According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: ‘God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.’

This reminds me of a song by Bright Eyes (i.e., Conor Oberst) entitled, “When the President Talks to God.” You can download it for free from iTunes; scroll down on the Bright Eyes ‘downloads’ page to find a link to the free iTunes download, compliments of Saddle Creek: Look here.

I slip in bed when you’re asleep
To hold you close and feel your breath on me
Tomorrow there’ll be so much to do
So tonight I’ll drift in a dream with you

Dixie Chicks, Lullaby

Isaac wrote a while back about looking for “a soundtrack for our lives.” Today I heard the Dixie Chick’s song above and knew after the first stanza that I’d be adding it to my life soundtrack. It captured perfectly this morning—a morning I want to remember. I drifted out of sleep just enough to realize how comfortable I was. The dawn was cool enough that our grandma bedspread (you know, white with cottage-cheese-feeling patterns all over it and tassled edges) was keeping me just warm enough. I sunk a little deeper into the mattress and fell back asleep reveling in the warmth of my wife using my shoulder for a pillow and the peace of nothing to worry about for the next four days. Meanwhile, Toby, our dog, sighed—a bit miffed perhaps that he’d be waiting a bit longer for breakfast.

As good as the waking hours are I often find sleep just as enjoyable. It hasn’t always been this way. As a kid I went through a period (when I moved my room down into the basement) of being terrified of going to sleep. In college I just saw it as an intrusion on the important business of the day. After September 11th sleep was fretful, depressing, and fear-filled. Not to mention the many nights in the last few years where anxiety woke me up well before dawn. So now when a morning comes along where I feel in my bones, fingertips, and breath that, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” I’m thankful. And when a song comes along that same day that recalls and vivifies the moment, all the better.

It’s the inverse of some of Brian Eno’s projects. Many call him the father of electronica—but that’s a bit misleading because his stuff sounds nothing like today’s “electronica.” Anyhow, he made a few soundtracks… but they weren’t soundtracks to any movie. Instead, he created music-scapes for imaginary movies, imaginary lives, imaginary landscapes. Great stuff. But my friends and I did the opposite sort of thing. Music was the language that held our lives together and we wanted a compilation album that made sense of us, or helped us make sense of our ordinary worlds; or, probably more true (maybe even painfully true), we were a bunch of kids stuck in the middle of an uninteresting town with middle-class lives and middle-class problems that struggled to escape the ordinary, to make things a little more interesting, more edgy—you know, piercings and tattoos, and stuff like that. This is indie America, friends. It’s no accident that Conor Oberst and his constantly shifting crew (i.e., Bright Eyes) are from Nebraska.

Well, I don’t know what this says about me, but I still carry around this idea of a soundtrack to life. Most of my songs are still in limbo; I’m not ready to release an album. But there are two that you can be quite sure will make the final cut: Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” and U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Yeah, that U2 song, in particular, says it all—as Lauryn Hill and the Fugees might say, “Telling my whole life with his words.” It’s one of those songs that I can’t live without; the sounds and melodic words reach deep down inside me and accompany those Romans 8:18-24" href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%208:18-24;&version=31;">groans too deep for words. It’s a song that walks with me, whose music moans with a world waiting in eager expectation for something to happen—the arrival of something that will make sense of the shadows. When I hear it I feel something stirring in this present darkness: a fleeting beauty, a glimpse of eternal light, something unspeakable,…maybe divine?

But it has to be the live version from Rattle and Hum, not the one from Joshua Tree. There’s something about that African-American gospel choir that sings along with Bono—it just makes more sense. In the Madison Square Garden, singing with a full gospel choir, Bono sings these words that, in a sense, become my words, the words of a pilgrim—or, better said, a refugee:

I have climbed the highest mountain; I have run through the fields, only to be with you. I have run; I have crawled; I have scaled these city walls, only to be with you. But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for… He will lift you higher and higher. He will pick you up when you fall. He will be the shelter from the storm. I believe in the Kingdom come, then all the colors will bleed into one, bleed into one, but yes I’m still running. You broke the bonds, loosed the chains, carried the cross of my shame, of my shame, you know I believe it. But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Maybe years of listening to that song predisposed me to the Epistle to the Hebrews. That letter makes me feel the same sorts of things I feel when I listen to U2’s song. Right in the middle of the description of those great saints who lived by faith, we read about the wandering people of God, the Hebrews 6:18" href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews%206:18;&version=50;">refugees:

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. (Heb. 11:13-16)

Unsettling. The text and song disturb any sense of belonging: “Where’s home?” “Who are my people?” Of course this unsettling provocation calls into question civic commitments and political ‘responsibility’—this is not our country. But the way Hebrews and the U2 song unsettle me runs deeper than the issues surrounding citizenship and belonging to the nation-state. My question: who am I? If I am without place, without a context, without frames of reference, my identity (dare I say ontology?) is insecure, tentative, unstable. It’s like being stuck in the middle of the Atlantic without a compass or stars above that could set the bearings for the journey. This, I think, is Bono’s desperate longing; this is Israel’s wandering in the wilderness, desperately awaiting the promised land—a people without land, looking for “the world to come,” as the writer of Hebrews puts it.

Is this the ecclesia? A people always called out? A people never arriving, never fixed or settled; rather, always to come—a provisional people, nomads living in tents, worshiping in tabernacles. The church: a people hastening to the edge of history’s collapse, and waiting for the city of promise to come down from heaven; a wandering people, marching (in circles?) in this chaotic wilderness at the border of the promised land, the heavenly city. The temptation in our wilderness is to build lasting houses, comfortable accommodations filled with the comforts of accommodation, which promise to shield permanently the desert winds—structures of order that promise reasonable and responsible defenses against the relentless bombardment of violent sand-storms, anarchic whirlwinds.

This is the ecclesia: the pilgrim people of God, refugees that witness to the world to come through wandering, through breaching the walls of security erected by those who fear the desert…

…Aliens and strangers on earth, longing for a better country—a heavenly one.

That there’s a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. But the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in shit and straw and poverty, is genius. And brings me to my knees, literally.