Twenty years ago, I was a few months shy of turning twenty. Now, that time is as distant from the present as it then was from my birth. Although many memories from my first twenty years are pretty hazy at this point, certain scenes arise with shocking clarity, often sparked by something like the hearing of a song — like the songs that make up The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree. It’s a CD I bought around that time that I can’t listen to now without being whisked directly to 2005, or indirectly even earlier, due to its retrospective and introspective nature.
It’s a concept album that John Darnielle wrote after the death of his abusive stepfather, reflecting on a pretty traumatic childhood lived largely in fear, with a specific focus on his teen years. It’s a harrowing listen, but it’s also an ultimately beautiful, grace-filled one. Darnielle was in his mid/late-30s when the record was written and released. Though he was reflecting on those years with a little distance, I would wager that, with the recent death of his stepfather, the memories flooding back felt newly remastered in Ultra HD.
I was nineteen, so just barely starting to think back on my earlier childhood with a hint of remove. And though my own experiences were quite different and nowhere near as severe, this album and a book I came across a couple of months earlier, Frederick Buechner’s The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days, really helped to kickstart some of the processing and contextualizing of my life up to that point, which is helpful to at least start doing in one’s twenties. They both helped introduce me to the idea that I could begin assimilating the negative events of those earlier years by discerning God’s work in and around them.
Buechner was writing with more distance from his childhood. He was in his mid-50s when his book was written and published. However, despite the extra twenty years between the living and the writing, there are many similarities between the two works.
Darnielle lived under the shadow of the unavoidable presence of his abusive stepfather. Buechner lived under the shadow of the unavoidable absence of his father who had died by suicide when he was ten. Though in many ways these are very different hardships for a child to face, both an abusive presence and an all-out absence are partially experienced as absence, as emptiness, a negative space looking to be filled with what could or should be; an especially potent version of an absence we all feel to some extent, an absence that sends many of us in search of a story to find ourselves in.
I’ve written before about the double-edged sword of the stories we tell ourselves. We need more than to just see ourselves reflected in a story. There has to be an openness to mystery and surprise. When there’s no sense that our story could have a divine author with the ability to redeem our missteps and mistakes in ways we can’t fathom, it all falls flat. If the story we graft ourselves onto is a “choose your own adventure” type narrative, a “pull up your bootstraps,” be “the master of your fate and captain of your soul” sort of situation, it only adds more pressure to our already pressure-filled lives. A story about someone who made all the right decisions, did exactly what needed to be done, and had things go to plan through a sheer bending of the will can be inspiring for a time, but when that inevitably doesn’t happen for us, it’s despair all the way down. Small setbacks are weighed down with moral judgment and take on a larger than warranted significance.
But if God’s holding the pen, and we can locate ourselves within the story of redemption that we see play out in scripture, of people just like us in our failings and our pain, it’s the opposite. It gives us a freedom to go on living our lives faithfully, taking life seriously (without taking ourselves too seriously) because we know we are not ultimately in control. We can love freely and try new things, because even if we fail, we know it’s not ultimate.
This isn’t to say that we’re always going to get it right. It’s probably more likely that we’ll be wrong about the movement of the Spirit in our lives, but there’s something in the attempt itself that quashes the idea that everything that happens to us is because of us; because of something we did or failed to do, or something we are or are not. Just the attempt to discern breaks us free from the persistent but false narrative of self-determination.
In the Gospel of John, after promising the disciples that when he is gone, the Father will send the Holy Spirit to stay with them forever, Jesus says, “I do not give to you as the world gives.” This has to be understood for any of the rest of this argument to hold any water. Without the aid of the Holy Spirit, we want God to give to us as the world gives, we want fame and fortune, we want worldly success that comes from our own sweat and toil. But with the Holy Spirit illuminating God’s consistent presence even in the situations of our lives we initially thought he couldn’t have been further from, we can see that what we want often isn’t what we need, and some of the things we wish we could change about ourselves or our pasts are actually the things that lead us to Jesus.
