Latest / Beyond Sunday Worship Leader Podcast / John Michael Talbot on The Christian Music Industry, Contemplative Prayer, & Why Church Music Needs to Differentiate Itself

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John Michael Talbot on The Christian Music Industry, Contemplative Prayer, & Why Church Music Needs to Differentiate Itself · Beyond Sunday Worship Leader Podcast

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Well, I'm very excited today to have a very special guest
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on the beyond Sunday podcast.
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John Michael Talbot, an absolute legend, Christian music legend.
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So great to have you on the podcast today.
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You know, John Michael, I I love your bio, I'm gonna read this just because
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I think it encapsulates a lot of you know, who you are, but so John Michael
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Talbot is a multi platinum selling, Grammy, Dove Award winning, contemporary,
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Catholic, Christian, music pioneer.
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And I know there's so much to your story and to your life, even beyond that.
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But there's a lot there.
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There's a lot to cover.
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Very honored to be able to chat with you.
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First question I want to ask is, you know, if you could go back, John, to
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being 16 years of age, say, or just being a teenager, and you at that point
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had the chance to look at the direction of your life, would you be surprised?
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Like, what did you want to be when you were younger?
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Well at 16 I wanted to be, God help me.
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I wanted to be a rock star and, I kind of began to succeed, but around
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16, I was getting disillusioned with the life because at 15, I was
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already in a national band, you know?
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So we had, already put out recordings and, and were touring nationally, and,
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and we were rubbing shoulders with all the bands that I thought I wanted to
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be like, and, and I was discovering the futility of the lifestyle pretty
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quickly, and so I was already beginning to investigate religion and philosophy.
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I was reading everything I could get my hands on about any religion
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in the world, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism the Essenes, Sufis.
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Greek philosophy I was reading a revised standard Bible that my
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grandmother had given me and those red letters were jumping out.
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Jesus seemed to say so much in very few words, you know with concise words where
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it took the Buddha, page after page after page, wonderful words, by the way,
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but it took him a long time to say what Jesus just took just a few words to say.
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And so I was really, really being touched by that, but I didn't have
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a personal encounter with God.
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So I began to pray pretty quickly.
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God, who are you?
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He or she or an Ed, as we said down in the South, I didn't have a dog in the hunt.
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So I, I just wanted to know.
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And out in the Midwest somewhere I had after praying for a long, long time,
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I had a personal encounter with Jesus.
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It was a visionary experience just a white light that was a Christ figure.
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I didn't understand theology, I didn't understand that he died for my sins,
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I didn't understand any of that.
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That came later.
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All I knew was I was loved and I was forgiven.
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And it was in the person of Jesus Christ.
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So I began calling myself a Christian again.
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I was raised in a Methodist and a Presbyterian home.
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My father was Presbyterian, my mother was a preacher's kid.
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I come from a long line of Methodist preachers on my mother's side.
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So gave my life back to Christ and got involved in the early
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days of the Jesus movement.
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My brother became a Christian shortly thereafter, not because of me, but
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because in the band, his wife was not living a Christian life by any stretch,
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but she was a good Baptist girl.
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And the Jesus movement was all around us.
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And we got involved in the early days of the Jesus movement.
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Now they call it the Jesus revolution, but we didn't call it that back then.
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And we just made Jesus music and we hung out with all the people on the West Coast.
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You know, that are in the movie.
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We didn't meet Lonnie Frisbee, but Chuck Smith, certainly and Chuck
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Gerard, you know, certainly love song.
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Chuck Gerard had a very big influence on me in the early days of my solo career.
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I write about that in my autobiography, Late Have I Loved You.
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He really knew how to worship God.
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I met him when he was a soloist, not during Love Song.
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We, we knew them as a band, but I met him as a soloist.
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And we mainly hung out with really, who I consider to be the grandfather
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of Christian contemporary music.
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And that's Larry Norman and, and Randy Stonehill.
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And those guys, and we began bouncing around and playing
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tent revivals and churches and coffeehouses and that kind of stuff.
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And we put Mason Prophet back together.
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and, and ended up playing a festival out in Colorado Springs
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called the Road Home Festival.
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And we ran into a guy named Billy Ray Hearn, and he was the A&R director
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for Myrrh Records, which was the contemporary label for Word Records.
