The Psalms as Stepping Stones from Darkness

A Conversation with Mike Janzen

Musical Artist, Writer & Composer

PART 1

(To watch or listen click these links or the ones at the end of the blog)

NORM:   So – welcome friends to another of our occasional ‘On Further Reflections’ with Norm Allen, where I have conversations with people whose story I find interesting and nourishing, and whose stories I believe may be interesting and nourishing for you.

Today, my friend Mike Janzen and I are going to discuss his new Psalms project. It’s a two-volume recording. But it’s not just the Psalms project that is of interest to me, because it’s an expression of his journey out of darkness into light as part of his recovery from a concussion injury that he suffered 5 years or so ago. I met Mike in 2003, where he was doing the music on a retreat that I was leading for Little Trinity Church, up at Muskoka Woods. My regard for him was really, really high, just in his manner of leading us in worship and in music. I have watched with interest his development as a respected jazz musician in Toronto. And I’ve actually had the opportunity to see him play in live venues where he is the master of the piano as a jazz musician. We’re going to explore his story - how the Psalms became stepping-stones to recovery over the past several years. So, Mike: welcome. And thank you for being willing to do this. Why don’t you give us a quick thumbnail on your history: you’re a Toronto boy, you’ve been married for 500 years – what kinds of things would you like us to know?

MIKE:   I’m actually a Manitoba boy…

NORM:   Oh – are you?

MIKE:   Yes, I grew up in Manitoba, and went to school there. I came out here in my 20’s to go to U. of T. And worked part-time in a church – and just continued to stay out here after that. I didn’t – I thought I was going to go back within a few days or at least a year. But I just kept staying out here. I loved it here. And it’s provided some great opportunities for music.

NORM:   You’re now married and you have kids, and all that sort of stuff.

MIKE:   Yes, I’m married – for coming up to 17 years (oh, my goodness). It goes by fast. And I have two kids. A 10-year-old named Hattie, and a 4-year-old named June – who sort of talks like she’s from Boston, Massachusetts, she is really adorable. They are both great. The house is always humming, so it’s lots of fun.

NORM:   So, for a person like yourself – the combination of a significant injury that didn’t allow you to play music – it’s a hit on a number of levels. You could make no income, it would be hard to support your family. It must have been a very dark, dark time. Tell us a little bit about what happened, and what the opening stages of the recovery were.

MIKE:   I have had some stomach problems off and on in life – from surgery when I was born. I sort of woke up in the middle of the night one day, having some stomach stuff, and thought, “I am just going to get some water.” So, I went to the washroom, drank a sip of water, I took two steps, and – I have never fainted before – but, I went crashing down, I hit my chin right into the tile floor, and I passed out. And a few seconds later, my wife was at my side, saying, “Are you okay?” And I was, “I think so. I don’t know.” So, I stumbled back to bed – and didn’t think about anything. Got up the next morning and realized that the window looked all foggy, and I couldn’t see the computer screen. So, I phoned one of my good friends up, and she said, “Yes, you’ve got a concussion.”

I thought, “Well. How bad can it be?” I don’t know – some people get over it in a few days. The worst one I had heard of was, like, 5 weeks. So, I thought – 5 weeks sounded terrible! Like terrible! Because I had all these gigs – I had one with you, actually. I was to play piano, right?

NORM:  We had booked you for a Sunday evening event.

MIKE:   Right! So, I had all these things, and as a musician you have to show up. You’ve got to get ready for it. And suddenly – I couldn’t do anything. In the weeks that followed, it just got worse and worse. I spent most of my time in the basement. Any time I came up, it felt like when you touch an electric fence. It felt a jolt. I remember one time walking with my family – I wanted to go for a 10-minute walk. I felt like maybe I was better, because people kept saying, “One day, you are just going to get better: boom!” I thought I was better, went for this walk, and literally, at around 7 minutes, my eyes were on fire, and my head, I was starting to get really dizzy, I just looked at my wife and said, “I’ve got to get home right now.” The next two weeks, I couldn’t move. It was a really intense injury. And it lasted for months, and then into years, and even today – sometimes I still have some not-great days.

NORM:   You had some hopeful signs of recovery (if my memory serves me) where it looked like you were going to be back, and then you had reversals, so that the hoped-for playing at the Rex or something that was in the cards, and then suddenly, it wasn’t.

MIKE:   Yes, you know, I thought at around 6 months, I was going to see a great doctor; he had me doing these exercises. I couldn’t listen to music at first – I couldn’t do anything. He literally said, “See if you can listen to one minute of music – see if you can play the piano for 30 seconds.” And so, over the course of that 6 months, I got better and better. I remember looking at my wife and saying, “I think this is over! It’s done!” But then my brother was in town, and we went to see – I believe it was World Championship hockey – and that night, I realized something was going wrong. I was sort of sliding down a hill that I couldn’t stop. That began a whole long season of sliding down. Which was pretty scary at times.

