The Song that Defines My Life
Every once in a while, you turn a corner in your everyday life and suddenly come face to face with some image, event or truth that shakes you to your core. That happened to me yesterday in the midst of my early morning routine, browsing the news online and filing the best bits away in my mental file cabinets – book-marking the pieces most relevant to my front-burner research and writing projects. I followed a link to a link, and on a whim clicked on a YouTube clip of what shockingly turned out to be the theme-song of my life: a song I had only heard snatches of over the years when turning radio dials and passing through hotel lobbies – hearing the pieces but never really listening.
But now, encountering it in its full length and power for the first time at the age of sixty-five, I watched or rather absorbed this song in swelling astonishment as a series of emotional waves washed over me, triggered by jolts of self-revelation. It was a clip from a stage performance of The Man From La Mancha, featuring a stunningly stirring and poignant baritone rendition of “The Impossible Dream” by Brian Stokes Mitchell. It literally made me cry, and in masculine reaction to those tears, to internally cringe in embarrassment and then sheepish self-deprecating amusement that the musical synthesis of my whole life is the plot of Don Quixote. 🙂
Strangely, my mind translated this realization to me through the lyrics of another song (made famous by Roberta Flack) – “and there he was, this young boy, a stranger to my eyes, strumming my pain with his fingers, telling my life with his words, killing me softly with his song.” Except that mature-man Mitchell’s song was “affirming me strongly” instead.
I confess to becoming increasingly emotional with age and in response to the collapse of the Christian civilization my entire post-salvation life has been dedicated to restoring and preserving. I’m frequently awash in sadness and melancholy these days as all my layers of macho emotion-shielding armor get eaten away by the acidic reality of our time and I am left with just my love of Jesus Christ and my family and friends to keep me focused on the impossible task of fighting “the unbeatable foe.” (Reassured in Christ that we do win in the end – but only after ruination.)
Years ago, in the early days of my greatest persecutions by the masters of personal destruction, a feature writer for Boston.com offered to tell my story and I let him do it. All in all it was a better piece than most – but I blasted him back ferociously because intertwined with some favorable observations and insights was a repetition of the talking points of my enemies, whose narrative about my work against the LGBT agenda in Africa would soon be amplified in the form of a monstrous life-crushing federal lawsuit against me (my fifth major besiegement by lawfare). The emplacement of those malicious contentions in this otherwise honest and benign feature article bolstered their credibility to my harm.
Looking back now, though, I recognize that he painted me as a Quixotic figure, even in the rather noble photo he ran with it, and that his personal conclusion that I had traded addiction to drugs and alcohol for “addiction” to political activism perhaps had some merit. I would tweak it to say that God assigned me to this quest.
“To dream the impossible dream, To fight the unbeatable foe, To bear with unbearable sorrow, To run where the brave dare not go. To right the unrightable wrong, To love pure and chaste from afar, To try when your arms are too weary, To reach the unreachable star.
“This is my quest, To follow that star No matter how hopeless, No matter how far. To fight for the right Without question or pause, To be willing to march Into hell for a heavenly cause. And I know if I’ll only be true To this glorious quest That my heart will be peaceful and calm When I’m laid to my rest. And the world will be better for this, That one man scorned and covered with scars Still strove with his last ounce of courage. To fight the unbeatable foe. To reach the unreachable star.”
Aside from the “pure and chaste from afar” stanza these lyrics pretty much define my Christian life. My impossible dream has been the cultural restoration of the biblical values whose destruction is the relentless obsession of an unbeatable foe whom, because of our collective sin, God has granted authority to (briefly) rule the earth before He returns to deliver us from them.
I have borne and still bear “unbearable” sorrow for the state of our world and the enslavement of its people. I have not shrunk from battles others fear to fight. I have marched into Hell for the heavenly cause, and I do know that this pleases God. I truly am a man scorned and covered with scars – but not yet reduced to my “last ounce of courage” – I assume because my life and quest are not yet done.
I had dropped out of high school before Don Quixote was assigned reading, and until this very day knew the story only indirectly from pop-cultural references. But investigating it now reveals further parallels to my life. His passion for romantic adventure derived from reading books, and I too was a compulsively voracious boyhood reader of adventure stories (my first addiction). Mental illness characterized his pre-quest home-life, as did mine (my father finally being permanently institutionalized when I was a teen). His venture into the world as a “knight errant” was akin to my own adventuring abroad by thumb from early adolescence, first in my home region then through all the continental states as a homeless alcoholic drifter sleeping rough.
Maybe, in funhouse-mirror irony, a kind-of inverted narcissism, I am the only one who perceives me in this way. Except that, most painfully, Don Quixote’s life-long existence as a figure of ridicule parallels my own experience on the world stage: from continual belittlement by leftist narrative-spinners for over thirty years, to being characterized as a “crackpot bigot” in the official ruling of a federal judge, to being targeted for special mockery on national television by both John Oliver and Jon Stewart – agreeing to appear with the latter on The Daily Show for a segment specifically about me (which I did purposefully to give the left a non-violent way to vent hostility toward me as an alternative to the literal assassination I believed might occur due to the level of hatred I then faced – a strategic “tilting at windmills”).
Writing this article is itself a (minor) act of running “where the brave dare not go” (all glory to God for any good thing in me). I know I am making myself vulnerable to my enemies by these admissions – and will again be slashed with vitriolic sarcasm as deeply as they can drive the blades. But like Mitchell in his sublime performance explaining the Impossible Dream to the skeptical prostitute Dulcinea del Toboso, I am impervious to their contempt because my vision is filled with the true “unreachable star” – the Star of Bethlehem – which leads every sincere seeker to the reachable, touchable Savior of Mankind, the bright Morning Star of Revelation 22:16, who Himself endured scars and mockery for us from a half-blind world that sees both our faith, and Christian chivalry itself, as foolishness.
Jesus Christ, Yeshua Hamashiach, transforms the Impossible Dream into our Certain Salvation, and as a knight bearing His mark on my shield, I will never be ashamed of His Gospel nor fear the scorn of His enemies.
–From Herb Eichen