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And they had done the 2nd Chapter of Acts, Nancy Honeytree,
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you know, folks like that.
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And we played and kind of stole the show because one of the, one of the guys in
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our band was a fellow named Al Perkins.
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Al was and is probably one of the best, lap steel players in the
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business and is responsible for the conversion of many, many of the, of
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the people in the country rock world.
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So, Billy Ray wanted to sign us, and so he approached me and I said, Well,
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the band's breaking up, you know.
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We wanted to be with Arista, with Clive Davis, and Clive had turned us
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down because we were going a little bit too much of a hard rock direction.
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He didn't mind the Jesus thing at all, surprisingly, but he didn't like the
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harder rock direction we were going.
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He wanted something more country rock, and Terry didn't want to do that.
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So he, he passed and I didn't really want to be in a band.
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I wanted to do more of a folk thing.
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So I said, well, would you want to sign me Billy Ray?
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And Billy Ray said, yes.
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So, but he says, I'm starting this new label.
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I'll either sign you to Myrrh if you want, or you can come with me
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on this new label called Sparrow.
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So I went with him.
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It was five artists, including eventually my older brother, And
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we were out of a you know, a little warehouse in Canoga Park, California.
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Fourteen employees, five artists.
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This is the 70s or the 80s?
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This is the mid 70s.
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Mid 70s.
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Like, 75.
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And so I've jumped from 71 to 75.
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And, uh, so, so we ended up starting this label and now it's part of the biggest
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Christian record company in the world.
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So that's how that happened.
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Then I began touring and doing the typical, you know, Christian
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contemporary thing, playing fellowships and churches and coffee houses.
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But I was grieved and I did two records with them and they did reasonably
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well, you know but I was grieved by the division I saw and, and I said,
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there's gotta be something missing because these are all really good people.
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They were just, you know, good folks.
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I stayed in their homes.
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I met him.
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They had the Holy Spirit.
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They go to the Bible.
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They knew their Bibles really, really well.
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So did I.
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But we were not able to They weren't fellowshipping together.
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There was too much doctrinal disagreement.
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And I said, what's missing?
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So, I discovered the early Church Fathers, namely Clement of Rome,
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Ignatius of Antioch the Didache, Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, which
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all these books were written, like, within 10 years of, of the writing
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of the apocalypse or the revelation.
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So these are early, early books.
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And I thought, well, we're going to find here something to bring us together.
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And I was shocked when I discovered the organic and primitive expressions of what
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today we would call the Catholic faith.
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I didn't want to find that.
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I wasn't looking to be a Catholic, didn't want to be a Catholic, you
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know, didn't even like Catholics.
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I'm still working on that.
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Still don't like them.
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And, uh, but the Lord gave me a word and he says, John, I want
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you to, to become a Catholic.
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She's my first church.
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I love her most dearly.
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But, You know, I'm going to heal her and raise her to new life, and
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I want you to be a part of her.
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So, uh, around the same time, I was being kind of double barreled, discovering this
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radical lifestyle through the likes of Francis of Assisi and the monastic saints.
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And the Desert Fathers and Mothers, who were these, these kind of radical
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gospel folks and a contemplative beating heart in the church.
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And I couldn't find that in the Jesus movement.
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I couldn't find that in American Protestantism.
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And.
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You were looking for something deeper.
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Deeper, deeper.
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So all that hit me at once and so in 1978 I became a Catholic.
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And I thought, you know what I guess my life in the Jesus movement is over.
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Because, They're not going to, they're not going to like this.
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So I put out one last record called The Lord's Supper,
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brought it to the record company.
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So wait, were you thinking of laying down music at this point entirely because
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you didn't think that you would fit in?
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Yeah, exactly.
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I thought this is my last record.
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I'm done.
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I'm just going to move into a hermitage in the woods and disappear.
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And that was my plan.
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I brought it to Billy Ray and he says, well, how it was a, it was
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a mass called the Lord's Supper.
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And it was charismatic setting how, and he goes, how am I going to sell
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this to a bunch of Southern Baptists?
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And I said, well, Billy Ray, I have no idea, you know, that's your job.
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Yeah.
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And, and he says, it's going to flop.
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And I said, well, it probably will, but this is my last record.
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So here we go.
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And he put it out and it was the biggest record with Sparrow that year.
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It was a bestseller.
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And I went back to the hermitage.
