Pull Out My Heart

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A Word From My Friend, Owen:

Revivalist traditions are intricately woven into the American experience. In a certain respect, to be an American is to understand the cathartic logic of the altar call. As another presidential election cycle shifts into full gear, we see this at the forefront yet again, as well practiced and well paid for suits evoke the spirits of Charles Finney and Dwight Moody while they call America to what is purported to be a better version of itself, in a moralistic cadence that has not changed all that much in the last 150 years. But that is American revivalism at its most crass and cynical.

I grew up the son of a Baptist preacher, albeit not a typical one, in a world full of camp, and tent, and old rickety country church calls to Jesus. This milieu might bear itself on a life in any number of ways, but one of them is the development of something like that spiritual sense of the good thief who died at the side of Christ – mixed with a sort of Pascalian wager or Kierkegaardian leap – even among those of us for whom revivalist forms never really “took.” It is that sense that I can see and acknowledge the broken that is my life and all that has bobbled in the wake of it, and an always present flicker of a contained, often muted exuberance, an insane confidence of sorts, however hidden, that I can turn my heart around at any moment, or, at the very least, that such can be done for me, and a bright awareness that this is what needs to be done.

One of the charisms of a good revivalist preacher is that ability to speak to people in such a way that many of them hear those words as spoken directly to them.

One of the very best venues in which that particular American revivalist charism is maintained today is in our folk music. How many of us have listened to an Americana song, written by one of nation’s folk songwriters, and felt that it was written directly to me, speaking precisely to what I have experienced, and in the telling, often calling me to a better version of myself, even if only by having well accounted for my own humanity?

David Warren’s new song, Pull Out My Heart, might be the apotheosis of such a song, for me. The language comes directly from the experience of American holiness Christianity. The old cadence is there, but the cathartic tremors, while plaintive, also express the posture of so many of us today – near exhaustion, not nearly as confident as we once were, not so inclined to trust the assurances of the next street preacher selling the next plastic Jesus --- but at the same time, that intuition that is so American, and so human, that tells me that I am broken, and that I need to turn, even as I find myself unable, and if I’m honest, unwilling.

Yet in that melancholy there is a clear hope, and Dave would be breaking the canons of the American folk and faith traditions were it not there. It is a quiet hope, and a weary one, the sigh as that last dollar is placed on a crazy bet. But, there is this peculiar bright sorrow that the ex-gambler who has thrown down his last buck knows, and the washed up drunk who remembers that pause before downing the last finger knows - that win or lose, if after that you still have some sliver of hope that there can be another outcome, a different end, then you have not lost yet.