God-Haunted

The band Over the Rhine uses a phrase in the liner notes for their album Ohio that has stuck with me for some time.

Co-founder and husband of the spousal duo Linford Detweiler writes of being born in Hartville, Ohio, the small Mennonite town that neighbors my home, and meeting eventual wife and bandmate Karin Bergquist at Malone University in Canton, a private and staunchly Christian school. He shares these and other details to give context to why they’d name an album Ohio, let alone why they’d call themselves Over the Rhine (a name also for a neighborhood in Cincinnati).

He also shares such background to show how he and Karin both grew up around the music of the church, for which they gained a lasting appreciation. Even as they might call their relationship to religion complicated, the influence remained. Detweiler writes:

The records we ended up making document in part our attempts to unravel the tangle of religion we inherited. It’s unsettling when someone named Jesus keeps turning up on unexpected places on a double album, but we’re by no means the first songwriters to be Christ-haunted.

That phrase “Christ-haunted” is one that has fascinated me since I first read it. In context, it doesn’t seem to have been written with any particular feeling attached. He neither seems to be lamenting this presence nor celebrating it. Rather, he’s merely acknowledging that it’s there. These beliefs and practices were part of his formative years and continue to seep into his life and songwriting so long after.

In a general sense, this speaks to the power of music: how certain songs or styles or musical experiences can stick with you. And particular musical forms, if associated with ritual or routine, can become that much more powerful. While I’m very much an intentional participant in religious practices, I can name several past phases of my journey from which I’ve been distancing myself. But the music of those phases has lingered, for better or worse.

Those both firmly or formerly within a spiritual tradition may find themselves God- or Christ-haunted in various ways. One’s relationship to that haunting will be different from one person to the next. Some may wish to deepen it, others may wish to understand it, and still others may wish to move on from it. But such a haunting may not be so simple, and whichever approach we prefer, we may need more time and resources to process it.