Undeception

I know, this artist has already appeared in my young Theologically Interesting Lyrics series. But I heard this song again today and because I related to it more strongly than ever, I feel compelled to share it.

Mark Heard was no sappy idealist. He was “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” Most of his songs — at least the best remembered ones — tend toward the depressing side. This guy had major problems with the dominant evangelical culture of his day, but he wasn’t one to let God off too easily, either. A man with a keen sense of social concern and an empathy for the plighted, he took on their role of crying out to anyone that would listen. An unconventional Christian who unnerved many believers by his penchant for “un-Christian” personal habits and for openly airing his theological concerns, he probably left many people listening to him wondering, “Why did he even bother self-identifying as a Christian?”

As if to finally answer this question, this song from Heard’s last album Satellite Sky (1992) speaks in words that could almost come from my own mind (more eloquently, naturally), as he describes something that perpetually drew him back to belief, trust, and hope in God. Despite all the problems in our universe, some of us hang on to an unshakeable sense of His love; not some mamby-pamby, touchy-feely love that merely winks at whatever we do, but a fierce, invincible force that will stop at nothing to have us clean and birth such love in us. (music below the lyrics)

Hammers and Nails
written and recorded by Mark Heard on Satellite Sky

Fire in my shallows, sap of my soul
I’m hungry for mercy and thirsty for slack
Out in the outland, the flesh and the dust
Weight of the tired earth is breaking my back
Hope where I left it under the skin
Countenance of maidens, the stance of the laddies
The healing of old wounds, the trust of my kin
The voices of children calling me Daddy

Your love
Never can fail to pierce me
Hammers and nails
Rhythm of passion louder than Hell
Thunder of Heaven
Hammers and nails

Light in the dark eyes, coal into diamonds
Shelter from heavy skies, sand into pearls
Bread for the breathless, cloth for the fresh wounds
Order and chaos orbit the half-world

The taste of a color, the flavor of light
None but a blind man can measure that weight
I am a deaf-mute idle as statue
Music of hemispheres lost in the half-haze

Your love
Never can fail to pierce me
Hammers and nails
Rhythm of passion louder than Hell
Thunder of Heaven
Hammers and nails

Hum in the graveyard, whistle in the dark
Stains on the stained glass, pains in the heart
In darkened corners love lies forgotten
In the heat of the moment it waits to be spotted

How could I slight you, how could I turn
How can you take it when I’m blind to your pain
The burning of fingers, the smoldering nerves
How can you take me back over and over again

Your love
Never can fail to pierce me
Hammers and nails
Rhythm of passion louder than Hell
Thunder of Heaven
Hammers and nails

YouTube – Mark Heard – 11 – Hammer And Nails – Satellite Sky (1992)

This installment of “Theologically Interesting Lyrics” features a song by the late Mark Heard, master lyricist, connoisseur of several stringed instruments, and pariah to the CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) industry of his time. Although widely acclaimed for his songwriting acumen, he was always an industry outsider: not only did he stand out as a “profane saint” who smoked, drank, and cussed, but because of his acute empathy for the outcasts of society and resulting social concerns, he even identified with the political left (whom he perceived to be more committed to those causes), setting him firmly at odds with mainstream evangelical culture. His lyrics are often melancholy, ironic, sarcastic, and rarely offer solutions.

Heard accused the Christian music industry of stifling the artists who strayed from the CCM norm of plastered smiles and facades of ethereal hope and who instead frequently deemed it necessary to use their lyrics to grapple with the problems of life and mourn the unfulfilled hopes that rightly plague us all, believers and unbelievers alike. On the last of over two dozen albums he released before his untimely death, he penned this song describing the plight of those artists like himself who felt exploited and whose not-always-pretty messages were essentially censored by what he considered to be a profit-seeking industry that held a seeming monopoly over Christian music.

(I’ve half a mind to leave the lyrics out so that you’ll just play the video and allow his expressive voice and the fitting music to carry you along. But nah, I’ll just post the lyrics below the video.)

(URL: http://www.youtube.com/v/N58edukzT8c)

The Orphans of God
written and recorded by Mark Heard on Satellite Sky

I will rise from my bed with a question again
As I work to inherit the restless wind
The view from my window is cold and obscene
I want to touch what my eyes have not seen

But they have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams
And sold us the remnants ’til our pockets are clean
‘Til our hopes fall ’round our feet
Like the dust of dead leaves
And we end up looking like what we believe

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins and make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

Like bees in a bottle we are flying at fate
Beating our wings against the walls of this place
Unaware that the struggle is the blood of the proof
In choosing to believe the unbelievable truth

But they have captured our siblings, they have rendered them mute
Disputed our lineage and poisoned our roots
We have bought from the brokers who have broken their oaths
And we’re out on the streets with a lump in our throats

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins
And make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

To date there have been two tribute albums making flutes of Mark Heard’s bones. There’s a marked contrast between his essentially incarnational approach to life’s difficulties in which he stands among the sufferers to give them a voice and the tendency of the CCM industry to offer advice from an enlightened position outside. The greater CCM lyrical tradition rejections the lyrical tradition of the orphans of God for bitterly complaining and offering no answers, while the orphans of God criticize the CCM model for merely offering platitudes and purely emotional pick-me-ups as solutions that too often prove hollow and illusory in the harsh realities of life. Those who prefer Heard’s approach will likely feel that his remains have been somewhat desecrated by a recent song from the CCM camp using his title that somewhat illustrates this tension. In this “Orphans of God”, the Christian pop vocal group Avalon offers this answer to the hopeless:

There are no orphans of God
So many fallen, but hallelujah
There are no orphans of God

Oh, you just feel like an orphan. God has made everything wonderful, if only you have the eyes of faith to see it.

CCM has changed; it is no longer such a monolith of pop/inspiration, and the degree to which CCM was actually stifling his music rather than, say, reflecting a low demand among the buying public that didn’t want to hear his moody, Appalachian-twanged music is certainly debatable. Either way, there are many more artists within and a robust movement outside of the mainstream industry labels who speak from the rubble, in the voices of the “fallen”, than there were in Heard’s day. But the tendency Heard identified remains in American suburban Christianity to eschew negative observations unless prepackaged with the dressed up “church talk” answers that most who go through a real dark patch find essentially dismissive. Most who have lost a loved one to a tragic circumstance tell us later that the least helpful and often most offensive thing they heard was, “It’s God’s will, and He loves you.” Yet that cold comfort is still routinely offered by Christians in “the bubble”.

Now, it is absolutely clear that mere words in songs, however poetic they might be, can never themselves resolve crises of distress, despair, hunger, sickness, fatigue, etc. in the same way that crying out accomplishes nothing but an appeal for an actual response. So in the end, the effectivity of Heard’s empathetic and others’ sympathetic approaches to lyrics will be judged by their comparative abilities to stir up the resolve to find real-world responses beyond pat answers within those who listen. From what I’ve seen, simplistically offering disembodied theological explanations that amount to gnostic escapism (particularly when those explanations seem to fly in the face of the facts) is perceived by those dealing with problems as taking those problems none too seriously. Those the most committed to not ignoring the emotional and physical hardships of life recognize that the suffering often sincerely need a shoulder to cry on and an empathetic acknowledgment of their pain rather than a tear and a lecture. In this, and in the potential to increase dissatisfaction with an intolerable state of affairs among the unaffected who might otherwise remain oblivious, I think Mark Heard’s approach triumphs.

So ends my hymn.