Radical Trust

Building Walls or Building Bridges?

(The Bodyworks Band: Jimmy Nalls, Noel, Denny Bouchard, Kent Palmer, Karla Thibodeau)

Looking back over these past 50 years of my musical and spiritual life, I'm struck occasionally by the thought of how many of my fellow Christian singer/songwriters have been part of my evolutionary faith walk. The desire to create substance from mystery and hope from personal doubt is most certainly a common calling among those of us drawn to speaking musically about the presence of the Divine in our lives.

Annie Herring, 2nd Chapter of Acts, Ricky Skaggs, Amy Grant, Michael Kelly Blanchard, Solveig Leithaug, Phil Keaggy—some of them writing and singing more traditionally based hymns and reflections—are all part of an inspiring and imaginative fellowship that included edgier creatives like Keith Green and Larry Norman, who have since passed on.

I recently came across an email from Larry Norman, with whom I had shared a Santa Barbara stage in the 1980s. In appreciation for a "pep talk" I'd given him after his performance, he wrote to me saying I was "the only radical leftist Christian" that he knew about and thanking me for "standing tall." Larry’s first album Only Visiting This Planet was an important part of confirming the interrelationship of faith and social equity for so many of us, including Bono, the Irish singer/songwriter and contemporary activist.  

No stranger to controversy, Larry had walked into the Gospel music scene wearing his rock and roll shoes. His song “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music” basically launched Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) in the late 70’s.  Here are two verses from the lyric:

They say to cut my hair, they're driving me insane
I grew it out long to make room for my brain
But sometimes people don't understand
What's a good boy doing in a rock n' roll band

If you've got scriptures, show me to my face
Why should the devil have all the good music?
There's nothing wrong with what I play
Jesus is the rock and He rolled my blues away

I remember responding to his letter by confessing that I was trying “to take the faith deeper and keep it wide at the same time.” In the evangelical world, descriptions of one's spiritual journey were often summed up by phrases like “born again,” “saved,” “washed in the blood,” and the preachers and singer/songwriters who used this “Christianese” were often unaware of how off-putting it was to the very folks that we all believed needed to hear the Good News."  

In a 2018 NPR interview with Gregory Alan Thornbury about his then recent book, Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?: Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock, the author said, “The church absolutely hated what he was doing because they thought that rock and roll was the devil’s music.” But there was another reason. Norman’s music criticized complacency about injustice, everything from “the war machine to racism to spending millions of dollars on the moon shot while people were starving in America at home.” 

Thornbury said that if Larry were around today he’d be heartbroken about the role of evangelicalism in American politics. He said, "The name evangelical has definitely become a polarizing one. Quite a different story from 1976 ... when it seemed like the evangelicals in leadership might actually be people that might bring the country together."  

In 1984, my solo and Bodyworks Band concert performances continued to be well-attended, but songs like “El Salvador,” offering a political as well as compassionate message, became more difficult for the mainstream Christian music community to accept. Hymns and praise music were obviously perfect to share in worship services, but to dismiss popular music’s spiritual hunger as merely “secular” seemed to me to be insensitive to some of the most poignant contemporary confessions of the desire to know God. I was increasingly convinced that story songs in an everyday language that revealed Gospel truths were my calling.  

One of the more contemporary Christian musical poets, Randy Stonehill, once suggested to me that in the desire to use familiar terms with which to address or confirm its faith, the believing community was being lazy. I sort of accepted that idea until about 10 minutes later <grin> when it occurred to me that no, it's probably not being lazy—it's being fearful. I’d seen it before in the behavior of converts who were concerned that, in their letting go of trusted references, there was a danger they would fall back into the sinful state from which they were miraculously rescued. So they doubled down on the intensity of their Bible reading and used only the accepted terms of the evangelical community to secure their faith. 

But then again, I thought “hey...not everybody is a songwriter. Not everybody is comfortable in the land of metaphor…” Still...in an age of radical fundamentalism and evangelical politics, often born from a lack of trust and a darker dependence on the rules instead of the Spirit, it seems to me that the use of parable and metaphor to recognize a broader presence of the Divine has an increasingly important role to play in bringing us together in Love.  An invitation to a more “radical trust” if you will…

To borrow two lines from one of Randy’s songs called “The Last Day”:

“We step into Eternity with empty hands and nothing left to show for all our pride. They will all forget your name and all that will remain is the love you could not keep inside.”

---

Connections

Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, we have felt shock and sadness at the violence and devastation as well as pain and sadness for the plight of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. As we reflect on this horrible situation, we find wisdom in Diana Butler Bass’s Substack post “History and Blame,” and we pray for peace.
Noel & Jeanne

Image credit:  The sketch of the Bodyworks Band was done by Kang C. Yi for the 1982  NPS and Bodyworks album Wait’ll You Hear This!

Vibrations

Watch Randy Stonehill’s performance of “The Last Day.”