The miracle of seeing two brothers continue to work together professionally without breaking up or killing each other is almost as remarkable as watching a love song be created ex nihlio right in front of your eyes, like when they riff “I Wish I Was” from chicken scratch ideas on napkins to chords and production and onto the big stage. 

Hands down, however, my favorite part of the film is everything that surrounds and is behind the harrowing song: “No Hard Feelings.” The lyrics bring us listeners face to face with our mortality – inquiring about the possibility of being ready to die when our time comes: 

When my feet won’t walk another mile?

And my lips give their last kiss goodbye?

Will my hands be steady when I lay down my fears, my hopes, and my doubts?

The rings on my fingers, and the keys to my house

With no hard feelings?

But more than this, the face of death brings a sharp, visceral confrontation with all the jealousy, lust, and nasty inner-angst we experience most days that end in the letter “y”. We’re invited to see how little these feelings do for us besides keeping us afraid and cold, ignoring all we’ve been given to have and enjoy. From there, we’re taken to a place of wonder at the freeing possibility of laying all these down and encountering supernatural laughter, light, and love: 

When my body won’t hold me anymore

And it finally lets me free

Where will I go?

…

Will I join with the ocean blue?

Or run into a savior true?

And shake hands laughing

And walk through the night, straight to the light

Holding the love I’ve known in my life

And no hard feelings

The song is poetic and palpably moving. But what happens next in the film is profound. The room of producers and support staff congratulate and praise the song: “Home run, boys – beautiful song” they’re profusely told. But rather than smiling and receiving the high marks, the brothers have taken a visible toll with this song, as if power had somehow gone out from them. They almost look like they’re crawling over the finish line of a long week at work after playing this one song.

And it’s here that we’re given a front-row seat to what truly draws people together. “It’s weird to be congratulated on mining the soul,” the younger Avett says before his older brother describes the elephant in the room as the fact that this is the hit song of the album – the one that’s going to make the money: “It’s the best song because it’s taken the most sacrifice to make. It’s taken the most living to make. You’ve sacrificed deeply, and the evidence of that struggle came out in something beautiful.”

The brothers have taken a resolute look at the lives they’ve been given and brought out things that we’re all afraid to confront. The song cuts through all the haze of life’s perpetual shallowness and “hey how’s it goin?…fines”. It takes the presence of death to see how often we’re overwhelmed by hard feelings that divide and leave us empty and cold. 

And yet we’re drawn in. We play the record over and over. Why is this? Because whereas other people’s strengths often keep us at bay and pretending, weakness invites us in and allows us to open up to our own inadequacies and experiences of being trapped. When someone metaphorically bleeds in front of you, a doorway opens. We’re brought into something more than the daily lists and measurements that wear us out with hard feelings of jealousy and insecurity. 

In 2 Corinthians 4:10, we’re told we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus. It’s a strange thing to say and perhaps an even more strange way to live. But these two brothers singing folk songs are showing the beauty in this strange way of being. The death of Jesus, like this song, gets to the point and silences all that traps us because our trappings are draped on his shoulders as he is strung up on the tree. It’s in his death we see with clear eyes that there really is a Love that rests at the heart of the universe. A doorway opens in the wound in Christ’s side, his poured-out blood making a way for our insecurities and shame to be absorbed and destroyed in the shame that Jesus bore on the cross. It’s an Active Love that finds us and replaces our coldness and the very existence of enemies with friends. Because in the story of Jesus, we were the enemies, and he died to make space at his table for us. In him, we have no enemies…and no hard feelings. 

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Talking with younger types about baptism, though, is a reminder of how much nuance it requires. For adults, too. It’s even hard to define — it’s less like “What is an apple?” and more like “What is marriage?” (Well, how much time do you have?)

Christians haven’t always agreed on things like when a person should be baptized or what it symbolizes. I don’t intend to dig deep into the different camps on the matter here, nor to argue for my “side”. What concerns me most, at least for this article, is not definitions per se, but how baptism becomes a window into greener pastures, how it’s not an end in and of itself (as if it were an act of obedience alone), but an arrow pointing downward into the very depths of the gospel itself.

The apostles utilize a variety of images for baptism in their letters — things like Noah’s ark, Red Sea crossings, washing rites, death and resurrection, oneness with Jesus, new creation motifs, etc. All of these are different facets of the one diamond, but there’s something even simpler that doesn’t get a lot of fanfare, and it has to do with directionality.

In the traditional gospel song “Down in the River to Pray” that Alison Krauss famously recorded for the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” the most pointed invitation in the song is, “Come on brothers, let’s go down. Come on sisters, let’s go down, down in the river to pray.”

Now, I don’t mean to meddle in semantics, but it’s worth asking, why “down” to the river and not “up”? The geographical answer might be obvious: rivers flow at (or toward) the lowest elevation possible. But the theological significance is greater still. Even the simplest child knows that going down is easier than going up, and sledding hills without toe-ropes are fun half the time. Baptisms, whether done in a river, a lake, or even a baptismal, are descended into, which requires much less energy, and is good news for those who are weary from failed attempts at saving themselves.

In Acts 8, after Philip shared the good news of Jesus with the Ethiopian eunuch, the eunuch says, “Look, there’s some water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” Good question! The answer is nothing, because nothing stands in the way of God and sinners anymore, due to Jesus’s sacrifice. Then it adds, “Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him.” Again: down, not up. And then the eunuch is baptized at the hands of another, not his own. If there were a passivity dial to all of this, it would be turned up to 11.

And that brings us to the crux of the matter: baptism is, physically speaking, an easy burden, just like salvation that is freely given. It requires no effort on our part, only belief. There’s a reason why it’s closer to “Let’s go for a leisurely swim,” than, “Climb up that mountain!” The Old Testament temple was located on a mountain for this very reason: to show how heavy of a burden law-observance was, and how much fruitless effort it took to draw near to God. After working hard to pay for their sacrifices, the work wasn’t done. They had to go up.

