HERE IS AN OLD CLIP OF MINE FROM AUGUST '93. THOUGHT I'D PASS IT ON.
In his book Now and Then: a memoir of vocation, Frederich Buechner describes a former seminar professor of his, James Muilenburg:
"Every morning when you wake up," he used to say, "before you reaffirm your faith in the majesty of a loving God, before you say I believe for another day, read the Daily News with its record of the latest crimes and tragedies of mankind and then see if you can honestly say it again." He was a fool in the sense that he didn't or couldn't or wouldn't resolve, intellectualize, evade, the tensions of his faith, but lived those tensions out, torn almost in two by them at times. His faith was not a seamless garment but a ragged garment with the seams showing, the tears showing, a garment that he clutched about him like a man in a storm.When I read those words, I immediately thought of Mark Heard. Mark was a man like that--a man who felt the tensions of living in a fallen world while clinging still to a profound faith. There were some who found his music too down or depressing because he refused to blind himself to the struggles and pains of the world around him. But for me, his affirmations of faith meant all the more because I knew that they did indeed come from somebody who didn't "evade the tensions of his faith" but lived them out despite the heavy cost to himself. Mark Heard was able, in his own words, "to conjure the magic of something good waiting around the corner, over the hill, tomorrow, on the morning of the resurrection." Mark heard the pounding of Hell's hammers. But he heard the pounding of Heaven's hammers too. And in the end, he knew that the the thunder of Heaven was the louder.
Copyright 1997 Miles O'Neal, Austin, TX. All rights reserved.
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