God and Christ, Jason Matthew Thirsk, and the Devil

– A look at Jason Matthew Thirsk of Pennywise, a victim of spiritual warfare, by a former punk rocker

~~~~

The punk band Pennywise formed in Hermosa beach in 1988.  One of the original members of the band would help write some of the most heart-breaking songs in the punk scene; verses I have since associated with the tragedy of John Keats, who died of tuberculosis at 26.  Both being tragic poets, Pennywise related in a stronger way to the results of spiritual warfare, the death of hope, and desperate faith.  Jason Matthew Thirsk was the bassist of Pennywise when they formed until he committed suicide at the age of 28 in the summer of 1996.

A Personal Spiritual Fever

Hearing Pennywise for the first time occurred in childhood. I cannot recall with certainty, so I will say I was somewhere between 10 and 13 years old.  My older brother put it on one day. Upon hearing the sound, I was stunned.  

I loved music at that point, but more things like Star Wars theme songs from the movies composed by John Williams.  It was my first introduction to punk rock: it may seem strange, but in the instant I heard it, it was like a spiritual experience; I had never heard anything like it; a mystifyingly potent and elevating rhythm. It was fast, even beautiful, there were words I only barely caught the meaning of. They spoke of powerful and great truths; their feature of choruses was reminiscent of something like an angelic choir. I think this first contact with them was the album Unknown Road or perhaps About Time.  My heart was captured immediately.

Jim Lindbergh especially ended up becoming an idolized figure for me, and the name Pennywise like a deity.  Well, not exactly…but later on I realized there is a form of idolatry sometimes in how people think towards some artists. In pop music for instance, there was a TV show called “American Idol,” and the phrase has long been applied to musicians, writers and artists in past and modern society.  The lyrics can become not just poems but philosophy and shape personal beliefs, forming a way of life.  I turned to the culture of punk rock for a long time.

Pennywise and other bands fueled a generation of youth of which I was a part.  As I look at my younger cousin’s love of them, it has died down, but the generation endures.

The Fury and the Mire

Punk rock music in bands like Pennywise, Bad Religion, Strike Anywhere, or All Autonomy/Bueno with Brian Gianelli, hold aloft the principled desperation of humanity, with the further element of resistance to being led astray as many now are and in the past, and defiance to the system of things and its evils. This is found especially in the four bands I previously named and many others, it overlapped with bands like Rage Against the Machine and can even be found in a very different aesthetic in hip-hop.  The message behind so many punk groups was that the world is corrupt, and to keep your humanity by doing whatever you want without corruptive rules, but to treasure the bond of brotherhood.

That is an attempt at being succinct.  Of course there’s a lot more to them.  W.B. Yeats wrote a century before in the poem “Byzantium”:

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is

All mere complexities

The fury and the mire of human veins.

-W.B. Yeats

~~~~

“The fury and the mire of human veins.” He was speaking about an essence in punk rock that you can find at a Warped Tour concert and the veins of their fierce, racing sound itself as well as the lyricism.  This is what Pennywise evoked in their lyrics and their music, and Jason’s influential pen hand was an influence over me I have kept in my heart alongside my own grief and the traumas and tragedies of others.

Pennywise and their first albums

I want to take a look now at several Pennywise songs prior to the album Full Circle, which was written after Jason’s death in commemoration of him.  The first, and most heart wrenching of them all for me, is a song entitled “Nothing” although “Killing Time” was also noteworthy for Thirsk’s short and tragic life.  Thirsk’s influence over these songs are noticeable although I do not know if he wrote them entirely himself or if the band developed them together.  Here is the song “Nothing.”

(*I cut a part of the song that follows this because it trails off after a vehement profanity that seems inaccurate to the nature of the rest of the song.)  The last line of the song reads:

