CLICK the title above to hear the song!
If I’m not mistaken, this live version is the only time we ever did this song as a group. I play it usually every year at school for my students and I have done it solo at some coffeehouses in the past. This version probably suffers because it is an impromptu first attempt debut. I had just written it, and I tried to teach the band real fast so we could get it in. You can tell! It is too fast in parts, and I am royally messing up my words, trying to fit in too many where they could not fit. Ah, well!
It's got nice transitions from verse to chorus and back, and the bridge really works, I think. One student commented today that he wished we could record it in a studio. That would be nice! It would probably take a miracle at this point, but it is pleasant to imagine it.
This was a song I wrote after I had started teaching when the group had stopped playing regularly. It was my first job as I completed my Masters at Assumption. Then as now I was teaching Freshmen on personal growth, giftedness and the meaning of love. Together with my mentor, Meg Curran, I developed a lecture which I chose to call the “Feelings Lecture”. This lecture tries to explain for the students the role ‘feelings’ plays in the normal moral life using C.S. Lewis’ Four Loves. The new kind of unconditional, sacrificial love Christians saw among themselves was so novel in the pagan world they had to come up with their own name, “agape”. The thing about this love was that, unlike eros or philia, it was not a feeling but a moral action. Marriage Encounter says ‘love is not a feeling, it is a decision’, and this is what they mean. A good word to describe this kind of love is “DEVOTION”. The lecture strives to encourage the kids to build their conscience and act on principle not feelings. “Devotion” is the key to happiness in life! This also fits with the virtue of Hope and the nature of the Covenants that God has used to move his Sacred Plan forward through Salvation History.
The actual impetus for the song involved this one particular kid. Some of the adults were talking about him and they said something which in effect was giving up on the kid, “he’s never going to be the same’. Well, my feeling is that God never gives up on so-called “failures”; he never gives up on any of us. I wrote this as a reaction to that lack of hope.
I do a little exercise where I describe how some famous person could be seen as a “failure”, until you hear the name, and you realize they refused to accept just being a failure. I also tell the story of St. Mary of Egypt who started as a Christian-hating prostitute who specialized in seducing clergy in order to discredit the group she hated so much. One day in Jerusalem, she decided to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself to seduce within that holiest of churches. An unseen wall [like they had in Star Trek!] prevented her and she had to face her degradation and tailspin into hate and lust head on. She decided to go to the desert and find the truth. Eventually, she became so wise and holy that Emperors and Popes came to ask her advice.
This kid at my first school, as I recall, was helped a lot by a priest friend of his and really seemed to be trying to get on the right path. As you listen to the song you can hear little scraps that allude to this kind of situation. The whole idea sprang out of the overheard comment featured in the first verse. If we can get enough kids to believe and love strongly, with “devotion” and virtue as advised by this song, I really DO think “the world will never be the same”!
Those shows were LONG! Combined with all the Sunday night practices, it was a crucible, burning our performances deep into our muscle memory; I'll bet we could still perform some of these songs right this minute if asked.
