I have been re-listening to Tracy Chapman’s self-titled album since the 2024 Grammys. I, and many of my peers, remember when this album was released. The songs Fast Car and Revolution played on repeat on the tape deck in my Chevrolet Citation. The entire album is a testimony to black experience in the U.S. And that VOICE. Wow.

It was 1988 when the album was relased. I was in seminary in Los Angeles. I had moved from a farm in rural Washington State (Fairfield) to a small town that felt huge (Bellingham). They had a bus system and bagels! Then I went on to a real city (Seattle) and eventually launched to the sprawling, smoggy, bougainvillia’d, Hollywood hub of Los Angeles. I was hyper-aware of racial differences and of the urban world I was immersed in. During my years in Seattle, I had become familiar with homeless women and attempted to support them. During the LA years, I lived in intentional community based in a Pasadena gang neighborhood. Helicopters were so frequent, we often didn’t hear them. Even 3 blocks away were the historic Pasadena bungalows, but where we lived, there was regular dis-regulation and chaos.

There was a development across the street that was regularly the recipient of cop chases and internal fights. A few times, someone jumped onto our porch and hid there until the lights of the helicopter disappeared. In those moments, we would avoid the front room just in case the person had a gun or was too heavily drugged. Plus there was the issue of policing. We didn’t trust them, either, though we sensed we stood out as “safe white people”.

The house to the south was equally run down to ours and had cars coming and going at all hours. I knew there was a lot of drug activity there. One night I sat in my safe little 2nd story bedroom overlooking that house and watched two men so wasted that their pants were soiled, almost down to their ankles, but they were unaware. I was the voyeur next door. I cried. I prayed. I wondered if I should call the police. Would they take advantage of them or someone else? Would my neighbor wander into the street and get hit by a car? I didn’t want to “out” them and I didn’t want them to die. I didn’t know what to do. So when Tracy’s song hit the charts, it felt both prophetic and obvious.

Plus, I had grown up on a family farm and couldn’t wait to leave. I could feel the chorus of Fast Car. “Get me outa here!” I was terrified I would have to marry some redneck who spoke poor English. That seems laughable now, but it was symbolic of my desire to do something different with my life. I blame my mom partially. She couldn’t bear improper English. And I had the beginning of dreams. As my youngest said before going to college, “I want to live a life to write stories about.”

Living in that neighborhood changed me. As did Tracy’s album. She asked the questions I was asking in the context of my attempt to live an authentic Christian life. Her song, “Why?” could have been my thesis.

Why do the babies starve
There’s enough food to feed the world
Why when there’re so many of us
Are there people still alone
Why are the missiles called peace keepers
When they’re aimed to kill
Why is a woman still not safe
When she’s in her home
Love is hate
War is peace
No is yes
We’re all free
But somebody’s gonna have to answer
Time is coming soon
Amidst all these questions and contradictions
There’re some who seek the truth

I mean really – what kind of God allows this kind of misery? I didn’t have answers. I left a youth ministry position to go to seminary partly because I didn’t have answers for some basic questions that seemed obvious before. When a young person asked, “what does it really mean to be a Christian?”, I fumbled. I knew the “right” answer. But those words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. I had questions, not answers.

I wish I could say studying theology answered those questions, but of course, this was a good liberal arts institution, so it did not. It created more. At least for me. Seen by the more liberal friends as “too conservative” and the more conservative friends as “too liberal”, it was a close enough fit. I imagine the outcome would have been similar, no matter where I studied. Plus, I was still enough farm girl to feel Princeton was too heady for the grass roots life I imagined. Perhaps I wanted to be closer to that farm I tried to escape.

The questions persisted.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Rainer Marie Rilke

In this reading of Rilke, I noticed the point. “Perhaps… gradually… you will live into the answer.” It seems so tentative, so “maybe yes/maybe no”. It is almost as if she is saying the questions we ask don’t really matter. We we have no reassurance we will find the answers, at the very least. Her answer: “live into” the questions.

In the past I think I would “feel” this answer in a sort of mystical way and be satisfied, but today I do not find it satisfying at all. What does it mean to “live into” the questions that haunt us? I do not know. Do you?

Still, I am comforted by Tracy Chapman, by the way the song Fast Car resonates with Luke Combs, and by the power of shared human experience. I wish I had more, but that’s all I got. (With apologies to my mom for my poor English.)