“Still I got the strange feeling that time is slowly slipping away…”

~~~~~~~

Aftermath of Nothing

Hearing this song wrote Pennywise on my heart more than most, but I did not come to appreciate many of it’s nuances and meaning, and the grief that exonerates it, until later in life.  One strange congruence to Thirsk’s influence over this song is at the end when he says “Time is slowly slipping away.” In some undivined sense he seemed to prophesy his own death which ended up being the most tragic way: by his own hand.

The song is beautiful, and layered with years of grief, loss, and despair, dominantly in a spiritual sense.   The content of the lyrics sings of all the sources he went to for life’s mysteries, the truth and the reason behind things like suffering, and death; his hope and despair over the creation and God. 

(Life, prayer, a cold death, asking “why” of the book of creation, asking the sky, teachers, sages, prophets throughout time, churches, schools, his parents, and finally God, who he had completely lost faith in: Why have you let all this happen, why did you abandon me, abandon us.)

Because he quotes Christ’s outcry that occurred right before his death, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” and that he writes this using Old English wording, I can determine his upbringing was in a faith leaning on the Bible and Christianity; perhaps Catholic or Protestant, if he was using the KJV or an archaic translation. 

Jason’s Augury: Losing faith

I point out these further lines from “Nothing”:

“I saw a cold death at the end of the line
And so I started to pray
Up towards the sky but knew no one would answer me
I asked the trees why they grew toward the sun…”

He is already in a state of little faith in God, although now he seems to be praying, even to the sky, the trees, the clouds – he sees something in them others may not.

“But knew no one would answer me.”  

He did not expect the fatherly compassion of Jehovah to be made evident in his distress; perhaps it was dark for too long, of course he did not think a booming voice would come out of heaven.  His faith in God is breaking, perhaps dead, and a loss like that comes with it the coming death of hope. 

~~~

It is like he is dying of a broken heart.  

~~~

Creation and Opposition

Due to the turmoil and strife he had witnessed in his life and the world, and the lack of integrity in the churches, most notably whatever sect or denomination he had been a part of, he cannot reconcile such an existence without his Creator or for definite answers for so much suffering.  If humans are built with a spiritual need as I believe, Thirsk was less a man of the nations like the rest of the band and had more of a deep and noble, beautiful heart, a spiritual thirst he never quenched.

“I asked the trees why they grew toward the sun.”

This is an almost fatalistic grief.  For there is much to be seen in this single poetic line.  First we can see that Thirsk has seen glimpses of something he does not really know; glimpses of evidence for God in the creation and the beauty of life.  He recognizes and catches sight of this but he wants to know why they are there, what is the meaning for such beauty and the eternity in his heart in relation to them.

It is something he cannot place, or thought he knew and yet now fears is a lie. 

The verse is linked to the same spirit that Jesus taught to his disciples and listeners in the Sermon on the Mount; the quality of love and wisdom that pervades and is built into the creation.  Thirsk is calling out for a guiding mind to teach and comfort him, an answer for things he cannot even define. 

~~~~

Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, and correlations with J.M.T.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls upon his listeners to take an example of the lilies of the field, an example of God’s love for us and also his power, and that in Jehovah they are beautiful because God has beautiful qualities, and wants man to be a part of this.  The lilies are a glimpse that display such things, a glimpse of the way toward the Creator and of the truths Jason needs.

“Take a lesson from the lilies of the field, how they grow; they do not toil, nor do they spin; yet I tell you that not even Solomon, in all his glory, was arrayed as one of these.  

Now if this is how God clothes the vegetation of the field, that is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much rather clothe you, you with little faith?”

-Matthew 6:28-30

Thirsk’s questions towards the trees, sky, clouds and his seeking for God are one and the same with the spirit of this teaching by Jesus.  As the poet Christopher Smart wrote:

Thirsk glimpses this but cannot grasp it, there are other forces and a great doubt overpowering his heart and mind.  Yet he realizes something is there, and his spiritual need becomes desperate, an outcry, a need the rest of the band, perhaps, were largely insensitive to.  More than anything, Thirsk desires whatever faith he once had, a fulfilling one, in what another Pennywise song, “Waste of Time” speaks of. I do not know if Thirsk wrote it or how much of it came from him.

“Through the darkness somewhere should be waiting
A final truth to shower me with light”

Pennywise is known for speaking against various authorities including any kind of religion. If Thirsk wrote or had a hand in “Waste of Time” his problem shows evidence of a fault you cannot blame him for: “the sin that easily entangles”(a lack of faith; Hebrews 12:1) caused mostly by the inhumanity of man and false teachers among them.

“Their pearls of wisdom and tales of glory
They fed me nicely until I found it was all a lie
No one right answer, spirit seems broken
And still I can’t help but wonder why

Seems like a tragic waste of time”

Because his spirituality was ripped apart by the corruption of churches and edifices, by evils of history and government, and to be certain his own faults and sins in some ways, his lifestyle and the loss that comes with it, he ended his life with the notion even his most dearly kept beliefs were a lie.

He also had either an alcohol or drug abuse problem. I think he speaks of this in “Nothing” in the lines :

“Sweets, took the pain away”

and:

So he shows he is joined to the world because he doesn’t have much hope; ignorant in a more innocent way, but searching for the truths he needs, not entirely innocent; but in fact, no one is.

