Decompressing on Thursday afternoon at the Blend coffee shop near Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, I was surprised to hear come over the speakers a gentle but soulful and fresh version of a tune I remembered from years ago, “In Your Eyes,” originally by Peter Gabriel. I could not place this new version, but later found it online as the cover played by Jeffrey Gaines.

Ever since its appearance in the 1980s, this song has had a way of demurely slipping in to texture countless intimate moments, private or shared, and many will claim it as the soundtrack to an era, a relationship, or a moment. I, too, have memories of this song helping hold together loves gone by.

Each phrase of the lyrics is sculpted, but not too much, a rare delicacy in pop music. But it took Peter Gabriel’s scratchy yearning to clinch the feeling, and now Jeffrey Gaines beautifully swashbuckles the original introspection of the tune into a soulful kind of gratitude.

Hearing it at Blend, I remembered the theological reverie so suddenly spilled out in the bridge: “In your eyes … I see the doorways to a thousand churches / the resolution of all my fruitless searches”. And I wondered, what would it mean for that to be true? I took it as the vault into an extraordinary hope. Those doorways. Why doorways? Why those otherwise unremarkable ante-antechambers?

Are those doorways that symbolize that existential “resolution,” are those the doorways seen from the street toward the inside, from the inside to the street, or is it the fact of being a church doorway itself that is significant here, the idea of the threshold between the church and the world? How might any of these resolve every single last fruitless search? And what sort of church, or its doorway, might even begin to be such a place?

It felt like a stroke of boldness for that lyric to be played in this time in the history of the church, especially of Catholicism here in the United States. And then later I thought that perhaps it is important that the lyric imagines not one, but one thousand church doorways.  A compressed way of saying “All possible churches”? “All possible holy thresholds”?

Perhaps it is because I have been so aware for the last decade of the implosion of Catholicism’s public credibility and pastoral coherence in the United States, that I am struck more deeply by a church that would want to risk again being a place for resolution, or even for fruitless searches to be encouraged, heard, staged. All this without going back to any earlier thinking that we are going to pre-speak theologically everyone’s resolution for them.

And so it was that I heard the imperative, sung with a new urgency by Gaines: “Keep me awake and alive”

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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