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What connected, like what connected with people so much about,
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with that record in particular?
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It was charismatic.
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The singers were, were part of a group called the Evangelical Orthodox
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Church that later became part of the Antiochian Orthodox Church.
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And they were, they were, they were a charismatic And we were
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all on kind of the same journey.
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It took them to the Orthodox church, it took me to the Catholic church, and we
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just intersected at that moment in time.
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It was just, A phenomenon, you know, and they just sang in the spirit.
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They made up the parts as they sang and they sang in the spirit.
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We didn't write the parts out.
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They literally just sang in the spirit and and that's, that's how it unfolded.
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So, and it, and it, you can hear it on, on the record.
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It's not a particularly well recorded piece of music by today's standards,
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but still it captures a freedom of the Holy Spirit, unlike, I think, anything
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that was recorded in those days.
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And we followed it with, I went down into my hermitage and disappeared
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and, and put the Psalms to music.
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and brought another project to them called Come to the Quiet and brought
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that to the record company and they said, Oh, well, this isn't going to sell.
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There's too much space in it.
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Americans won't know what to do.
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It's too quiet.
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Well, you know, try putting it out.
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And they said, well, it's going to flop.
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And I said, yeah, it probably will.
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Same dance, right?
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And So you, at that time, you were just, you were trying to be as
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honest as possible with your art.
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And you weren't, you weren't thinking, Hey, is this marketable?
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Is this commercial enough?
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It was like, I need to be honest with where I am and let the chips
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fall where they may, whether people accept this or not, I got to do it.
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Exactly.
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See, see that record sold three times more than the Lord's supper.
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And the, the pattern that was the industry pattern for artists was
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you, you put together something that is commercially viable.
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You go out and you do 150 tour dates every year to promote it.
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And that's the pattern.
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I went into a hermitage and did maybe at most 10 concerts a year.
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At most.
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So for our listeners that are curious what a hermitage is,
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can you tell us what that is?
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Well, it's, it's, it's a tradition in the church that goes back to,
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to started with, with ascetics.
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We hear about certainly virgins in the scripture and also widows in scripture.
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And it was, it was those who wanted to go a little bit extra than kind
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of the normal Christian expression.
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And then they wanted eventually those who wanted to withdraw into a quiet
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place to do deeper and deeper and deeper prayer, to devote themselves to prayer.
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And it reached probably its its greatest matrix with St.
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Anthony of the Desert, who is a third and fourth century saint in, in Egypt,
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who went into the desert and just prayed and gave us some of the strongest
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paradigms for spiritual warfare.
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On how to do spiritual warfare.
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So he, he went into solitude to do, because the Egyptians believed that the
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desert was where the demons lived, and he learned how to do warfare with evil.
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With evil.
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So the main problem with the world was evil.
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So he went into the place where evil existed the strongest.
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And he learned how to fight the evils of the world, not by fighting it in you
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or in somebody else, but starting with himself and, and doing spiritual warfare.
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So that's, that's the paradigm that you go into solitude.
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You do spiritual warfare, and then you enter into a place of, of real
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contemplative peace eventually, and you enter into heaven on earth, and
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you bring the greatest peace to earth by entering into heaven on earth.
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Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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How hard was that for you at the time?
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Because, you know, my mind immediately goes to 2024 with our fast paced, hectic
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lifestyle At the time, retreating into solitude and contemplation and quiet.
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How difficult was that for you to learn?
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I'm an introvert by nature.
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I've, I've, I've accomplished a lot of things.
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But, I'm an introvert by nature.
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Most artists are introverts by nature.
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So, it was easier for me.
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But still, there are two levels of solitude.
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There's the first level where you go into solitude like for a retreat.
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And this is what most people need.
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And I think most people do need this to go on a retreat to recharge their batteries.
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In other words, I'm I'm depleted.
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I'm exhausted.
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I'm spiritually burned out.
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I need to go make a retreat for.
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Oh, it used to be two weeks.
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Now it's, you, it's like, you're lucky if you get three or four days out of people.
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We give retreats here on the, at our monastery.
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And you know, if we can get people to come here for three
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days, it's a miracle doing good.
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Yeah.
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Go make a retreat.
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That's the first level.
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So go and recharge your batteries.
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Most people need that.
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And it's like soaking in a nice warm bath, a spiritual bath.
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People need that and they understand that.
