'A Song that Gets to Everybody'

ALERT: Ash Wednesday is only a few weeks off

Sing the first measure of “Amazing Grace” to a person on the street and they’ll be able to finish the first verse. Why does this song have such pervasive staying power?

When Johnny Cash was asked this question, he recalled his childhood—after his older brother was killed in an accident, his family would sing this song together to find hope. He went on to include it in his prison concerts, explaining, “For the three minutes that song is going on, everybody is free. It just frees the spirit and frees the person."

The melody hits major chords as it rises and falls—we feel like it’s picking us up and carrying us when we sing it, especially in a group. And the words plainly state a fundamental Christian insight: we’ve become lost and blind and need to be saved—and we’re here to testify that God’s grace breaks into our lives in undeserved and surprising ways. Put those dynamics together and, as the gospel singer Marion Williams said, “That's a song that gets to everybody.”

It has been such a privilege to write the daily Lenten devotionals from Ave Maria Press this year; it was also a ton of fun. These page-a-day reflection booklets are built around a line from a well-known hymn such as “Amazing Grace,” so I got to comb through the American gospel music tradition for songs about conversion—and then create a playlist from such varied artists as Johnny Cash and Harry Belafonte and cloistered Carmelite nuns and Matt Maher and the Irish Tenors.

Any writer worth their salt knows it’s a gift to have a good editor, and my editor at Ave had the idea to center these reflections around music. It made immediate sense to me: music puts prayer in our bones. Even in the writing of this, dwelling with a given song allowed me to carry the tune through my day. As I found myself humming in the grocery store, I realized my heart was reconnecting with the prayerful movements I had been writing about in the reflection.

Another gift of writing this booklet: looking closer at hymns I’ve been singing my whole life. There’s a reason our family of faith has been singing these tunes for well more than a hundred years: they have “big shoulders” as Brian Doyle would say—they carry a heavy load of meaning. “Amazing Grace” is a great example.

John Newton wrote this hymn in 1772 as an English pastor, but he was looking back at his life before his conversion when he captained a ship carrying people from Africa into slavery in North America. He wasn’t using hyperbole when he said that God’s grace “saved a wretch like me.”

God’s amazing grace first broke into his life when he spent eleven hours lashed to the helm of his ship as a violent storm was sweeping his crew overboard. Out there on the angry ocean, he needed help and had no one to turn to but the God he had scorned and mocked. When he survived, he began to consider that God had a purpose for him and eventually found his way to faith.

We might not be battered by mountainous waves in the North Atlantic, but it’s true for us as well: God’s grace is the only thing that can keep us safe and lead us home. Lent is a time to remember that truth—to put it in our bones—and to practice placing our lives in God’s hands.

You can learn more about Lord, Show Me the Way at Ave Maria Press—thanks for reading along! Here’s a playlist I gathered from the songs I used for this booklet—maybe it will prime your pump for Ash Wednesday, which is coming up March 5.