Haunted (Whispers in a Ruined House)

He looks at me warily as he approaches the guard’s station at the jail. He’s thirty-something, huge beard, menacing tattoos snaking up and around his neck and bald head. I stand there, inoffensively, with my clipboard and my death notification. “I’m a chaplain here, just wondering if you’d like to talk to someone about losing your dad?” I motion over to the interview room over in the corner of the unit and start to walk in that direction. His expression doesn’t change. “Not really,” says. He follows me anyway.

I sit down on one of the plastic chairs and gesture toward the other one. He stays standing. He’s looking anywhere but at me. He doesn’t want to be here. “I don’t really need to talk or to pray or whatever.” he says. “That’s fine,” I reply. “You know, you don’t have to be here. I just thought I’d come down and check on you.” He’s still staring at the door, but he sits down. He talks briefly about his mom, his brother, his kids, about how his dad and mom look after them while he’s inside. I ask a few questions that are met with a few cursory responses. He stands up and starts walking toward the door. He’s done.

“You know,” he says, “it is what it is. We’re born, we live, we die, that’s it.” I measure my response carefully. “I don’t think that’s it, actually.” He looks at me for the first time in our brief interaction. “Yeah, I don’t either, actually. I think we live on. And we can haunt people from the afterlife.” And with that, he was gone. No “goodbye,” no “thanks for the gesture.” Not even a “nice try, dude.” I sit there, inoffensively, with my clipboard and my death notification. I cringe to think of who this guy might be looking forward to haunting from the afterlife. And why. And how.

According to Merriam Webster, to “haunt” is “to visit or inhabit” or “to have a disquieting or harmful effect on eventually.” I rather suspect that my conversation partner had the latter in mind. He was looking forward to menacing his enemies from beyond the grave. But to “haunt” can also mean “to stay around or persist; to linger.”  And in this sense, we do, of course, “haunt” those we leave behind. Our absences leave a hole where a presence once was. We linger, we persist, for good or for ill. For a while.

What is true of people is also true of beliefs, of cultural frameworks, of moral assumptions. The twenty-first century post-Christian secular West is haunted by its past. In countless ways—in that which we find good, true, and beautiful, in that which we assume we owe our neighbours, in our convictions about justice, in our politics and the assumptions that underly them, in the meaning we demand for our suffering, and many other things besides—we are far more Christian than we realize or probably prefer. We are deeply confused, incoherent, and inconsistent about much of the above, to be sure. But our cultural assumptions are unintelligible apart from the Christian soil from which they sprung. The risen Christ and all he brought into the world lingers. He persists, even among and amidst those who claim to want nothing to do with him. His is a beautiful haunting.

And it shows up in all kinds of places. Rock and roll, for example. I came across two relatively new songs in the last little while that give voice, I think, to this haunting. The first is a new single by Foo Fighters called “Asking for a Friend.” I was struck by these lines:

What is real? I’m asking for a friend
Or is this the end?

Give me a reason, show me a sign
Ugliest truth or the prettiest lie

I feel it fading away, fading on you
Searching for something to pray, words I can use
To lay your worry down

It’s not hard to read these lines as haunted in the best sense of the word. There is a longing for something beyond, for something real to grab on to, somewhere to lay one’s burdens down.

The second one comes off Mumford & Sons’ new album Prizefighter. The song is called “Conversation with my Son (Gangsters & Angels).”

Whispers in a ruined house
The leaves that sing with no sound…

I get higher and higher
The lower I go
This upside world
With a knife at its throat
We’re all tumblers and beggars
Your mother and I will show you
Gangsters and angels
Darling, come and see
The cross or the machine?
It’s always the same choice
The best I ever met
Had nothing and gave it all away

We’d rather be ruined than change
And die in our dread
But love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart

Reach across again
Here’s where Heaven starts
I end where you begin
With my hand over your heart

A haunted song, if ever there was one. So much going on in there, but what a great line, “whispers in a ruined house.” What a beautiful description of the ways in which Christ persists and lingers in a culture determined to forget him.

I’ve been listening to these two songs this morning as I think about and pray for the guy I met at the jail yesterday. I believe that there are always hearts of flesh seeking to be awakened where there seems to be only stone. I believe that Christ haunts all of our ruined houses—that he will not leave any of us tumblers and beggars, gangsters and angels alone. And that this is our deepest and truest hope.

——

I took the picture above somewhere in northwestern Spain while walking the Camino de Santiago last spring. It was one of many ruined houses that whispered to us along the way.