I'll be right behind you
Love changes everything
I'm not sorry we loved,
but I hope I didn’t keep you too long
We're not experts
We are believers, ministers of silence
Let no man pull us under doubt
I'll always open my hands to you
I'll be right behind you
— Sam Phillips, Love Changes Everything
Sometime last summer I was in the car traveling to my hometown with my husband. It was one of those moments when you witness the symmetry of things. Calling this serendipity or coincidence does not describe it. Earlier that day I had a hankering to listen to one of the bands that created my musical identity both artistically and spiritually. The days of self-discovery and my first brushes with spiritual intimacy surround the early work of U2. There are others who would like to deny they had the same encounter with the band considering the confusion of their overwhelming popularity. Yet when Larry begins the first cadence on Sunday Bloody Sunday, my first brushes with social justice re-awaken. Pride (In the Name of Love) taught me that I should be vocal about spiritual heroes in defiance of those leaders that embarrassed me when it came to my faith. Bad was a song that taught me yes, there are some things that are too difficult to talk or do anything about. And 40 was the first time I had heard a Psalm sung proudly outside of the church.
My own spiritual landscape is such a varied place. Love was as pure as the thin air on mountain tops that seem so far behind me, never to be approached again. There are lush forests I tucked into out of fascination with the green then became horribly lost in the darkness there. There are lakes where I have sat near to ebbs and flows and into which I was lured to play. There are overwhelming fields of harvest so terribly mangled by religion where I do not know where to begin and sometimes turn away from. Streets and streets of grit and despair are there, where I have to keep remembrance of those the mountain tops.
I want to 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*
The moment I had in the car that day was one of deep listening. A rather long song, Where the Streets Have No Name, was playing as I was reading a short biography on St. John of the Cross. The connection I had with the music and the difficult story of St. John's desire to create heaven on earth grabbed my attention.
I want to feel sunlight on my face
I see the dust cloud disappear
Without a trace
I want to take shelter from the poison rain
Where the streets have no name
St. John was a reformer when reformation was not cool in 16th century Spain. He tried desperately to reform the Carmelite Order, and made a female friend with whom he shared the spiritual practices of solitude and silence, St. Teresa de Avila. Together they founded many ministries and monasteries, making themselves active in the political and religious busyness of the time. They ended up being the first barefoot Jesus people and created the Discalced (shoeless) Carmelite order.
Where the streets have no name
Where the streets have no name
We're still building
Then burning down love
Burning down love
And when I go there
I go there with you
It's all I can do
John was captured by the shoed Carmelites, beaten and imprisoned. They had launched a counter-reformation against his values and the shoeless ones. Being it Spain in the 16th century, John was also tortured. He spent nine months in a cell not much larger than his body. A friar had been slipping paper into his cell, and during this time of humiliating confinement he wrote the poetry that became his Spiritual Canticle. After months of muscle atrophy, malnutrition and darkness, he escaped by pulling the hinges of his cell door. He returned to his friend and spiritual sister Teresa to continue their ministry of shoelessness and reformation.
The city's aflood
And our love turns to rust
We're beaten and blown by the wind
Trampled in dust
I'll show you a place
High on a desert plain
Where the streets have no name
St. John was known to have taken his young monk brothers on walks along the Spanish plains to tell them about wonders of nature and the glories of heaven. He frequently related the beauty of the earth to glories of heaven to his charges, walking barefoot through the fields with his charges. He had a deep desire for heaven.
He also had a habit of silence. He would spend long periods of time in deep silence to point where he would dive into the darkest parts of the unknown places of God. He dared to confront the silence and found rapturous joy there. It is from these experiences with the most silent darkest place of where his treatise on the dark night of the soul was born.
He was arrested again a few years later and severely beaten, to the point where he was disabled from injury and sent to a far off monastery where the abbott was told to let him die. Although John's brothers begged the abbott to have mercy on him and get him a doctor, the abbot refused to disobey his authority. John's condition worsened, yet he remained placid, anticipating his place of heavenly splendor. As John was dying, the abbott asked for forgiveness. John forgave him and let go of the place that held him from being with his Divine love.
Where the streets have no name
Where the streets have no name
We're still building
Then burning down love
Burning down love
And when I go there
I go there with you
It's all I can do
Our love turns to rust
We're beaten and blown by the wind
Blown by the wind
The music and St. John's story married in deep, intricate way within me that day on the road home. It was as if the song was written about him, about a friend who had suffered and passed on. I grieved for him. I knew more about what my faith was worth threw his eyes; those eyes that saw in the silent moments of meditation our resplendent heaven. I felt a little of what his sister-friend Teresa may have felt felt, participating and seeing all of her brother's history making.
In my life, I admit I have no been able to be St. Teresa to my biological brothers. I have failed, as well as the conflicting voices of godliness that surrounded their upbringing, to help them know the love God has for them. There have been a few friends, male friends, with which I have felt I've been the St. Teresa co-conspirator on their long spiritual journey. We have made many stops along the way. A bookstore in a rusty title city called Flint, a pentecostal church choir, a farm in the middle of a cornfield in Illinois called Cornerstone, a queenly, European city called Cincinnati and a small town with a chapel on a hill in the town square called Tyldesly.
This band of brothers has seen relationships that have come and gone, marriages, children and more children. A brother just toured Venice. One is an artist, his dream. Another is a music minister. Another just had his heart pulled wide open by love. And another I found along the roadside, walking alone.
This last brother came back to me via a dream I had (about Chinese food in which my husband's cousin Amanda made a cameo) and the search button on Facebook. It has been over a dozen years since we communicated, yet it feels like we are picking up straight from the time when we wrote each other packets of letters that drifted for weeks over the ocean.
I was impacted not just by the fact that he has produced four children over the years but also deeply affected by that he has lost touch with his faith and left the church. He found himself an absence of hearing from God within, depressed and no longer believing what he was brought up to believe. He bravely walked away not wanting to be a hypocrite, knowing it would affect his family. He couldn't find anyone to help him get past the point in his faith when he want the big MORE. The ones surrounding him by just didn't have the capacity educationally, spiritually or psychologically to facilitate MORE. They were caught up in agendas, prognosis and politics. I feel it is no big wonder that he took the long walk....AWAY. His wings crashed around the cage he was in until he figured out it was easier just not to fly, and not flying fits.
My brother has grown mentally, as he says, and feels a strong confidence about his life plans. He hopes to find his place again amongst the folds but waits. I find him courageous for taking up the challenge of finding his faith beyond the definition of others, even his own ideals of what that means. Yet I feel as helpless to bring him to any conclusion as I feel in the reawakening of my own biological brothers' faith. I just want to listen and walk along side of my friend as St. Teresa did with John.
Oh, and I see love
See our love turn to rust
We're beaten and blown by the wind
Blown by the wind
Oh, when I go there
I go there with you
It's all I can do
*Where the streets have no name by U2
