Soul

This is to my mind one of the heaviest songs on Sixpence's debut, but it's betrayed by a lightness of melody and riffage (it has two distinct guitar riff intros, a peppy 80's new-wave one followed by a more morose alt-rock one). The song is quite plainly about the death of Slocum's father, who, again quite clearly from the lyrics, was not what Evangelicals call "a Believer."  Using imagery from C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce and distinctly Anglican/Episcopal liturgical language, the young Slocum wonders what exactly has become of his father in the afterlife: "Tell me father, are you riding on / The fictional bus up to heaven above? / Do you listen to the angels on the outskirts / Have they persuaded you?"

This is a familiar question for any young person who has lost a loved one, and one every Christian must ultimately grapple with: how could a person we deeply love -- indeed, a person God deeply and unconditionally loves -- somehow be permanently lost? Different Christian traditions, and different thinkers within those traditions, have different answers. And one must come to terms with the temporal loss of death, whether one believes that human souls can indeed be eternally lost. 

The sprightly chorus offers no answers: "But I know I'll never know" (which rolls off Leigh Bingham's tongue so nicely) / "'till I pass away to the next life." Yet there is a Balthazarian hope in the bridge: "mother and I pray/ that it would happen someday."

I am grateful not to have known such personal loss even now as I near the age of forty, but I know it is only a matter of time. I am not a theologian and I do not claim to know much of anything about what is beyond this life, but I am, to borrow a phrase from Cornel West, "a prisoner of hope." To quote the folk song "The Old Churchyard":

I rest in the hope that one bright day
Sunshine will burst to these prisons of clay,
And old Gabriel's trumpet and voice of the Lord
Will wake up the dead in the old churchyard.