NORM:   So, the Psalms project – was something that was already in the back of your mind as the result of a conversation with our mutual friend, Keith Martin? Is that right? Before the injury, the idea of doing something with the Psalms was already there?

MIKE:   That’s right. We went to this little sushi restaurant in Toronto. I think it’s called Fune right?

NORM: Yes, we’ve gone many times– it’s got the little sailboats that go around the centre.

MIKE:   Keith took me there for dinner. And when we were talking, he said, “Hey – I’m thinking about – I would like someone to do a project on the Psalms. Would you ever consider that? I’d love if you would do it.” I sort of listened, but in the back of my mind I was thinking of all these other things – jazz gigs, and I had a symphony gig coming up, a whole bunch of stuff that I couldn’t get out of. I sort of thought: This is a great idea, but I am not sure when time will actually open up. Then it was literally a few months later that I hit my head. Suddenly I had nothing to do, I couldn’t do anything. I just had to sit on the couch for a long time. And the Psalms started to become a real lifeboat for me to hang on to. It gave me some kind of words and prayers when I was pretty desperate.

NORM:   So – talk about that process. Where the Psalms connected for you. I mean, you and I have talked before that – I’ve had my own challenges with the Psalms. I love the Psalms and I use them regularly – in fact I am using your two CDs and have for the last two or three weeks: one song every morning to get me into my morning prayers. I love them, but an awful lot of the Psalms are about enemies and anger and vengeance – I don’t have enemies and all that sort of stuff, so I had to learn that the Psalms were something that had to trigger me to pray for others who are maybe getting that stuff; whereas I may be singing something that is a little bit different. So – the complexity of your situation. What was it about the Psalms that seemed to be the thing that you reached out to?

MIKE:   Just like what you were saying: the Psalms for me also – I loved reading them, they told me a lot about who God was. They also reminded me a lot of how other people go through really hard times., and maybe what that looks like. I had gone through some stuff in life, but I had never really been in the place where I actually saw myself on every page, or most pages. I think that such a big injury as this did that – I started to see myself through a lot of different parts of the Psalms that I wasn’t – you know, didn’t see before.

It started off pretty simply for me. What do you do when you’re stuck on a couch? I couldn’t talk to people, I couldn’t look at movies, I couldn’t distract myself with my phone – I was basically having no stimulation.

NORM:   You couldn’t listen to music, because your ear is so acute to what is going on in music, it would be a major…

MIKE:   It totally overwhelmed me, yes. Totally – I tried a couple of times, and what happens when you have a head injury – you start getting dizzy, you start getting nauseous. Literally, your head will not let you do anything of what you thought you could do. But the one thing I could do – I would pull out my phone. I couldn’t look at it for more than a couple of seconds. So, I started going to the Psalms. Because I thought, “I’m not doing anything. I’m in a hard place here. I need some words or something, because I feel like sometimes my head is empty or going crazy”. So, I started going through the Psalms. I would quickly look at my phone, and quickly try to find a verse or two that I could grab onto…

NORM:   Were there Psalms that you had in your memory bank, that you said, “Okay, I am going to go to…” Because I think Psalm 42 was one of the initial ones. Would you have in your mind: “Well, I know Psalm 42, I’ll go take a look at it,” or did you do some sort of a crap shoot on…

MIKE:   It was sort of a crap shoot – yes, a bit of a crap shoot – I think I started on Psalm 1, and just worked my way through. I would just highlight – at the beginning it was literally one or two verses. I didn’t make it through a chapter, ever. So, I would just quickly scan a Psalm for a couple of verses and highlight those, and eventually I got to Psalm 42. That was at the same time that my therapists were having me do a lot of breathing exercises, trying to calm my head down a bit. I started looking through Psalm 42, which was familiar to me from my past – it starts off with: “As a deer pants for the water…”. I have a really funny story about when I was at camp, and we used to sing that all the time. We actually ended up hitting a deer when we were singing it one time!

There is this whole story for me about that Psalm – but I kept going through the verses, and I got to one verse that I just hadn’t seen before, which was: ‘By day, the Lord directs his love; at night his song is with me’. And those were the first words that were – they were pretty critical. Because I started thinking about what that meant for me. I would breathe in: ‘By day, the Lord directs his love… at night his song is with me,’ would be on the way out. Literally hundreds, thousands of times that would go through my head. At night-time, and during the day. It would remind me of God’s hand, presence, faithfulness – in a season where I wasn’t doing anything. I couldn’t rely on my gifts, or how good I was at playing the piano or anything – I just had to sit there.

It reminded me of my value: that God directs his love to me in all the unexpected ways. Maybe it was my wife bringing me a meal, or my daughter coming by the studio and giving me a hug for a few seconds. There were all these little ways – and big ways – friends dropping off food; my one friend brought a Valentine’s Day gift for my wife – I just had a lot of stuff around me that I could be thankful for. And then at nighttime – the hard season when there is no light – it really carried me through those seasons, as I thought of the words, ‘At night, His song is with me,’ – that what is stored up during the day, sort of carries you through the hard times as well.

