The Singer Trilogy
THE SINGER TRILOGY
The Mythic Retelling of the Story of the New Testament
Calvin Miller
THE SINGER, THE SONG, THE FINALE
IN ONE VOLUME
Cover and interior illustrations
by Joe DeVelasco
www.IVPress.com/books
Contents
THE SINGER
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XXIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
THE SONG
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
THE FINALE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
About the Author
About the Singer Trilogy
More Titles from InterVarsity Press
Copyright
THE SINGER
I
For most who live, hell is never knowing who they are.
The Singer knew and knowing was his torment.
When he awoke, the song was there.
Its melody beckoned and begged him to sing it.
It hung upon the wind and settled in the meadows where he walked.
He knew its lovely words and could have sung it all, but feared to sing a song whose harmony was far too perfect for human ear to understand.
And still at midnight it stirred him to awareness, and with its haunting melody it drew him with a curious mystery to stand before an open window.
In rhapsody it played among the stars.
It rippled through Andromeda and deepened Vega’s hues.
It swirled in heavy strains from galaxy to galaxy and gave him back his very fingerprint.
“Sing the Song!” the heavens seemed to cry. “We never could have been without the melody that you alone can sing.”
But he drew back, sighing that the song they so desired was higher than the earth.
And always in his agony of longing and reluctance, the atmosphere around him argued back.
“You, too, are higher than the earth! You sang the higher music once, before the oceans ever crashed their craggy coasts.”
He braced himself upon a precipice above the canyon floor, and with the wind full on his face, he cried into the sky:
“Earthmaker, tell me if I have the right to sing …”
But then his final word trailed off into gales.
The gull screamed.
“No,” he thought, “only Earthmaker is everlasting. His alone must be the theme from which sprung the world I stand upon.”
And so he only loved but never sang the song.
Full well he knew that few would ever see him as a singer of so grand a piece.
He knew that they would say to him:
“You are no singer! And even if you are you should sing the songs we know.”
And well he knew the penalty of law. A dreamer could be ostracized in hate for singing songs the world had never heard.
Such songs had sent a thousand singers to their death already.
And the song which dogged his aching steps and begged him pleadingly to sing it was completely unfamiliar.
Only the stars and mountains knew it. But they were old. And man was new, and chained to simple, useless rhymes; thus he could not understand the majesty that settled down upon him.
But daily now it played upon his heart and swept his soul, until the joy exploded his awareness—crying near the edge of sanity, “Sing … sing … S I N G!”
II
It is strange how oftentimes the air speaks.
We are sane as long as we hear voices when there are none.
We are insane when we hear nothing and worse we are deaf.
He worked the wood and drove the pegs methodically.
The shavings from the adze piled high upon the floor.
“Earthmaker, full of mercy,” he said, when evening had come, “I am a tradesman!”
“No,” said the silent air, not a tradesman—a troubadour instead!”
“A tradesman!” he said firmly as he smashed his mallet on the vise.
“A troubadour!” the silence thundered back.
III
Two artists met one time within a little wood. Each brought his finest painting stroked by his complete uniqueness. When each revealed his canvas to the other—they were identical.
So once in every solar system there are two fingerprints alike.
But only once.
His seeming madness made the music play a hundred times more loudly than before.
It lured him from his highland home.
He left the mallet broken on the vise and walked away.
Never had he been the way he walked, and yet his feet knew every step. He could not cease to marvel how they moved his body forward through the mist of circumstances which he vaguely knew by name.
His naked feet intrigued him, for they moved with purpose which his mind had not yet measured. Besides they each one wore a curious scar of some wound as yet unopened; yet they had been there long before his birth. What twist of meaning had Earthmaker given him, to scar his feet before he ever walked?
From the hills, he walked ever downward to the valley miles below.
Down, down, down—until the vegetation thickened into shrubs, and the desert gave way to river jungles.
And there where water lapped at his fatigue, he heard a singer, singing his compelling carols to the empty air.
