Singer/songwriter David Wilcox has been described as a poet, storyteller, guitar virtuoso, healer, shaman, prophet. For more than 20 years, he's carved a mostly indie career out of pulling back the veil on ordinary life to reveal humor, inspiration, and an extended hand for listeners to join him in wrestling with the tensions of uniting the spiritual and the human. Wilcox has always remained outside the boundaries of the Christian music industry, but his is music of the soul. We spoke with him about his latest release, Open Hand, the church and spirituality, and following Jesus into new peacemaking territory.

You've said people expect music to wake up places in their hearts. What places have your news songs awakened in your heart?

David Wilcox

David Wilcox

David Wilcox: I love that I never even know what a CD is really about until it's done. Open Hand really came from a conversation with a friend. I was asking him how he was keeping his confidence after he had looked death in the eye. I asked, "Do you feel shaken by it? Do you feel tentative now?" And he said, "No, I feel more alive than ever. I'm just holding my life with an open hand." It reminded me of those times when life gets big and deep and full and exciting. Those are the times when I'm not in the middle of trying to control everything with my clever plans but just feel like I'm swept up in a bigger current. So I love how this record is another series of songs that are showing me sort of what's next for my heart.

Your liner notes say these songs are saying, "Don't get suckered into the lulling comfort of lifeless institutional religion." You're referencing the song "Beyond Belief"?

Wilcox: That song was a humbling wake-up. It definitely was showing me that if I'm choosing safety and the comforts of my little community where I'm understood, it's sort of like a theological gated community. The problem is that the Outrageous Carpenter is always outside that gate saying, "Wait a minute. You know, he's your neighbor, too." We're trying to say, "Hey, man, get back in here. It's all about you." He's always daring us to follow beyond our comfort zone.

"Beyond Belief" uses an intimate first person voice, and each verse begins "Jesus called me a hypocrite." Are you exhorting the church or calling more to individuals to follow beyond the walls?

Wilcox: The obvious rule is that if there's something that really bugs you, it's probably annoyingly close to reminding you of exactly how you are yourself. I love the process in writing where I'll be on some second person rant and suddenly think, Oh no, if I were to sing this first person, it would be so much more true. I don't want to rant about what other people should do. That's not been my goal as a musician. What I want is to make a little musical chapel, a meeting place.

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There are references to the church throughout your body of work. How do you see your relationship to the corporate church?

Wilcox: I have a lot of gratitude and compassion. It's like when musicians talk about the music business as some big, evil thing. It's not an evil thing; it's just people who are scared of losing their jobs. When you get individuals who are scared of losing their jobs running an institution, pretty soon the institution starts thinking about saving its skin. And if the institution were to behave like Jesus, it would have to value the truth more than its own life. That's a hard thing for an institution to do. Board meetings don't say, "How can we die gloriously?" Their death is not in their business plan. For Jesus it was. So I think it's beautifully contradictory.

Obviously, we're all very grateful to the institutions for preserving the writing, the stories, the framework of [faith], but what makes it worth keeping is the fact that it springs brand new through the cracks in the pavement. And the life that matters is the life that transforms the heart and suddenly makes this lonely personal existence a glorious glide down this beautiful river, where you're caught up in a current that makes life powerful and invigorating. That's all beautiful, and that happens every day to individuals. When it happened to me I was scratching my head, Wow, maybe these institutions were trying to tell the same story. How come I never heard it?And why is it that they could be dealing with such absolutely gorgeous truth and somehow sort of dumb it down to the point where it becomes something to fight over, a way of bunkering down in the fearful us against them?

It makes me sad, but I also realize that's what we have to walk in this world—trying to mix this oil and water, this spirit and matter. I love that the church is willing to brave that and step into that role, knowing that it is inevitably going to harm the sacred to try to bring it to earth. But at the same time, there's such compassion to want to try. I do the same thing. I'm writing these stupid, scribbling songs to try to capture the brightest shining moments of grace and joy, as if you could get wind in a box.

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The spiritual undercurrents in your music seem to have grown more direct in recent records—sometimes in ways that might make the religious squirm. What in your spiritual experience has brought that to the surface?

Wilcox plans to travel to the Middle East

Wilcox plans to travel to the Middle East

Wilcox: I think there is an answer that may serve if I'm bold enough to find words for it. [pause] I was realizing that I have been praying for my time here to be—what is the word? I'm embarrassed by it actually. There is a selfishness. I've been praying for wanting to be significant or important. The way I describe it in my prayers is that I want to be part of what God is making in this world. I want to feel like I'm on the right side of history, so to speak. And the funny part, of course, is that I realize I have gotten what I prayed for. But I was not recognizing it because it didn't look at all like my picture of what I was asking for. My picture is, let me sing these songs and everyone comes and says, "Oh, wow, I feel the spirit and you're so cool and woowoowoo." And that's not what I've been offered.

When I look at what God is actually making in my life, I realize the path I've been given is a path of reconciliation, of compassion. So I went to the Sudan, and now I'm going to the Middle East to meet with Palestinian and Jewish groups. I'm in this place where everything is lining up so that I will dare to speak about the fact that following Jesus means walking past your little gated community, the boundaries of your comfort, and your sense of safety and belonging to a little group and toward your sense of Jesus breaking those barriers. I feel like God is asking me to be a peacemaker and to walk into the places where people are entrenched in their conflict and their belief that God is asking them to fight and to kill. And I'm supposed to go there and sing songs about what we have in common.

And there are a lot of people who are really angry about that kind of behavior. They think that's diluting their personal truth, and they are frightened to think that maybe God is bigger, maybe there is more than one language to speak those ideas, maybe there is more than one way of God reaching people around this earth. So that becomes a frightening thing [for me], yet I think as much as I try to not see it, I keep being asked to follow Jesus out of my little comfort zone. On the days that I do that in small ways, I feel that beautiful goosebump feeling of Oh my God, this is what I want from life. It's a feeling of my life being not my own, but being carried in this beautiful current of following Jesus into what God's making in the world. That feels great, and it's also still kind of scary. It's a strange place to be.

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What will your peacemaking trips look like?

Wilcox: I have no idea. [Brian] McLaren invited me on this trip. I've seen the itinerary briefly, but I haven't really studied it. We're meeting with lots of different groups—Palestinian groups and Jewish groups. I think it will be like the song "Three Brothers." It will be looking at what it is we are given—this situation, this world, this time to live—not as if it's a call to arms but as if it's the perfect setting where each of us gets to choose moment to moment between following love or bunkering down in old fears. I don't know where it's going yet, but I feel like if I continue to try and just play it safe and stay comfortable, then I'm betraying the most sacred promise I ever made: that I would follow.

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