Any of you who know me well, know my love for Tom Waits. And you can imagine how pleased I was to find this, a piece by Ben Myers on the theology of Tom Waits’ songs.Let me say, I agree wholeheartedly with Ben: Waits’ message is a dys-angelion and precisely as such it serves the euangelion. We have need of the “bad news”; we need to assume what David Tracy calls the “tragic vision.” Without it, without taking seriously the hopelessness of the human situation, we can’t possibly appreciate the impossibly “good news” given to us in the message of Jesus Christ.The fact of the matter is, we Christians know the “bad news” – God’s “shattering ‘No’” – precisely because we’ve given ourselves to the proclamation of the “good news” about God’s “Yes.” Because the Spirit of the resurrected crucified Jesus dwells in and among us, we live our lives in this time before the End in the light of the gospel, a light that though it cannot be comprehended, darkens for us the surrounding darkness.
