Remembering Led Zeppelin as a Spiritual Practice
Houses of the Not-So Holy
For the last month or so I have been drawn back into classic rock mode.
I blame Pandora.
I think it all started with wanting to listen to an old Blood, Sweat and Tears song that randomly ran through my head. “You made me so very happy, I’m so glad you came into my life.” And no, my sheltered friends, they weren’t singing about Jesus.
After finding that song, Pandora chain-linked me to Steve Miller Band, Kansas, Queen, AC/DC and finally to Led Zeppelin. Yes, these are your musical roots when your parents allow teenage friends to give their seven-year old son his first musical lessons with albums by Black Sabbath and Grand Funk Railroad.
This classic rock-fest began as a nostalgic musical journey, until the power of memory took over, and then the listening led to something far more significant.
While working out at the gym a few days later, I was listening to Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song,” off the Houses of the Holy album, the one with the provocative cover that got it banned in some regions of the Bible Belt. Suddenly, I was lying on the gold sculptured carpet of my boyhood bedroom. I could almost physically sense the furniture in the room; the twin beds of my brother and I separated by the Jetson-esque desk painted Hershey-chocolate brown, and the matching dresser I used to swan-dive from onto the bed pretending to be Captain America.
As Roger Plant’s haunting lyrics washed over me, I was there all over again, lying on the floor, mesmerized, escaping, on a vinyl magic carpet ride moving at 33 revolutions per minute. And for a moment, I also felt the old emotional ache again, the invisible “other brother” that I now realize was always there in my childhood for a host of reasons too complicated to explain here, but ones that are common to anyone with a dysfunctional upbringing in a house that was not holy in the way kids need.
But here is where God was suddenly present in my heart and mind. In the midst of the music and the remembering in such a visceral way, I felt deep gratitude for where my life is today. That childhood ache has long-been massaged by grace. The acute absence I felt as a child has been filled with an enduring Presence. “See,” God seemed to say inwardly, “I have taken care of you, haven’t I? That boy grew up to be a confidant, competent man. You have become the father you never had. I have kept my word to you.” I smiled to myself, right there in the gym.
These are the seasons of emotion and like the winds they rise and fall
This is the wonder of devotion – I seek the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient – Upon us all a little rain must fall…
It’s just a little rain…
This spiritual moment brought to you by Led Zeppelin … and the Holy Spirit.
On Remembering with God
But before I get too self-indulgent (as Simon Cowell would say), let me make some observations about remembering. Spiritual writers have long-observed that remembering is a potent spiritual practice. The ancient Israelites modeled remembering with their persistent storytelling of their deliverance from Egypt. The early church’s location of the Jesus movement within the epic story of God’s creation is powerful remembering. The recording of Scripture and the study of Scripture, the written record of God’s revelation, are acts of remembering what God has said and done.
Re-membering your own life is a means of probing the past parts of your life as you seek a deeper understanding and integration of the parts into a more coherent whole. This includes the painful stuff and the ordinary stuff, as well as all the stuff that made your creative memories scrapbook. Most importantly, by remembering along with God we can experience the redemption of our memories, perhaps not until years later, by identifying the lasting value of a heartache or hardship that God has used for our good.
My first experience with this “remembering with God” happened at the age of 25 when I was struggling with a call to leave my advertising agency job and pursue ministry. I took a long camping trip to the woods of eastern Kentucky. It rained a good deal of the time I was there so I spent large chunks of time reading and writing in my tent. I don’t really know what prompted me to do it, but I began to remember and literally journal the story of my life, but this time with God as the main actor in my story. Through this incredibly affirming experience I came to a much deeper clarity about the purpose of my life and the experiential power of God to redeem and transform me.
Of course we’re often reluctant to remember because we’re so bent on moving forward, or because we’re not very thoughtful people, or because we feel some parts of the past are just too excruciating to relive. Yet in forgetting, or refusing to remember, we render our story disconnected, dis-integrated, and unredeemed in our understanding. People for whom forgetting is a common spiritual practice are often emotionally numb and suffer difficulty being fully present with others.
On the other hand, I have found that when we remember with God-awareness, we can go back through the memory and re-member it in new ways that positively feed our identity, self-understanding, peace, and direction for the future. Knowing the truth is indeed a path to freedom, that is, knowing the full truth that includes God’s redemptive work beneath the surface of our lives. I am not making light of what can sometimes be awkward and painful. I’m also not reducing remembering to a simple 1-2-3 process because it’s pretty much a “rinse and repeat” kind of thing. However, I am deeply convinced that this kind of remembering is vital to personal happiness and well-being, and one of the wonderful gifts of God’s companionship with us.
A Few Exercises for Remembering
So, here’s a few exercises for remembering that might help you.
- Regardless of the prompt you might use (photos, music, objects), consider these significant topics for your remembering: family and friendships, loves and losses, achievements and disappointments, adjustments to life’s changes.
- Pull out your scrapbooks for your devotional time and have a conversation with God about the different stages of your life. What did you need? What did you want? How did you feel about yourself, your significant relationships? How did events shape you? How would God have you understand the significance of each stage?
- Do a visualization walk-through of important places in your life, such as your childhood homes, your schools, your churches, your neighborhoods, your college campus, your workplaces, vacations and nature experiences. As you remember the details of each place be attentive to what you think and feel and what happened in these places.
- If faith has long been important to you, pull out one of your old Bibles, maybe the one you used as a youth or college student, and walk through the pages, perhaps considering the verses you underlined or notes you made in the margin, reflecting on your spiritual journey and the progress you have made in understanding God and learning from Christ how to live.
- If you can, travel back to important places in your life and spend some time remembering them while in them, celebrating the good, naming the bad and confessing the secret.
- For each of the significant people in your life, attempt to remember them at the point they were most influential on you. Try to also remember what influences shaped who they were, what they needed, what they wanted. We become far more forgiving when we remember the needs of others, even those who failed us, and not just our own needs.
- And if it works for you, play a little Led Zeppelin, or something like it.
It is the summer of my smiles – flee from me Keepers of the Gloom.
Speak to me only with your eyes. It is to you I give this tune.
Ain’t so hard to recognize – These things are clear to all from
time to time.
So how about you, what do you need to re-member?













