Martyr - Story Behind The Song
You lay here a martyr
In one they’ll confide
What’s holy and sacred
I can decide
Your blessid communion
Get drunk off of wine
Another disciple
Holy and high
Amen, repent, sacred and numb
Amen, repent, bathe me in blood
Your eulogy’s broken
Remember the tale
A heart full of scarring
A knife to prevail
I’ll hold this memento
Battered and bruised
Dull from the horror
And quenched by your wounds
And now you’re my burden
So primal and pure
Her screams break the silence
Renowned with my curse
Forgive my resentment
For it’s laid to die
With this confession
Blood soaked in lies
…
So, here is a song that is obviously about religion, but there are two concrete experiences I had that made the tone so morbid.
Before diving into those, I’d like to say that I’m not anti-religious. While I don’t practice religion, I’m not writing this to preach my stance on religion. Once again, I don’t write to solicit. I’m just here to tell the story of how “Martyr” came to be a song.
In the spring of 2015, I had just gotten back from studying abroad in Madrid, Spain. It was an incredible semester filled with insane memories and experiences that I will never forget.
While I will now look back on those times with nothing but joy, something terrible happened while I was abroad. My family was set to visit me in Greece for a weekend in late September, but during a Skype conversation with them a week before their arrival, my parents emotionally told me that the trip had to be cancelled.
My brother was diagnosed with lymphoma. Cancer of the lymph nodes. CANCER.
At first, I was nothing short of horrified, devastated, in shock. Cancer is one of the deadliest diseases in the world, so the last thing that anyone would feel is ease upon hearing that someone they love was diagnosed with it.
However, it is always important to find a silver lining in these situations:
My brother was a young guy in really good shape, so I will admit that upon reading that lymphoma is curable in most cases, I was extremely relieved. It wasn’t leukemia or pancreatic cancer. That in itself could be considered a small win in this upward battle.
After the semester, I returned home. My brother started chemo treatments. Described the symptoms being as brutal as “the worst hangover you could have times 10.”
Scary.
Luckily, he had great friends who did an incredible job in supporting him throughout the fight. They would take days off from work with him to watch movies, mope around, play video games, etc. Anything to keep my brother’s mind off the treatment.
Meanwhile, back at Saint Louis University, I had started going to church again. It’s a Jesuit University and I was hoping to find a deeper justification and sense of peace for my brother’s diagnosis.
Initially, I went three weeks in a row. It didn’t help much. We would hold an opening prayer and sing songs that seemed irrelevant. I would awkwardly go up for Eucharist with my arms creating an “x” across my torso to signify that I wasn’t baptized. I was a tourist of the Catholic Church. “May the father bless you,” the Priest would say in a distanced tone.
I remember the fourth week of going, students were filtering into the church, and I was trailing behind a pack of two girls that were talking about classes. We were stopped at an intersection, waiting for traffic to clear. There was a rugged, homeless man sitting next to the streetlight asking for spare change.
“Excuse me, ladies, do you have any spare change?”
“Uh, no. We don’t.”
The man then looked at me.
“Any spare change, sir?”
“No, I’m sorry. I only have a card on me.”
Honest answer. I actually had gotten into the habit of not carrying much or any cash in my wallet to avoid situations like this on a daily basis. All I had was a debit card, which wasn’t going anywhere. SLU is a very nice campus, but the area surrounding the school in mid-town St. Louis is snake-bitten by crime. Students are constantly told to carry little or no cash so that any robbery has limited consequences. If a student’s debit card is stolen, it can be cancelled very easily.
I do sympathize with the homeless, so I try to stop myself from making predetermined judgements about how or why they find themselves in such a grueling financial situation.
The light changed and we went on our way towards the church. Once we turned the corner, out of sight of the homeless man, I picked up a conversation that the girls in front of me were having:
“God that guy was a freaking creep. He was like the 3rd guy to ask me for money this weekend. Don’t know why he can’t get a job like a normal person.”
“Seriously though. It’s like ‘I’m a broke college student. Stop asking me for my damn cash.’”
