By Joseph Amagliani

When I say that I don’t remember learning the lyrics to “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” what I mean is I don’t remember not knowing them. I grew up attending Methodist services with robes, organs, acolytes, and hymns. “Come Thou Fount” was a regular, a mainstay, and honestly, a favorite of mine. Like much of my religious infrastructure, it’s in my bones.

In some of my earliest memories — the kind that are fuzzy and more feeling than image — I hum along to hymns during the 8:30 early service because I couldn’t read but wanted to participate. My mother would often lean down, her head next to mine, brown hair grazing my cheek, and hum along with me.

But not with “Come Thou Fount,” I knew the words to this one:

“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love”

The congregation would sing, and I would join in, arrested and laid bare by the song’s honesty.

In Sufjan’s rendition, the cresting piano alongside his layered voice does something for me. Stripped down, it seems, to the end of himself and also filled with hope, thrilled about coming to a point of inevitable and undeniable honesty. These lyrics have long captured my imagination; they seem less an admission and more an acknowledgement of powerlessness. “Prone to wander,” in my estimation, communicates a state of being.

In my youth group years, I traded the organ for electric guitar, heavy bass lines, and a steady dose of kick drum, all played by 15- to 18-year-olds. There was this one kid, three or four years older than me, who would worship so intensely, with so much movement and passion, that he brought a shirt to change into for the post-youth group hangs. I envied him for his complete abandon, his maximalist passion, and, most of all, for what I perceived to be a deep disregard for that most valuable of teenage currencies: what others think of you.

When I think of him now, I wonder if what I really envied was the honesty in his expression. For some reason, with him, it didn’t seem performative, but rooted. I didn’t receive it as anything other than the inevitable and appropriate response to an overwhelming cosmic love. I viewed it as consummation, rapture, transfiguration. People back then might say, “The spirit broke through.”

I yearned for this rapture. To be overcome by God, or being itself (God again), or some, any external source (God, I guess). To be overwhelmed by presence and spirit to the point of dancing and sweating, singing and weeping. I realize, now, that a level of manipulation was involved in these spiritual expressions. I also miss them.

These moments live in memory for me — I don’t know the last time I sat in a full band, dimmed-lights worship session that advertised a start time but no length or ending. In fact, I actively avoid those settings. Yet, I still cherish that feeling, those moments, and the mystery in all of it. I long for the cynicism I've developed over time to slip away and leave me with a moment of honesty.

“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above”

The hymnist and Sufjan look outward after their moment of honesty to their higher power, their God. It’s another admission of powerlessness, but also an admission of a power outside themself. There’s a homecoming hidden in these lyrics. Listening to this song on repeat these past couple of weeks moved me to a memory first, then created a longing for a spiritual home that, now, often seems to live only in said memory.

Marilynne Robinson, in her novel Housekeeping, writes:

“Every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home...”

This quote makes me wonder if the turning over of this memory — again and again, those moments of passion and dancing and sweating and singing — is a kind of homecoming in itself. It makes me wonder if the somatic experience of returning to those rooms, those kids, and those songs is one way to say, “Here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it.”

Joseph is a transportation engineer based in North Carolina. You can find his writing by stealing his journals.