I went to a Garth Brooks concert last night, and during his second encore, he pointed out a sign that someone was holding in one of the front rows. The sign said that the woman had been to all ten of his Chicago concerts. He asked her what she wanted to hear, and she said, “The Red Strokes.”
I was pretty excited about this because although I love most of his music, I am particularly fond of the lesser known songs – probably because they haven’t been played on the radio seventy million times. But as excited as I was, this woman was beside herself. Her face was plastered on the jumbotron through most of the song as tears streamed down her face.
It was an awesome moment. I love seeing people so caught up in a moment that it takes their breath away. “The Red Strokes” is a song about passion and love and the feeling that all of that is about to burst out of your chest.
As I watched this, and I thought about the song and the thousands upon thousands of people who have lined up for weeks to see his eleven shows, I started to think about what it is that draws us together in such a way. Why were so very many people willing to pay their money and park half a world away to hike all the way to the arena past their (or at least my!) bedtime to watch a middle aged man sing songs?
And I realized that it is because the myth is wrong.
The myth is the part of ourselves that tells us that we are different. It’s looking at people who speak differently than us and us assuming they are different. It’s the part of us that sees people dressed differently who worship differently and assumes that their experience of humanity feels different. It’s the newscasters and the photographs and the sensationalism that pits us versus them into an ever widening vortex of hate and misunderstanding and judgment and closed minds.
The myth is the part of ourselves that sees bombs dropping and thinks that it must not hurt them as much. It’s the part of ourselves that sees poverty and injustice in our cities and turns the other way thinking that they are different enough from us that we don’t have to worry our hearts about it. It’s the part of us that can close our eyes because we feel safe and thus we assume that the world is as it should be.
But then you see someone lost in the sentiment of a song and you realize that we are all the same in our humanity. The hand that penned the lyrics and the ears that created the melodies and the musicians who bring it to life and the woman who is moved to tears by it were all brought together in that moment because they shared something much deeper than their external situation.
We believe that we are all separate and that our bodies keep our souls inside, locked away from the outside world. We feel alone, yearning for a communion we don’t believe we can achieve.
But then we do achieve it. In brief moments of transcedent grace, we realize that we aren’t alone. Our pain is his pain, and our joy is her joy, and different though we may all be, we are united by a humanity that is stronger than all that separates us.
If only we could all reside permanently in that moment, our world might become a kinder place.
But we don’t live there; the best we can do is experience glimpses of it. Until one day, on the other side of the moon, we find ourselves home in the final communion we were created for.
