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I saw Haley Heynderickx this evening at Space in Evanston, IL. She was (once) an obscure, modern folk artist. Then, a song of hers went viral on TikTok. (So, my son tells me.) The crowd this evening was young, even for this trendy venue on Chicago’s ever hip north shore.

Existential angst (or dread, depending on your flavor of melancholy) is the thread that runs through her work. She is a siren for the spirit of this age. Her chords strike true with my son, who turned me on to her, and with my daughter, who accompanied us to the show.

I was young once also, and the existential angst of my youth drove me on a quest that led me to the threshold of Jesus, the Lamb of God who was slain for the sins of the world. A different generation, now, leans into a similar ages old myopia.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
….
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

Ecclesiastes 1:2

This words may have accompanied a more ancient tune played on a lyre from a more distant youth, but the melody sounds the same.

Existential first visited me one night when I was too young to have a vocabulary for the experience. We watched old home movies from a projector in our living room. Younger ghosts of my parents and grandparents played on the grainy screen in washed out black and white.

I remember it like a dream sequence. The images and feelings of the past are equally washed out in my mind now, but the poignance and clarity of the dread that I felt is clear.

This was, I believe, the first time I became aware of the unforgiving and unrelenting passage of time. This was the first time, perhaps, that I stared the inevitability of death in the face, and the eyes of death stared back, penetrating into my soul.

The next sequence in this dream is now (and always has been) more palpable and imminent than those grainy home movies. Later that night, I found myself detached …. floating in a yawning chasm of outer space …. utterly alone and disconnected.

I don’t know to this day whether I had a dream when I fell asleep that night or whether it came to me in a ghastly vision. It doesn’t matter. If claustrophobia can be felt in an endless void, the experience would be close to what I felt. Angst and dread have nothing on the feelings I had that night.

I say this to frame my thoughts as I recall the song with which Haley Heynderickx closed out the evening: the Untitled God Song.

Perhaps, our existential angst (or dread) comes from our fear of detachment, our fear of loss (of others? of self?), and our fear of the ultimate detachment: death. Hailey sings plaintively:

And maybe my god
Has a trot in her walk
And her coach bags are knock-off
Her shoes are all dressed up
And she spins me around like a marionette.

The untitled God Song

We shrink from the yawning chasm into ourselves. Time, fate, and death lurk in the darkness about us. Utter insignificance mixed with the awful consciousness of it, and and we long for a god like us – familiar, and close, and intimate.

Oh my web is still spinning
My web is still spinning
My web is still spinning
You can’t see it yet.

Untitled God Song

We long to be our own god, to be the captain of our own souls, to seize fate and make it our own. We long to bring fate down to our level and into our bosom. This is the stuff of legends and epic tales. It is the stuff of poems about autumn and sunsets and a posterity that we hope against hope will live on.

Or maybe my god
Has thick hips and big lips
And the buttons she’s pressing
She speaks every language
Shift A, right B, Nintendo 63
On her video, baby
The game she’s been changing

Untitled God Song

We hope there’s a God who knows us, who is calling the shots and changing the game, while what we see around us seems out of control. We have trouble seeing God through the chaos, and the noise, and the commotion. We hope against hope that the world is spinning our way – even if we don’t really believe in such a God.

I didn’t believe in such a god, either: a god we control. I didn’t see him in the void that visited me on that dark night so many years ago. I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7 years old. That dream/vision has never left me. The impression remains deep in my soul.

I think of that experience from time to time, but I have an answer for it now. I know that I am not alone in my angst. The earth was once formless and void, and the Spirit of God hovered in that vast and empty expanse. Then, He created. He spoke, and it was. It is.

Not I, one of the billions of people who have inhabited this earth since before recorded time. I am less than a mist, not even a full exhale. I am under no delusions about the web I am spinning.

When you’re drunk near a sunset
Look straight in her eyes
She’s a quick glimpse of heaven

Untitled God Song

I believe the writer of Ecclesiastes who says that God put eternity into the hearts of men (and women). (Ecc. 3:11) We do see in the sunset something of heaven, but heaven is not in the sunset. It is not in the us. It is only in the God who made us – of which we are an image.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known

1 Corinthians 13:12

The solution to our existential angst does not lie in the wistfulness we spin out of our own angst (however beautiful, haunting, and charming). The solution to our longing lies in God who made us in His image: a God who put eternity in our hearts, that we might (perhaps) reach out for Him, and find Him.

“[T]hough he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’”

Paul, the apostle, quoting Epimenides, a cretan philosopher (acts17:27-28)