Secret of the Easy Yoke

hey genius, read the song lyrics again. this isn't even close to being about losing faith. it's about losing faith in religion and it's followers. it's about realizing that most of the christian community is hurting inside while they project perfection. it's about buying physical things to profess their faith instead of professing it in their own way and through their lives. i strongly urge you to read this again and think about it that way. it is quite possibly the best pedro the lion song ever written by David Bazan. next to almost there of course.

This song describes in painful detail the events surrounding me as I gave up Christianity. It amazes me that he could write lyrics so personally applicable. "If all that's left is duty, I'm falling on my sword." Bazan is incredible.

this song says everything that I just want to scream at Christians. don't get me wrong, I am one. I've just become rather disillusioned with religion.

what some fail to understand is the difference between God and religion. for someone who has never realized the difference between the two, this song would totally seem about loosing faith in God. Bazan I suspect (along with myself and others) is often disgusted by the social institution of religion, but he understands that Christ exists as an eternal spiritual truth totally apart from the flawed religious institutions that us flawed human beings create.

God often has little or nothing to do with what we think of as "religion."

i couldn't believe my eyes when i read the lyrics to this song. blessed me more than any hymn, let me tell you. his brash honesty is amazing.

Notice how he says:

"But if all that's left is duty I'm falling on my sword At least then I would not serve An unseen, distant Lord"

So, he's not necessairly saying that those "duties" or actions are useless or uninspired, but that if that's ALL that's left, if it all just boils down to duty to a distant unseen lord, then he doesn't want a part of that.

Everybody needs to get close before pretending to be.

This song is inspiring. I discovered it 2 days after I felt really down and far from God. I still want to believe in Him, but I'm losing faith...

This is my favorite Pedro the Lion song- and that statement carries a lot of weight because I enjoy so many of his songs.

I have to disagree with the previous poster who feels that this song is from the perspective of an outsider, but it really is just a matter of perspective either way! To me, this song is not about an outsider at all, rather, the person who was raised up and inundated in the church life but didn't find God there(and not for lack of trying).

The hard fact that we as Christians struggle with day-by-day is that Christians are human too. We can't quite seem to wrap our minds simultaneously around the non-performance based concept of redeeming grace in light of the everyday, tough, cutthroat experience of dealing with other Christians. This dichotomy of spiritual truth and physical experience lends itself to bitterness and the emotional boundaries that come from betrayed trust.

Trust me, I go to Valley Forge Christian College, and I know too many who are so racked with guilt, they can't seperate God from their feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Too often, this manifests itself through defensiveness and protective legalism. So many in the school admin trip over themselves to prove that they are morally upright- and the self righteous learn that they too can excersize power through the enforcement of rules. Have we learned nothing?

Real spirituality is not something you incidentally stumble across. It's not something that happens because you were raised up in the church or went to Bible college. Some might say it could happen IN SPITE of such things. To find truly authentic, real spirituality you need to dig for it, and pursue it as the absolute highest priority. You need to love a genuine relationship with God- like you would love the most precious commodity imaginable. It's a life work- your singular and lasting magnum opus. It needs to be your first pursuit instead of pursuing the feel good affirmation of other Christians who themselves are just scared enough and just hurt enough to do a lot of damage(both to professing believers or staunch atheists).

But what could I say that Pedro hasn't himself expressed with greater eloquence?

Likely the greatest wisdom to endure the tumultuous experience of corporate religion is simply: "Be still, and know that I am God."

Thus spoke Zarathustra:
God is dead.

The question of relativity is where it all lies - When logic dictates that universal morality and even absolute epistemology isn't an instrinsic part of the universe, how can one be even close to any kind certainty about the existence of god.

As an athiest, what makes David Bazan so interesting is seeing the same questions that us godless heathens are in constant turmoil with, raised from the perspective of a "christian".

Although I dont quite think that a christian ideology can be aplied to Pedro the Lion. He obviously agrees that organized religion is a farse and that individuals need to deal with all the metaphysical problems, inconsistancies and irrationalities, that have plagued mankind since the enlightenment, on our own, rather than being indocrinated by some propaganda artist in the form of a priest or preacher with his bullshit rhetoric.

David Bazan kind of bridges the gap between those of us who find our beliefs closer to those of Descartes and Neitzsche and those of us who dont ever question what we read in the Bible or Torah or Koran.

I see this as a prayer. An ernest prayer to God from a Christian who's burnt out on the current Christian movement (you know, the one with little focus on God).

If you look at the lyrics closely, he's speaking directly to God the whole time. At the end, considering the melody, timing, vocal style, et al, it could very well be the last 4 words are spoken by Jesus to the character praying.

Just like he did to the storm. The character got his answer, but it wasn't the answer he was looking for, of course. It was just a message of peace, faith and hope. "Peace, be still."

i agree with the prayer context. david bazan is writing a psalm, a lament in the true style of David. He is speaking to God, look at the lyrics again. he is lamenting at his situation (feelings) and his surroundings (fake people) but just like the psalms it comes back to i still want to trust you. peace, be still.

thanks david bazan for writing something real

i think what's genius about david bazan it's how he writes about christianity and god (bein' a devotee himself) but he's never really explicit about it. it's not like he's preaching. so his songs have many possible interpretations....

i can see why most people would connect this with losing faith in god/organized religions and such (pretty obvious immagery, sinners, unseen distant lords, churches), but you could also see it as a metaphor for a failed marriage. they took their vows in church, people attended to the celebration, they moved in together, so it's supposed to be ok, right?

but then the speaker begins to progressively grow out of love for his wife: "I still have never seen you and somedays i don't love you at all", this means he never really sees the girl's true face. he feels confused at who she is, and why he loved her to being with it. you see, love changes when you're forced to spend each day together by marriage. people (and the toughts you have on them) change a lot. there's days when everything is beautiful and then there's days where "i don't love you at all".

in this case, the "unseen, distant lord" would be Love, the impossible, unconditional Love.