Ah Holy Jesus (a capella)
I’ve wanted to write about Sufjan for years, it seems. That’s why it feels strange to be writing about this particular Sufjan song, one off one of his long and rambling Christmas albums that I’ll admit I don’t entirely understand or digest as a whole. I could (one day will) go on about a song like “The Dress Looks Nice on You” and how hearing I can see a lot of life in you has reminded me that I am alive. Or maybe “Casimir Pulaski Day” and how I was homeschooled, and my mom didn’t let us have Casimir Pulaski day off unless we could tell her who he was. She, born in an Indian village and twice an immigrant to Nairobi and then the US, definitely didn’t know who he was either, but I think she did this to prove her record as a teacher with the discipline to refute people who thought we sat around in pajamas all day. We didn’t have the internet, and my sister and I, unsuccessfully, tried to squeeze a 500-word essay out of a two-line dictionary entry on Pulaski, Casimir from our Thorndike Barnhart Dictionary.
I’ve always loved reading the dictionary. Words are alchemy. Whenever I came across a word I didn't know, I would write it down and look it up, and then another word would catch my eye, and then another. At fourteen, I squeezed up to thirty words and definitions on an index card every week in my tiniest handwriting. My relationship with words has changed as my understanding of English as a language of oppression and, so I’m left in a confusing love affair like many poets whose mother tongue isn’t English. Words, still, allow me to immerse and indulge in this love.
I first encountered this hymn at church. I hated a lot of things about church, like the theological arguments we’d have to dreg up and make airtight to justify doing something common sense like divorcing a man who hits you or squaring up with someone being a jag. Still, I loved the words of the liturgy, the question and answer of basic tenets of faith. There’s something about the tradition that made me feel grounded since I claim so many things and yet nothing at all. I’ve always loved the catechisms. I have loved the hymns. When I believed in the words of the Bible, I loved the kinder commandments, and I strived to learn and live from them. This love has thankfully evolved into my relationship with poetry.
This scene happened many times in 2012: a winter’s evening, my mom and sister and I walking to church in the small south suburban Illinois town we moved to because someone from our old Chicago church needed someone to house sit and let us all stay for less than $300. This was a miracle because even our cockroach-infested basement apartment in the West Ridge was too expensive, so we moved forty or so miles south with only a maroon Dodge van my dad bought for around $800 and used for work. We are still looking for a church in this small neighborhood because the commute to Chicago is too long for both our regular church and the Kenyan church we go to, so the methodist church is our current fling. The methodist church has a couple weirdos, but they have a woman pastor (also one of the weirdos), and my mom is in one of the phases where her personal theology accepts this, so we go to the methodist church. We come to the Thursday Knitting evenings with a lot of bitter and mean old women, and this is before Trump though most of them certainly voted for Trump. I’m not sure why we spent so much time around them, but my mom doesn't have the CTA anymore to see her friends anywhere except Facebook, and her and my dad’s marriage was hardly social relief that I’m sure she was doing what she could to survive.
I keep wanting to explain my love for Sufjan defensively because I understand the valid criticism - the concept of a young white man mythologizing and idealizing a country full of genocide. I get it. How do I navigate holding the criticism in its appropriate light but working against explaining, working to claim my right to speak with love here?
Sufjan Stevens isn't asking to be defended and has made his stance on history, politics, and life fairly clear. I am defending my right to love Sufjan as a brown woman who swam and drowned in whiteness and developed a lot of my taste from that simply because it was what was around me or what was leveraged to learn and love to belong. Being defensive and learning to dismantle that is going to be a lifelong healing process for me.
Sufjan showed me how I felt before I knew how to speak it by using only a handful of words and sometimes no words at all. It is in this feeling witnessed that I found healing. What do you do when you’ve seen so much, remember so much, and know that it’s worth talking about but don’t know how to do it? Do I just talk about it in therapy? How do I save myself from oversharing with anyone who will listen or, worse, running my story through the mill of capitalism in a memoir cataloging pain? Love for words can be masturbatory - both beautiful things to indulge in, but when done too much and all sloppy, I feel worn out and empty.
When I first heard Ah Holy Jesus (acapella), I immediately cried, something I rarely do upon listening to a song. And I could not tell you the exact reason why. I can try to approximate what I felt though- I cried because it’s one of my favorite hymns. It’s a Lutheran hymn originally from Germany, and I don’t want to go into its deep history because Wikipedia has covered that interesting chapter. It’s not a fascination with the Western canon of classics I was educated in that makes me cry because for some cultural crying, I consult a cassette of Lata & Rafi songs that I stole from my dad’s dusty collection in the garage when I was packing up to escape my home this year with full knowledge I wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. I have left so much behind: my faith, the church, lovers, community projects, my family home. I leave when staying requires me to give up, holding myself in love. This is one of my big life lessons, and it does not get easier with time. To say so would undermine the love I have for someone or something I left.
