Does It Rise?

Erin Doom

Sep 25

10 min read

Rich Mullins and the Ascetic Art of Listening

Commemoration of the Venerable Mother Euphrosyne of Alexandria

Commemoration of the Holy Martyr Paphnutius and 546 Companions in Egypt

Anno Domini 2026, September 25

Three voices behind the Listening Room: Rich Mullins, Gregory Wolfe, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

I FOUND the question that now governs the Listening Room in a book I had pulled from my shelves: Does it rise?

The essay is called “Convergences.” Gregory Wolfe had written it during the early years of Image, when a journal devoted to art and faith still had to defend the possibility that those two words belonged together. Wolfe described the unexpected resonances that appeared when poems, stories, paintings, memoirs, and criticism were allowed to stand beside one another. The pieces had not been commissioned to support a common argument, yet when the editors stepped back, patterns emerged. One work illuminated another. Separate acts of attention began to sound like voices finding their places in a composition.

Wolfe’s editorial question was wonderfully simple: Does it rise?

I had carried that question into Eighth Day Institute's first Inklings Festival without remembering how deeply it had lodged in me. In the festival notebook, I joined Wolfe’s language of convergence to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s claim that truth is symphonic and to Tolkien’s account of creation as a Great Music made beneath the theme of Ilúvatar.

Eighth Day Books appeared to contain an eccentric company of books. The festival gathered an equally eccentric company of lectures, stories, pipes, pints, poems, and conversations. But eccentricity was not necessarily disorder. Distinct things could come into harmony without ceasing to be distinct—but only if they gave their allegiance to a truth beyond themselves.

Years later, I have returned to Wolfe’s question while trying to name the purpose of the Podvig Listening Room. What I have come to is that it is not simply a place where I recommend music I enjoy. It is not an attempt to identify artists who can safely be admitted into a Christian household. Nor is it a machine for converting every song into a sermon illustration.

The Listening Room begins with attention. It asks what a song loves, what it fears, what it remembers, and what kind of person it invites the listener to become.

Then it asks: Does it rise?

The Question Before the Label

Christian approaches to popular music often begin with classification. Is the artist Christian? Is the lyric clean? Does the song mention Jesus? Can it be used in worship? Those questions may sometimes matter, but none of them can tell us whether we are in the presence of art that tells the truth.

A song can use Christian language while remaining shallow, manipulative, or false. It can repeat a timeless truth so cheaply that the truth becomes a cliché we are able to sing without allowing it to judge us. Another song may contain no explicitly religious vocabulary and yet attend with painful honesty to mortality, loneliness, fidelity, wonder, or the desire to be known. The first may bear the correct label while remaining spiritually weightless. The second may stand at the threshold of prayer without knowing how to name the One toward whom it has turned.

“Does it rise?” is therefore not a way of asking whether art floats above ordinary life into a vaguely spiritual atmosphere. Wolfe’s formulation is more incarnational than that. A work rises when it reveals that the natural world borders upon the supernatural. The ordinary is not discarded; it becomes transparent to depths it cannot contain.

A kitchen table may disclose communion. A broken promise may reveal the terrible dignity of fidelity. A road may become pilgrimage. The memory of a friend may open into the communion of saints. Death may cease to be merely an ending and become a question asked of resurrection.

The movement is not away from the world but more deeply into it. True art does not rescue us from reality. It returns reality to us with its mystery restored.

Attention Before Appropriation

Simone Weil helps us name the discipline the Listening Room requires. She understood attention as a form of self-emptying. To attend is to suspend the impatient demand that a thing become useful to us. It is to wait long enough for another person, a poem, a problem, or a sorrow to disclose what is actually there.

That discipline matters because religious interpretation can become a form of conquest. We can seize a song, attach a theological meaning to it, and congratulate ourselves for having redeemed it. But if the interpretation bears little relation to the work itself, we have not listened. We have merely used the song as raw material for something we already wanted to say.

