My mission president was one of those rare ones who refused to straight up ban genres of music, trusting us to use our own judgment to determine whether a song was “conducive to the spirit” or not. This actually worked out better than one might expect, and there were a surprisingly high number of missionaries who voluntarily, of their own volition, stopped listening to their favorite pop music on their downtime, since doing so demonstrably put them in a better headspace before proselyting. (If nothing else, it gave us missionaries one less thing to feel debilitating guilt and resentment over).

That’s not to say we didn’t still push the limits sometimes. Case in point, one of my companions bought Ben Harper’s Diamonds on the Inside when it came out: the liner notes included pics of Harper on his knees in prayer, did it not?^[1]Obviously ignoring the naked woman’s backside on the album cover And Afro-Pop pastiches like “Blessed to be a Witness” and “Picture of Jesus” were already faith-promoting missionary anthems in and of themselves, were they not? To this day, I can’t hear that album without thinking of that companion chilling on P-Days.^[2]As well as of a girl I once made out with in Salt Lake, but that’s a completely different story.

Yet the track that made its way onto my Sunday Morning playlist was neither of the above, but “Amen Omen.”

As with so many other songs we’ve examined at this point, this is a break-up song: “Amen Omen, will I see your face again,” “OId friends become old strangers,” “Silence is the loudest/Parting word you never say,” and so on and so forth. What sets this song apart from the others, then, is it’s not just about the loss of lovers,^[3]I guess the fact that this album reminds me of a girl I made out with but whom I haven’t seen in 12 years is relevant after all. but of friends. Indeed, in many ways, surveying all the friendships we’ve lost over our lifetimes is even harder to contemplate than all of our lost chances at romance.

Seriously, if you had asked me in, say, 2007, when I graduated college, who my closest friends would still be 10 or 15 years down the line, I don’t think I would’ve made a single correct guess. People who made little to no impression on me at the time I’ve somehow stayed in regular contact with; while others whom I thought I shared a close and endearing friendship with have simply drifted away. And the hardest part about all these losses was that it wasn’t anyone’s fault–there was never any sort of falling out or what not–it’s just that our lives had simply moved in different directions. It’s one of the hardest lessons to learn as an adult, that often friendships end for no good reason. (It’s almost enough to make one want to believe in the Hereafter, just to feel some inkling of hope that somewhere in the distant eternities, all those lost connections can at last be recovered and redeemed.) “Amen Omen” expresses that realization.

And just like all those other break-up songs, “Amen Omen” can also double as a song about one’s relationship with the Almighty. That is, it’s not just separation from a friend or a lover that the song expresses, but from the divine. That opening line of “What started as a whisper/slowly turned into a scream”^[4]malleable enough to have been used in a freakin’ insurance commercial just nails that familiar feeling of depression sliding into agony that we are all too familiar with on Sunday mornings, when we similarly reflect on not only all our lost friendships and failed relationships, but our infinite estrangement from our Heavenly Father.

And it doesn’t matter how firmly you believe in the reality of the Atonement or feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, you must first feel the magnitude of our separation–from God, from each other^[5]which may very well be the same thing, for “when ye are in the service of your fire being, ye are only in the service of your God,” after all–before you can fully appreciate the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.

Redemption was likewise on the mind of reggae legend Bob Marley when he cut the demo for “Redemption Song” near the end of his life.

Speaking of songs used and abused by missionaries: I served in the Caribbean, so we all listened to Bob Marley simply as a matter of course. And why wouldn’t we? Not only was it just part of the cultural air we breathed, but “Iron Lion Zion” and “Exodus” were basically gospel songs already (even more so than many of our actual gospel songs, frankly). “Redemption Song’s” own line of “Forward in this generation/Triumphantly” easily doubled as a mission anthem–all while we pretended that “How long shall they kill our prophets/while we stand aside and look” referred to Joseph Smith.^[6]This very site one did a tongue-in-cheek catalogue of how easily a Bob Marley soundtrack could be deployed in a Joseph Smith biopic. Besides, we were all overwhelmingly college-age middle-class white dudes; blaring Legend from our apartments was practically de rigueur anyways.

But as with so many overplayed songs, “Redemption Song” is only a cliché if you’re not paying attention. That opening line of “Old pirates yes they rob I/sold I to the merchant ship,” for example, is a clear allusion to the transatlantic slave trade that brought Marley’s ancestors to Jamaica in the first place–the aftermath of which great evil we are still dealing with today (including within our own church, as the recent fracas with Brad Wilcox and the haunting spectre of 1978 reminds us). That was definitely a context that the white missionaries, at least, were not grappling with near enough when we played Legend on P-Days.

On an even more personal note, Marley wrote “Redemption Song” while he was in the terminal stages of cancer. I bring this up because my own mother passed away of cancer literally two days after I returned home from my mission–an event that I have alluded to at least twice before, and that I will be wrestling with in a forthcoming project. For the moment, I’ll note that when she was on her death-bed, a group of young women who grew up in our previous ward sent my Mom a packet of letters, to express their appreciation for her example. It arrived 2 days after her passing. My Mom had also recently talked on the phone with an estranged brother for the first time in 6 years. He promised to fly out in a couple months to visit her. He had to move up his ticket a few weeks to instead be a pall-bearer at her funeral.

None of these people committed any great or terrible sins. Their timing was simply off.

Suffice to say for now, that ever since my Mom’s passing, both “Redemption Song” and “Amen Omen” have taken on a very different resonance for me—especially when I have found myself in a brooding Sunday morning mood, when I reflect on everyone we’ve lost, and how there is always less time to reconnect than we think…