The power of discomfort in The Singer

We sing about blood and torture

I’m infamous among my friends for disliking allegory.

The Pilgrim’s Progress? Mostly eh.¹ Some of my friends love getting to the last book in a fantasy series and realizing that it was an allegory all along; that’s never done much more than make me lose interest with the story.

(In pursuit of full honesty, I’ll have to say that I don’t dislike all Christian allegory. I said that for a while, then Sir Knight of the Splendid Way came along, knocked me off my feet, and kept me there for a solid two months, after which I had to take back all my black-and-white claims about the genre. But the overall leaning is still there.)

So when I mentioned to my neighbor that I was reading The Singer (written by Calvin Miller), he went home, researched it, and came back the next day with raised eyebrows. “You’re reading this?”

It’s very honest about being an allegory, I’ll grant it that. Did I somehow miss this before picking it up? Yes, yes, I did.

To be honest, that was my same thought process all the way through. I’m reading this? I don’t like allegory. This is very much allegory. Why haven’t I stopped?

And to that, I don’t have a good answer. I know there was something that kept me reading, even when I was providing snarky internal commentary on the allegorical hints. But I still can’t say what it was.

I couldn’t settle into this book. The style is magnetic but detached. Every time I thought I had my feet under me, Miller pulled the rug out again, and I was left stumbling my way through a writing style I didn’t know how to sink into.

Most of my reading with The Singer happened at night. And somehow, it kept me awake. I didn’t like it; I didn’t feel comfortable with it; I wasn’t raving about it through the day.

But I lay awake, in the dark, reading about this Singer and the song so many people hated.

The Singer isn’t a very long book. (It’s the first in a trilogy, but I’ve yet to pick up book two.) So after a few nights of this, I was done.

The unsettling feeling as I turned pages at eleven thirty was done. It had been interesting—interesting enough for me to make it to the end. But it wasn’t the best book I’d ever read.

So I closed the book and decided to carry on with life. It had been a strange few days, but that was over now.

Except it wasn’t.

I couldn’t escape The Singer. Little phrases kept popping up in my mind. Something I would read or hear or think about as I went through my day would pull a scene back into my mind.

The way Miller laid out this story was, in all honesty, genius. It began superficially, but with each day that I tried not to think about it, the story dug deeper and deeper into my consciousness.

I couldn’t escape it, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

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The “crucifixion” in The Singer involves the Singer being hung on a wall. There’s a machine in there too. It’s been a bit since I’ve read it, but I remember the descriptions being so—functional. This is how it works. This is what it does.

This is why no one looks at the wall when they walk past.

We’ve grown, I think, familiar with the idea and the picture of a cross. It’s somewhere in the architecture of almost every western church. It fills Christian art. The followers of the crucified one wear it on necklaces, tattoo it on their wrists, and see it dozens of times a week.

I’m not against Christian art by many means.² The cross has been the clearest symbol of Christianity for the past two years, and I don’t think that’s bad.

But I think our familiarity with it washes away some of its horror. When we associate it with Christian bookmarks and T-shirts that say “greater love has no man than this,” we divorce ourselves from how the first-century Roman world actually saw crosses.

They were torture devices designed to kill people. Every aspect of crosses from beginning to end centered around pain and humiliation and brutality.

They were horrific. Executions were long, public affairs that could leave passers-by sick with what they had seen.

There was nothing artistically pleasing about them. They were functional, they were effective, and they were awful.

They were, in fact, like the wall in The Singer.

When he reaches the killing of the Singer, Calvin Miller uses words that shook me. Not fancy—not flowery—but maybe that was the point. The horror spoke for itself.

And that is, I think, the power of The Singer: that it re-introduces discomfort into the story of our Lord.

The Wounds of God, by Penelope Wilcock, is another book that does this well. While this one’s not an allegory (but rather a collection of stories about a group of monks in the fourteenth century), it too dips into the horror of human suffering, the humiliation of helplessness, the darkness of grief.

And don’t we sing about all these things? Don’t the songs we rejoice in every Sunday include words like “blood” and “mocked” and “tears”?

I forget what those words mean sometimes. I get distracted by harmonies and the three-year-old coloring next to his mom and lose track of what I’m actually singing.

It’s awful.

And yes, it’s beautiful. Yes, he who despised the shame is now sitting at the right-hand of the throne. Yes, he endured for the joy set before him. The ending of this story—the ending of The Singer—is life everlasting, life reforged, life triumphant.

But we pass through death to get there.

I don’t want to (or rather I shouldn’t want to) forget that. Jesus died. He hung for hours, stapled to hunks of wood by metal driven through his hands. He bled. He cried.

This is the power of discomfort in our faith, and I believe it does two things.

It makes the sacrifice real. We can lose track, sometimes, how dreadful and beautiful it all was. The witnesses at the foot of the cross saw things they would never forget. Human suffering was on full display.

That is real. The Son of God really suffered. The Son of God really died.

I don’t want to forget.

And it makes us, I think, readier to face the same. I recently finished reading Why God Calls Us to Dangerous Places³. One of the author’s points was that God does not call us anywhere that he has not gone first.

In Christ, we cannot go anywhere our shepherd has not gone first. Not death, not life, not tears, not darkness. He visited them all. He left his light in all places.

It hurts. Isn’t that the whole point? We cannot erase this pain. We cannot escape the suffering that we’ve been promised will come.

But oh, he has overcome the world. Let us go where he goes—even if that means the cross.

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I still don’t know what to think of The Singer.

But I will say this: If an allegory’s role is to convey truth in a new and unforgettable way, then Miller has succeeded a hundred times over.

The wall is real. The cross is real. Our faith is built on the darkest day—the longest wait—and then the brightest dawn this world has seen.

There is more yet to come. More darkness, more waiting, and yes—more dawns. You and I have not yet seen all the light that is to come.

Come with me. It won’t be easy, no. And I’m afraid too.

But listen. Can you hear him singing?

Come.

1. I’ve read it and I’ve consulted it to give words to something I was thinking on one very sleep-deprived night, so I don’t hate it by any means. Please put the pitchforks away.

2. I may be a hypocrite—I am a human, after all—but not in this regard.

3. This book is absolutely beautiful and I heartily recommend it.