Because Sufjan Stevens arranges this song as a chorus, all you hear are the voices singing a different part of minor chords, and at that point, the words dissolve, and only feelings are left. Because the song is bittersweet. It’s a Lamentations-flavored song, a Psalm-deep mourning. In the singing out of our pain, there’s reverie, a religious vision. Because I can cry and know that I’m crying out everything I’ve been through and witnessed, but I was inspired to cry because something beautiful confronted me. In the song’s case, it’s unconditional love from Jesus. Because in Christmas, we celebrated Jesus’ birth but also understood that he came here to die - and here on the other side of faith, that is a lesson in letting go and of how departures are necessary and can happen because of abundance instead of the absence of love.
More than being the Christian folk singer who flirted with subtle spiritual suggestions in his music, I believe that for Sufjan, Christianity was a tool he was handed to make sense of the world and where he chooses to operate from. I've followed Sufjan's blog for several years, and along with Christianity, he's dedicated to Buddhist texts and humanism as well. His family was part of Subud, an interfaith religious community that believed in a God of life force, and many were part of different spiritual practices. I’m not sure how deep Sufjan’s roots with Christianity go, but I resonate with how he presents it. Christianity was part of my every day - I was homeschooled in it from eight am to three pm, went to church two times a week, and stayed for morning service, Sunday School and Bible Study, and then evening service. While others in the youth group went to Burger King and Boston Market with friends, my mom insisted we eat together every Sunday and brought the same green lunch bag with theplas, kabab, rice, chutney, and microwaved it all in the open for all to see and to judge.
I found Sufjan around the time I lost my faith in Christianity and also started facing immigrant and family grief, and I felt like Sufjan was co-grieving with me. As I grieved losing my faith in Jesus, faith that had sustained me, I found a way to be a person of belief. I found a way to be a person of doubt too.
“Ah Holy Jesus” reminds me of winter with my mom and my sister. And the many winters we survived where we walked everywhere and we talked to Jesus together.
The methodist church had a small chapel in a different wing of the church, distinct from the main sanctuary. This chapel had awnings, columns, a pulpit made out of warm-colored wood. Plush velvet lined the pews. There were only about ten rows on each side to keep the setting intimate. The stained glass was yellow, green, and red - it was nothing glorious, but it still felt holy. Even though shame is something I face every day in large doses, there’s a part of me that has always known that I am holy, that we are all holy, that humans everywhere are holy. This makes facing myself a kinder task. I don’t believe in Jesus like I used to, but I thank Jesus for this lesson.
I could be sad inside of a hymn like “Ah Holy Jesus.” I’m sure we sang it once in that tiny chapel, where all around me was a December winter evening, candles flickering in and out next to stained glass saints. We take the bread, we drink the grape juice. There were days I was racked with guilt because of things that I deemed sinful, and I didn’t feel like I should be taking the Lord’s body. And yet I did. And this act, the belief I could partake, that has saved me far more than any theological breakdowns of why I am redeemed.
I believe in the divine, and at one point, I understood this as Jesus. The divine holds me in love when I have a hard time holding myself in love, whether through trees, through a friend, through music - that is what saves my soul. The small things keep me surviving. Survival isn't a way to live and can be brittle, but it is a way we hold on to get to life; it is an argument in favor of living. Thawing in a pew saved me. The Domino’s across the street from the church with a free slice day saved me. The one older woman from the knitting nights who gave us free yarn that smelled like cigarettes and was outcast because she didn’t vote conservative and how acted like our food was not repulsive and spoke kindly to my mom and praised that she could speak seven languages, seeing my mom not being othered, that saved me. My soul, contrary to Christianity, was not saved one time. My soul is constantly in the process of being saved; it goes through many savings. Sufjan Stevens' Ah Holy Jesus asks-- what is saving my soul by holding me in love that I did not know I was worthy of? I am grateful to keep having answers. And so I cry, confronted with the beautiful.
Stuti Sharma is a 24-year-old stand up comic, poet, and educator based in Chicago. She's passionate about solidarity, youth, trees, and healing. She was born in Kenya, is of Indian heritage, and was raised in Illinois. She ran an after school program in Chicago’s West Ridge, teaches poetry to CPS students with the Chicago Poetry Center, and is a community organizer with Chicago Desi Youth Rising and a science librarian at a public library. She’s been published in Belt Publishing’s Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook and was a Tin House 2020 Workshop participant. You can find her eating from restaurants where the cooks FaceTime family or in the forests and prairies of Illinois.