"I am just a worthless liar, I am just an imbecile, I will only complicate you, Trust in me and fall as well"

On my way home from work today I heard a song that always grips me by the soul and demands my attention. That song was Tool’s “Sober” (one of the coolest videos ever made!). 

This band has always meant a lot to me, but in the past five years or so they took on some deeper importance as I cultivated a friendship with a cancer laden man named Isaac. Isaac and I began our friendship when he joined the life group I was leading while at LBC. We quickly came to discover that we had similar taste in music when it came to the band Tool. 

Isaac was fascinated with them for reasons that would be obvious had you known my friend. Tool has been referred to as “the thinking man’s metal.” Their deep philosophical lyrics would grab a hold of the dark night in your soul and keep you there for the duration of your listening experience. 

The subject matter of their songs was intriguing to Isaac as well. The lead singer, Maynard Keenan, Isaac and I suspected, had lost either his wife or his mother to cancer. We also suspected that Maynard came from a religious Christian home, hence the disillusionment with the unfulfilled promises of Christendom that flavored Maynard’s lyrics. 

We would discuss the legitimacy of Keenan’s observations about our faith. We wouldn’t judge Maynard, nor would we dismiss him. I remember sitting in Isaac’s car soaking in the raw angst and grief Maynard spilled into the microphone and subsequently into our ears and hearts. In all of the “blasphemy”, in all of the calling out of the God that Isaac and I shared faith in, there was an unspoken “blessed are those that mourn” applied to Maynard’s account when we listened to his naked vulnerabilities.  

The Christ that Isaac and I shared wept with Maynard in his wounded plea, and we wept with Maynard knowing that it was more than likely that cancer would devour my friends body. 

So I found myself weeping on my way home when I sang these lyrics with Maynard:

There's a shadow just behind me
Shrouding every step I take
Making every promise empty
Pointing every finger at me

Waiting like the stalking butler
Whom upon the finger rests
Murder now the path called "must we"
Just because the Son has come

Jesus, won't you fucking whistle
Something but what's past and done?
Jesus, won't you fucking whistle
Something but what's past and done?

Why can't we not be sober?
I just want to start this over
Why can't we drink forever?
I just want to start this over

I am just a worthless liar
I am just an imbecile
I will only complicate you
Trust in me and fall as well

I will find a center in you
I will chew it up and leave
I will work to elevate you
Just enough to bring you down

Mother Mary, won't you whisper
Something but what's past and done?
Mother Mary, won't you whisper
Something but what's past and done?

Why can't we not be sober?
I just want to start this over
Why can't we sleep forever?
I just want to start this over

I am just a worthless liar
I am just an imbecile
I will only complicate you
Trust in me and fall as well
I will find a center in you
I will chew it up and leave

Trust me
Trust me
Trust me
Trust me
Trust me

Why can't we not be sober?
I just want to start this over
Why can't we sleep forever?
I just want to start this over

I want what I want
I want what I want
I want what I want
I want what I want

I don’t find myself in the place from which Maynard wrote these lyrics, but I also do not find it hard to imagine myself there. I know what it is to feel as though “the promises have been made empty.” I know what it is to feel that this Christ has “found a center in me just long enough to chew me up and leave."

Isaac and I discussed the mystery that, in a way, Maynard’s lyrics affirm our faith. I’m not quite sure if I can fully express it here but I will try:

We understood the deep grief from which he wrote. Myself coming into a relationship with Jesus from a position of hostility to all things resembling religion, especially the Christian religion; and Isaac, who dedicated his life to following Christ yet was stricken with Cancer. When Maynard wept in song, we understood his loss.

By entering into Maynard’s grief, by weeping for ourselves from which we came and to which we were going, we did not weep as those who were without hope. Though we understood what it was to desire to “sleep forever,” to close our eyes and drift into nothingness where the dark realities of this world do not exist, we knew the joy that remained in the middle of grief this world brought us. We knew this joy because we knew of the Christ who would suffer in our place, the Christ who would restore that to which we desire to fall asleep; and the Christ who would call us to partake in the traumatic joy of bringing and being the good news that the way of death and despair will soon pass away.