Voices from the Past

So I've been trying to decide about getting another tattoo. For years, I've wanted the celtic design that appears on the cover of Jeff Johnson's 1984 CD Icons, but in the innumerable moves I've made over the past five-ish years, I seem to have lost the album art. Bummer.

Last night, this prompted a massive Internet search for the cover art, to no avail. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since the disc has been out-of-print for at least fifteen years, but I was still saddened. Until I got the bright idea to look for a copy of the CD itself. All I've had for years is the booklet, so that would be good on a number of levels. I started thinking back, trying to remember the songs, and several were still backed up in my cognitive hard drive. Wild!

I thought back to the end of my junior high years, when I was first coming to terms with my decidedly artsy nature - amazed that I survived seventh and eighth grades - listening to this collection of songs that was God-centered yet bore no resemblance to the typical bubble-gum, Jesus-y, Amy-Grant pop that dominated the Christian music scene. As I remember, it was the last track that stuck in my head, that I would listen to over and over again, sitting in the tan bucket seat of our conversion van and weeping in gratitude.

It was called "Windemere," Johnson's setting of a poem by John Keble that was written at the British lake of the same name:

Looking through the window
out upon the lake
Windemere is trying to sleep
but continues to awake.
High above the village,
standing on a hill,
an angel sings a psalmody
that interrups the still.

The song seeps through the cracks and gaps
of the weathered window-frame
and fills the room with praises
of an even older Name.
Through the walls that form this room,
I'm taken to that hill,
face-to-face with Someone
that my memory marvels still...

I could never hear these sounds,
I could never see,
I could never feel this breeze
until you blew on me.
I could never love, really,
I could never fear.
I would have never, ever thought
that I'd be standing here.

Thou who has given me eyes to see
and love this sight so fair,
give me a heart to find Thee out
and read Thee everywhere.

Standing in my dining room, looking through the slats of cheap apartment vertical blinds, I welled up again. This time, though, I was as grateful for everything since ninth grade as I was then for everything before. This crazy thing called life truly is a journey - a blessed one - and I find myself at thirty-five praying the same prayer I prayed at sixteen:

Give me a heart to find Thee out and read Thee everywhere.