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But there's another level of solitude where you sink down deeper and that's
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tougher because That's where everything, all the noise stops, all the activity
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stops, and suddenly God shines his light on your your fallacies, your sins.
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All the things that you do to stay busy, to cover up what you do in
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your life, to fake yourself out, and, and that is excruciating.
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And that's, that's called the purgative life.
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That takes a long time.
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And then you enter into the illuminative life, the illuminative life.
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is where you begin to move out of that and experience various graces and phenomenon
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in the spirit that you can actually identify as you know, you can identify
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them as something that you can describe.
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You know, I saw this, I, I experienced that, but contemplative life moves beyond
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anything that you can name or describe, and it's simply being with the one who is.
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It's being with the I am.
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And contemplative prayer.
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Properly speaking, really isn't prayer anymore.
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It's simply being.
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Which is so hard to do for so many people, right?
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Because we're so distracted, you know, we're, we're so busy and frantic and
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chasing after this and chasing after that and consuming this and consuming that.
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So to sit in silence is actually incredibly challenging, but as
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you're saying, it is absolutely necessary for us to be healthy.
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Right.
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And, and the average American picks up their phone.
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To, to look at their phone every two seconds.
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That's insane.
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That is just mind blowing, but Hey, I believe it.
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Cause that's me.
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I'm that way.
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I do it too.
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I do it too.
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And you know, I have a Facebook page and I check my Facebook page.
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So we all, we all do it.
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You know, yeah, and and it's that that my friend is an addiction.
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Well, hey, it's encouraging to us that even John Michael Talbot,
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who's lives a monastic life still struggles with social media.
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Checking the phone that gives that's gives hope for the rest of us.
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We're all human.
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We're all right.
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I want to ask you so a lot of our listeners may not necessarily choose
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the path of life that you have chosen with so much silence and
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solitude and contemplative prayer.
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But I wonder if you could help us with what's a daily practice
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that we could all participate in that would be really helpful in,
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in grounding us every single day?
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Well, I sit, just sit, put your feet flat on the floor, And, you know, I breathe
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in, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, that's everything positive in our faith.
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You know, I, I wrote a book on this called the Jesus Prayer, and I breathe
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out, have mercy on me, a sinner.
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So you breathe in everything that's positive in our faith as
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Christians, and you breathe out anything that's standing between you
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and a communion with God in Christ.
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And with anybody in the church or in your life, you, you just let it go.
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Have mercy on me, a sinner.
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Because a sinner just means, you know, hamartia, to get off the path.
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We, we might be going the right direction, but we get off the path.
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And we all do it.
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We all do it just about every day.
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So Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
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So that's, that's what I do.
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And I pray in tongues and I read my, I read my gospel of the day
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from the liturgical cycle every day.
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You know, I just pray.
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Look, what's the gospel saying from the liturgical readings today?
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I'm a Catholic.
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I don't know what your faith is But I'm a Catholic and and I really appreciate
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The fact that the church gives us a liturgical set of readings because it
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really takes me through the whole New Testament in the daily readings, you
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know every year I really appreciate that.
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You mentioned praying in tongues.
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I know that is a, I guess, maybe a controversial topic.
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Yeah, in different churches, you know, where, you know, some believe that
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gifts like that ceased and they no longer are for today, but I wonder
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if you could just speak to that.
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I know we don't have a lot of time, but speak to the practice of, of praying
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in tongues and kind of the, what that does for you and your daily prayer.
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Cessationism was a theory.
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They go to Augustine to try to prove it.
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I wrote a book called Exploring the Gifts of the Spirit, and they mainly go to St.
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Augustine for that.
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But historically, that doesn't hold water.
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Augustine believed that before he became the Bishop of Hippo.
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And once he became the bishop of Hippo, he reneged on that theory because he
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realized that the gifts of the spirit were so overflowing in his diocese that
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it just didn't hold water that miracles.
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And, you know, and they s you know, in, in, in Hippo, they,
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they experienced Jubilatsio.
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When they sang, they sang in the spirit.
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Basically, he called it jubilatsio because they would sing vowel sounds
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without there being any written notes or without there being any words.
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They would just begin to sing and they would go on and on and it was loud.
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So they were what we would call today singing in the spirit.
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When you, when you speak in tongues or sing in tongues.
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There are two different, well, there's actually three different kinds of tongues.
