| Peter Hammill – Faint-Heart and the Sermon Lyrics | 6 months ago |
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Obviously this song is about struggling with faith. The person is listening to a sermon (though metaphorically this could be any kind of message) and REALLY tries hard and fails to understand, connect, believe, find comfort in it. Faint heart has two meanings here - one that's commonly used in sermons: a person who doesn't have the courage or ability to have faith in God - and also the literal meaning: this person feeling heart fainted - terrifyingly threatened both by his own inevitable death and his inability to find sense and comfort in faith. This reminds me of when I was young and hearing prayers, struggling to find sense in them, eventually resigning to deduce they're either meaningless or just too hard to understand. Nowadays I believe there's just a very big gap between the original wise and well intentioned meaning and the end result, a gap that is very poorly bridged by most clergy, who themselves often struggle just as hard to understand it. I think all faint hearted people like the person in the song should find the courage not to make believe, but rather to ask challenging questions of the messages they don't understand, until they get satisfying answers from whoever claims to have them. Struggling to understand, though normally perceived as weakness and is ridiculed, is actually a very brave stance and a powerful tool to meaningful insight - especially if you don't do it alone, in your own mind, but with the help of others. |
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