“Yeah, he could find something better to do than harass people. Go find a homeless shelter.”
“For real.”
“I don’t want to go to mass. The wine is from the party last night is still killing me, and I have a paper to write.”
“Haha. Really? Still hungover?”
“Yeah. That’s what happens when you go to a frat party. You drink too much wine and then end up in frat boy Joe’s bed.”
“Haha. Yeah you were pretty wasted. Are you guys still texting or was it a one night thing?”
“Hopefully just a one night thing. I don’t want to return to that.”
“Well good thing we are going to church. So you can be forgiven for your sins from last night.”
“YOLO!”
I bit my tongue, and walked into St. Frances Xavier College Church - one of the most gorgeous and intimate college churches to ever have been built:
I’m not an easily offended social warrior. I’m not anyone’s posterboy of a perfect citizen. I mean, hey, I didn’t give the homeless guy any money either. I’ve made regrettable, drunk decisions at parties - as the majority of college students have.
I was pissed because once again, a lot of those who endorse religion will not live up to its standards outside the eyes of religious figures. It’s like clockwork. I’m not going to sit here and come up with the Commandment or Biblical verse that was broken by these two, but it blew my mind that they couldn’t see the irony of the moment. Criticizing the homeless guy. Shamelessly walking into a church while hungover while hoping to be forgiven for the fact that you fucked a frat boy last night while hammered.
I suddenly felt alienated walking into the church. Maybe I didn’t fit in with these people. Maybe I’m here for the wrong reasons. Maybe I need to turn elsewhere for some kind of explanation to why my brother, who could possibly lose his life, along with my family who might have to witness it, was suffering. It wasn’t fair. There was no logical reason behind it. And if these girls could walk into a church and be forgiven for their petty, insignificant sins and have their trivial prayers answered, then God isn’t who I should be turning to. I was already walking on thin ice with the whole church routine. Consider this the first crack.
I took a deep breath and walked into the church, found my friends, and sat down. I figured that it wouldn’t be worth turning around because I had already made the long walk to the church from my apartment, which was on the other side of campus. I also didn’t want my friends worrying about me when I didn’t show up. As previously noted - St. Louis is a city plagued by violent crime. If I didn’t show up, my friends would have valid reasoning to believe that I was assaulted.
I sat down in the pew, greeted my friends and laid my head back. I took a few deep breaths trying to meditate in the gothic architecture of the church. Tall columns that transform into arches stretching across the ceiling 50 feet above. I looked around and tried to take it all in. The students, the peaceful atmosphere, observed the genuine greetings from one another that brought churchgoers together. I finally felt relaxed.
By Farragutful - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69774458
Upon further observation of the surrounding area, that sense of peace came to a screeching halt.
The two women that I trailed on the way to church were sitting in the pew right in front of us.
Sense of peace, gone. Blood pressure, raised.
My breaking point of attending church came about 5 minutes after this observation. Mass always started with a student led prayer. That week was a week at SLU in which we were specifically celebrating inclusion of different backgrounds and cultures. We celebrated different viewpoints and opinions. We celebrated the challenging of predetermined assumptions and thanked God that we lived and studied in an atmosphere where this was encouraged. In following this theme, opening prayer just happened to be dedicated to…
The homeless.
I got a few harsh looks from my neighbors in the surrounding pews from defeatedly and quietly laughing at the irony of the situation.
The prayer started and halfway through, I could not stop myself from looking down the pew to the two girls whom I was trailing on my way to the church. There they were. Heads bowed, Hands folded. Rehearsed concerned expressions on their faces, like a five year old child claiming that he or she is trying “reeeaalllyyy reeaallly hard.”
I couldn’t take it.
I had to get out.
My brother is dying. This doesn’t help.
Once the prayer was done, I mouthed to my friends that I wasn’t feeling well and that I had to leave.
I went home back into my apartment, immediately laid in bed and turned on Netflix. I needed a distraction. Homework could wait til tomorrow morning before my classes.
Consider this strike two.
