The Grand Façade, So Soon Will Burn

If memory serves, I wore blue jeans and a blue-striped shirt, and without missing a note, I sat on the gym stage and played Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” for the eighth-grade talent show. I killed it, the undisputed zenith of my guitar-playing career, except perhaps for when I played Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me” the following year in the ninth-grade talent show. After these moments in the limelight, I retired early and never played in public again.

And for those wondering, I didn’t sing in either performance. No one wants to get booed by peers, especially in our young teenage years.

Thirty years have passed since middle school, and to say I tinker with the guitar these days feels generous. I play maybe thirty minutes a year. But I still know enough to help my youngest daughter learn the instrument. She’s the age I was when I played Clapton, Nirvana, and Michael W. Smith, so the artists she’ll want to imitate have changed. Still, she wants to learn, and I’m happy to help.

Playing guitar with her has led me to pull out some favorite songs from the past to see if I can still play them—or learn them. One of my favorite songs of all time is Peter Gabriel’s hit “In Your Eyes.” In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2012 when Gabriel rereleased the album, he described the basis of the song as “an ambiguous love song that can be human love, man to woman, or man to God.” Over the years, I’ve come to love this ambiguity of the song.

Sometimes, of course, intentional ambiguity of singing about God or singing about romantic love can go wrong. I’m a hard pass on sappy church worship songs that sing of Jesus as though he were our boyfriend. But in the hands of careful poets, the double referent of lovers and Lover can work. I think of the Song of Solomon and the lines about the flame of the Lord. “Love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD” (Song 8:6). Is the author speaking about his love for his bride or God’s love for us? Both, I think.

The song “From Now On” from The Greatest Showman strikes me as another example of a song with a double referent. Sure, P.T. Barnum’s character, played by Hugh Jackman, sings his repentance to his wife, but could we not also hope that the anthem which starts in his heart is also sung—perhaps even more so—to his creator? Putting aside whatever the historical realities are, I like to think his words double as a song of repentance and coming home to the Lord.

Anyway, back to “In Your Eyes.” The version of the classic song that I love so much is a cover by Jeffrey Gaines. Gaines recorded a live version of “In Your Eyes” that became popular about twenty-five years ago, which, incidentally, paralleled the time I started coming back to following the Lord.

Indeed, I can still remember the exact moment I drove from one major city to another, rolled down the windows, and turned up the volume when the Gaines version came on the radio. I sang along like I was in the front row at the concert. At the time, I’m not sure how familiar I was with Gabriel’s original from ’86. I’m sure I knew it through cultural osmosis, but, to me, it might as well have been Gaines who wrote it first.

In recent days, I’ve been thinking a lot about a particular line, singing it over and over in my head. The pre-chorus goes,

All my instincts, they return
The grand façade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

The line I have in mind is, “The grand façade, so soon will burn.” It names all the fakery we erect between ourselves and God, and between ourselves and others, even those we love.

Twenty-five years ago, I don’t think I understood what I was singing when I sang those lines. I suppose that’s often the case. For some song lyrics, it’s probably better that way. Around that time I had also memorized songs by Nelly and the St. Lunatics, which I will most certainly not be teaching to my daughter, even if I could play them on the guitar.

The lines about burning down our grand façade would ordinarily be a dreadful and haunting prospect. We wear masks on purpose. Sure, part of us wants to be fully seen and fully known by others, lest we live with deep isolation and alienation. But we also most certainly do not want to be fully seen and fully known. We’ve placed our fig leaves, thin as they are, to hide shame. The isolation is intentional. What could be more dreadful than burning the façade we’ve so elaborately manicured? Who would want to be naked before those we’ve wronged, those from whom we legitimately have so much to hide?

But the song lyrics clearly ring with hope, even thankfulness, for the experience of burning. They sound nothing like the lamenting and bemoaning of arson.

The assumption must be that it is good for the façade, grand as we might consider it, to be scorched to ash. It’s good for a man to reckon with his maker. It’s good for us to give up the pretense.

More than when I first started singing the song, I see today how burning the façade is good. It’s good when there is such a thing as Christ. When we have a savior who is holy and happy, powerful and loving, just and good, then dropping the masks is good. Having the unconditional love of a savior means the façade can’t burn soon enough.

Writing about both marriage and the love of Christ, Timothy Keller says, “When over the years someone has seen you at your worst, and knows you with all your strengths and flaws, yet commits him- or herself to you wholly, it is a consummate experience.” He adds, “To be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us” (The Meaning of Marriage).

In recent days, as I find myself singing the lines, they still ring with hope and thankfulness in my heart. As I play the chords B minor followed by a quick A and a little riff on D, I look forward to the day when whatever façade yet remains will also fully and finally burn in the very flame of the Lord at the second coming of Christ. On that day we will be known even as we are fully known, a consummate experience. In the light and the heat in God’s eyes, we will be complete. In God’s eyes, we see the resolution of all our fruitless searches.

In the good news of Jesus, the future day of judgment and burning becomes a prospect more happy than haunting.

* Photo by Nivenn Lanos on Unsplash