My seatmate on the bus had brought her Walkman.
“Wow,” I said, because they were expensive, and CDs were expensive, and to have a brand-name portable CD player carried a certain level of cache.
She settled in, pulling out her headphones, battling the Walkman carefully on her knee so it wouldn’t skip. “I’ve been listening to Counting Crows and No Doubt nonstop,” she said. “Their music is great. What’s your favorite song?”
“Um,” I said, aware I was about to fail yet another coolness test.
But for the first time, I didn’t feel embarrassed about it. And the reason I didn’t, and I had long stopped craving the secular CDs my classmates always seemed to have, was simple:
Jars of Clay.
My music taste, in the 90s, was all over the map. Secular CDs of certain provenance were forbidden in our house—no Gwen Stefani, no Adam Duritz—although others that my mom listened to (Richard Marx, Michael Bolton) were somehow permissible. I listened to everything that fell within my parents’ parameters: video game soundtracks, instrumental music, classical, and a lot of contemporary Christian music like dc Talk and the Newsboys.
But Jars of Clay was different.
I didn’t know how to explain why, at first. My mom arched an eyebrow when I begged for the CD. The music sounded—well, modern to her in a way that she wasn’t quite sure was Christian. “I don’t know,” she told me, doubtful. “Didn’t they have a video that showed on MTV?”
I didn’t tell her that was a feature, not a bug.
When I pulled my trump card—“their name is from a Bible verse, Mom!”—she relented. I got the debut CD. And I fell in love. I listened to it nonstop. I listened to it so much that decades later I still somehow remember every word, where the violins start and stop, where Dan Haseltine’s voice catches on certain lines.
But I didn’t love them for the obvious reasons. I wasn’t listening to them to sound “cool and secular,” although their sound certainly placed them in a new realm of Christian music that I hadn’t heard before. I didn’t listen to them because I thought the band members were hot (though when other people pointed out the obvious, I didn’t disagree). I didn’t listen to them because they put on a stellar live show, although I would eventually see them in concert three times and they did, indeed.
I listened to them because they helped me understand God, and my relationship to Him.
I had been exposed to so much bombast and enthusiasm in Christian music (again: I listened to a lot of the Newsboys) that listening to Jars of Clay felt like emerging into a starry night after a day in glaring sunlight. The lyrics were quiet, introspective, complex. They touched on the love of God and the believer’s love of God and the believer’s conflicts with God, the struggles and failures of life lived in faith. The band sang to God and about God in a way that was both timeless and deeply relevant, and they wove violins and cellos and delicate chords and Haseltine’s voice into all of those songs.
Jars of Clay was music for me.
I was the kind of Christian, as a thirteen year old, that thought about absolutely everything, all the time. I was deeply analytical. I was a book nerd. I wasn’t afraid of what many of my Christian peers were prohibited from, despite the constraints on music in my house: I was permitted to read anything I liked (within reason), and had developed a fierce love of myth and story and fantasy. I loved learning about other cultures and religions. I delved into apologetics. I was blessed growing up by my parents who taught me to be unafraid of tension, of asking God hard questions, because I had the faith that he would answer them.
But that wasn’t always easy. I didn’t know how to integrate everything. I felt out of step with my secular peers and somehow also with my Christian ones. The walk of faith that seemed so easy to everyone else seemed frustrating, sometimes to me, and rewarding and challenging by turns. I didn’t know where I fit. Years later, I’m still not sure I do.
But Jars of Clay provided me the same home, the same vocabulary, that Philip Yancey later would. Those songs, and Yancey’s books, raised me up in a deeply authentic Christianity that didn’t shy away from difficulties. That permitted vulnerability and loneliness and hard questions and the deep, dizzy gratitude of the prodigal.
I recovered my old CD recently, tucked away in a box of old mementos. I was surprised, at a listen, to find how relevant it all still was. There’s praise and questioning, struggle and failure, challenge and victory. My favorite songs are still my favorite songs. And it is a reminder to me of how art can reach the heart, can shape us and change us in ways that astonish in later years. This band was one of my spiritual mentors: a guide along the way. A reminder of God’s love, a signpost on the path.
I listened to Jars of Clay for years and years. In college, after some sort of spiritual crisis or other—one that eludes memory now—I remember sitting awake in my dorm room, wrapped up tentlike in my blanket, feeling overwhelmed by regret and bewilderment. I felt far from God; I didn’t know how to fix it; I didn’t know what I was doing.
It was 4am. I had left my computer playing random songs. And The Eleventh Hour by Jars of Clay came on. The chorus presented itself and I dissolved into tears. I don’t know why that song needed to turn the key, but God used it to do so—I cried and I cried and I cried for hours, and I experienced a profound sense of restoration that night, of the world having been made right. Art can provide the space we need to encounter God, can create the frame for a conversation. Can invite us in.
And here I am, a grown adult woman, decades out of my college years. I put on their debut album and I turned it up as far as it would go and I misted up at the first sounds of Liquid. It was the strangest, loveliest experience, as though experiencing my past self overlaid on my present one.
I had changed in some ways, a lot. And in some others, not at all.
But God was still God. And my relationship with Him is still here.
I think a lot about the way we form habits. But revisiting Jars of Clay was a reminder that the beautiful things that help form us in faith, that we listen to or consume or do until they’re deeply ingrained, don’t ever leave us: they linger on, indelible, in ways we may never fully understand. And when I think about how the Kingdom will be—when I think about how what is borne of love will endure—I think it might just a little bit like that, an opportunity to see those seeds full-grown and flourishing into entire gardens beyond our reckoning.
Thanks, Jars of Clay.
I’ll keep listening.
Samaritan's Song 