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One is a missionary tongue, where you speak in a tongue, and you're speaking
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so that other people can understand you and you don't know that language.
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So that's happened supernaturally with some of our missionaries.
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It happened at Pentecost.
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The other is You speak and there needs to be an interpretation.
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So in other words, I stand up or sit down, it might be, but
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I address the congregation.
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in a tongue.
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I'm not praying quietly.
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I'm praying loud.
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I'm saying something.
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I'm, I'm definitely addressing the group that needs to be interpreted.
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Either I have to interpret it or somebody has to be given
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the gift of interpretation.
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If there is no interpretation, either the tongue was not from God or somebody was
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given an interpretation and they didn't have the faith to step out and give it.
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But we missed it somewhere.
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Most people that pray in tongues, and that's the most common
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thing, that's for themselves.
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What happens with me is I bypass my mind.
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So it's a, it's kind of bypassing your mind temporarily.
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So that you can pray in the spirit and then the spirit can reach down
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and kind of scrub the mind out.
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So my mind can get stuck really, really easily in negative patterns about people,
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about a situation, about the world, about the church, about all kinds of things.
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And when I pray in the spirit, when I pray in tongues, I just boom, go around
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it and then the spirit can cleanse my mind and then I can be positive because
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I don't want to get stuck in negativity.
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When I pray with my mind, I just pray too weakly, you know, it's too weak.
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So when I pray in the spirit, I can pray in power and I
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need that power when I pray.
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So I try to pray privately in tongues.
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every day, every day.
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And it's not loud.
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It's sometimes it's not even out loud.
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Sometimes it's just, just internal, but I'm praying in tongues, yeah,
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I think this conversation is just helping us to see a new side, you
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know, and to slow down a little bit.
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To me, it just feels like we have a little breath of fresh air here,
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you know where we can slow down the hustle and bustle a little bit.
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But I wonder if we could, we could switch gears a little bit, John.
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And so you're new, you've written an autobiography and an album
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called Late How I Loved You.
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And if, if our listeners don't know, Tell us, first off, you know,
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this is book number, what, 39 and album number 50, something like 59.
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Okay.
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Amazing.
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What does this title mean to you Late Have I Loved You and, and why did you feel,
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Hey, now's the time for an autobiography?
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Well I had an experience.
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In the hospital seven years ago, where I was really sick.
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Not talking about the flu, I'm talking about really sick.
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And in the hospital, I, I wanted to praise God and I couldn't.
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It hurt to think objective thoughts.
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So all I could do was mumble in tongues.
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I'm not talking about Pentecostal tongues.
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I'm talking about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like that, okay.
28:58
And I did that for hours and during that experience my guardian angel
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grabbed me under my left arm, pretty sure the angel of death grabbed me under
29:09
my right arm and they took me out of my bed and they let me see paradise.
29:22
And
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in that view, I could see all of my sins like I'd never
29:31
seen them before in a flash.
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But I could also see.
29:38
all of God's forgiveness and his mercy on me in that same flash all at once.
29:46
And I was so overwhelmed by it.
29:48
All I could do was weep.
29:49
When I had been there sufficiently there, it was outside of time.
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They turned me around and brought me back to my bed where I mumbled
30:01
in tongues for however long.
30:05
I was discharged when I was healthy and brought back to the monastery.
30:13
And for another year or more, all I could do when I prayed was weep, or when I said
30:21
the name Jesus, all I could do was weep.
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When I went to mass, all I could do was weep mass took on
30:27
a whole new dimension to me.
30:30
The reality of his real presence
30:33
took on a whole new to me.
30:35
I'd always believed it, but it took on a whole new dynamism and the reality
30:40
of heaven and earth being together took on a whole new dimension for me.
30:47
It was an immediate dimension.
30:49
And I was really aware that I could die at any moment, and I've walked with that
30:56
ever since, as I got further away from it they wanted me to update my story,
31:03
and I was convinced by my editor not to do it with a biographer, but to write
31:09
it as an autobiography, so I updated the autobiography, and I, I, I took out some
31:15
of the negative stories to I didn't want some of the negative things that were
31:21
in the previous biographies to be there.
31:25
So I shortened it so it would be an easier read.
31:31
And told some fun stories like, oh, the birds, you know, a band back in the 60s.