To situate their own lives and experiences within God’s broader redemptive narrative, both Darnielle and Buechner use allusions, quotations, and images from scripture. Buechner demonstrates this in passages like the following:
The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak … Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear … ‘Be not afraid, for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him.
The sweet and bitter airs of our past and present, God’s in it all. At nineteen, this insight was new, and it didn’t fully take for years, but a seed was planted. Buechner modeled a way of looking back without getting stuck in the past and of moving forward with humility, humor, compassion, and grace, that, with God’s help, I hope to keep attempting myself.
Darnielle’s work had a bit more edge to it, a little more anger bubbling under the surface, which was appealing to me on some level, with my teenage hormone levels only then beginning to recede. But rather than letting the anger boil over, Darnielle knew when and how to turn the heat down, to acknowledge and feel his feelings, but like Buechner, not get stuck in them.
Although the whole record is close to my heart, my favorite song, the one that really sticks out and works as a microcosm of the whole, is “Up the Wolves.”
The one-two punch of the opening law/gospel-resonant verses cuts straight to the reality of our situation (first verse) and our ultimate hope (the second verse):
There’s bound to be a ghost at the back of your closet
No matter where you live
There’ll always be a few things, maybe several things
That you’re gonna find really difficult to forgiveThere’s gonna come a day when you’ll feel better
You’ll rise up free and easy on that day
And float from branch to branch, lighter than the air
Just when that day is coming, who can say? Who can say?
Darnielle is setting it up so that we can see the suffering we all endure, sometimes by our own hand, sometimes due to how we deal with (or don’t deal with) negative past experiences. He juxtaposes that with the idea that eventually that suffering will cease, and our negative past experiences will be ameliorated when we “rise up free and easy” on an unknown day, both ultimately and in moments when that eschatological hope breaks through in our day-to-day life. That phrase, combined with “who can say?” echoes both Matthew 24:36: “But about that day and hour no one knows” and Proverbs 20:9: “Who can say, ‘I have made my heart clean; I am pure from my sin’?”
At first, it seems odd to start rather than end the song that way, because the verses that follow are about exacting revenge: “I’m gonna get myself in fighting trim/ Scope out every angle of unfair advantage/ I’m gonna bribe the officials, I’m gonna kill all the judges/ It’s gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage.” However, what this topsy-turvy order ends up accomplishing is the doubling down on of a realistic view of human nature. Acknowledging that even when we know we are acting out of a base impulse for distorted “justice,” we also know (on some level) that our only real hope is to be turned from that towards love, towards God, towards the good of our neighbor, through trusting in Jesus and his promises. And frequently we still don’t make that turn, opting to turn to ourselves instead, thinking that we know better than God and would be better off taking matters into our own hands.
At a show in 2007, Darnielle said this of the song:
It’s a song about the moment in your quest for revenge when you learn to embrace the futility of it. The moment when you know that the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you’re headed is not the direction in which you want to go, yet you’re going to head that way a while longer anyway.
Unfortunately, this sounds just about right for most of us much of the time. Buechner gets at a similar truth: “To do for yourself the best you have it in you to do — to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst — is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still.” What we miss when we buy into self-reliance and self-mastery is that the one thing we actually need “more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift … that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept a helping hand.”
God’s hand is always outstretched to us, but he will not force it. He won’t pry our clasped fingers apart to entwine them with his. He offers his hand as a gift, one without preconditions or ulterior motives. But it’s more than just a helping hand. It’s a rescuing hand, a life-altering hand, a death-conquering hand, a hand that changes everything by offering a peace completely unlike the uncertain and limited peace the world offers. A hand that has been and will always be working in the background of our lives, through our stories, the stories of all those who came before us, and the stories of all who will come after us; in the moments we can name as sacred and even in those we deem profane. A hand that is perpetually shaping, cradling, and sustaining us, gathering us in as beloved children without qualification.
