One Thing Have I Asked

Worship, Devotion, and the Music of Jon Guerra

I went to see the musician Jon Guerra play live recently. I have spent time with Jon on a few occasions — we share a close mutual friend — but I had never attended one of his concerts. This show was being held at a little UCC church with one of those steeply pitched roofs beloved of mainline Protestant congregations. After sitting down at the church’s piano and offering a few words of introduction, Jon began his set with “In the Beginning Was Love,” a song off his new album, Jesus. Thirty seconds after he started playing, almost before I knew what was happening, I found myself in tears. 

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Jon is a Christian songwriter who describes his art as a form of “devotional music,” a term by which he opens some daylight between himself and what is more commonly called “worship music.” If, like me, you grew up in the evangelical church, you are intimately familiar with the latter. Even if you are not conversant in the form’s distinctive features, or aware of its roots in the Jesus People movement of the 1970s, you would likely still recognize it. It can sometimes feel like half of all terrestrial radio stations feature the stuff. 

Born in 1982, I grew up the son of an evangelical pastor in the heyday of the music I am describing. I spent nearly every Sunday morning of my childhood sitting in a crowd of baby boomers, their eyes closed, their hands raised as they earnestly belted out the refrain to “Lord, I lift Your Name on High,” or “Open the Eyes of my Heart.” I have sung “God of Wonders” around many a campfire. I am familiar with the deep catalogue of Maranatha! Music, the music of both Michaels (W. Smith and Card), and that lesser known but still influential British Invasion spearheaded by Delirious, Matt Redman, and Phil Wickham.

There is plenty to critique about the American worship music of the last half century. Nowadays, the genre’s most commercially successful artists are prone to churning out songs that give the general impression not of being rooted in the hymnody or plainsong of the last five hundred years of Protestantism, but rather of having been produced by a vaguely country western group who locked themselves in a closet for two weeks with nothing but the New Testament and a copy of U2’s The Joshua Tree. That being said, I’m going to keep my complaints brief for two reasons, the first being that there is also much about this music that is good. Worship music composed a huge part of the aesthetic backdrop to my childhood, and was deeply woven into the fabric of my spiritual formation. I experienced many genuine moments of vivid transport in which this music, whatever its flaws, served to open my heart to an experience of God. 

The second reason for keeping my grievances brief is simple: I am not here to talk about what I don’t like. I am here to talk about the music of Jon Guerra. 

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However we define worship, whether as the expression of adoration, the ritualization of devotion, a sense of reverence, or something more primal still, it is clearly a universal human impulse, one far wider in its possible forms — and often more abject in its expression — than I grew up understanding it to be. This only became apparent to me upon setting out into the world as a young adult and beginning to encounter other religious traditions on their own terms. 

I traveled alone across much of northern India in my late twenties. One evening I found myself standing inside a rudimentary Hindu shrine on a ridge above the medieval town of Bundi, deep in the Rajasthani desert. As the sun began to set I watched two young men sprinkle flower petals on a lingam. After adorning this ancient, phallic symbol of Shiva, they began clapping in slow unison while chanting a song of praise to the god Ganesha. 

Years later, back in the United States, I attended an Eastern Orthodox service in which the drone of ancient prayers combined with the elaborate rituals of the eucharistic liturgy to give the sense that something truly sober, even fraught, was taking place. Worship was truly being paid to a god, and I felt a thrill of the ominous. At one point the entire congregation lay face down on the floor of the church in a physical expression of humility which reminded me not of the relatively staid and orderly Sunday services of my youth, but of a Friday afternoon I once spent in Delhi’s largest Sunni mosque, watching thousands of men and boys press their foreheads to their prayer rugs like waves of grain bending over in a strong wind.