The tradesman knew that it was an earth song, for it was different from the Star-Song which begged him be its singer—yet somehow like it.
The River Singer finished and they walked into the trees.
“Are you the Troubadour, who knows the Ancient Star-Song?” the tradesman softly asked.
“No, you are the Great Troubadour for whom the songless world, so long has waited,” the River Singer said. “Sing, for many years now, I have hungered to hear the Ancient Star-Song …”
“I am a tradesman only …”
Then the River Singer waded out into the water and beckoned with his hand. Slowly the tradesman followed.
They stopped waist-deep in water. Their eyes swam and they waited for the music to begin.
It did.
The tradesman knew the River Singer heard it too.
The water swirled around them and the music surged.
Every chord seemed to fuse the world in oneness.
They stood until the surging current buried them in song. It then receded and the music died away.
And the river was once more a simple river.
Then over that thin silver stream the thunder pealed, and a voice called from the sky above …
“Tradesman! You are the Troubadour! Go now and sing!”
IV
I knew a blind man whom a surgeon helped to see. The doctor never had a lover such as he. It is in such a way that singers love composers.
From the river, he moved on and on in quietness alone.
He still talked to Earthmaker as he always had but now he called him “Father-Spirit.” He loved the newer name.
The Star-Song came upon him with a manly joy.
At last he sang!
He threw the song against the basalt canyon walls.
It ricocheted in splendor, and he remembered far before that he had sung those very canyons into being.
“Father-Spirit!” he shouted at the desert sky, “I love you. Ask of me anything you will and I will do it all.”
The universe gathered up the echoes of his joy and answered back, “I love you, too, my Singer. One thing alone I ask of you:
“Sing my Ancient Star-Song to the world.”
“Father-Spirit, I will sing it, in every country will I sing it, till all the world you love can sing it.”
In joy he sang and sang until he fell asleep upon the desert floor.
V
Hate sometimes stands quite close to love.
God too stands often near to evil—like silent chessmen—side by side.
Only the color of the squares is different.
He was not alone when he awoke.
The ancient World Hater had come upon his resting place and not by chance.
The Hater leered at him with one defiant, impish grin.
“Hello, Singer!”
“Hello, World Hater,” the Troubadour responded.
“You know my name, old friend of man?”
“As you know mine, old enemy of God.”
“What brings you to the desert?”
“The Giver of the Song!”
“And does he let you sing it only in these isolated spots?”
“I only practice here to sing it in the crowded ways!”
It was hard to sing before the World Hater, for he ground each joyous stanza underneath his heel.
The music only seemed to make the venom in his hate more bitter than before.
The Hater drew a silver flute from underneath his studded belt. He placed it to his leathered lips drawn tight to play a melody.
The song surprisingly was sweet. It filled the canyon with an airy-tune and hung its lingering reverberations mysteriously in every cleft. It rippled on the very ground around their feet.
A strange compulsion came upon the Singer. Furiously he wanted so to sing the Hater’s tune.
He barely staunched the eager urge to sing.
The morning sun glinted fire upon the silver flute. The music and the dazzling light appeared to mesmerize the Singer.
“You must not sing the Hater’s song,” the Father-Spirit cried, “Be very careful, for I love you, Troubadour.”
“Now,” cried the World Hater, “Let’s do this tune at once. I’ll pipe, you sing. Think of the thousand kingdoms that will dance about our feet.”
“No, Hater, I’ll not sing your melodies,” the Troubadour replied.
“What then Singer will you sing?”
“The Ancient Star-Song of the Father-Spirit.”
“Alone, without accompaniment?”
“Yes, Hater, all alone if need be.”
“You need my pipe, man.”
“You need my song instead.”
“The music of your song is far beyond my tiny pipe.”
“Then, go! For I shall never sing a lesser piece.”
Then all at once the Troubadour began again. The mountains amplified his song. It swirled as sunlit symphony, until the Hater put his pipe beneath his belt and fled before the song of love.
