Songwriting: It’s So Dark
So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them–because of the blasphemy–If there be God –please forgive me–When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven–there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul.–I am told God loves me–and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
- Mother Theresa
I suppose you can piece together my life story so far if you read through my blogs, old and new. I grew up singing and serving in church, saw the ins and outs of “how the sausage is made” in ministry, faced sickness and death among loved ones, battled anxiety and irrational fears since childhood…all alongside my faith, which has been a constant. The harder life got, the more complicated things became for me and my religion.
No words can describe the fear and dense black that came over me when I slowly and secretly began to deconstruct my beliefs. Historically by way of my church and its doctrine, I always had a fail safe, a way to troubleshoot fright and doubt and disease and pain. It was scripture, it was God, it was my church community and lifting my hands at the loudest point of a worship song, shouting all bad feelings away. But by 25, none of those things seemed to work for me anymore. It felt like the spells that once held all the magic in the universe had faded out of touch, color, and tune.
But most people who know me know that already.
It’s So Dark is about the feeling of losing God and sitting alone in the pitch black, waiting for the assurance of such a Presence to return. It’s about mourning the loss of confidence and blind trust in ideas, in meaning, in the navigation of a religious tradition that I could no longer practice. It’s both a lament and a cry for help. Though I can’t see anything, or feel anyone nearby, desperation has led me to ask the Almighty where It has gone, where It is now. Growing up in a pentecostal, charismatic church, where we “align” ourselves “in agreement” with God’s will and sometimes our prayers in church sounded more like telling God to do something, rather than asking God, the line I wrote in the chorus, “Tell me where you are,” sings more like a pleaful demand than a request. I may no longer identify as a pentecostal evangelical as I once did, but I must always thank them for teaching me how to bring passion to my religious practice. I think it comes through in all my songs.
An old friend from my coffee-shop-server days commented on my song post via Instagram, “What a beautiful and timely longing.” And I thought, “Yes, that’s exactly it.” This song is also the melody of my longing. My longing to go back to certainty and to the days when my path was well lit.
The tag and refrain of each chorus is my favorite part of the song, as a choir of falsetto friends echo my realization that some seasons in life are just dark. Instead of pushing that down, explaining it away, or trying to spiritually bypass my struggle, why not admit it? Make a song of it? So many of the greats in Americana music sang of their misfortune and dangerous journeys, why can’t I? While it took a lot of convincing to grant myself permission to write a sad song, (thanks again to those pentecostal / word of faith roots) singing in a gentle whisper as I pounded my fingers into 7th chords on my keyboard in my bedroom, the honesty was a weight lifting off my shoulders.
To admit to a darkness that engulfs.
To sing about the perils of a sightless road.
To write a melody that colors in the lines of what God’s absence feels like. It gave meaning to my music for the first time since writing worship music for a congregation. The lyrics and order of the song came with such ease. (I love when songs practically write themselves, and for me it is a rare occurrence!)
It’s So Dark has since helped lots of friends along the way, new and old. One new friend put my song on a playlist of hers via Spotify called, “Finding Jesus Again.” I was honored. Maybe the first step to reconstructing our faith from a deconstructed place is simply admitting that the old way was a dead end. Maybe it’s about being willing to wait around in the dark with a song to sing in the interim.
