Gospel

I don’t believe in reli­gious exper­i­ences. I don’t trust in the blind­ing light of heaven. God, I wish I did. But every time we hear the gos­pel, it’s as if we’re listen­ing for the first time. Anew. These thoughts are born again each hour of the heaven-sent day, called upon whenever our unevent­ful unfold­ing requires incid­ental music.

This is no pound­ing soundtrack, burst­ing at the seams with action, adven­ture and mind­less melo­drama. We can do that, of course — we’re past mas­ters — but such epis­odes are best saved for out of our heads, out of our minds, out of our cocoon. That time comes soon enough. Always too soon. No mat­ter how much we turn up the volume to drown out all the clocks — alarms, tick­ing and all — the bell tolls from down the hallway.

Scan­ning the lines, we can see the light in each shad­owy par­able, and we weave our way into words that were once upon a time so secretly swept off those con­crete streets. Always in the bar­fly hours after mid­night, too: vign­ettes penned by one of the city’s army of anonym­ous romantics. Hands in his pock­ets and bent against the sleet and the sickly neon glim­mer, he keeps his head down and trudges home before dawn. Or at least that’s how it seems in my overly poetic imaginings.

We no longer care that each urban tableau was taken from aven­ues where we may never walk hand in hand because, by now, we know every foot­print on every pav­ing stone. Famili­ar­ity breeds contentment.

There’s a fel­low feel­ing in such tales; a sense that they were gathered into the leath­ery fold and scribbled onto creased pages by a kindred spirit: a world-weary wage slave who can barely give voice to his own name, let alone pro­nounce every twis­ted syl­lable of his frus­tra­tion. He never looks the sub­jects of his stor­ies in the eye, except when par­oxysms of twenty-first cen­tury right­eous indig­na­tion over­take his battered frame. We find ourselves end­lessly fas­cin­ated, unhealth­ily fix­ated, with his dreams and fears. Because they’re our dreams and fears, too. Writ­ten into our skin. Like scripture.

And so we observe these pre­cious moments of com­fort­ing ritual, tak­ing refuge in our endur­ing faith. Break­ing each other’s bod­ies, sip­ping each other’s blood, and giv­ing grate­ful thanks for small mercies.

• The National
• Lyr­ics to Gos­pel