Part VII - The Gospel According to Joe: Meditations on Joe Pug's Sketch of a Promised Departure

6. Treasury of Prayers

This song speaks for itself. And like every other song on this album, better to just listen to it and let it work on you than to read this. But that won’t stop me from teasing some meaning from a handful of my favorite lines, commenting on a few of the more surprising ones, and celebrating some of the allusions.

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One distinguishing feature of this track is that it departs from the mythic mode and settles into something more typical of lyrics–an apparently closer identity between the speaker and the artist. Here, the speaker is no Christ figure, no scrappy upstart of an artist–he seems like Joe Pug, or an everyman–and I’d argue that anyone would do well to adopt some version of these prayers into a personal liturgy. 

In the first verse the speaker prays for himself. The prayers don’t reflect a selfish acquisitiveness or an anxious narcissism, but rather a humble transparency expressive of weakness and need. The first couple of lines request basic wellbeing and health; the hope for weak fevers harkens back to the fevers that compete with coughs in “Nation of Heat.” Line three features an explicit reference to Christ’s saying, “Do not throw your pearls before swine,” the basic idea being that since some people will only despise what’s precious to you, you’re not obliged to stupidly share your treasure with them. They might even attack you for it. Pug inflects Christ’s proverb, singing, “That these days are not the pearls, and I am not the swine.” Here, the days are precious gifts from whatever source our days come from (in a litany of prayers, God, perhaps), and the speaker doesn’t want to give them a low appraisal by being ungrateful, bitter, or swinish. He then prays that he’d be permitted to always know what faithfulness is, that he’d be able to avoid problems with alcohol, or “if that’s too much to ask, that [his] hangovers are brief.” Pug underscores the joke by dropping into a speaking voice on the punchline–an acknowledgment of a possible lack of faith or maybe an admission to a degree of insincerity in the request.

The last line in verse one might be slightly puzzling. Although the whole verse embodies an apparently sincere hope to be a decent human being and to be spared physical suffering, these lines seem to be a request to get away with something. Pug sings, “That while we’re here on earth I can keep the difference hid / Between what I should have done and what I really did.” At first, it seems like he’s asking that he be able to keep people in the dark about some sin he committed, but keeping “the difference” between what ought to have been done and what actually was done could also just express a desire for uncertainty about this. It might also be a request to keep this difference hidden from himself. It’s also possible that he’s referring to that road in the yellow wood he might have been better advised to take than the one he did (Cf. the dream that he shouldn’t have chased in “Brother John”). In either case, this wouldn’t seem like the most courageous or upright of prayers. That is, if this treasury of prayers were merely addressed to God. In addition to being prayers to some unnamed interlocutor, this is also a song on a published work of art, and here the singer is making this prayer in front of us. It’s an admission that the supplicant has either done some things he’s not proud of or not done some things he knows he should’ve. Whatever else these last two lines are, they at least constitute a partial confession. Which always takes some humility.

In verse two, the speaker prays for his children and for the world they’ll live in. I won’t parse every line here, but the prayers in this verse are so good, I should pray them verbatim for my one-year-old son and for the world on a daily basis. Your kids’ lives really won’t have been half bad if they wind up being able to sit around fires and tell good stories they’ve lived out. You should pray your kids recognize beauty because beauty is often disguised and we are often the swine that don’t recognize it. As any English teacher knows, some tastes are acquired and some children don’t get the lens to see the worth of literature or poetry at home. And some who are given the ability to recognize the beauty of a novel or a sonnet, won’t automatically recognize the beauty of a thirty yard run or a double play. Familiarity—the everydayness in anyone’s life—also hinders us from recognizing ordinary beauty. In line three, the speaker prays that his children’s innocence remains. How many forces stand ready to steal it from them? Their name is Legion. They creep in through the device in your pocket, the screen in your living room, the computer you’re reading this on. They whisper through the words of their classmates, gleam through the strokes of bad paintings, follow like the propositions of tedious arguments of insidious intent. While I’m too much of an Augustinian to think I can keep my son innocent even if I protect him from every corrupting influence in the world, I’ve prayed since before he was born that God would champion his innocence. 