The final straw was pulled when told my friends the truth about why I left the mass. It happened the next Friday as we were in the apartment pregaming (drinking beforehand) for a house party that was happening off campus. There were probably seven of us in the apartment. There was a mix of people playing drinking games and those who were taking a break from the games, and talking about weekend plans, besides - you know - getting drunk.
“...then I’m going to mass on Sunday after I’m done with the group project at the business school. Is anyone else going?”
“Yeah I’m going.”
“Sweet. We can meet up and walk together. Kirk, are you going?”
“Uh, probably not.”
“Really? Why not?”
I went on to explain what had transpired the previous Sunday. The hungover girls. The homeless guy. The opening prayer.
No, I wasn’t sick. I was pissed that the two girls went to church as a formality to justify that they were good people. They either weren’t good people or didn’t have the minimal self-awareness skills to fake that they were. They were making a mockery of organized religion. They are the reason that organized religion is becoming less popular. They confirmed that good people aren’t listened to, and that uncaring, non-generous people are catered to because they make the minimal effort of showing up every week. It’s a hoax. They don’t have the right to represent the definition of “good hearted.” To find the peace of mind and answers that I’m looking for. If that’s what religion has come to, then it’s not for me. I’ll find define my own standards of “good hearted.” Then I’ll judge them by telling them that they can burn in hell based on my standards. Not the formality of the church’s. Fuck the church. If I’m sent to hell for trying to help myself cope with obstacles in my own way, then so be it. The standards are nonsensical and have become the laughing stock of anyone with a sense of logic. And if God can’t see that, then fuck Him too.
Silence.
I took a deep breath. The majority of my friends were Catholic and I felt terrible about slandering their religion based on a bad experience I had. It just happened to strike an extremely dark, personal chord with me.
“Sorry guys, I didn’t mean to bash Catholicism or The Church.”
A moment passed and then my friend, John, looked up.
“You know Kirk, a lot of people see prayer as a powerful force.”
“What do you mean?”
“Prayer is powerful. Maybe it's more helpful to pray for someone like the homeless guy rather than give him money if he uses it to fulfill his vices.”
“So you’re saying that prayer is more powerful than something tangible?”
“Not necessarily, but maybe having faith is the most powerful force. In a spiritual way. It’s hard to separate spiritual and tangible things.”
“So the homeless guy would be better off being prayed for rather than me giving him five bucks to go buy a meal from McDonald’s?”
“Yes. In a spiritual sense.”
Sense of peace, gone. Blood pressure, raised, again.
Not being pleased by this answer, I bit my tongue. I understood that my friend had good intentions and just wanted me to understand a spiritual perspective - a perspective that we later talked about in terms of how it helped with major obstacles in his life. It is an extremely important perspective that has grown on me since then and has helped me see through the perspective of religious faith. However, unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied by the justification of his answer at the time.
Many people in the room saw my expression and quickly changed the subject. We were trying to get into the mood for a party, after all.
Later that night, after the party, having had too many drinks and not being able to get over the conversation with my buddy, my girlfriend at the time was the victim of my venting.
“How do you compare the power of prayer to something tangible? It’s fucking bullshit! No, soldiers shouldn’t fight to defend themselves, they should just PRAY the danger away. People shouldn’t work to escape poverty, they should just PRAY for more money,”
Then came the most revealing statement of the night:
“My brother should just stop his chemo treatment and PRAY the cancer away!!!”
I fell silent. I knew why the conversation earlier in the night was eating at me, but it was the first time I had expressed it.
The dark, personal chord had exposed itself.
Thinking about the girls getting fucked up on wine. Getting hammered and sleeping with guys every weekend. Being expected to be forgiven. Holding others to standards that they don’t uphold themselves.
In biblical times, I feel like God would kill them as martyrs to make an example of how not to follow Christianity.
Imagine being Abraham and killing Isaac. Killing your own son based on blind faith and your own morals.
In the words of Maynard James Keenan, “I should play God and shoot you myself.”
This would make an interesting concept for a song.
