I STILL HAVE FAITH IN YOU

 

This is the title of the opening track of the album Abba Voyage.  Abba Voyage is a collection of ten songs from a 70s band, that reunited a few years back and produced a fresh album: their first in over forty years!  Because these are new songs, none of them turn up in any Greatest Hits collections. None of them are featured in the popular musical Mama Mia.  The music feels more seasoned than their earlier body of work.

I Still Have Faith in You is about the hard journey of relationships, one of the best Abba songs ever, but more pensive than before.  Another song on the same album is about the way I tense up when you yell at me. Not exactly the stuff of American Bandstand.

I was supposed to see the Abba Voyage concert last summer.  Via modern technological miracle, the original band appears holographically and in Dolby sound.  Abba Voyage plays nightly in a special theater in East London.  The show was recommended to me personally by a leading West End talent in musical theater, who blew me away in Les Mis a few years back.  I ran into him last year briefly – on an elevator, God bless him!  Since I was headed to London for work, I decided in a split second to ask him what he felt was the current best show in town. I expected something playing in the West End, but he said Abba Voyage.

So, I bought a ticket.  However, due to illness, I flew home early and missed it.  I will try again this fall.

Then on the day after New Years 2025, I listened to the Abba Voyage album on a flight to Hong Kong.  I was just mesmerized by the power of the ballad I Still Have Faith in You.  It is written with reference to a romantic relationship that has survived ups and downs. If you have forty plus years with someone, the song will evoke the joy of having hung in there despite it all.

Quite a lot of us have had multiple marriages or key relationships across our decades.  I met the one I love just 16 years ago (this month).  By the time I am 87, we will have made 40 years, but that is yet a ways off.

So, as I listened, the lyrics did not speak to me in terms of a multi-decade romance.  They carried me a different direction.  The relationship that the song lifted up for me was my relationship with Jesus.  Sixty years ago, in Sunday school a couple songs burrowed deep into my consciousness. One is Jesus Loves Me. More to the point was a lesser-known little ditty entitled My Best Friend is Jesus.

Growing up in an evangelical church, we talked (and sang) a lot about our relationship with Jesus.  My relationship with Jesus catapulted forward with my discovery of the Beatitudes and their game-changing social ethics back when I was 11.  Then, off to university and seminary where I bumped into Albert Schweitzer and his search for the historical Jesus, then Marcus Borg, as he narrated the re-discovery of Jesus, after the deconstruction of childhood faith.

Somewhere in the intervening years, the evangelicals lost me – and, I fear, lost Jesus in many cases as they went down the rabbit hole of reactionary politics.

But Jesus is still my friend: the guy truly wears well with time, and with age.

Funny that his disciples were mostly twenty-somethings.  Young adults!  Christianity was a young people’s movement in its early days.

I am rapidly becoming an old man.  And Jesus is no spring chicken himself these days, twenty centuries after his birth, and after all the baggage that has been assigned to him, and stripped from him… across that time.

He and I are still hanging on to one another, with a relationship so different than the giddy thing that I recall from my preteen years.   Our friendship is quieter now, and our understanding of one another, far deeper.  We have moved beyond cartoons to complexity. You could say we grew up, together.

And I believe each of us can fairly say to the other: I Still Have Faith in You.

I invite you to take a coffee break at some point today, and pull up YouTube on your phone, and play I Still Have Faith in You.  I am curious what it will evoke for you.