Earlier this week I was awakened in the middle of the night by a peculiar restlessness. I found myself on the couch, bathed in the flickering light of the television, wandering amongst the late night hucksters and commercial laden movies, settling for brief moments in the midst of cable news shows and sports network broadcasts. As I thumbed the remote I found a Christian program where a young man was speaking to an arena full of teenagers. In that brief moment before I flipped the channel I heard him utter - with great conviction - "The world has nothing to say, and they say it so well." It's the kind of thing that makes one pause, sitting there in the darkened living room, in the middle of the night, suffering from an indescribable restlessness of the soul. The world has nothing to say, and they say it so well.
I wondered what was going to happen to the Christian teens that were buying into this mentality of 'in here' verses 'out there'. I wondered what would happen when they reached college and lacked the tiny little wooden desk under which they could duck and cover while the nuclear bomb that would obliterate their faith went off. What really got my attention, however, was the name that entered my mind next, the face, the voice, the unmistakeable sound that began as a tiny whispered memory and, like single guitar string plucked in the silence of an empty cathedral, resonated clear through my soul. Van Morrison. I sat there for a moment, staring at the remote clutched in a hand that seemed like - but strangely unlike - my own as I was displaced for a timeless moment, as I remembered.
There was a time when I couldn't get off the couch. When I was first diagnosed with depression I began to laugh. There was a name for what I felt. There was an explanation. There was, for the first time in my adult life, hope. A few years later, however, the illness overwhelmed the meds and I spent those dark, difficult months on the couch. It should have been far longer, but I went back to work too soon and a short time later was unable to cope once more. I survived that dark night. There's few people I can thank for that - my wife, my mother, my cousin, and God, not least of all, but I have to tell you that what got me through those days was Van the Man. Without a doubt, Van Morrison saved my life.
My wife came home for lunch each day, and in the afternoon I would stack up the cd's and crank up the music and sit on the couch or lie on the floor and listen, the way the earth listens to water, the way the moon listens to the prayers of heartbroken lovers. Van never mentioned it in any of his songs. It wasn't in the words on the page. It was in the music. It was in the tone of his voice. It was in the haunted, pained moan that lay just beneath every phrase, in the wild howl that threatened to break loose in almost every chorus, in the loneliness and hurt and anguished, bruised, broken, soul-deep wound that bled into everything he said. Van Morrison knew my pain. I spent hours on end, unable to weep, listening to his shaking, scarred hands holding my heart in his, longing to be free, longing for this Gethsemane to end.
That experience was so profound, so emotionally powerful, that to this day I can't listen to those albums. I still listen with great joy to his early work, and still maintain that 'Moondance' may be the greatest love song ever written, but I simply cannot play the music from those dark days without immediately being transported back to that brokenness and despair. I've been thinking about that experience for the last few days, turning it over in my mind, examining the smooth, round edges of this stone plucked from the eternal river's edge. God met me there, in that music. I needed something to hang onto, something that would speak to the very depths of my soul in a way that I understood, in a way that my woundedness would accept. It wasn't a bible verse, it wasn't a sacred hymn, it wasn't a sermon or a worship song or anything you might expect it to be. God threw me a life line, and his name was Van Morrison.
The world has nothing to say, the young preacher said, and they say it so well. I came back to myself, sitting on the couch in the middle of the night once more and wondered what it takes to know the truth, wondered how great the cost of it, the tears shed for it. Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life, and we all just assumed we could get to Pentecost without going through Gethsemane, without going through the cross, without enduring that terrible abyss that is the tomb. I wonder how many of our lives will allow us to see Christ return as the conquering hero without first having seen him as the slaughtered lamb and I wonder, truly wonder, what would have become of me had I believed Van Morrison had nothing to say.
August 14, 2008 
