The River

View the lyrics, watch the video on YouTube.

This is a heavy song.  The music itself, strong and steady, is a current that never relents.  In it, one can feel a mass of water that could carry away a car, a friend, a life.  The only break in the steady flow is at the chorus:  swift rapids that carry the listener around the bend and to the next verse.

I have yet to see an artist capture baptism in a way as honest, true, and raw.  We are quick to turn to the "nicer" side of baptism.  It is easy to do.  Water cleanses, nourishes, rains, and gives new life.  It is much tougher to look at the other side of Baptism.  This lyric does.  New life means the end of the old one.  Water is deluge, chaos.  To put it bluntly:  water drowns.

          I was baptized in that same water

          Gave my soul to Jesus

          How can such a peaceful place

          Be filled with so much pain?

These lyrics remind us that following Christ offers no peaceful refuge from life's pain.  Life's blessings can be swept away in ways that shake us, like a high school class that loses a friend, down to the core.  We lose people we love.  Cherished ways of doing things that we celebrate one moment, change in the next.  People and parts of our lives that we rely on get swept away overnight in life's current.

It should be different.  In shock, pain, and loss at the senselessness of it all, we wonder where God is.   We can wonder:  if baptism doesn't protect us from pain, then why bother?  It leads the lyricist to write, I swear I'll never go down there again.

My favorite quote of Fr. Dehon, the first Dehonian, begins, The Heart of Jesus is overflowing with compassion for all those who suffer...   The lyrics remind the listener of the real suffering that is part of life, part of baptism.  Baptism and Christ offer no rescue from suffering's current.  If anything, Baptism asks us to immerse ourselves and experience the suffering.  We are asked to step in and drown. 

There are no easy answers, but I find some measure of baptism's peace in the words of Dehon.  Maybe it is in the current that we find compassion, the true depth of love found in the Heart of Christ.  I know that Dehon experienced his share of suffering in life, and wanted others to embrace it in theirs.  He found that the Heart of Christ was there in the depths.  He found that it drew him closer to the suffering of others.

This song opens the listener to experience the drowning that is found in baptism.  As one of the baptized, and as a Dehonian, I find that experiencing the love in Christ's heart and taking it to others is a call to the river:

          That mean ole' river

          That beautiful river
          That damn ole' river.