That Our Unity Will One Day Be Restored 2 comments

By Joel Hartse

The psychedelic pop band Mercury Rev sums up the experience of playing in a rock group succinctly: “bands / those funny little plans / that never turn out right.” To get two people to work well together in a romantic relationship is a miracle. To make an emotionally charged (because you are 19-25 years old and in a band doing what you always wanted to do with your life) five-way democratic rock group run smoothly is simply impossible.

A band like the one I was once in, with four singers and five songwriters, isn’t even a democracy: it’s anarchy. Sometimes we sounded like Switchfoot, sometimes like Phish, sometimes like Do Make Say Think and sometimes like a crappy mariachi band. We were a mess. The only time a record of ours was ever reviewed, the writer dropped about ten completely disparate band names names as possible influences. “We sound like a mix tape,” our guitarist said. It wasn’t even a cohesive mix tape. We were like iTunes on shuffle.

Incredibly, musical unity was sometimes achieved, and when we got there it was divine. Our songs, taken together, did not sound like the output of one entity. But with The Song, however, we were sometimes gloriously one. Being the drummer in the Dandelion Method (I probably do not feel like explaining the name of the band—maybe you can come up with a good story for it) was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, if only for The Song. And, in particular, for the bridge on “Stars Become Smoke.” (Do some googling if you must.) Even then, unity, the attempt to get five hearts and minds in gear, moving in the same direction, was rare.

I’m happy to blame myself for this. I am such an obnoxious jerk when it comes to pop music that I think I know where every harmony belongs, how every hook should grab a listener. I even went so far as to insist that our last record had to be titled The Holy Glimmers of Goodbyes, which is both a pretentious literary reference (bonus points to the first person to identify the allusion) and a painfully immature, emo-lite name for a record.

And maybe it wasn’t just me. We loved each other, but all had different favorite bands, and we picked fights about where we should be playing shows, who was late to practice and why. Since the band broke up, too many other things have gotten in the way of even allowing five people who used to play music together to be in the same physical space at the same time: moves cross-country, new girlfriends and breakups, PhDs, hospital stays, children, jobs.

Peter R. Scholtes, once a Catholic priest, later a husband and father and management consultant, died last week. He wrote a song called “They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love,” a fairly ubiquitous tune—maybe you sang it in your church. The last time I heard it mentioned was by a postmodern funk DJ in a cab ride in Shanghai. “They Will Know…” is one hell of an optimistic song, and it’s also a challenge, for it doesn’t tell us what we do do, but what we will do—work side by side, walk hand in hand, love—and surely, the implication is, surely we will not do this alone, we could not do this alone, we must have help from the Spirit.

The line that really gets me lately is the one about how our unity will be restored. This idea of restoration, things going back to the way they used to be, is on my mind, because in a few days I am going to see those five people again, for the first time in four years, with whom I once strove, struggled, for unity. These are relationships, musical and otherwise, that mean so much to me, though they have been eroded by the vagaries of time and geography.

We are all singing new songs now, songs we didn’t write together, and I feel such anxious joy about being able to be with my friends again. I am not sure that our unity will be restored in the way Scholtes was singing about. But I know that if anything like that happens it will be for the same reasons it used to happen: the Song, and the Lord of Song.