Welcome to season 4. We changed the set over the summer. I felt bad having my guests sit on a hard backless wooden stool for upwards of an hour. I’m trying to be more hospitable okay?
Anyway I found a pair of armchairs on facebook marketplace, from the home of a couple who had passed. One of them has clearly been sat in and smoked in for decades. That one’s mine. The guest gets the good one.
Thomas Austin got the good one. He’s 28, a pastor’s kid from Maryland who led worship most Sundays growing up. I grew up with a hardbound hymnal, and bailed when they started putting drum kits on stage. On paper that’s not a lot of common ground. But Thomas writes toward the mystery instead of the certainty, and that’s about where I tend to hover, so I figured we’d have something to talk about. I didn’t figure on how much of the talking would be mine.
The song that made me want to have him on is called “Just Emotion.” It starts at a youth retreat altar call, the big planned moment most of us who grew up in church had a dozen times by eighth grade. The easy move is to write it off: somebody dimmed the lights and played the bridge one more time. Thomas has been the one playing the bridge, so he knows. But then the song goes to his wedding, which was planned too. “I knew exactly what moment I was going to cry,” he told me, “and damn it, I still cried.” If the critique holds for the altar call, it holds for the altar. Either he’s a hypocrite everywhere or something else is going on. His bet is that emotion is as true about a life as anything else, and that a God who is a person has feelings too.
To speak churchese for a moment, I grew up with the best version of all this. My dad is the real thing. My parents are 80 and still go to the hospital to sit with “old people” in their hour of need. My brother pastors a church in Washington and is as decent a human as you’ll ever find. And in all my years of praying, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt loved by God. I read the Bible most mornings now, working through the Old Testament, and mostly I don’t know who I’m talking to when I pray. I wouldn’t advertise that. It’s just true.
I said all this to Thomas. He didn’t try to fix it, which I appreciated. He said the Bible’s main picture of God and his people is a bride and a groom, and that he doesn’t feel loved by his wife every minute either. He was two miles from her while we talked and hadn’t thought about her once. He still knows she does.
I’ve made a lot of decisions on feeling, some good ones, plenty not, and I’ve learned to anchor my life to something that doesn’t depend on how I feel from one hour to the next. I think my marriage works because of that. Maybe the rest of it can too.
A couple of months ago my parents sent me a box of my childhood things. In it was a newspaper clipping my mom had laminated (from the late seventies judging by the yellowing) - a mother writing about her baby trying to say the name of Jesus and hoping the child would grow up knowing how to call on it. I teared up reading it, which surprised me. Then I went on eBay and found a small picture of Jesus (vintage for taste lol), and now it’s part of bedtime. My daughter says his name before we turn off the lights. I can’t fully explain what I’m doing there. I know I want her to have the stories. I know what it meant to me to watch my father live them.
Thomas closes the episode with “Normal Church,” the song that put him on a lot of people’s phones and in the middle of a comment-section war he’d rather not referee. Before that, near the end, he brought up Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, the scene where a young man asks an old professor when he’ll get answers to his questions. The professor tells him some questions can’t be answered, only lived. The young man asks how long that takes. Maybe as long as you live, the professor says. Then: it may take longer.
No answers in this one. Two guys, some good questions, and a couple of songs.
Welcome to Season 4.
This episode is supported by A Song for Someone You Love. We write, record, and film custom songs for birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, close-call near breakups etc.
