Josh Garrels' Worship for Addicts
On the best Christian songwriter out there, addiction and surrender.
Last Friday night I saw my favourite artist in the world, Josh Garrels, live. On saying this to a lot of people before the gig, I realised I hadn’t dug into exactly why this was the case. So I’m going to do that here.
I didn’t know if I would ever see Josh live. He’s from Indiana in the States and has always been fiercely independently produced. Because of this, even though his music reached the UK long ago, I thought he might never come here. After-all, he could tour the States forever and do just fine.
Last year he was booked to play a festival in Cornwall that I went to with friends purely to see him. Right before he was due to come on stage, they announced he had broken his rib on his farm. This was gutting and we thought maybe our one chance to see him was gone. (This also tells you that he is the kind of guy who breaks his rib on his farm.)
Anyway, on Friday he played King’s House, a trendy warehouse kind of church down the street from King’s Cross station in London. And I spent pretty much all of it quietly crying, off to the right of stage.
Josh Garrels draws from serious depths when he sings and speaks. I felt the same way around him as I have done around all Christian heroes of mine, including the best priests I know and the monastics I have hung out with, they all feel the same. You can feel when someone is living from the depths of the Christian life. They exude something. It is clear that they pray and have given their attention to God so often that it has rubbed off on them. They are living the way of Jesus. When Josh sings and when I listen to his music, that’s what I feel and it calls me to respond similarly. Often, it has called me back to following the way of Jesus after times away and served as a reminder of how shallow life feels without my faith.
So, when he sang, it cracked me open as it always does. Particularly so this time because I came to the gig in not such a great state internally. It called me back again. He opened with ‘At The Table’ and very quickly I knew why he was the artist who spoke to me the most out of all the artists in the world. Here are the first verses and chorus.
‘I went the ways of wayward winds
In a world of trouble and sin
Walked a long and crooked mile
Behind a million rank and file
Forgot where I came from
Somewhere back when I was young
I was a good man’s child
‘Cause I lost some nameless things
My innocence flew away from me
She had to hide her face from my desire
To embrace forbidden fire
But at night I dream
She’s singing over me
Oh, oh, my child
Come on home, home to me
And I will hold you in my arms
And joyful be
There will always, always be
A place for you at my table
Return to me.’
It’s a beautiful ode to lost innocence and the welcome return of the prodigal. This is what Christianity feels like to me. This is what much of my journey of faith has felt like.
I have always remembered a conversion from a house party at uni with a good friend who said to me something like, ‘It must be nice being a Christian, be good and go to heaven, that sort of thing.’ I baulked at this. I went on to say that this wasn’t how lived faith felt to me at all. I felt, and feel, that having a faith feels much more like struggle, a hard, counter-cultural path, that pits me against parts of myself that I ultimately know are harmful. It frequently exposes me to my brokenness and my need to ask for the grace to get by.
As a singer-songwriter and not a worship leader, Josh Garrels can ‘go there’ in his writing, able to give language to the struggle of faith and our need for grace. We really need people who can write this reality, it serves a totally different need to the bands writing worship songs for congregations in churches. It can be the poetry that we need.
When he went on to speak, it hit me as much as his music. He told some of his story and I filmed it on my phone because I was so struck by what he was saying. I’m gonna give you the whole thing because I love it all. Here’s what he said:
‘I believe it’s DL Moody that said, ‘The world has not seen what God can do with someone who has wholly surrendered to him.’ What does it look like to surrender more and more of the tracts of our heart? I do know that the more we give to him he has something to work with. And I believe that’s when we begin seeing the impossibilities.
As a new believer, this thing has stuck with me my whole Christian life for the last twenty years … I came out of a lot of addictions, counter-culture, spiritual darkness. My friend who had recently come to the faith, he was scared I was going home over the summer to the same old friendships … and he put his hand on my shoulder and was like ‘Dude, I’m scared for you man, that you’re going to forget. That you’re going to forget.’
And he said, ‘This thing goes as far and as deep as you want to go with it.’ And that was like the language I needed, that resonates with me, you know. This thing goes as far and as deep as we want to go with it. But ironically it doesn’t just magically happen. What is required of us to go farther and deeper is surrender.
So everyone in this room has an area in their life that the Lord is kindly putting his finger on and saying, ‘Just give it to me. You know, I’ve been talking to you about this for a long time. You know you’d actually be free if you let go of this.’ And then watch what he does, because that’s actually the crucified life. Then something new resurrects. And it’s not of you.’
Here, I really knew why his writing meant so much to me. I’ve written about my experience of addiction before and so I’m not going to drag it out a lot here, but in hearing him speak I realised that he shared this reality, this specific journey.
Addiction is a particular kind of thing. It always comes hand-in-hand with shame and is usually followed up by self-hatred too, particularly as you try to quit something. It is an emotionally complex and psychologically draining thing. It leaves you feeling split between a sober self and a non-sober self, which makes living in one consistent direction impossible. It causes you to lie to cover up for yourself, even to those closest to you. It is a spiral of self sabotage.
But every cloud. This experience tends to make you very aware of your undeniable brokenness and, if you are Christian, of your need for grace. This, in turn, becomes empathy for the dysfunction of others.
Having lived this, Josh is right about his conclusion. Surrender is the only way out. The anonymous groups, formed by Christian addicts, know this through and through, the only way out is a well attended to spiritual life, the maintaining of peace and the surrendering to a higher power.
Before and since Josh’s London gig, I’ve been reading
’s book, ‘Fully Alive’ (her Substack @morefullyalive bears the same name and is worth a look, she’s good stuff). This morning, it quoted me these excellent David Foster Wallace lines on worship:‘the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.’
I have been thinking a lot about worship, addiction and attention this year. Oldfield actually names worship, ‘a cousin of attention’ which I like. Increasingly, I know that worship and addiction can’t coexist.
One of the best things I have read about addiction is from ‘Addiction and Grace’ by Gerald May. He writes:
‘Psychologically, addiction uses up desire. It is like a psychic malignancy, sucking our life energy into specific obsessions and compulsions, leaving less and less energy available for other people and other pursuits. Spiritually, addiction is a deep-seated form of idolatry. The objects of our addictions become our false gods … Addiction, then, displaces and supplants God’s love as the source and object of our deepest true desire … for love and goodness …
Saint Augustine once said that God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them. If our hands are full, they are full of the things to which we are addicted. And not only our hands, but also our hearts, our minds, and attention are clogged with addiction. Our addictions fill up the spaces within us, spaces where grace might flow.’
So there it is. Open hands. We’re back to surrender.
Allow me one last quote from another hero on these themes, John Mark Comer.
‘The poet Mary Oliver, not a Christian but a lifelong spiritual seeker, wrote: "Attention is the beginning of devotion." Worship and joy start with the capacity to turn our minds' attention toward the God who is always with us in the now … what you give your attention to is the person you become.’
I didn’t get to say all of this to Josh Garrels (thank God). I almost left without speaking to him, unsure of how I could convey half of what his music has meant to me. In the end, I joined the queue and thought up my perfect question before being told that the venue would close soon and I would have to be really quick. So I just told him the funny story about Cornwall, that he was my favourite musician in the world and that I return to his album, ‘Home’, especially the song, ‘Born Again’ all the time. He gave me his full attention and was exactly what I thought he would be like.
That night he reminded me, as his music always does, what a life of depth is available, if I turn my attention to God more often, if I can continue to lean into a life of surrender.
I’ll leave you with those great words that were his turning point and which have been running through my mind since, ‘This thing goes as far and as deep as you want to go with it.’
Thanks for reading friends.
Isaac
The read I needed today. Thank you friend.