But, again, Jesus is different. He came down to us — laying in a manger, growing up in the Podunk town of Nazareth, beginning his ministry in the Jordan River of all places. He would even die outside the city, apart from temples and laws, to get at this same idea. The New Testament is much more valley than mountain.

So Jesus chooses his sacraments carefully. Nothing is by chance, even the mode by which they’re administered. As popular as mountaintop selfies are today, they will never epitomize Christianity. Too much ascension. Too much self-optimization. It would send all the wrong messages about the gospel. Instead, we’re left with the humbling act of baptism, the river of grace that washes away our pride, and the realization that it’s not our breathlessness that matters (after a steep climb), but Jesus’s, as he’s gasping for air on the cross and giving away everything that we might have new life in him.

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In the weeks and months after The Batman, “Something in the Way” shot up the billboard charts. Clearly, the song hits a nerve in a way that can’t be written off as another case of 90s nostalgia.

For context, the song describes the emotional turmoil and plight of living without a home in this world. For years, the opening lyrics, “underneath the bridge, tarp has sprung a leak” were interpreted as lead singer Kurt Cobain’s attempt to put to words his own experiences of homelessness in his adolescent years. Though this would later be proved to be a myth, the homeless imagery and the angsty mood of the song expresses a frustration with the world. As if it has conspired against Cobain to put a series of setbacks in his way. But by the end of the song and its unending chorus, one is left with the impression that there’s something else going on below the surface, that maybe the thing in the way is Cobain himself.

There exists an inner dark night of the soul that can’t be cured by human achievement or effort.  Regardless of the desire to heal, the walls of the well of sadness and purposelessness are too high to scale and climb out. Something else will always get in the way, leaving you right back where you started.

This is one of many hidden messages in the life of one of the more well known prophets in the Old Testament. Even if you didn’t grow up in Sunday school, there’s still a chance you’ve heard the story of Elijah and how he single handedly took 400 false prophets to task in an epic showdown of “Whose God is Real Anyway?” If there were a hall of fame for the prophets, Elijah calling fire down from heaven would earn him one of the tallest trophies.

What often gets less stage time is the dark night of the soul that follows Elijah’s literal mountain top experience. He pleads with God to end his life the day after this career high moment. He has vanquished his enemy — there’s no long anything in his way — but he finds himself forlorn. His cry out for death resembles Psalm 88, the only prayer in the Bible that ends without a single hint of hope: “Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me? You have taken from me friend and neighbor — darkness is my closest friend.”

British journalist Oliver Burkeman describes two main forms of suffering that plagues the human experience:

1. The kind that results from power disparities between groups: racism, sexism, economic inequality.
2. The universal kind that comes with being a finite human, faced with a limited lifespan, the inevitability of death, the unavoidability of grief and regret, the inability to control the present or predict the future and the impossibility of ever fully knowing even those to whom we’re closest.

The first form of suffering rightly gets a lot of airtime in the news, coverage in our scrolling, and in conversation because it’s that form of suffering that human beings can actually solve, at least in part. Campaigns to end any “ism,” that is, any form of suffering inflicted from one group to another, can be successful. In many ways, it is the form of suffering humans can do something about. Amid our pursuit of happiness, an obstacle gets in our way and must be overcome.

The second form, the kind that rests a layer deeper than what we can do to one another, cannot be solved with human hands. The problem isn’t out there somewhere, but seems to be much closer to home.

This deeper layer of suffering is no respecter of persons. It’s an inner insecurity revealed by both Cobain and Elijah. No amount of fire called down from heaven, musically or literally, can inhibit our unrest — our own dark nights of the soul. Regardless of the level of severity, if you are a human being, you have experienced that inner anxiety, even if outward circumstances are going your way. This inner turmoil can’t be fixed with outward solutions. Our efforts for resolve are in vain — there is, as Cobain diagnoses, “something in the way” and that something is us.

What hope do we have? Where do we turn?

God’s response to Elijah is a proverbial lighthouse for us. After letting him take a couple naps and giving him a sandwich, God has him go up on another mountain. But this time, God’s got something better for Elijah than a dramatic accomplishment. He sees terrifying and wondrous acts. A mountain falls apart from a windstorm. And then an earthquake and firestorm come and go. In all these, God was absent. But then he hears a gentle whisper (1 Kings 19:11-12). What comes after the gentle whisper? Nothing. No “but’s” — God himself is in the gentle whisper! Elijah expected to hear God in impressive, powerful displays, but what he needed most was the gentle whisper of God.

This whisper waits to take full shape until the New Testament, in which the person of Jesus takes center stage. He extends an invitation to come to him to find the type of soul-rest you can’t achieve for yourself. Because he is gentle and lowly in heart. Because he himself is the whisper of God.

While he’s dying on the cross, he shouts “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The people who hear the shout respond saying, “he’s calling Elijah.” In one sense, they are correct, but maybe not in the way they first intend. Jesus is calling Elijah and everyone else who has ever experienced the universal kind of suffering that comes with being human.

In love, he steps into the void of our deepest anxieties, puts them on like a robe, and then burns beneath the fiery wrath of God in our place. He became our dark night of the soul to remove the “something in the way.” Elijah was spared from the earthquake of God because Jesus redirected it to himself on the cross, when the earth shook as it swallowed the son of man. In his death, he descends to hell to break the deep chains that bind us and set us free to receive his rest.

Come to me, he says. My yoke is easy and my burden is light. Light of course means “not heavy,” but it is also equally true to say his burden is light itself, capable of illuminating our darkest darkness. In him, nothing is in the way.

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This post originally appeared on mbird.com

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