It is not only my travels across cultures and religious traditions that have widened the aperture of my perspective on worship. Exposure to the breadth of Western Christianity, itself no narrow stream, has also been instructive. I have recently been reading The Sign of Jonas, a collection of excerpts from the journals of Trappist monk Thomas Merton. While the particulars of Merton’s daily life in a monastery seem a universe apart from my own routines as a twenty-first-century parent in a shrieking urban landscape, I hear in his description of the contemplative life an echo of my own hunger for communion with the divine. Whether praying the daily office with other monks or meditating in his cell, Merton’s experience of awe intermingled with silent ecstasy seems clearly to be a form of worship. 

All this has been illuminating. And yet, whatever other forms it takes, the expression of veneration always seems to come back to the fertile seed of music in the end. Wherever people find themselves across space and time, whatever the object of their adoration, the urge to give voice to spiritual yearning through the act of singing is ubiquitous. Whether a muezzin in his minaret, a Charismatic with her tambourine, or a sadhu chanting before an image of Kali, it is as if we human beings cannot help but open our mouths and lift a song — of praise, of gratitude, of naked supplication — to the One(s) we intuitively recognize as greater than ourselves, and by whom we long to be heard.

Sitting in my car after Jon’s concert, comforted if a bit punch drunk, I found myself wondering what it is about his songs that moves me so deeply.

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Partly it has to do with the subtlety of the music itself. Christian radio hits tend to utilize a surging, anthemic template. Jon’s music is neither surging nor anthemic. In his instrumentation, his arrangements, his dynamic choices, which tend toward the gentle and hushed, he manages to evoke a sense of the contemplative while retaining an element of the visceral. His voice, shadowed by tremulous strings, finger-picked guitar, or spare piano, is strong and clear and capable of a high, delicate falsetto. The cumulative effect is beautiful, and occasionally rending.

Then there are his lyrics, which are vulnerably honest, unfailingly hopeful, and rooted in the biblical text in a way that is at once rich and guileless. One of my favorite of Jon’s songs is “Thank you, Lord.” At first blush its lyrics seem quite simple, yet by the end of this song alone there have been references to the Psalms (“To be still and know you”), the Epistle to the Philippians (“All that’s lost will be gained”), the Epistle to the Romans (“The riches of your kindness”), and the Gospel of Matthew (“Christ is with me always through every age.”) To listen to one of Jon’s albums is to encounter a writer whose fluency with Scripture has been given freedom to play with its cadences while still cherishing its promises.

There is a plaintive note to much of Jon’s lyricism. Indeed, it brings to mind no one so much as the late Keith Green, whose music positively ached with longing. Yet Jon’s songs are never depressed. They shimmer with that strange, wonderful species of hope unique to the Christian tradition. Across his entire body of work we find Jon exulting, rejoicing, and delighting in showing gratitude, even while offering candid descriptions of life’s bleakness and pain. There is nothing veiled in his depictions of suffering — mental and spiritual anguish are referenced in explicit terms — yet there is always a turning back to Christ. I find this the most redemptive and inspiring of the work’s many redemptive, inspiring aspects. Unlike the triumphalism of much contemporary worship, I hear in Jon’s music the unapologetic cry of the Psalmist, who asks God why He has abandoned his beloved, and at the same time the voice of Job, who keeps faith despite that apparent abandonment.

It is pure, this music. That is what I am trying to say. Pure, with a brightness about it that I fear I will fail to fully convey. Here is an artist unabashed in his devotion, unashamed in his expression of vulnerability, earnest in his desire to see the face of God, and seemingly unconcerned with who else may be listening. I have heard many, many musicians talk about wanting to come before God, and I have almost never encountered music that so perfectly captures that yearning as I experience it myself. 

The last few years have been hard for me. I have struggled mightily; as a parent, as a husband, as someone trying to find my path in life. I have felt myself coming to the end of something. Myself, perhaps. On the night of Jon’s concert I was in a particularly low state. The music swept over my lowered defenses, permeating the membrane of my soul, lifting me up in something like rapture. By the end of the set I felt wrung out, raw, and at peace. By the next morning I was already anxious again, desperate to escape the world and its cares. I found myself longing to disappear into the embrace of God, whatever that might mean. Then I recalled the night before, and how for a few precious moments while listening to Jon’s music, I had.