, then mine would register a fever, a symptom of homelessness and the hunger for a home I often feel.

When I first began teaching philosophy at Calvin College I was given all 8:00 a.m. classes. I grew to hate walking into the classroom at that godforsaken hour. It was like walking into a morgue, as a veritable sea of pale, lifeless faces greeted me each morning. So one day, when I could take it no more, I tried something different. I arrived about 15 minutes before class began and played songs on a cd player so that what greeted students when they arrived was music. To this very day, before each introductory level class I teach, I now play music. I play music that I enjoy listening to, like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Counting Crows, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, Bright Eyes and others. This practice has revolutionized my classroom experience. When I enter the classroom now, regardless of the hour, there is evidence of blood coursing through veins and signs of life among my students. Since I prefer the sights and sounds of life to the deafening and soul-sucking silence of death, I am much happier.

Not long ago the before-class set list consisted of these songs: When it Don’t Come Easy (Patty Griffin), Shipwrecked at the Stable Door (Bruce Cockburn), Love’s Gonna Carry Me Home (Pierce Pettis) and Where the Streets Have no Name (U2). It occurred to me only afterward that every one of those songs gives voice to a profound sense of homelessness and a yearning for home. And though not intentionally chosen for that common theme, there is no doubt that the music I played that day says a lot about where I was and am spiritually, what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling.

Patty Griffin, for example, wonders aloud if we’ll ever make it home:
Everywhere the water’s gettin’ rough/Your best intentions may not be enough/ I wonder if we're gonna ever get home tonight…/I don't know nothin’ except change will come/Year after year what we do is undone/Time keeps moving from a crawl to a run/I wonder if we're gonna ever get home…./You're out there walking down a highway/And all of the signs got blown away/Sometimes you wonder if you're walkin’ in the wrong direction…/So many things that I had before/It don't matter to me now/Tonight I cry for the love that I've lost/And the love I've never found.

Bruce Cockburn is not exactly sure where home is, but he knows it can’t be bought: Big Circumstance has brought me here/Wish it would send me home/Never was clear where home is/But it's nothing you can own/It can't be bought with cigarettes/Or nylons or perfume/And all the highest bidder gets/Is a voucher for a tomb.

While Cockburn may not know just where home is, Pierce Pettis seems to know what or Who will lead us there: These days I’m noticing things/Smell of the rain/Wind in the trees when it gets moving/Seems to say, I’m not alone/Some day Love’s gonna carry me home/These days I’m learning to smile/The hand of a child/Has led me into fields of laughter/They make sure that I know/Someday Love’s gonna carry me home.

Finally, U2 has an unmistakable sense that when we do finally make it home differences will no longer divide, the streets will “have no name” and we will travel those streets together: I wanna run, I want to hide/I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside/I want to reach out and touch the flame/Where the streets have no name/I wanna feel sunlight on my face/I see that rain cloud disappearing without a trace/But I can dance, dance, dance in the dirty rain//Where the streets have no name/Where the streets have no name/Where the streets have no name/And when I go there/I’ll go there with you/It’s all I can do/Still building then burning down love/Burning down love//The city’s afloat/Our love turns to rust/We’re being blown by the wind and trampled by dust/I’ll show you a place with no sorrow no pain/Where the streets have no name/Love, Love, Love

Each song, in its own way, expresses what is perhaps a universal longing for rest and refuge, especially for the world-weary wanderer. Each expresses a yearning that resonates with those who never were clear where home is and who sometimes feel, in the words of Patty Griffin, like we’re walking down a highway void of signs, wondering if we’re walking in the wrong direction.

I must confess that this is part of the fabric of my own experience—disorientation, dislocation, groaning, longing, and hoping, hoping that Love has the last word after all and that when I go “there” I go there “with/you” and not alone.

Reminds me of a children’s story, Runaway Bunny, which I used to read to my own children when they were younger. It’s the story of a young bunny who schemes and shares with its mother all the ways it plans to runaway and leave home. And it is also the story of the lengths to which a loving mother will go to find her prodigal baby. “If you runaway, I will run after you,” says the mother bunny to the runaway bunny, over and over and over again. I think I was always reassured as much by the reading of that story to my children as my children may have been by my reading it. It reminds me that runaway bunny that I am, I can never outrun the long arm of Love.

The story of journeying home is the story of us all; it’s the story of the prodigal children we all are and the love of a Father who will spare no expense in coming to our rescue. Patty Griffin puts it well in the chorus of When it Don’t Come Easy:
But if you break down, I’ll drive out and find you/If you forget my love, I’ll try to remind you/Stay by you, when it don’t come easy/When it don’t come easy.

It’s been my experience that life rarely comes easy. And I am more like the runaway bunny than the sheep who knows its Shepherd’s voice and follows. In the hardest of times, when the water is “gettin’ rough,” I am easily temped to forget God’s love and to want to runaway. Even so I’m still on the highway, stumbling and blundering home. At times I may even be walking in the wrong direction, heading home but way off course. The really good news is that even if I am sometimes heading in the wrong direction, then just like the mother bunny, God runs after me. He “drives out and finds me.” And He carries me home, where I “dance, dance, dance.”