Attention refuses that violence. It does not ask first, “How can I make this Christian?” It asks, “What is this song actually doing? What world does it reveal? Where is it honest? Where does it lie? What does it awaken in me, and where does that awakening lead?”

This makes listening an ascetic practice. The listener must restrain the desire to classify too quickly, praise too easily, or condemn without understanding. Attention places a boundary around interpretation so that the song is permitted to remain other than the listener.

But attention is not passivity, and it is not relativism. Listening generously does not require surrendering judgment. It makes judgment more truthful because it delays judgment until we have actually encountered what we mean to judge.

Wolfe supplies the editorial question: Does it rise?

Weil supplies the discipline required to answer it: Attend.

A Song That Rises

Rich Mullins’s “Elijah” provides a nearly perfect entrance into this way of listening. The song is biblical without becoming a Bible lesson. It is funny without treating death as a joke. It is rowdy, affectionate, mortal, and strangely peaceful. Elijah’s chariot of fire enters the imagination of a man who knows that he will die and hopes that, when the time comes, he will be taken into a life more substantial than the one he leaves behind.

Mullins does not sing about death in order to make pleasure urgent. He makes love and obedience urgent. His remembrance of death strips away postponement, but resurrection keeps that remembrance from collapsing into despair. What must be done should be done now. What must be said should be said now. The people whose burdens we can help carry should not have to wait for a more convenient version of us.

The song rises because it does not remain enclosed within mortality, yet it does not evade mortality either. It passes through the fact of death toward the hope of resurrection.

Near the end, Mullins imagines looking back upon the stars as “candlelight in Central Park.” The image gathers more than it explains. It may evoke a city mourning John Lennon—a popular musician remembered through a field of human lights. It places Mullins’s biblical imagination beside the memory of another songwriter whose music gave language to longing for millions of listeners.

The song neither baptizes Lennon nor dismisses him. It permits different lights to appear within the same field of vision. Elijah’s fiery ascent, the candles of mourners, the stars above them, and Mullins’s own anticipated death begin to resonate. The sacred and the rowdy, Scripture and popular culture, mortality and humor occupy one song without being flattened into equivalence.

That is convergence.

It is not the claim that all roads lead to the same place. It is the discovery that wherever something is genuinely true, good, or beautiful, it has already begun to move beyond isolation. It rises toward other truths because truth is finally one—not monotonous, but symphonic; not manufactured by the critic, but given in the Logos through whom all things were made.

Music is not saving Mullins in “Elijah.” Music is drawing him toward salvation’s horizon.

Hearing Salvation Approach

Art is not salvation, but at its best it lets us hear salvation approaching.

That distinction matters. A song can awaken longing, train attention, give suffering language, and permit the coming world to cast an echo into this one. It can keep someone alive through the night. It can expose the fraudulence of a life built upon money, movement, appetite, or reputation. It can even bring a listener to the threshold of prayer.

But it cannot cross the Jordan for us.

The danger is not that we will love music too much. The deeper danger is that we will ask music to complete a work it can only begin. Longing is not yet communion. Expression is not yet transformation. Recognition is not yet repentance. The song may reveal our captivity without freeing us from it.

Still, revelation matters. A person cannot repent of a lie he has never recognized. He cannot seek the home whose absence he has never felt. Art may not carry us across the river, but it may help us recognize the music coming from the other shore.

This is why the Listening Room belongs within Podvig. Voluntary struggle requires more than instruction. We do not become faithful merely by accumulating correct ideas. We must learn to notice what we love, how our desires have been trained, which stories possess our imagination, and what our habits are allowing to sink into us.

Music often reaches those hidden places before an argument does. A melody enters memory. A line returns unbidden. A rhythm teaches the body what the mind has not yet learned to say. Repeated listening can reinforce a passion, but it can also expose one. It can make us restless for the wrong things or awaken a homesickness for the Kingdom.

The question is never merely whether a song moves us. The question is where it moves us. Does it leave us more enclosed within ourselves or more capable of receiving reality? Does it intensify appetite or teach desire where to go? Does it turn suffering into spectacle or help us bear it truthfully? Does it make other people disposable supporting characters in the drama of the self or restore their weight and mystery?

