Muscle Memories Continue to Haunt Me
On the tension between a day we call good and a God who meets you in the loop
In the liturgical practices preceding the reforms of 1955, the Trisagion hymn: Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One—was exclusively featured in the Good Friday liturgy of the Roman Church, where it was sung in both Greek and Latin. Hope one day the Latin Church brings it back.
So it’s fitting that today, on Good Friday, we begin the Divine Mercy novena.
A day we call “good.” A day that doesn’t look good. The tension holding those two words together is almost unbearable. But we’re called to sit in it. The emotion of Friday and the silence of Saturday. In our fluttering day-to-day culture, we can miss the point. We’re trying to see but there’s so much to overwhelm the senses. Everyone scurries around preparing for the feast. They almost forget to prepare for the feast. As we try to get last-minute haircuts, get pastel outfits in order, plan the menu, buy the 300%-inflated plastic eggs and fill them with pseudo-chocolate micro-plastic candies…
Maybe it’s a good time just to take a walk in the silence. Maybe it’s a good time to do whatever you need to do to connect, even if it’s an action that feels the same tension as the words Good and Friday put together.
Most nights I fall asleep to the album LP3 by American Football. More specifically, the song “Silhouettes,” on repeat. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s still playing and it lulls me right back under. It has for years. In fact, Spotify told me I’m the number one listener of this band on the planet (literally see in the comments), which is either an achievement or a diagnosis. The funny thing is… they’re not my “favorite band,” even though they are up there.
The song opens like a call to liturgy for me. A bell and a vibraphone, then these layered guitars that ripple more than they resolve, and Mike Kinsella singing almost chanting almost humming about the muscle memory it takes to stay close to someone like him. It’s seven minutes of guilt and wonder and a promise that someday, when the chaos subsides, he’ll find his way back. I don’t know when it started, but at some point the Jesus Prayer began running underneath it. Unconscious, unprompted, like a second pulse. Behind the Midwest math-rock crescendo: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Not on my lips. Deeper. In the chest somewhere.
The song holds the surface of my brain just enough, the arpeggios, the repetition, the ache, that something quieter underneath can finally breathe. The Desert Fathers called it unceasing prayer, when the prayer descends from the mind into the heart and runs on its own like a heartbeat. Like a frequency. They achieved it in the silence of the Egyptian wilderness. I achieve it to a midwest emo band from Urbana, Illinois, with a Zyn pouch tucked in my lip and a phone full of unanswered emails.
“I don’t think God minds this as a vehicle,” I whisper to myself in an attempt to mix the tension of the vulgar (in the classical sense of common) with the sacred as I put in my earbuds and roll over. Grace builds on nature, and my nature is a buzzing, scanning, pattern-drunk mess that can’t sit still unless something is feeding the noise. So the song feeds the noise. And in the quiet it creates, a quiet I can’t manufacture any other way, the prayer prays itself in time signatures I can’t count. The wound on the outside, the mercy on the inside, both running at once. At least I think that’s what the whole thing looks like from the inside. Not pristine. Not silent. Not what the prayer manuals describe. Nor the starets recommend. But real. Incarnational. The only hesychasm my wiring will permit.
And it’s enough.
Or I hope it is. It’s enough to go to sleep and that will do. For tonight.
And the last decade or so too. And it’s good enough for this day that we call “good.”
Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One have mercy on me, a sinner, at 139 beats per minute.
