(Note: “faith” in the subject line is the lowercase-f kind. There will be no mention of Faith Hill—arguably the most egregious example of All That Is Wrong with Country Music (or at least the most famous one), in this post, or indeed, any other that I will ever write. I promise.)
Someone on one of my e-mail lists posted a link to a quiz recently that focused on religion and spirituality. I’m an Internet quiz buff, I freely admit; I know that most of them are poorly constructed and fuzzily conceived, but they’re fun, and harmless fun at that. So I always take them whenever someone posts a link to them. On this one, my results classified me as “spiritual”—80 percent spiritual, to be exact, but also 60 percent “reason-oriented,” and—perhaps because the quiz seemed (based on the way the questions were phrased) to have a slight bias toward fundamentalist Christianity—they had reason at the opposite end of the spectrum from faith. Which I guess makes sense in a way, but then again, I consider myself both a believer in logic and reason and a person of faith, so the results bugged me a little, even though I know it was just a dumb badly constructed and probably biased Internet quiz.
Faith is something I don’t talk about a lot, and it troubles me a little that I don’t even think about it as much as I used to, but it’s definitely something I possess. I believe in God, unlike many (most?) of my friends. I am purely a secular humanist type in orientation; I believe in science, I believe in evolution, I do not believe that God created man in His image. (Furthermore, and especially because I live next door to Kansas, I am a devout Pastafarian.) And I believe, ever more passionately, in the necessity of the separation of church and state. But I believe in God. There have been times in my life when I’ve wished I didn’t, because the belief doesn’t really make sense when paired with the rest of my worldview. But I think that’s what faith is, what the Kierkegaardian (I was a big Kierkegaard fan back when I still read things like philosophy) leap of faith is all about: I believe because I am incapable of not believing. For me, believing is very much like knowing; it’s something that I feel—not in the frequently misused sense of that word, when people say “I feel” when what they really mean is “I think,” but in a literal, physical way. I’ve even tried not to believe, to abandon anything like faith, but I can’t. It’s not something I can choose to do.
Nonetheless, I’m okay with the fuzzy term “spiritual,” because in the sense in which the quiz used it, it implies that belief is important to me and is an essential part of who I am, but organized religion is not. And that’s completely accurate. I sometimes wish I were part of some sort of religious community, but I don’t know which one I’d join, exactly; if I had kids, I’d raise them in my family’s religion, which is Judaism, but it’s just me (since my husband, raised Methodist, doesn’t believe in God), and I find myself drawn to aspects of several religions: Catholicism, which I investigated pretty extensively when I was in college, and some of the more liberal/socially conscious Protestant denominations (Quakers, Episcopalians, Congregationalists) appeal to me, as do the basic tenets of Judaism. But I figure I’m probably never going to be a religious person exactly, except in my own very personal way. I used to think of myself as a seeker (in the Pete Townshend sense), when I was younger and did a lot of religion-shopping, but now I’d just call myself a believer. I wish I paid more attention to that aspect of my life, as I used to; I used to pray nightly, and now I mostly do it on planes. (That’s an oversimplification, though semi-serious.) It’s been on my mind lately, though, and maybe I will start focusing on it more again, both because just exploring it, and attempting to reconcile it with my decidedly godless-commie-secular-humanist views, interests me, and because it brings comfort and hope to my life, which I occasionally can’t generate on my own.
Sam Phillips—the female singer, not the Elvis guy—is also a believer, and someone who examines her own spirituality and faith regularly, which is one of several reasons that I adore her and wish more people loved her music the way I do. She was raised in a moderately observant Episcopalian family, but somewhere in her teens, I guess, she became more serious about religion; I don’t know if she would have described herself as born again, but she was definitely a Christian. She recorded a few contemporary Christian records under her given name, Leslie Phillips (Sam is a childhood nickname, I guess), at least one of which, “The Turning,” is very good and still widely available. Somewhere along the line, she broke with organized fundamentalist Christianity, but she is still a believer, a seeker, someone who seeks to find truth and meaning through God, I guess. (I’m saying “I guess” a lot because I’m obviously not fully comfortable writing about something as intimate and personal as religious belief on behalf of someone I don’t know, based only on what I’ve read in interviews and, especially, what I’ve gleaned from her songs.) Listening to Sam often helps crystallize my own thoughts about faith and belief, because she writes so eloquently about it. Her most recent record, written in the wake of her divorce from her husband of quite a few years, the fine musician, songwriter, and producer T-Bone Burnett (who has also been part of, and then separated himself from, fundamentalist Christianity), begins with the line, “I was broken when you got me,” which I suspect she is singing to both her ex-husband and to God. That line has been resonating with me (to use a phrase I detest but seem unable to avoid) recently; it makes sense to me on some gut level that I can’t quite explain.