“Beloved Singer, beware the World Hater,” the Father-Spirit said.
Then upward there the Singer stretched his arms and said again, “I love you, Father-Spirit.”
He waited there a moment while the sky embraced him and then he walked away. Ahead he saw the cities rise, and people thronged the crowded ways.
VI
If she has loved him, a man will carry anything for his mother—a waterpot or a world.
“Where first to sing?” he thought.
He turned back to the highlands where he had left the broken tool so useless on the vise.
For days he walked. The dust flew up around his feet as he walked home.
At length, he passed the village signpost and there by odd coincidence, his mother at that very time stood by the well.
They met.
He reached to carry her stone jar.
“It’s not traditional,” she said.
He took it anyway.
Her cares had made her fifty years seem even more.
“You broke your hammer on the vise,” she said. “I had it mended for you.”
“I’m through with hammers, anyway,” he said. “I’ve just come home to board the shop.”
“And then you’ll leave?”
“I will,” he said.
“Where will you go?” She studied paving stones as on they walked. He moved the heavy jar to ride upon his other shoulder.
“Wherever there are crowds of many people.”
“The Great Walled City of the Ancient King?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
He feared to talk to her. Yet he must tell her of the River Singer and all about the Star-Song, he had so lately sung. He seemed afraid that she would think him mad. He could not bear to hurt her. For besides the Father-Spirit, he loved her most of all. At length he knew he must lay bare his heart.
“You seem so troubled, son,” she said.
“Not for myself,” he said. Then with the hand that was not needed in balancing the jar, he took her hand and smiled.
“I hate for you to board the shop and leave …”
“Am I the tradesman that my father was, while still he was alive?” he asked.
“You both were good, but somehow wood is never kind to your great hands. Your father’s hands never paid the pain it cost you, just to love his trade.”
She looked down at the gentle, suffering hand that held her own. Somewhere in her swimming recollection, she remembered the same hand with infant fingers that had clutched the ringlets of her hair and reached to feel the leathered face of Eastern Kings. But he could not remember that.
They walked still further without speaking.
“MOTHER, I AM THE SINGER!” He blurted out at once.
“I know,” she said.
“I love the Father-Spirit more than life. He has sent me to the crowded ways to sing the Ancient Star-Song.”
“I know,” she said again. “I heard the Ancient Star-Song only once. It was the very night that you were born. And all these years, my son, I’ve known that you would come to board the shop someday. Can you sing the Star-Song yet?”
“I can,” he answered back.
They neared a house and entered. They shared a simple meal and sat in silence. And the song, which they alone of all the world did know, was lingering all around them in the air.
She had not heard its strains for thirty years but hungered for its music.
He had not sung it for an afternoon but longed to have its fluid meaning coursing through his soul.
Of course the song began.
VII
Before the song all music came like muted, empty octaves begging a composer’s pen. The notes cried silently for paper staves and kept their sound in theory only.
In the beginning was the song of love.
Alone in empty nothingness and space
It sang itself through vaulted halls above
Reached gently out to touch the Father’s face.
And all the tracklessness where worlds would be
Cried “Father” through the aching void. Sound tore
The distant chasm, and eternity
Called back—“I love you Son—sing Troubadour.”
His melody fell upward into joy
And climbed its way in spangled rhapsody.
Earthmaker’s infant stars adored his boy,
And blazed his name through every galaxy.
“Love,” sang the Spirit Son and mountains came.
More melody, and life began to grow.
He sang of light, and darkness fled in shame
Before a universe in embryo.
Then on the naked ground the Troubadour
Knelt down and firmly sang a stronger chord.
He scooped the earth dust in his hand
And worked the clay till he had molded man.
They laid him down beneath primeval trees
And waited there. They loved him while he slept
And both rejoiced as he began to breathe
A triumph etched in brutal nakedness.
“I am a Man!” the sun-crowned being sang.
He stood and brushed away the clinging sand.
He knew from where his very being sprang.
Wet clay still dripped from off the Singer’s hands.