The Spirituality of … Phil Phillips: “Home” and Lent

I risk losing all respect from my hipster youth group at church, but I have to talk about Phil Phillips. The American Idol winner (yeah, there goes my youth group cred) from 2012 has an amazing song called Home. The song is deeply spiritual and relates specifically to the Christian season of Lent.

I want to emphasize one section:

Settle down, it’ll all be clear

Don’t pay no mind to the demons

They fill you with fear

The trouble it might drag you down

If you get lost, you can always be found

Just know you’re not alone

Cause I’m gonna make this place your home

Lent commemorates the beginning of Jesus’ ministry when he went alone into the desert to fast for 40 days. Near the end of the 40 days, the devil tempted Jesus three times by troubling his mind with fear. Truly, the devil’s temptations are mind games. We moderns can be helped in our understanding of demons by realizing that Jesus wasn’t confronted by a physical entity in red with horns, pitchfork, and a tail. The demons Jesus heard in the desert were the voices of the “social other,” voices Jesus would hear throughout his life. By “social other” I mean the people and institutions within Jesus’ culture. The devil attempted to enforce within Jesus a specific message from the “social other.” That message was that Jesus lacked a sense of being, that he was not enough.

We see this specifically in the first temptation. “If you are God’s son tell this stone to become a loaf of bread” (Luke 4:3). We usually emphasize the hunger aspect of this temptation, but I’ve chosen to emphasize the identity aspect. “If you are God’s son…” is the devil’s way of suggesting to Jesus that he is not the son of God. The devil is a voice that tells Jesus he lacks being, he lacks a sense of self as God’s son. The temptation stems from a message within Jesus’ culture that told him he was not enough. And really, who hasn’t heard that message? Like Jesus we are confronted by these “demons” within our culture that assail us with the fear of not being enough: not being successful enough, not pretty enough, not rich enough, not prestigious enough, not strong enough. These demonic voices are like a CD player stuck on repeat, playing the same tragic song that distorts our relationship with God, with ourselves, and our fellow human beings.

The song ends with these powerful verses:

Just know you’re not alone

Cause I’m gonna make this place your home

Few things are worse than feeling alone and abandoned. For me, the desert experience of Lent comes in realizing that we are not alone. This is a bit of a paradox for me because I’m an introvert; I like my alone time, but I like to choose my alone time. The sense of being alone that the song alludes to is the painful sense of abandonment. The sense of abandonment is grounded in the sense that we are not loveable enough. Knowing that we are not alone is to know that we are loved. The most powerful thing I’ve experience in the face of abandonment and suffering are the simple words of presence, specifically the words you are loved and you are not alone.

To paraphrase John 3:16, In Jesus we know that God so loved the world that God gave God’s Son, that the world might know that God is making the world God’s home. Even in the desert experience of Lent, God is making a home with us. God is moving us ways from a demonic spirit that repeats the old message that we are not loved enough and into the Spirit of enough; into the Spirit of God’s loving home.

(This was Part 2 of the “Spirituality of …” series. See Part 1 “The Spirituality of … Pearl Jam: Love Boat Captain.”)