On that note of biblical anthropology, and in light of the notion that man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward, Pug’s prayer for his children reminds me of another father’s prayer. In “You’ll Find Your Way,” Andrew Peterson tells his son, “you’re gonna grow up and you’re gonna get lost.” And he tells him, “Just go back, go back  to the ancient paths / Lash your heart to the ancient mast.” That is some sad but redemptive realism. It reminds me of yet another song written for progeny, which I’ll admit was the song I played in the car when my wife and I brought our son home from the hospital. In it, Dave Matthews sings, “Remember we begin the same / We lose our way in fear and pain.” I suppose that amounts to a confession on my part, but if you don’t like Dave Matthews, well–it may not be Mozart, Bach, or whatever elitist hipster band you’d have played for your son, but I’ll defend Dave and “Samurai Cop” any day. And if Andrew Peterson, Dave Matthews, and St. Augustine all agree about something, it’s got to be right. Not that I think Joe Pug is endorsing a Roussueaian theory of human nature here.

In line with the hope that his children recognize beauty, Pug prays his children will “work to build cathedrals they won’t live to pray inside of.” Beyond standing to applaud, let me say that if everyone raised their kids to do this, the world would be a much better place in one generation or two.  Again, this line needn’t be taken literally, but the overt religiousness here is remarkable. It’s the kind of line that makes you wonder exactly how Joe Pug’s worldview has evolved since he began his career. His beliefs may be the same as when he established some distance from “the Christians left behind” in “How Good You Are” or when he first sang “I’d rather be nobody’s man than somebody’s child.” But even if he’s using confessional, religious language on this song as metaphor, he’s also not doing much to distance himself from the figurative vehicles of Christianity.

The second half of verse two contains some of my favorite lines on the album: “That our better angels sing of peace instead of war / That the pistol’s close at hand when the wolf is at the door.” The blend here of the folksinger’s anti-war stance and not-necessarily-literal intention to have a pistol nearby to defend against the wolf strikes a balanced stance on violence. You can’t say this is an endorsement of strictly literal interpretations of the 2nd Amendment, and men with pistols aren’t painted in a positive light in Joe Pug songs, but it does make room for something like what Rust Chole suggests about the need for defense when he says, “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.”

The next line makes use of some proverbs to ask that trouble not rise, but then the last line of the verse rises to sublime levels. I got shivers–and might have shed a manly tear or two–when I first heard it: “That the age of grace begins when the age of reason stops.” The existence of this line in this song on this album is one small indication to me that what he’s praying for could possibly come about. The phrase “the age of reason” could mean a lot of things, but to me it evokes western civilization since the Enlightenment, which along with all the blessings it has conferred, has also cursed us with many ills. I’m not alone in thinking this, but in spite of all the advancements of science and technology and all the mitigation of genuinely stupid superstition, the Enlightenment didn’t flower into an earthly millennium of heaven on earth–it wilted into the 20th Century’s incomprehensibilities, postmodernism, and the meaning vacuum we’ve found ourselves in. We discovered a source of infinite energy and invented ourselves a power station, but it has melted down, and in many quarters, the lights have gone out–except for the dim green glow of abandoned nights. 

Since the Enlightenment has led to atheism, nihilism, tribalism, postmodernism, and since we now tilt toward totalitarianism, intolerance, and the “thought that stops all thought,” the eventual end of the age of reason is hard to deny. For all I know, it’s already passed. But as Pug’s prayer suggests, the age of the wolf need not follow, and it need not be prevented with pistols. Maybe the age of grace will dawn. Maybe the sun’s already rising.

There are signs that alternatives to illiberal leftwing totalitarianism and illiberal rightwing fascism might win the day and maybe even take the age. As Walker Percy says, artists are canaries in our coal mines. They also might be doves we let fly from the ark. I know there are some less than better angels singing about subjects other than peace, but here Joe Pug is, and he hasn’t keeled over. Maybe he even has an olive branch in his beak. 