Further Theological Factors

There is something more here well I note that involves more theology than yet discussed.  Christ, in Bible teaching, is the only thing God created directly and solely, all other things being created through Christ.  This is why the Bible calls him the “only-begotten Son.”(John 1:14; 1:18; 3:16; 3:18; 1 John 4:9) 

Jesus thus had a hand in all the rest of creation, including men and angels, those trees growing towards the sun, clouds and rain, those lilies of the field.  Thirsk caught glimpses of this, the secret nature of flowers and of trees.  For when we look at such seeming simple adornment like a lily, it was not created to be so beautiful for no purpose. 

The earth where it grows was made especially for mankind, for us to enjoy and live and appreciate these things; their very existence exudes the love God and Christ have for mankind, and for those who have care for it, still Jehovah has these things imprinted and bejeweled in the world to give us faith and help lead us to him.  Christians, and others, see the trees in majesty, and the flowers’ delicacy, or observe bees in symbiotic relationship with trees and flowers, feeding and spreading both life and beauty, and we recognize the qualities of their Creator and also the one “master worker” over the rest of creation apart from himself: Jesus.  Love and wisdom are there.(Proverbs 8:30)

Perhaps when discerning this, we see or remember a Sermon on the Mount moment, or a Revelation 4:11 moment, the right of God’s sovereignty as Creator of these things.  Perhaps Thirsk saw such a secret and mystery there, one he thought he could never know, perhaps because it no longer existed to him.

The name to which every knee must bend.

In Revelation the glorified Christ in heaven bears written on his thigh a name “that he alone knows,” a hint of this name that we cannot know, perhaps, on his handiwork alongside his Father.  And spiritual truths regarding Jesus and his Father, Thirsk was searching for and needed to heal his despair.(Revelation 19:12,16)

~~~~

Dying to Know

Another Pennywise song must be looked at, it was written on the album Unknown Road and so it involved, if not solely written by, Thirsk.  It is called “Dying to Know”:

Dying to Know:

“I’ll carry the torch, feed off my flame
Love is the hottest word for me it knows my name
And your spirit cuts through me like a silent sword
And leaves its score inside

Well I know sometimes I
Everytime I take a chance, take it
Everytime a rule to break, break it
Everytime I change my mind, change it
Everytime there’s suicide

You know what’s on my mind
You’re everywhere I try to hide
I’m threatened by your suicide
I’ll test my faith till satisfied

My God I need to know
I know there’s got to be a place
A heaven for the human race
Why do I need to die to go?
I need to know, I’m dyin’ to know

Well good book says, ‘Love should be the best thing you can feel’
So you gotta stand by your faith exactly what they say is real
So you push this back in your mind ’cause the thought was too intense
That don’t make sense

‘Cause I know sometimes I
Everytime I take a chance, take it
Everytime a rule to break, break it
Everytime I change my mind, change it
Everytime there’s suicide

You know what’s on my mind gotta have it, I must know it
Here is my only chance and I ain’t gonna blow it
It’s in my nature, something so sublime
Got to know before I’m outta time, I’m all out of time

It’s burning a hole inside of me
Answers to questions I seek
Burning a hole inside
Keepin’ the flame alive

I will burn this flame until I know
The name I need to know
I will burn this flame until I know
The name I need to know

I will burn this flame until I know
The name I need to know
I will burn this flame until I know
The name I need to know”

Suicide and Desperation

Was he speaking of the love of God and the “spirit” of Bible teachings in the “silent sword” that leaves its score in him? I do not know. I half expected he was speaking of a romance of a woman.  This idea is dispelled by the rest of the song.

“Well I know sometimes I
Everytime I take a chance, take it
Everytime a rule to break, break it
Everytime I change my mind, change it
Everytime there’s suicide“

“everytime theres suicide”

Was he struggling with the desire to kill himself at this point? The thought of suicide in him, or was he speaking of someone else?

“You know what’s on my mind
You’re everywhere I try to hide
I’m threatened by your suicide
I’ll test my faith till satisfied”

God is on his mind all the time, even when he wants to push it away, to “hide.”  He may have been speaking here of Jesus’ death, the ransom sacrifice, “I’m threatened by your suicide” –it is a common and also false doctrine that Jesus is God himself, and so if he died he himself caused it. 

Live for Better Days

Testing our faith to validate its truthfulness is not only good, it’s required. He says this…perhaps around this time is when he realized his church, whatever doctrines he had, whatever false teachers he relied on, were false, and now he doesn’t know if God is there at all.

My God I need to know
I know there’s got to be a place
A heaven for the human race
Why do I need to die to go?
I need to know, I’m dyin’ to know

Here he begins to pray to his God, his belief in heaven that he is not certain of; he doesn’t have a certain idea of what the paradise is; most of the churches teach there is only a hope of heavenly life and not an earthly one.  “Dying to Know” became literal later upon his death; his spiritual darkness is killing him in every way. 

Indeed, he may have killed himself in not only his unbearable spiritual and emotional agony, wanting only an end, but also in an attempt to go to “a place, a heaven for the human race,” in imitation of what he perceived as true regarding Christ’s own actions leading to death.

In other words, he was following after Christ bearing his own torture stake.(Matthew 16:24)

“…my only chance and I ain’t gonna blow it…”

His “only chance” may have been the course of his entire life as he perceived it.  There is such an urgency here that remains unexplained;

It’s burning a hole inside of me
Answers to questions I seek
Burning a hole inside
Keepin’ the flame alive

I will burn this flame until I know
The name I need to know
I will burn this flame until I know
The name I need to know

Again we come “full circle”(also the name of the album after his death); his faith is a flame keeping him alive, and, like “Nothing” the answers he needs are either vital or fatal.  Still I think, as related earlier, of the name upon Christ’s thigh.  But there is also the divine name of God that the clergy hid and replaced in their Bibles for centuries.  What is the name?  He never seemed to have found it.

