To visit Cambridge, Massachusetts this week was to come back to a certain kind of home. I spent eight years in Boston, the longest sojourn thus far of my adult life. Much of that time was spent in cafes, reading, writing, pondering, daydreaming.

Thus my first stop on arriving in Cambridge was back to a café I began frequenting in the mid-1990s, and where I wrote a good portion of my first book. And there happened, in that place, an example of how rock lyrics can both give and serve a kairotic stance, can allow a moment its point and necessity: I put on my headphones and cued up the song “Faithless” (from the album Snakes and Arrows, 2007) by the Canadian rock group Rush. Here is the chorus:

I don’t have faith in faith

I don’t believe in belief

You can call me faithless

But I still cling to hope

And I believe in love

And that’s faith enough for me

This song created the meditative space for me to imagine what has changed in my life between now and fourteen years ago, between the more pious liberal grid I used to occupy and whatever it is that I now channel theologically. (In my most recent book, I name it “dispossession.”) In other words, one way to inhabit this passage of years theologically is letting these lyrics interpret one dimension of the deep process going on as I checked in with this café again and again, and to recognize that being the same person in this place this many years later means sensing how lyrics that I could not have lived fourteen years ago have become lyrics that make a kind of existential, space-setting claim on me. Those fourteen years, those changes rung in this café, have been years of getting ready for this song, of becoming available to what it might mean for this song to be true.

(I trust readers will understand that I am referring to a phenomenon beyond merely ‘agreeing’ or ‘disagreeing’ with these lyrics.)

In this way may secular music hold something of our theological life for us.

Tom Beaudoin

On the train between Boston and New York City

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