Finding My Missing Person In Solitude

Back Catalog #2: Missing Person

Back Catalog is an occassional series on music and lyricism, old and new, that I am discovering or rediscovering.

I think everyone of a certain age has a missing person—a part of themselves they once knew that they have lost touch with. I know I have one. And I’ve begun to rediscover him. And part of that journey for me, as an exvangelical, came through listening to an old evangelical song by Michael W. Smith called “Missing Person.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the artist, here’s my first entry on him.

Back Catalog #1: Michael W. Smith

The Missing Person Every Evangelical Is Looking For

“Missing Person” (1998), written by Smith and Wayne Kirkpatrick is a song about losing a piece of yourself and longing for that “missing person.”

First off, look at the dreamy smolder. They don’t make album art like they used to.

In the first verse, Smith’s speaker lays out the precarious state he’s in.

Verse 1
Another question in me
One for the powers that be
It's got me thrown
And so I put on my poker face
And try to figure it out
This undeniable doubt
A common occurence
Feeling so out of place
Guarded and cynical now
Can't help but wondering how
My heart evolved into
A rock beating inside of me
So I feel such a stoic ordeal
Where's that feeling that I don't feel

I want to start with how I used to understand this song as an evangelical because it leads to both an error I have learned from and a resonance with my exvangelical experience. This is a song about moments of doubt and struggle, perhaps even a dark night of the soul, that culminate in a loss of feeling. And for an evangelical, feeling is an important part of faith. The experience of becoming “born again” is intensely personal, emotional, and life changing. But that feeling fades, as feelings do eventually, and Smith’s speaker here wonders “Where’s that feeling that I don’t feel?”

Trying to conjure a feeling you once had? That shit is poison. It is, perhaps, the most difficult aspect of the evangelical experience that I have had to unlearn—longing for lost feelings, trying to recreate them, finding the recreation false, trying again, and again, and again. So much so that I feel like half my life was spent in this state of uncertainty, looking backward, living in the past, worrying so much about my internal feelings. Because the lack of intense emotion lead to one fear: I was lost. I was going to hell.

This was the insidious nature of my evangelicalism: the constant questioning of self and others. Who’s in and who’s out? Who’s good and who’s bad? Who’s lost and who’s found? And what does it take—how do you really know, beyond all doubt, that you’re not going to live in eternal torment? You just gotta feel it? Feelings fade. Trust God? But God gave conditions: “believe in Jesus.” How do you know if you “believe” in Jesus enough? We’re back to feelings, and the endless loop. And yes, that’s OCD—a broken part of my brain. But it’s also a product of a culture that promotes feeling as a basis for faith.

Needless to say, Smith’s speaker is in a scary place. But who exactly is the speaker looking for? Smith’s speaker continues:

Refrain 1
There was a boy who had the faith to move a mountain
And like a child he would believe without a reason
Without a trace he disappeared into the void and
I've been searching for that missing person

Smith’s speaker is looking for a “boy” he once was. Not a man. Continuing with a Christian interpretation, the “child” aspect of this lyric is important because of the ideal that children represent. They are utterly trusting, they “believe without a reason,” and as a result, they have “the faith to move a mountain.” The father-child relationship between God and the faithful is one many Christians aspire to and desire to have in their own walk. Because when life is difficult, faith looks like the trust of a child in their parents. And that faith is powerful—it is sustaning in the most gut-wrenching personal hells. Losing that kind of faith is, indeed, dire when you need it most.

Refrain 2
He used to want to try to walk the straight and narrow
He had a fire and he could feel it in the marrow
It's been a long time and I haven't seen him lately
But I've been searching for that missing person

Here, we get more into the consequences of losing the missing person—sin. Smith’s speaker explains, “He used to want to try to walk the straight and narrow.” But Smith’s speaker overstates his case here. He does seem to want to live according to his values. How do we know this? Because he’s looking for the missing person. He wants to want to try to walk the straight and narrow. That’s what looking for the missing person means—to have the want back, the desire back, the intention back. He wants to live according to his values. But his actions are out of alignment with his own values.

And now we’re at a point of resonance for me as an exvangelical.

Missing Persons in Modernity

I’ve been in a funk, mind out of wack, for something going a year now. Endless work, endless scrolling, endless distraction. My actions are out of alignment with my values.

