All the time, on this stupid little blog, I’m yapping about my terrible taste in music. And it’s true, I like a lot of really bad songs. But guess what! I like some good ones too. One of them is this:

It’s called “Five Colors” by Sam Phillips, in case the above embedded video isn’t working for you.

I know absolutely nothing about Sam Phillips, so if you’re looking to learn about her, sorry, move along. This is actually the only song of hers that I know. According to Google, this album was released in 2001, which makes sense because that’s approximately when I became aware of it, or soon thereafter. I was in middle school (’01-’04), and my parents owned the CD, so I’d hear it sometimes in my mom’s car.

Middle school was around the time my social anxiety/AVPD began to amp up to adult levels. In a way it was even worse, back then, than it is now, because at that age you haven’t developed any defenses yet, and minor things still seem huge, in that childlike way. Yeah, middle school sucked. I don’t remember the first time I heard this song. It was just there, in my house; it seemed like it had been around for a long time. I always found it soothing. I have a distinct memory of listening to it and like intentionally memorizing the words and installing them into my brain prior to this big social event in seventh grade, because hearing it made me physically relax, made me feel like everything was going to be okay. Something about its peaceful sound — but also the lyrics, somehow, although I couldn’t really make much sense of them at that age.

A twelve-year-old’s brain is an impressionable thing, and things inscribed upon it tend to stick there for life. This song has stuck with me for life. And I don’t even listen to it that often — almost never, tbh. It just kind of lives in my brain. (You may have seen me mention it on this blog before.) It pops back up at random times. Specifically, those lingering last two lines:

“I tried, but can’t find refuge in the angle

I’ll walk the mystery of the curve.”

I dunno about you guys, but for me, those lines pretty much sum it up, this whole “life” situation. In my experience, it’s been thirty-six years of repeatedly seeking refuge in the angle, in one way or another, only to eventually have to resign myself to walking the mystery of the curve.

Things are rarely as black-and-white as I’d like for them to be. The senseless, incomprehensible nature of being alive is, to put it lightly, frightening. Angles are comforting. We can explain them. Curves, though, are unknowable. Pi goes on forever. Like, what even is that. How is something as essential as a simple circle so mysterious?

Life is, essentially, crazy. I keep having to accept that.

But isn’t this incompatible with my TradCath POV? Au contraire. Some people like to accuse organized religion of trying to find refuge in the angle — of trying to put God in a nice angular little box. This is only true of those who are doing organized religion wrong.

As I was recently talking about in my post on C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, we humans can’t have a healthy attitude towards God unless we accept how terrifyingly unfathomable are His ways. Our little minds aren’t capable of fathoming Him. Innocent people suffer, and for what? “A loving God would never allow this!” — it seems that way to us, but God is way too big for us to understand.

It isn’t always nice. There isn’t always an upside. I don’t believe that “all things happen for a reason.” Some things are just purely bad, by our own standards. Yet God is good. How can that be?

Things rarely make sense. Accepting our smallness, our powerlessness, the mind-bending horror and brutality of life, the unknowability of God, or of anything important, really — this is a necessary part of being religious. Of being human. This, imo, is what Sam Phillips was getting at.

And so it keeps coming back to me. Still, twenty-five years after first hearing it, this song soothes me. Still, it pops back into my mind at odd times, like a friendly remimder, as life proves its lyrics true again and again and again. I’ll walk the mystery of the curve, it says, while the peaceful, simple melody suggests to me that that’s not necessarily such a bad thing.