~~~~

Jason’s Good Book – Anchor Cut

“Well good book says, ‘Love should be the best thing you can feel’
So you gotta stand by your faith exactly what they say is real
So you push this back in your mind ’cause the thought was too intense
That don’t make sense…”

The Bible was where he placed a great deal of his hope in the end, and it seemed he cared more about the quality of love than any other.  Love is, of course, the primary quality of God, what the greatest commandments of the entire Law hang on, and the strongest bond of union in the creation.  He knew God’s dominant quality of love as the strongest nature in man as well.  Because of this he had a loyalty to his church, and relied on them to a precise and exact measure on the reality behind every teaching they shaped him with.  Realizing something was wrong with these; perhaps hellfire, or the Trinity, or other false doctrines, he was left drifting and without understanding.  

Noble hearts, Integrity keepers, and we who suffer…

Thirsk was honest hearted and noble and also desperate and in pain.  He went everywhere for answers.  He sought out other religions and teachers, his own parents who gave him “this dark life.”  He sees keenly the value and sanctity of human life, not just his own but his friends and all mankind.  This is made very evident in the song “Killing Time” off the album “About Time”, the last one before his suicide.  Although his life is darkening, he does not cast away all hope.  He seems unaware of any barriers he himself may have erected that may prevent him from finding answers.  His alcohol or drug abuse, being one of them.

“Crime, it was the price to pay.
I saw the whole world as guilty as I – it took the danger away.”