But I remember times—some recent and some long past—when they weren’t out of alignment. So there is a missing person in my life too—a part of me that I’ve lost. And I think I rediscovered him in a stash of my old notebooks my parents found in their basement. I took a few nights to reread what I had written when I was a teenager.

In those pages, I found a poet who seemed to have infinite things to say. A seeker whose journey was the most important part of his life. A writer in love with the pen and the page, whose notebooks were soaked in the banalities and beauties of living life. Echoing Smith’s speaker, my missing person is, in some ways, a child. But not a child who has faith without reason, but love without fear. True, there was fear there—fear of losing my soul to hell. And that was, perhaps, the ever-present fear. But at the same time, what I loved without fear was the journey I was on and the world about me. I loved making meaning of it all—that’s why I wrote so much. Whereas now, more often than not, I’d rather just escape it all, and my notebooks fill with nothing but to-do lists.

Verse 2
Under a lavender moon
So many thoughts consume me
Who dimmed that glowing light
That once burned so bright in me
Is this a radical phase
A problematical age
That keeps me running
From all that I used to be

Is there a way to return
Is there a way to unlearn
That carnal knowledge
That's chipping away at my soul
I've been gone too long
Will I ever find my way home?

I don’t think I’m alone in this. We live in a “problematical age,” modernity. We have an abundance of distractions from the real world. But the real world is where we live. And so, if we value living in the real world, our indulgence in these distractions comes with the price of not living according to our values. And we lose something as a result. Andrew Sullivan’s influential essay, “I Used To Be A Human Being,” puts it well:

This new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.

Indeed, in modernity, to believe in a soul is itself a counter-cultural thing. Modernity is a materialist condition, sweeping away the ancient and medieval metaphysics of “souls.” But the age of distraction has given us clues that things may be more complicated than we thought. Following Smith, this “carnal knowledge” of modernity seems to be “chipping away at” something. Otherwise we wouldn’t feel so out of sorts when we decide to live in the world of distraction away from the real world. Some days, I can’t hear my own thoughts. Some days, I can’t remember what it was like to just be a human being. Something is there, inside, pleading. Could it be my missing person?

Finding My Missing Person In Solitude

But how to find him? My notebooks gave me a clue: I took more time to write way back when. And why? Because I was alone with my own thoughts more. Because I wasn’t on my phone or working as much. I had more solitude. In his book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport defines solitude, following Kethledge and Erwin, as:

A subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

That’s what the internet is. Other minds. And TV. Other minds. Radio, podcasts, even books. Other minds. I know that I often seek out other minds because I fear my own thoughts. In comparison to the instant high of the screen, being alone with my thoughts seems hopelessly boring or even a recipe for anxiety. So escaping them is a relief.

But my Stoic practice teaches me temperance is a virtue. Too much of other minds is a vice. And so, my practice has changed. I started making time away from the screen, time for solitude, time away from other minds. And I found out the screen was lying to me. The page was calling.

One night, I sat down in solitude with a blank page in my notebook and words just started pouring out. Epiphany. I had forgotten the page. The page was what I needed to focus my attention—and as teenage me once wrote, “I only have one attention.” And when I focused, I noticed a change. I could hear my own thoughts again. And the page gave me something to do with my thoughts—externalize and make meaning with them. Far from my fears that my own thoughts would be boring or anxious, I found them stimulating and invigorating. And I felt at once at one with myself, like I had stumbled but got back on my feet, back on the journey I had been on for so long.

But of course, this is the nature of epiphany. Epiphanies come with strong feelings. And feelings fade. I have had to remember what I learned about putting too much faith in feelings. I’ve been working on this post for weeks now, long past that night I rediscovered my voice in the pages of my notebook. And now, the epiphany has translated into a simple regular practice. Building time in every day for solitude. Chores done in silence. A jaunt to the park and back alone. A keyboard and a white screen. An evening scrawl in my notebook. The thoughts externalized are not all that invigorating. Some nights, banalities pervade. But they are my banalities. I know I’m back on my journey, in all its trivialities and all its glories.

I am aware once more of a part of me I lost. I have something inside me growing and groaning to grow, to thrive. A person, a mind, a soul, without wires or screens. And when he speaks, I learn something. And he is whispering, “Solitude.”

I found my missing person.