Does it rise?

Convergence Is Not Confusion

That question also supplies a necessary limit: not everything rises. Some art falsifies suffering. Some flatters resentment. Some treats desire as self-justifying and freedom as the absence of form. Some music makes the self feel immense while shrinking the world around it. Technical excellence does not guarantee truth, and emotional intensity is not the same as spiritual depth.

Nor does every fragment of beauty prove that the whole work is good. A song may perceive one truth and evade another. It may name the wound accurately while prescribing poison as the cure. The task of listening is not to issue a total verdict upon an artist’s soul. It is to discern what within the work opens toward reality and what closes against it.

Convergence therefore cannot mean confusion. The Christian confession is not that every human longing arrives safely at God if it is sincere enough. It is that every genuine truth finds its coherence in Christ the Logos. He does not erase partial truths; He judges, purifies, and fulfills them. What rises converges because it approaches Him, whether or not the artist can yet name the source of the light.

This keeps the Listening Room from becoming either a culture-war checkpoint or an exercise in aesthetic sentimentality. It need not fear every voice outside the Christian enclosure, and it need not pretend that every voice is equally trustworthy. It can become, in Wolfe’s phrase, a conscientious objector in the culture wars: attentive rather than reactionary, discerning rather than suspicious, hospitable without abandoning the truth that makes hospitality possible.

The Work of the Listener

The Listening Room is concerned not only with music but with the formation of the listener. To listen well is to practice receptivity without surrendering discernment. It is to allow another voice to carry some of the weight without asking that voice to become a savior. It is to notice resonance without manufacturing agreement. It is to remain open to surprise while remembering that surprise itself is not a criterion of truth.

This kind of listening requires podvig. Attention wanders. Appetite demands novelty. Algorithms reward instant reaction and endless consumption. We are trained to skip before a song can unfold, to rank before we can receive, and to use art as a badge of identity. Deep listening resists those habits. It remains. It returns. It lets the work become familiar enough to challenge the first impression.

The same practice applies beyond songs. Podcasts, conversations, homilies, interviews, and stories told aloud enter the Listening Room because the room is finally defined not by music alone but by the practice of attentive hearing. The discipline is to hear another voice truthfully and test the direction of its movement:

What does it love? What kind of attention does it cultivate? What becomes visible because it exists? Who am I becoming as I receive it?

Does it rise?

Music from the Other Shore

I once used Wolfe’s insight to defend a festival that placed lectures on virtue beside pipe seminars and beer tastings. The defense was not that every activity was equally important or automatically holy. It was that truth has a power of convergence. Things that appear eccentric can be brought into harmony when they turn toward a transcendent center.

The same conviction makes the Listening Room possible. Rich Mullins belongs there not because every song answers every theological question correctly, but because his best songs rise. They remain stubbornly particular—full of roads, weather, jokes, friendships, failures, biblical images, and the prospect of death—while opening toward a world they cannot manufacture. They do not merely attach religious language to ordinary experience. They allow ordinary experience to recover its border with mystery.

“Elijah” is a Listening Room manifesto because it lets resurrection approach through a song that never stops sounding human. It does not confuse art with salvation. It allows art to become an act of attention to salvation’s horizon.

Perhaps that is the work of a worthy Listening Room: to gather disparate voices without flattening them, to resist both suspicion and gullibility, and to listen for the moment when a fragment of created beauty begins to turn toward its source.

The final question is simple enough to carry into any song and demanding enough to govern a lifetime of listening:

Does it rise?

Sources and Further Reading

Gregory Wolfe, “Convergences,” in Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith, and Mystery.
Erin Doom, “Rise and Converge with the Symphony of Truth,” adapted from the inaugural 2015 Eighth Day Institute Inklings Festival notebook.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion.
Simone Weil, writings on attention, especially Waiting for God.
Rich Mullins, “Elijah,” from Rich Mullins.