In Richard Powers’ recent novel, Bewilderment, what astrobiologist, Theo Byrne, and his nine-year old son, Robin, love to do more than anything else is to sit under the night sky and imagine together what undiscovered wonders might exist beyond our galaxy’s four hundred billion stars. On one of these nights, Robin turns to his dad and asks a question: “Which do you think is bigger — outer space? Or (placing a finger to his father’s forehead) inner space?”
Jon Guerra’s new record, Ordinary Ways, is a window into one soul’s relationship with God — of faith, doubt, yearning, searching, straining, and suffering — a universe that spans both the immense inner space of one’s heart and the outer space of that heart reaching beyond itself toward God or something of God. That’s not to say that this album is anything like a memoir. Guerra is more interested in God than he is himself. He sings on the first track: the ways of God are higher / and the ways of God are small / and the days of men amount / to nothing at all. Guerra’s own heart and soul are simply the instruments he must use to grapple with the God who has grabbed hold of his life.
You could say the album is a portrait of God and Guerra at some down-the-road-a-ways stage of a long-term relationship — a marriage even. His lyrics articulate the manifold ways both partners have been working, fighting, and feeling their way toward something new that is more mature, more durable, and more beautiful than whatever was possible in its earlier seasons. It’s not a love that have come easily — he sings I have sought / a quiet life / but I have found / a lifelong fight — which is just to say, he describes a love that is enviously real.
Guerra’s lyrics brim over with evidence of this relationship’s intimate familiarity, in all the directions you would expect to see in any real relationship. It is a bond that has been tested to the brink of breaking (and the drive was almost over / and our love was almost gone). There is outright accusation (why don’t the bombs obey you / like the storms of Galilee do); there is stinging rebuke (all I see is all you are not); there is compromise (as I lift my voice to you / O Lord / would you increase my faith); there is romance (quiet my heart with the rhythm of your breath); there is ecstasy (you are the all in all / my soul is reaching for); there is grief (how long will the weight be this heavy?); there is confession (I am in a mess of my own making); there is adoration (you are all I’m worth); there is the wondrous realization that you are still the person I fell madly in love with all those years ago (The light still bends / when we say Yes).
This love between God and humanity, in Guerra’s voice, is not one that can be sustained by the banal platitudes that fill the lyric sheets of so many other “Christian singer-songwriters” or worship leaders. Guerra is up to something different entirely than the others he is often lumped into Spotify playlists alongside. One senses underneath his songs the earnestness of George Herbert, the reverent doubt of R.S. Thomas, the piercing acuity of Christian Wiman, and the determined vulnerability of St. Augustine’s Confessions. One senses a soul that is truly alive.
Guerra is out on the front edge of the genre, grasping for new, living language to help get our hands and minds around this ancient, ever-evolving, infinitely complex, occasionally maddening, endlessly wonderful communion between God and humanity. Somehow this feels true even though Guerra’s lyrics are shot through with Scriptural quotation and allusion. It is not regurgitation — which so much “successful Christian music” can feel like in its cheaper moments. It is instead as if Guerra has so thoroughly devoured the words of Scripture, so deeply dwelled inside the Bible’s strange world, that its words can now be offered back to us in new combinations, as revivified gifts, still ancient yet now made new. Call it “traditioned innovation;” call it “scriptural imagination;” call it, for me, a balm in Gilead.
What is forged in this fire of vulnerability and heart-strong striving is a relationship with God sustained in Ordinary Ways. It is a simplicity on the far side of complexity, a charged commonplace obtainable only to those who have traversed the valley of the shadow of death. A key song is Nazareth — a nowhere town of lowliness, Guerra sings, yet the hand of God is hiddenness. Guerra has learned that one need not travel to the mountain top to find God; his glory can be found precisely in the unglorious everyday, in the overlooked moment, the ignored stranger, in places almost always closer than we think to look. In his song Like You, Lord Guerra names God the “sinews of my sturdiness” (one hears Augustine’s “You are more inward to me than my most inward part”). God may indeed be present even in your overlooked, everyday self.
In a weird way, the song that best captures the heart of the album is not a song at all. It’s the accidental, providential audio capture of their toddler — one is clued in by the title — on the verge of unraveling, one suspects testing boundaries of bedtime, hovering on the knife-edge of tantrum territory, when they are surprised instead by the miracle of a love song. I love you in the morning / I love you in the evening their daughter sings into her preferred “mic-a-phone.” The God who is all in all is amongst us speaking love, singing brightness, inside the ordinary routine — dare I say, the battleground — of a toddler’s bedtime (your mother held and witnessed this). What actually is revealed in the unraveling is (to borrow another lyric from Nazareth) the love behind everything. It’s God in moments you never thought to look for him before.
Which is not to say that God shows up only in sweet moments of sentimental awe. In what I take to be the album’s thesis song (which is also the record’s most complex both musically and lyrically), My Transfiguration, Guerra sings that his transfiguration has been to receive all things as grace, whether joy, or toil, or pain. Guerra’s faith has not come easy, but his struggle is not really that God is elusive; his struggle seems instead to be that there’s too much God. He now looks to find God under every rock, such that not just belief but doubt can be seen as a possible gift from God; not just the peaks but the valleys, not just the victories but the defeats. Ordinary does not mean easy. Guerra’s plea: Teach me to pray in the ordinary ways is a determination to wrestle God out the everyday air.
It is against this backdrop that songs like Thank You, Lord, The Lord Will Provide, and even The Lord’s Prayer must be listened to. On their own, they can sound like stones skipping across the surface of the water: simple, straightforward testaments of God’s faithfulness — the first two in earnest, evangelical prayer mode, the third in that of liturgical prayer. In conversation with the rest of the album, you realize these songs are not stones but icebergs. There’s a veiled vastness under the surface of their simplicity. They embody a child-like faith built on top of a mature reckoning with the world’s heart-rending brokenness. To lay down my life and trust / You are not yet done with us / Could you teach me how to love?
Listening to this album feels like praying, and not in a way that is teaching how one is “supposed to” pray. Listening, instead, releases one’s heart to pray honestly, candidly, full of doubt and frustration, simultaneously full of wonder and soaring faith, humbled before the beauty that is undeservedly still possible despite it all. Like a parent singing love and melody into the heart of a child, who now in turn delights to hear that song sung back to them, so Guerra sings a miraculously ordinary faith into ours, so we might use his words to sing our own souls more deeply into the immense wonder of God.
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3 responses to “An Earnest, Reverent, Vulnerable Love”
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I loved Guerras music so much at the NYC conference that I’m headed to Chicagoland to see him again tonight . I couldn’t find the words to describe what was unique about his music, but here, you’ve done it !
Hi, can someone help me out, in the song “How Long” the chorus has the lyrics, “And Your grace isn’t good ’till it’s spent”. Can anyone help me understand that line? Thanks.
Hey James, it seems to me that Jon is writing from the revelation that the grace we’re given is not our own, it’s meant to be given again and again from us towards others. If we receive grace and withhold it, there is no goodness to that.