Involved with his bandmates, they resisted not just corrupt government and religion, but also ways that do end up belonging to truths, the Bible, and Jehovah and his Son.  “Waste of Time” displays this.

~~~

Diametrics: Christ against the Devil

I bring to mind the Sermon on the Mount once more to show the polarity and the conflict being played out through history and in our own time for the souls, hearts, and minds of mankind. Thirsk is one of the saddest accounts I know of.

Jesus Christ, who Thirsk wanted to know, taught:

“Keep on asking, and it will be given you; keep on seeking, and you will find; keep on knocking, and it will be opened to you; for everyone asking receives, and everyone seeking finds, and to everyone knocking, it will be opened.”

-Matthew 7:7, 8

This is a guarantee, a certainty, an axiomatic truth.  The Messiah, being called the “Leader” in Daniel and elsewhere, offers this opportunity.  If Thirsk had kept trying, kept asking, had some seed of further truth about God been planted, perhaps it would have stayed his hand long enough to decide against taking his life. 

The desperation in his voice is like nothing, literally, his song “Nothing”, I ever see occur.  He was in the punk rock scene constituting “friendship with the world,”(James 4:4)I believe he abused alcohol; these are minor wrongs compared to many, but they do have an influence over spirituality and finding God. 

The Adversary had another thing in store for him; I am uncertain as to all his verses about “running out of time” or “this is my only chance.”  Satan’s lies had been in his heart; we find the Devil’s words as relevant to Thirsk’s life, and in contrast to Jesus’ promise in the Sermon on the Mount in a diametrically opposed manner.  

Job, his false comforters, and Thirsk

In the book of Job, Satan, or possibly one of his demons, spoke to Eliphaz the Temanite, a false comforter of that suffering predecessor, and he repeats them:

“Now a word was brought to me in secret, And a whisper of it reached my ear.  In troubling thoughts during visions of the night, When deep sleep falls upon men, A terrible trembling came upon me, Filling all my bones with dread. A spirit passed over my face; The hair of my flesh bristled.  It then stood still, But I did not recognize its appearance. A form was in front of my eyes; There was a calm, and then I heard a voice: 

‘Can a mortal man be more righteous than God? Can a man be cleaner than his own Maker?’  Look! He has no faith in his servants, And he finds fault with his angels.  How much more so with those dwelling in houses of clay, Whose foundation is in the dust, Who are crushed as easily as a moth!  They are completely crushed from morning to evening; They perish forever, and no one takes notice.  Are they not like a tent whose cord is pulled out? They die without wisdom.”

-Job 4:12-21

Satan’s insidious nature and machinations are revealed here.  He declares man as being “crushed as easily as a moth”, whose “foundation is in the dust.”  It shows a hatred and a malicious oppression against them.  In Thirsk’s case, despite Jesus promise to “Keep asking…and it will be given to you”, this came true, he was “crushed as easily as a moth” to the point of his death by his own suicide.  “Completely crushed from morning to evening”; or for a lifetime; and “they perish forever, and no one notices…they die without wisdom.”

Thirsk had seeds of Kingdom truth in his heart.  He knew some of what Jesus taught but he trusted in the clergy who distort him.  Sadly and hatefully enough, he died “without wisdom” in many ways.  He had lost all or most faith in God and the Bible, failing to find his answers:

Why do we suffer?

Where is there any hope of real security?
Is there not a final truth?

A retribution?

A reason for the atrocities and anxieties Jason was so aware of and sensitive to?

The passage in Job reveals then the outlook and personality of the enemy Thirsk faced without knowing much of it, man’s worst foe in general terms.  I believe Thirsk will be there in the resurrection, with a rather absolute certainty, but I am not a judge.  Satan wanted him to “perish forever” because he knows this is his own fate.

So we see a polarization between Jesus in Matthew 7, and the enemy Satan in the book of Job.  It is a spiritual battle.

~~~~

Death will Shepherd Them

For all of this, I loved Pennywise in my youth, and for many years after.  However, they actually carry the same rebellious, independent spirit and manner of life that Satan promotes and that characterizes him as the “ruler of the authority of the air.”(Ephesians 2:2) The sound of punk rock is on the radio, on your stereo, it fills your ears and your mind.  It is loud and violent and defiant. In many songs such as “Waste of Time” and “My Own Way” this independent and prideful spirit is expressed. 

It is not an ugly arrogance or a completely bad heart; it’s just a stirring of constant revolt, not just against the churches and governments and systems influenced by the Devil, but against the possibility of truth, in their aggressive music and carefree way, that can lead to the Bible’s true teachings, “the good book” Thirsk depended on for security and peace mentally and emotionally.

So although unwittingly, they serve some fringe ends of the Devil whose machinations also resulted in their own brother’s death.

In this way I come to tears recalling the Scripture found in Psalm 49:14, where God says:

“Death will shepherd them.”