Musically, Sam is a true original. The two great records that she released while she was married to T-Bone (there are several, but there are two in particular, “Cruel Inventions” and “Martinis and Bikinis,” that are nearly perfect) were produced by him, and they’re full of elaborate, Beatles-y arrangements, so they’re a delight to listen to on a purely musical level even if you pay no attention to the lyrics. Her two equally great recent records, “Fan Dance” and “A Boot and a Shoe,” which were not produced by T-Bone, are almost the polar opposite, striking in their spareness and understatement.
And then there’s Sam’s voice, which is also totally unlike anyone else’s sound. She herself has compared it to the braying of a mule, which is unnecessarily harsh, but it’s true that it’s not a conventional voice by any stretch of the imagination. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a wonderful, listenable, affecting voice; it’s just kind of odd, but in a powerful way. It’s instantly recognizable, and when a Sam song comes up on the iPod, I get chills right away, because I know it will make me happy or just make me feel.
I could quote Sam’s lyrics for days on end, but there are a few songs in particular that get at her concept of faith in a particularly concise and thought-provoking way that I’ll quote briefly here, because I’m in the mood to. The song that made me a Sam fan—I read a review that described it in detail and quoted from it, and I was so intrigued by it that I went out and bought the record (on cassette; this was back when my first husband and I could only afford a few CDs a year, and if there was a record that we weren’t both going to listen to, I’d buy it on prerecorded cassette to save money and listen to it in the car) without ever having heard a note—is “Lying,” which is on “Cruel Inventions.” She wrote it partly in response to Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got,” and the last verse, which addresses that song directly, goes:
If I said I don’t want what I don’t have
And all the answers are in love
If I said I believe in myself
And that’s enough
I’d be lying…
Then there are two from “Martinis and Bikinis” that have a way of coming up on the iPod whenever it’s the exact moment when I need to hear them. One is maybe her best song, an irresistibly catchy pop song called “I Need Love,” and the first verse is pretty stunning:
I left my conscience like a crying child
Locked the door behind me, put the pain on file
Broken like a window, I see my blindness now
(and then the chorus:)
I need love, not some sentimental prison
I need God, not the political church
I need fire to melt the frozen sea inside me
I need love
I find myself singing the second verse a lot when I’m commuting in wretched I-70 traffic on my way to and from work:
Driving into town, tired and depressed
Like a flare, a streetlamp sent an SOS
Peace comes to my rescue
And I don’t know what it means
(followed by the chorus again)
Then there’s the song “Strawberry Road,” which people tend to think is a reference to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but which actually came from some Eastern religious reference that Sam read. She envisions it as a sort of physical locus of faith, I guess (there’s that “I guess” again):
The strawberry road where the dream fades
Is down between our longing and desire
The strawberry road where our hearts break
Into love
It also contains one of the most beautiful lines in any song I can think of, and that’s the one that tends to pop into my head most often. I’m not quite sure what it has to do with faith, specifically, but it’s tied into it somehow—I feel that, too. It also sums up the way I’ve lived my life at certain times, so it has a special poignancy for me:
You censor longing
And organize beauty
Because you’re afraid you want it more than
Oxygen or light
You can’t get there
With your morals
Or without love…
I have a feeling this post isn’t making much sense, but it’s been fulminating in my head for a couple of weeks now, and this might be as close as I can get to articulating it. And now I need to go listen to some Sam.
(She’s not a huge star by any means, but she tends to inspire tremendous devotion in those of us who do love her. In that spirit, I think, a list friend whom I’ve never actually met recently sent me a live recording of Sam that someone had sent him. He’s never actually seen her live, and it’s one of the great musical gaps in my world that I never have either. I think that if I did, I’d be almost too overcome to bear it, and I’d probably spend the whole show barely able to breathe; that’s what happened to me the first time I saw Iris DeMent, who—as I said a few posts back—has a post of her own brewing in my head.)
I’ve been kind of boring lately here, I think, so I’ll try to post something less esoteric and more entertaining next time. I think I’m going to try to finish up my Replacements tales pretty soon, because I need to stop having those be my main distinguishing feature; they’re old stories that I’m tired of hearing myself tell, so I’ll finish them up here and then retire them.