Christian Bands

Hello to everyone who has found their way here. It is lovely to be with you. I was sitting with a small group of artists at a monthly arts meeting at Door of Hope NE recently. As part of an exercise, were asked to recount the earliest transcendent moment we had with our craft. It’s been about 3 weeks now, and I am thinking about this exercise every day.

I grew growing up with some tension in the home. Not a ton but some. Whatever the source of my unwellness, if you could even call it that, is a discussion for another time. The point is that I felt some kind of sadness at a pretty early age. I felt my own inadequacy. I felt some kind of asymmetry in the world around me.

My mother grew up in a very musical Baptist home. Our home was not very musical early on, but on rare occasion my mother would sit down at the piano and plink plank her way through a hymn or two. I can still remember these moments. The patient triads gently resonating in the family room hit me with all the force of a blasting out from the piano settled me, it nuked my sadness. All the sudden, the world had symmetry, there was peace.

A quote from Richard Rohr: “Fours once lived serenely as an essential part of a united and beautiful world. But at some point during childhood, the union and beauty were seemingly broken. So, for much of their lives, Fours desperately try to create an outer world of balance and symmetry. They put their gifts to work to awaken a sense of beauty and harmony in their surroundings…”

You see what I am getting at here… Music felt like it could fix the asymmetry in my life. My life in music is really closely tied to this moment, and I think it’s why I accidentally started a Christian band.

Some of the complications of my younger years were tied to religion. As a result of this, much my religious practice has been much more “where 4 or less are gathered” for most of my adult life. Still, when I sit down to write, all I tend to write about is the stuff that is quietly but deeply christian.

For me the act of writing music for TENTS is a descending and ascending at the same time. Up into the joy and bliss of togetherness with God, down into the buried grief that I know too well. Writing this music, for me, is an act of prayer. It is the quieting of my own inner world, so that I can know God and heal. It is a gift to you. My hope is that this sacred music will end up really bringing life and hope to your universe. Maybe it can encourage you to move toward people, or to move toward God. It certainly has done that for me.

On behalf of Amy and the whole band, thanks for dropping in. I don’t want to gush about all the exciting stuff happening, cuz then it might not happen. Really though, we are scheming. More fun is coming. Big love to you all.