Awake, lyre and harp
I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace.
Today is a week of music.
And this is a turning point. Stay with me.
I’ve come along through 50 years of living and the kids are heading off to college. Soon the house will be empty, and then the next part of life will start. I guess.
We’re at the February choir concert in the community college where our youngest son is finishing his prep work before he heads away for his final two years at a university. It’s a program to celebrate cultural diversity, if I recall. The closing number is U2’s song about Martin Luther King, Jr., a song I’d never heard before. It’s a slow, contemplative song. For reasons too long to describe here, it hit me deep in the emotions. But why? I don’t know. But I’m thinking “he was a beloved man.”
Then this clear tenor voice rises up above the choir, singing of dreams and sleep and rain. It sounds like my son — but he’s not in the program as a soloist. Someone else is. I look for him in the choir — and yes, he’s there, with the solo part.
I can tell you what I felt and thought. I can’t tell you if I understood. It was just an experience, rising up, perhaps, over grief of one part of my life ending, over the immense pride in my son’s accomplishments and talents, and something ineffable about the song itself — grief at the life and passing of someone I had not paid attention to, to MLK, for whom the song was written as an elegy years after his murder.
That tied into something I was already struggling with, but more about that later, in another post, maybe. Not now.
For now, you should know that it was the early days of Spotify, I think. Something I had on my cell phone hooked up to my car stereo. “Show me songs like this,” I entered later that week.
I don’t know what songs played, but eventually, somehow — Kirk Franklin came on.
Now, if I’d never really heard U2, at least I knew of them. Kirk Franklin was completely foreign to me. Style, methodology, musicianship, production — this was not me. Not like anything I’d experienced before. (I’m just telling you. I had no negative feelings. Just — bafflement.)
But the words rolled over me like boulders. The words were where I was and they spoke to me where I was.
Look, I’m not saying that it was a revelation and a change and a way for music to speak of my own journey. But I ended up searching for everything he had produced up to that time. And some of the albums I listened to on repeat. There were simply words that were meaningful, to me, in those moments.
It was just the moment of thinking — feeling really — that a new leaf was turning, and it was all going to work out.
This was the song that started it all.
Hold Me Now
Words and music by Kirk Franklin
Album: The Nu Nation Project
The spring of April is gone
The leaves have all turned brown
The children are all grown up
And there’s no one around
I’m looking over my life
And all the mistakes I made
And I’m afraid,
Afraid
Somebody told me that You would wash all my sins
And cleanse me from the scars
That are so deep within
So I’m calling to You
If you can hear me
I don’t know how
I was wondering can you hold me now
You are the only one that’s patient when I fall
Your angels come to save me every time I call
You don’t laugh at me
When I make mistakes and cry
You’re not like man
You understand me
See people change
One day they don’t like you
The next they do
I wish that everyone could love me just like You
So here I am this sinful man peace won’t allow
I was wondering can you hold me now
I was wondering can you hold me now
To every broken person that may hear this song
To every boy or girl that feels their smile is gone
I know exactly how it feels to lay in the bed at night
And cry,
And cry
Don’t you worry God is faithful and He cares
About the tears you’ve cried
And the pain you feel is there
When you are weak that’s when he’s strong
Even though you don’t know how
God can and he will hold you now
God can and he will hold you now
God can and he will hold you now
Don’t you worry, he can hold you now
This is the song “Hold Me Now” on video. But unfortunately, it cannot be played on this website. You must open it on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/jkEF3K4NbjQ