I see other signs, too. And as for grace in particular, I don’t know where that idea has come from if not Christianity (of course, there is an ancient Greek word for grace and there are the Graces of Mythology). I know the religion is often hated, much maligned, and unavoidably offends some important modern sensibilities, but even Richard Dawkins has been in headlines for reasserting that he considers himself a cultural Christian. And for my money, Christianity provides a way of understanding and interacting with the world that is honest, keen, loving, and gracious. For me, then, the most encouraging signs are canaries, doves, and all manner of life hoving into the ark. The conversions to Orthodox Christianity of the British writers Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw stand out. Aayan Hirsi-Ali’s public statement of faith. The asseverations of the yet secular historian Tom Holland. The conversion of the poet who wrote “Paper Planes,” M.I.A. The work of Louise Perry and the fact that she regularly promotes an online intro-to-Christianity course made by the evangelist Glen Scrivener. 

Everyone in that paragraph is either British or featured in a British media outlet. Does that mean I need to pay more attention to American culture, or is something happening in the United Kingdom? Probably both–and there’s certainly plenty of gracelessness and unreason afoot on the sceptered ilse as well. But when I sniff the air on this continent, my main impression is that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. Thank God all the more, then, for Joe Pug and this album. I’m sure there are other doves and live canaries I’ve not noticed, and I’d be much obliged if anyone would point them out to me.

Again, it would be a mistake simply to take Joe Pug lyrics literally, but verse three makes me feel like the dove has found a tree to nest in. The lyrics almost work as a creed. They begin with prayers about the speaker’s eventual death and end with hopes almost eschatological in their redemptive and eternal vision. I’ve been formatting my quotations based on the lyric collection in The Vault, and though it’s possible I shouldn’t be treating the script there like the authorized version of the King James, it’s interesting to see where they end lines and lay out verses. The capitalization choices might also be suggestive. For instance, the first line, “That it feels just like a memory when my father calls me home,” strikes me as a direct admission of faith in God, but since the first letter of “father” isn’t capitalized, Pug might just be saying he hopes his death will be like picking up the phone and hearing his dad say, “Dinner’s ready.” (For the record, I have been lazily inconsistent in my capitalization of the pronouns referring to Christ and God in these very meditations.) I'd have no complaint with such a nontheist metaphor. But after a vision of love and reconciliation, he prays something that would be harder to deny. And by alluding to a song everyone knows, which also alludes to the deaths of a few great American musicians, he manages again, with the particular lines he references, to kill two birds with one stone. Don Maclean laments the fact the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost caught the last train for the coast, that the music died, and that the levee was dry–Pug prays that it wasn’t, that the music never died, and that the three men he admired most never caught the train. In “American Pie” it could be that the “three men” are just Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens, but even in that case, the metaphor still suggests a land abandoned by God and therefore without hope. 

The last line in the verse references Genesis and Steinbeck’s great novel East of Eden (not the first Steinbeck reference in Pug’s oeuvre). He prays, though we might be on this side of paradise, headed toward the east coast, that we could maybe head the other way soon. Off into the sunset, perhaps. 

The song ends with a couplet that departs from the litany and suddenly addresses a friend in the second person. The speaker says he “heard the news this morning” (that whoever he’s talking to has passed away) and that his hope will never end that this friend “found heaven quick from here in Baltimore.” Again, this could be a manner of speaking, but it would be an odd metaphor in this context and a little tactless. What is certain is that this coda cements the impression that losing friends provokes the speaker to turn to transcendence and to reflect on his own eventual death. The finality of death and the notion of annihilation tends to lead to despair. Without an actual faith in everlasting life presided over by a benevolent Custodian of Souls, the kind of hope evinced in this song would be hard to take seriously.

*Go listen to the music, the podcast, subscribe to the vault, read the dispatches, sign up for the newsletter, and buy stuff.