In my previous post, I mentioned how the long instrumental second half of "Half the World" was an after thought, one that came nearly 30 years (!) after I first set out to compose the intro. Why on earth did it take me so long to think of taking the words of v. 3 (which are sung twice): "We'll do a pilgrimage ..." and portraying that long pilgrimage musically with an extended and repetitive riff? Well, for one thing, I was busy with other things. But once the idea stuck, it was hard to let go of. The transformation of the song, halfway through "Half the World," really takes place with the switch to the electric guitar, but also with a slight change in which notes are emphasized in the hammered transition from the Cmaj7 (I'm talking shapes here, since this is all capo 2 stuff) to B7sus. Where in the song, I had been plucking the fifth string between the chords, the whole thing took on an entirely new feel as I went for the third string. Now when I play it, I love to get the top string ringing like a drone throughout, which sets a rather nice ceiling over the whole, not unlike the effect of those long synth pad chords.
As for the final track, "Persevere," with its short speech for a lyric, this was inspired by the comment that I hear most often from students in my worship class, when I take them on a tour of worship through the Old and New Testaments. It is a good occasion to tell them about Kierkegaard's definition of sin as the opposite of faith (Romans 14:23), which forces us to rethink this long-standing theological aberration about a "fall from grace." No, says Jesus, "God sends rain on the just and the unjust." It is all grace, all the time, even if it does not always feel like it. As the Dominican Meister Eckhart said: "God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk." Or as I put it here: "The Fall was never a fall from grace. It was only ever a fall from faith." That places the responsibility for faith back where it belongs, and it also gives us the reassurance that, when we are "in faith," i.e., "in Christ," we really are free from sin, free from the (eternal) consequences of sin, and, yes, free to go and sin no more! So many students have been struck by this, it seemed to me worth restating in this final track as we set out once again on the "pilgrimage" with the admonition to persevere as our mission statement.