31:38
In the 70s playing bumper cars with with us between Chicago and Champaign,
31:45
Illinois, going to a gig and then them feeling real bad because they thought
31:51
the van we were driving was a rental van.
31:54
It was our van and then being very apologetic when they
31:59
found out it was our van.
32:01
But you've never you've never lived until you've had the birds.
32:05
Playing bumper cars with you at 75 miles an hour on the I 55.
32:10
But anyway added stories, stories about Those days and stories about how hard it
32:19
is to live in community, you know today you are in an individualistic society
32:27
where Individuation as Duns Scotus would describe every individual is a
32:36
totally unique and unrepeatable Gift, but always in the context of community
32:40
as compared to the individualism of our culture, which sees the individual really
32:47
at the expense of any community, whether that's family or religious community
32:53
or a job or a nation, you know.
32:57
So I added a lot of stuff that were not in the other books.
33:02
Yeah.
33:03
And then musically, and this is where I think it gets fun, is the late If I
33:10
Loved You, I started a course with St.
33:12
Augustine.
33:13
I'd put, I'd, I'd sketched it out 10 years ago and, and tried to put it to music.
33:22
And finally I tried about three different settings.
33:26
And finally this one worked and I'm pleased with it.
33:29
And then I followed that with second Corinthians, God's window.
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We see as through a glass dimly.
33:38
And then I bring in the apocalypse that we see the New Jerusalem, streets
33:44
of gold, like transparent glass.
33:48
The New Jerusalem, it has physicality, but it's invisible.
33:55
It's, it's, you can see through it, it's transparent.
33:59
It's beyond what eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it even
34:03
dawned on our mind what awaits us.
34:08
It's we haven't even thought of it yet.
34:11
It's so amazing.
34:14
And since this experience in the hospital, I spent some time, a lot of time thinking
34:21
about the glories of heaven and where we're going, because that's our home.
34:26
This is just the bus stop.
34:27
St.
34:27
Romuald's prayer sit in your cell as in paradise, that paradise is right here.
34:34
And when you pray, Paradise is right here on earth, your title, Beyond Sunday.
34:41
When you pray in your prayer corner, in your prayer place, paradise is right here.
34:47
is right there.
34:49
And then I do the apocalypse triptych, which is my feeble attempt
34:54
to capture some of what describes heavenly worship as an audio icon.
35:01
I was tempted to put a lot of orchestra to it, but I didn't.
35:05
I kept it mainly vocal because those are mainly angelic and saintly voices
35:15
that we hear in the apocalypse.
35:18
So I kept it mainly.
35:20
Mainly choir, mainly choir, and I did bolster it with a big orchestra.
35:26
But we did use a good orchestra on this record, and people that have heard it
35:31
like it, because it, it harkens back to some of my early London recordings,
35:36
and they like the sound of it.
35:38
We used a great orchestral engineer, Rob Burrell.
35:43
Yeah, no, it's, it's beautiful.
35:46
And I know there's a lot of classical guitar on there.
35:48
Is that sort of your kind of instrument of choice?
35:51
Like if you could choose one instrument to play, would that be it?
35:54
No, that's it.
35:54
That's my sound.
35:56
I can play other guitars and, and in my early years, I was, I was rather legendary
36:02
as an acoustic guitarist, but, but I, I prefer my sound is the classical guitar
36:10
and not as a classical guitarist as a, as kind of a folk classical guitarist.
36:16
I want to let you go here, but I wonder if you could real quick, just
36:21
reflect on Christian music today.
36:24
What's something that encourages you About contemporary Christian music today,
36:30
and what's something that concerns you.
36:33
Well, what encourages me is there's a lot of new musicians, and I'm glad about that.
36:40
There's a lot of interest, and there's a lot of musicians wanting to worship, and
36:45
I think that's very, very encouraging.
36:49
The danger that we have is that the Hillsong and Bethel movement have
36:54
crossed over from engagement to entertainment and from the inclusion
37:02
of emotions to emotional ism, which crosses into manipulation.
37:09
And that's a real danger and in the Catholic world.
37:12
So, so the other thing is, is that has copied a secular model.
37:19
Years later, and in the Catholic world, we, we have copied the Hillsong and Bethel
37:26
model years after Hillsong and Bethel.
37:30
So, my word in the Catholic world, and I, I really only have authority to speak
37:35
to the Catholic world because I don't exist in the Evangelical world anymore.
