From the recording The Midnight Commander
"To really want the truth, to long for it desperately, is to reject every formulation and theory and dogma and opinion right up to the time you see and touch and unite with the thing itself" (Titus Irving Gerard, The River Why)
This is actually a reworking of an older tune from Contrary Visions. I spent time in a monastery in southern Germany and considered taking monastic vows, but obviously didn't. The process of losing faith only to find something deeper, more dynamic and less dogmatic, is a very old story. In this instance, a prophet loses God and finds a deeper root in her own stance that she chooses to take in the face of what often appears to be an uncaring universe. Love!
Lyrics
God was dead one morning, it was 9:00 a.m.
Struck down by a radar dish that stretched to heaven's end
When the prophet heard the news, she laughed until she cried
Then she shouted "God is dead! Long live the Divine!"
And in the rain, along the strip, her holiness, she let it slip
All night long
Stand on the walls of Jerusalem
Cry out to a desert land
That we need not guns in the darkness
We need water from the sand
O Jerusalem
The morning after found her, on a bar room floor
Lying in the consequences of the night before
Staggering through dirty streets, she made her way back home
And cried behind the bathroom door, naked and alone
The compass lost, the map was burned, while in the darkness monsters turned
And called out her name
Stand on the walls of Jerusalem
Cry out to a desert land
That we need not guns in the darkness
We need water from the sand
O Jerusalem
It's a miracle of rare device
Begotten for a beggar's price
It's been 40 years and a day
Time to wipe this weary mud away
The drum to war was sounding, it was 9:00 a.m.
There were walls to keep the strangers out, but lock their children in
And the prophet who was godless stood upon the shifting sand
And bravely shouted "LOVE" to all the monsters on the land
Then suddenly amazed to find, that love was echoed back in kind
From a voice so still and small it hardly was a voice at all
Then her wife said "Don't you know? Most things have to die to grow
In their own time?"
So come with me, upon the walls of Jerusalem
Cry out to a desert land
That we shall be, not guns in the darkness
For we are water from the sand
O Jerusalem