I'm a pilgrim
One of my favorite Christian singer-songwriters is John Mark McMillan. He’s best known for a handful of worship songs, notably How He Loves, but he’s also an introspective, poetic songwriter with a way of singing about deep feelings without getting caught up in wordiness, saccharine or otherwise.
Of his more recent work, Pilgrim, is my favorite. If you want to give it a listen, you can do so here. Here’s the opening verse and chorus:
There is a heavenly city
That I'm compelled to find
Though I love the flowers and trees
And the smell of the grinding sea
And all the beautiful things here in lifeI, I'm a pilgrim here
On this side of the great divide
I'm a pilgrim here
But I'll walk with you for a while
I don’t know if John Mark would describe it this way, but I think he’s singing about sehnsucht. I’ve only recently become familiar with the term. Most Christians know it from C.S. Lewis, but I heard it first from the another Christian singer-songwriter and author Andrew Peterson. In his book Adorning the Dark, just in a footnote, he introduced the concept this way, quoting Lewis as calling it:
“Inconsolable longing”, …(Lewis) even pointed to it as a proof for the existence of God. We all feel it. We’re all familiar with it on some level. What’s it there for if we’re just meaningless clusters of cells hurtling through a meaningless universe?...Pay attention to the moments when we’re crying without knowing why. It could be that the author of the great mystery of creation is whispering to you.
In Pilgrim, John Mark describes the ‘beautiful things here in life’, yet describes himself as a ‘pilgrim’, someone on a journey ‘on this side of the great divide’ between the beauty of nature—earth—and the heavenly city he’s compelled to find. As I journey through faith, I’m compelled to long for heaven too, to find love incarnate, unmarred by sins of the earth, to cast off fear, regret, and shame. Sehnsucht, inconsolable longing, is probably a right response to awe and wonder at our God.
Music tends to evoke sehnsucht. I’ve already mentioned John Mark McMillan and Andrew Peterson. The Gray Havens have a great song which seems to be speaking of this longing as well. Though I’m classically trained and minded, I find great inspiration in these worship-adjacent songs.
But it isn’t just words that invokes sehnsucht. There’s a mystery to music—defined as sound arranged in time—itself. You can feel this in all kinds of contexts, trained musically or not.
I’ve been a church organist for the last 8 months and sometimes I find myself just staring at these hymns with awe. Four-part harmony, the voice-leading I studied for years as a teenager and undergraduate student, it all comes alive. It’s so right, these chord progressions and simple yet supple rhythms, these specific notes moving in a specific way in each individual voice, that I find myself marveling as if at living and breathing organisms. Of course they’re just notes on a page. Yet I am gifted as a worshipper and a performer with the chance to make them sound, in real life, for those worshipping with me as I play.
More on sehnsucht in my next post.