Repurposed Preacher

2/18/2022

So, Rich. Where to begin.

I guess I’ll start with the fact that initially I was not a fan. To me Rich was the guy who wrote “Awesome God,” a worship song I did not really like, and another song with a confusing title, “Sometimes by Step,” that I could at least tolerate sometimes. You know, if it was tucked in the right place in the worship set list, right at the point when my eyes were affixed to some distant point along a 45-degree trajectory and I had already raised my hand in emphatic praise a time or two.

Rich was scheduled to play a concert at my Bible College in the fall of what should have been my Junior year, but really served as my sophomore year since I need to marinate in the collegiate womb for a full five years. The concert was free, but I wasn’t planning on attending. “Sometime by Step” might have made someone’s evening, but I doubted it would make mine.

Then he died. In the week before he was scheduled to play our college, on a highway heading out of Peoria, Illinois the Jeep he was riding in was overturned, Rich was ejected through the windshield, and he was gone. People were understandably shocked. I remember that someone on my dorm floor who I considered an unserious student, said that he couldn’t go to class because he was too broken up by Rich’s death. Skipping your Bible College class in honor of a person of faith seemed like a strange choice to me, but less CO2 in one cinder block classroom was never a bad thing.

I don’t remember the exact moment I started listening, but I do have a strong memory of listening to a CD of the Songs collection while driving back and forth to Waukesha, Wisconsin, where I served as a youth ministry intern with a contrary streak* at a new church plant. On those long car drives I tried to pray and sit in silence for at least an hour at a time. This was a new practice for my ADHD addled mind and was a wonderful way to sweep my interior deck. Would that I was as disciplined as that still.

Anyway, on those rides I fell in love with Rich’s music. I’m a lyrics guy and initially it was the remarkable imagery that captured me. “And the moon was a sliver of silver, like a shaving that fell on the floor of a carpenter’s shop.” And it took me months to untangle the metaphor of the “two legged memorials to the law of happenstance” waiting for “four wheeled Messiahs” to take them anywhere but here. The world Rich painted, from the “hills of Appalachia” to the “coast of North New England” felt infused with beauty and meaning. I was hooked.

I continued to listen. I fell into the “Liturgy, Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band” album and the Christian Church kid whose faith was saved by Parochial School started to sense** Rich’s pull to the rigid, but warm contours of liturgical life. It was around that time when I heard that his life had also been changed by seeing the 70s paean to St. Francis, Father Son and Sister Moon. That helped me understand his life a little better. The refusal to live on more than the median working man’s wage, the peripatetic path he wove, the affinity for life with bare feet amidst a merry group of troubadours, was intentional. The man clearly saw himself as a knockaround third order Franciscan.

Being me, the more I heard evangelicals speak of Rich’s “seedy side,” the more I identified with him. “When he played our church he smoked like a chimney,” said one. “You know he’s a liberal,” said a ministerial co-laborer. Neither of these tendencies was likely to make my affections ebb. Rich, in all of his raggedness – this was a man who late in his career stopped in mid-song to confess to his evangelical audience that the previous night he was a patron at a strip club*** - taught me that we could love God in our brokenness and could serve others without a semblance of judgment. One could argue that Rich was Reality Bites for the Evangelical set, but he was much, much more.

And those lyrics. I still love to sing them today. A few favorites:

“Jacob he loved Rachel and Rachel she loved him. And Leah was just there for dramatic effect. Well it’s right there in the Bible, so it must not be a sin. But it sure does seem like an awful dirty trick.”

“And if you make me laugh I know I could make you like me. Cause when I laugh I can be a lot of fun.”

And even, “When you smash this cosmos to kingdom come. When the jagged edged mountains we love are gone. When the sky is crossed with the tears of a thousand falling sons as they crash into the sea. Can I be with you? Can I be with you?”

Fellow Ragamuffins, your faves?

*”Will you take a pie to the face if we raise $300 for world missions,” they asked. “No, but I will give you a swirlie at the $200 level,” I responded.

**I was not smart enough to see at that point.

***Searching for a less objectifying term here? Body positive display center?