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<\/a>When I listen to Rich Mullins\u2019 music (and I still listen), he makes me want to go camping. It\u2019s weird, I know, but it always seems like I could more easily imagine the world he imagined if I were off in the woods somewhere \u2026 and I really want to imagine the world that he imagined.<\/p>\nDuring his concerts Rich used to joke that his fans really think he lived on the edge of rivers lighting campfires (the cover of one of Rich\u2019s popular records showed him doing just this). It was an illusion, and Rich loved nothing more than destroying our illusions.<\/p>\n
But after all these years I still love Rich Mullins, and not because I\u2019m hooked on an illusion. Back when I was playing with Satellite Soul we toured with\u00a0Mitch McVicker (and Cobra Joe, and Brad Lahyer) for several years. I spent many a night smoking cigarettes under the stars and buying them beers to try to\u00a0get them to tell me one more story about Rich. I think I have a pretty decent picture of the man. I still love Rich because he was clear-eyed about the world in which we lived and he could talk about it so artfully.<\/p>\n
Rich embraced the darkness as well as any poet. He knew real pain. Rich did not see the world in black and white. He saw the world in deep, rich, velvety colors and textures\u2013the very colors and textures he wrote into his songs. That\u2019s the world I want to live in. That\u2019s the world I want to imagine. That world is why Rich was so profound.<\/p>\n
I was a rail-thin pimple-faced high school kid prone to spending long lonely hours\u00a0in my room playing piano and guitar. I lived with an intense longing for I didn\u2019t know what. Rich helped me interpret that longing, and my\u00a0experience of the world. He helped me to root the longing in an ancient story. He gave my own story dignity and depth.<\/p>\n
Rich insisted, argued, and wrote amazing songs in order to prove that the world is enchanted. \u201cI do not meet God in a vacuum,\u201d Rich wrote. \u201cI meet Him in the world He has provided for me to meet Him in \u2013 in a world of events and of places, of history (time and space), in a world of lives of people and their records of their encounters. I meet God in this world \u2013 in the world of these things\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Rich lived at the intersection of his own personal brokenness, the brokenness of the world, and the hope that we were not left here alone to struggle in the darkness without any help. Night after night Rich would play his songs for an audience for which I believe he felt\u00a0equal parts compassion and disgust. I sometimes think it was Rich\u2019s deep love of the physical world, of nature and the wonder of this place that we live that kept him from being terminally cynical.<\/p>\n
Rich had an uncanny ability to describe the world as an enchanted place of wonder and awe and mystery. \u201cI do not work myself into some ecstatic frenzy to meet God.\u201d he said. \u201cGod does not speak to me through opium dreams or out of hypnotic trances. He meets me in history and takes me beyond it to Himself. Any \u201cmysticism\u201d that is authentic does not abrogate time and space \u2013 it infuses those elements with meaning. Time and space \u2013 that is the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rich was disgusted by people who lived without compassion. He railed against the politics of greed and the Christian right. He did this not to be like James Dean. He did this because Rich could see what we couldn\u2019t see. \u201cLook at us all\u201d he said, \u201cwe are all of us lost and in all of our different ways of pretending, we all fool ourselves into the very same hell. Look at the cross \u2013 we are all of us loved and one God meets us all at the point of our common need and brings to all of us \u2013 all who will let Him \u2013 salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Rich died it did strange\u00a0things to me. I had\u00a0embarked on my own journey as a professional musician and songwriter, doing my best to follow in his footsteps as I went, and all the sudden he was gone. Irving describes the sensation this way in Owen Meany:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen someone you love dies, and you\u2019re not expecting it, you don\u2019t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time\u2014the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes\u2014when there\u2019s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she\u2019s gone, forever\u2014there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He died in 1997. The next year The Jesus Record released, then a few songs and remakes would trickle out here and there. Old concert footage would show\u00a0up on the web. I didn\u2019t lose him all at once. But now, more than ever, I can feel that he is gone.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m forty-eight years old now, seven years\u00a0older than Rich was when he died. But if I live a hundred years, I\u2019ll never be as wise as he was. And if I live to be a hundred I will never stop missing him. I will never stop repeating the final line from\u00a0A Prayer For Owen Meany<\/em>, that Rich once told me I should read: \u201cO God\u2014please give him back! I shall keep asking you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I listen to Rich Mullins\u2019 music (and I still listen), he makes me want to go camping. It\u2019s weird, I know, but it always seems like I could more easily imagine the world he imagined if I were off in the woods somewhere \u2026 and I really want to imagine the world that he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1864,539,1878,18],"class_list":["post-6612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-compassion","tag-john-irving","tag-owen-meany","tag-rich-mullins"],"yoast_head":"\n
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