It may not be clear and forceful, but Thirsk’s death, in a way, shepherded me.  I believe this is mostly by grief over his poems and loss, and the desire to see him and talk to him in the new world to come.  Perhaps in some unknown design he died for someone like me, or someone else to see “something better” than such a fate as his own, realizing, in my own case, (unlike Thirsk) “not too late,” that the truth can be found and does exist…and all the answers, the name he needed to know, I myself found.(Isaiah 52:7)

~~~

Loss: “Killing Time”

Jason’s great grief over our world, his spiritual decay, and the domination of Satan’s influence that he witnessed is found in the song “Killing Time” on the last album they made with him as a bandmate.  It reads:

Killing Time:

On my tv, violent actions race across my screen
A world of hate staring at the rise in murder rate
I can’t believe what we’ve become
Is all hope lost to everyone?

A battered wife waits for us to hear
Her screams tonight
A child of war wonders what we’re all fighting for
I look and think how can this be?

What causes all our suffering?
Eyes wide open we can’t see
I can’t understand it’s out of hand
To me we’re all just killing time

Killing time
Killing time, we’re running our lives
Religious right, is buying up guns for
A hell of a fight

Another victim lies in pain
A serial killer waits for fame
Have we all gone insane?
I can’t understand it’s out of hand

To me we’re all just killing time
Killing time
I can’t believe There’s got to be
Some way to break through

I think that I – will have to try, I’ll lose my mind
We’re all killing time

Why? Why? Why?

I found a saying that goes “Can you really “kill time” without injuring eternity?”

It is Satan’s goal to do so.  He has, already, ultimately failed.  But the touchstone of what he did and his agents will remain forever in case the issue over God’s sovereignty ever rises again.

The superlative is telling me that help is on the way…

A noteworthy point of this song is at the end, where Jim sings the words: “Why? Why? Why?”

The Bible does not engage in a strict numerology after something Kabbalistic or occultic or something.  But certain numbers do have symbolic meanings sometimes.  When something is expressed “three times”, it denotes a supreme, even a divine, emphasis.  TwoeExamples of this are when the Cherubim’s express God as being “Holy, Holy, Holy.”(Isaiah 6:3) Another is the number “666”(Revelation 13:18)found in the concluding Bible book, Revelation.  So when Thirsk and the band express in their song the word “Why?” three times towards the darkness and evils all over the world, it is in a Biblical sense an expression of supreme despair and grief, not just a desire but a need for knowledge. 

Free from the Chains

“If you remain in my word, you are really my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” -John 8:31,32

“…if the Son sets you free, you will be truly free.” -John 8:36

~~~~~

Thirsk was the most sensitive to spirituality of anyone in the band, and most people I meet.  Whereas Jim sings in the song “Slowdown” almost casually: 

I respond to this, with the thought: Thirsk was “feeling” what is real, far too much.

~~~~

Brotherhood and Kinship

The poet John Keats died around two centuries before Jason Thirsk from tuberculosis which also killed his younger brother at a young age.  His father and then his mother died in his youth.  He was a prodigy in the world of poets in the span of human history, he died at 26, almost the same age as Thirsk.  Keats fell in love with a woman before the tuberculosis set in; his last days were spent in rage, grief, and frenzy as he slowly drowned to death in his lungs. 

Knowing his death was imminent, as Thirsk seemed to in some strangely premonitory way, he lashed out even at his bride-to-be, because not only was he dying he didn’t want to lose her as well as his family before.  He succumbed to the tuberculosis with a single close friend at his side.  His fiancee lived a quiet and sorrowful life into older age and found another man years after Keats.

Peace in a coming new world

Keats last hours were the same “Fury and the mire of human veins” W.B. Yeats wrote about in “Byzantium.”  The same “Fury and mire of human veins” as the punk rock movement, especially Thirsk’s life and Pennywise.  The same “fury and mire of human veins” is found in the suffering of the predecessor Job in the Bible.

Keat’s epitaph reads, by his own wishes before he died:

“Here lies one

Whose name was writ in water.”

Keat’s tombstone is solemn, a reminder of our transience, both in God’s saying that he: “remembers we are dust”(Psalm 103:14) in a tender and forgiving way, a reminder of his mercy towards us, and also in Satan’s challenging hate in saying: “they perish forever, and no one notices.” (Job 4:20)

His despair was much like Thirsk’s; an utter hopelessness, as though his life had had no meaning and he be forgotten.  A tracing in the water swept away by the stream of time.

~~~~

Those in God’s Memory, Stay…

Thirsk’s memory, and Keat’s, remains with Jehovah’s judicial right.  I believe they will both be in Paradise.  As for among the present system, Keats is considered one of the greatest poets to ever live, and one of my personal favorites, and Thirsk…the albums he helped write are still in the hearts of millions, and though they were more severe in bad ways than Keats ever was due to the nature of the time they lived in, Pennywise spread a bond of brotherhood that was also benevolent in nature.

~~~

In the song Every Single Day, Jim sings a sort of Epicurean flavored philosophy:

“Who cares what happened

Long ago

I don’t want to know.”

But we should care, as the “fury and the mire of human veins” spans not just Yeats or Keats’ day, or the punk rock era, but the desperate spiritual warfare it relates to spanning across time.  It was a reality for the men of former times all the way back to human origin, long before music developed into something like Pennywise.  We can learn from those men, in the spirit of “Bro Hymn” we can love them, and furthermore, we can learn, from the things “Long ago,” about the One whose image all of us are made in. 

Jehovah willing, I will see you in the place you needed to be, Jason.

~~~~~

Essay written by

-J.D. Sandberg

***

Citations and References