In the summer of 2019, I finally broke down & downloaded Spotify—a very popular music streaming app—& have since used it to listen for tens of thousands of hours. In December they send out “Spotify Wrapped”, which is a curated snapshot of your year in music: a bunch of interesting data about your listening habits, including your most-played songs.
My top song of 2020 was “The Wrote & The Writ” (which apparently I streamed 110 times). On the one hand, this didn't surprise me—I was definitely aware that I listened a lot to this tune—but on the other hand, I didn't at first understand what drew me so strongly to this song.
Written & sung by Johnny Flynn (whom some may know as the main love interest, Mr. Knightly, in 2020's movie adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma), this is, according to Spotify, his most popular single, with over 13.5 million streams as of the time of writing. There is some debate about whether the song is meant to be about God or a woman (or perhaps both), but I believe that either way it speaks of a man struggling with & eventually (I believe) losing his faith.
Riddled throughout with Christian religious imagery, he talks about gladly receiving writings from his beloved, how he aligned his life to live by the promises contained therein, but then how one day he realizes that all they have are these letters—dead words absent any experience of true intimacy—& so he walks away.
This song breaks my heart because I know people like that. Without experiencing actual relationship with Christ, there aren't many options other than walking away or slipping into dogmatic legalism. It frustrates me because he (& people I know) blame/put the burden of proof on God to show up: “Don't say in a letter what you can't in my ear”. But just a few lines earlier, he even admits that he stops reading the letters because “Your blood's between the pages / And I can't stand to see you bleed”: he's not walking away because God isn't there; he's walking away because it is too difficult to truly reckon with what these writings are saying.
Or perhaps the song warms my soul because in the beautiful ambiguity of poetry it is impossible to tell if the “letters” in the song refer to the Bible (as assumed in the previous paragraph) or if they refer to some representative of the secular world—love letters or emblems of some other idol. In this interpretation, when the singer is “asked to drink the blood of Christ” he realizes the ashen emptiness of the world's works & finds true relationship in the sacred—I know people like that too.
Therein lies the brilliance: the exact same song, with the exact same words, yet just enough left unsaid that—depending on what happened in the untold silence—the outcome is literally as different as Heaven & Hell.
This time off between finishing support raising & starting training in mid-January has been hard for me for various reasons, but if God has shown me anything it's that this space is important. The spectacular moments are awesome, but just as critical is what goes on in the background between each stanza of your song: you never know how your small service in the silence could change the entire meaning of the silence for someone else.