37:40
Is that we really need to be careful of crossing over into emotionalism,
37:47
which is manipulative and addictive, and crossing from engagement,
37:54
which we need, into entertainment and thinking that it's worship.
38:02
I also am a little worried when I hear people talking about I,
38:07
I, I in their experience, rather than it being focused on God.
38:14
It should be God, God, God, God, rather than me, me, me, me, me, you know.
38:20
So those are some of my, my concerns.
38:24
I personally think we in the Catholic world have a challenge
38:31
before us to find a musical form.
38:36
And, and by the way, in the Catholic world, like Gregorian chant is
38:39
very popular among young people.
38:42
My music, when they hear it, young people really like my music when they hear it.
38:48
They don't hear it very often, or they grew up with it, maybe, but when they
38:54
get a chance to actually sit and pray with it, they really, really like it.
38:59
The, the challenge is to find that which is uniquely sacred music.
39:08
Sacred music.
39:11
That jumps, it really jumps all categories and it no longer copies the world.
39:20
It might include aspects of the world, but it, it doesn't copy it.
39:27
I think in the West we have a little bit of an identity crisis, whereas,
39:33
for instance, the Eastern Orthodox or the Oriental Orthodox are not.
39:38
They're not suffering from this issue.
39:42
You know, they have their own musical sound and their own musical experiences
39:47
in worship and they're very very pleased with How they worship, you know, and
39:53
and they love it somehow or another we have Allowed the world in our back
39:59
door And, and therefore now we have a lot of, we kind of have an identity
40:05
crisis both in the Protestant and in the Catholic world on, on how do we do this?
40:13
How do we do this?
40:14
We have to be very, very discerning.
40:16
Very discerning.
40:18
The answer, of course, the answer is the musicians have to be trained, they
40:23
have to be good, and they have to be men and women of deep, deep, deep prayer.
40:30
And when you do that, it will flow forth naturally.
40:35
It'll just flow forth in the spirit of God.
40:38
It won't be manipulative.
40:40
It won't be.
40:41
You know, it won't be something that you say, Oh, gee, now we're going
40:44
to write this kind of song or that kind of song or I never do that.
40:50
I just sit down and let, I let the prayer, write it Michelangelo said, you
40:56
know, the figure is already in the stone.
40:58
His job, God put the figure in the stone.
41:01
His job was to just find it.
41:05
He had to find it.
41:07
And I feel the same way about a song or about.
41:11
any artistic form.
41:13
God has put, God has put the work of art there.
41:17
The artist's job is to find it, so.
41:22
Brilliant.
41:24
Yeah, I, I feel like in our efforts to evangelize and to reach people,
41:31
we've lost our identity, like you said.
41:34
Yeah.
41:35
We've sort of copied the world's methods to sort of attract a crowd.
41:42
But in the end, that leaves you empty, right?
41:45
Because what differentiates the church is something very
41:49
supernatural and sacred and holy.
41:51
And when we push those things to the side, we don't know who we are anymore.
41:57
Yeah.
41:58
Well, it's okay to go out and do those things as long as
42:02
you bring them back somewhere.
42:05
It's okay to have a Christian rock band, for instance.
42:09
But then bring them back to something sacred, but don't
42:14
just make church that rock band.
42:17
Yeah.
42:17
So good.
42:18
So good.
42:19
That is so important.
42:22
What, what you have shared with us today, John, and I, I so, so appreciate it.
42:27
Last question before I let you go, what's and I want to encourage
42:30
all of our listeners to check out your music and your books.
42:34
If they're not familiar with you, I know so many are.
42:36
But what's a book that you haven't written that you have given
42:41
away or recommended most often?
42:44
Oh, I would, I would just say the Desert Fathers and Mothers or I don't
42:48
know, I don't If you're interested in desert spirituality or the omnibus
42:54
of sources, if you're interested in Franciscan spirituality or the
42:58
faith of the early fathers, if you're interested in patristics.
43:02
Fantastic.
43:04
John Michael Talbot.
43:05
So honored to have you on the show.
43:06
Thanks for your time today and I hope you feel better.
43:09
Go get some rest and we really appreciate you investing in us today.
43:13
Thank you.
43:14
God bless you, buddy.
43:15
Thank you.
43:17
Bye bye.