NORM:   Did you have a sense of the motion of God towards you. So, you’re saying that ‘God directs his love’ was the line [Mike: I did, yes.] You had that sense of people through – whatever – that the Lord was directing his love.

MIKE:   Yes, that’s a great question: How does God direct his love to us? How do we feel it, how do we experience it? Do we need to have done something where we get positive affirmation back to feel that? Do we need to be in a corporate group to feel that? For me, I think the ‘regular’ places that I would feel that were sort of – gone. But what I felt, was carried. I felt held. I felt kept. And that was the way I felt God directing his love to me. There was an eerie sense of peace when a lot of things were falling apart, but there was this deeper sense of peace in my heart.

NORM:   The mission of Touchstone is encouraging and teaching friendship in Christ. And so, the whole business of spiritual friendship, or friendship, must have taken on a different dimension for you in the context of – this idea of God directing his love. Because – we have shared friends: Hugh Brewster, and Keith among them – but people who take initiative means something different when we have nothing to offer them back, I guess.

MIKE: In a huge way. One of my good friends has often said it was so hard being my friend, because he didn’t really know what to do. I remember, he would drive in, and he would spend maybe 10, 15 minutes talking to me – I would go and rest in the basement for half an hour; he would still be there when I came up, and then we would spend another 10 minutes talking, and by that time I was fried, and so he would take off.

NORM:   And he wasn’t offended: he was there to help.

MIKE:   He wasn’t offended, right. The lesson that I learned over and over was: when someone is going through a hard time, we often ask them – or I ask people, “What can I do for you?” But when you are really going through a bad time, the best thing is when people just slowly do some stuff. Sort of take initiative, jump into the whole – one of my really good friends would take my daughter to the park, my brother-in-law, I remember him taking my daughter to go and do pottery – because I could not spend much time with her for the first years. So, people would take initiative, and it’s really changed how I look at when people are going through hard times. Now - what I would do. I caught myself last week, texting a friend and saying, “What can I do for you?” And I was like – maybe I will just suggest a few things that might be helpful. And just go for it, even if I don’t get the okay. As long as it’s something that’s helpful, right?

NORM:   That’s the thing that I have learned the hard way: that most of the time it’s presence – it’s initiative. Not necessarily saying anything or doing anything. It’s just being with the person in whatever way they allow us to. I still – I could probably find places in the last three weeks where I have said, “If there is anything I can do to help, let me know.” And then afterwards, I just go: “You are an idiot, [self].” Because people often are not capable of responding.

So – Psalm 42. Would you be willing to just – because this was the first one – now, did it begin to be melodic in your head while you were listening to those things? Did the music come to you?

MIKE:   Yes – being a musician and writing music a lot – all the way through the season from my worst days to my best, there are records on my iPhone of me coming up with little melodies. The main problem was that I just couldn’t be myself for more than a minute or two at a time. So, being a musician, that’s the first thing that I gravitated towards: it was an easy way of remembering it; as well, it was just helpful to have a melody going through my head. So, I would read the verse, and then just listen, be quiet for a while and see if anything came to me, and sometimes, a little melody would pop into my head that I actually didn’t mind.

 In the early days, I would sing this melody through, over and over. It was something like this: ‘By day, the Lord directs his love; by night, His song is with me’. Sort of like a chant, that I repeated over – breathing in those words, breathing in and out. Later on, I came up with this piano part.

NORM:  That’s great, Mike. And we’ll have the opportunity to hear the finished product when we finish this segment of the video. But the balance there between the confidence in the presence of God, and yet the questions about the absence of God are in strong juxtaposition. Thank you for that.

So then – Psalm 42. Talk about the next stages of the progress. How far into recovery did you actually feel like “Okay – Psalm 42 is more than just a very brief snippet of melody,” to “I am now constructing a song, which on the recording, takes 7 minutes.”

MIKE:   Yes, you are right. It turned out to be a lot longer song. And the first part is more repetitive, almost Taizé-like, but then it goes into the verses, which are more questions of, ‘Where are you, God? Why have you forsaken me? I don’t feel you, I don’t see you, I am stuck in this hard place,’ – and those were written later on.

NORM:   But those are really interesting, because you can say, ‘By day the Lord directs his love’, and at the same time, say, ‘Why have you forgotten me?’

MIKE:   Exactly, it’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it? But what I love about the Psalms, and love about that song, is this idea of lament, or pouring out our hearts, or our deepest feelings or our most vulnerable thoughts before God. The reason we can do that is because we can trust God. We can trust God with the hard stuff. We can get angry. We can ask questions. But I think what God is saying to us in the Psalms is: Come to me to do it. Don’t run off, throwing your hands up in the air and say: “I am just tired of this! I’m done!” I think he wants us to actually come to him with that stuff. Often in friendships in life – some of my best friends are often friends who have gone through the hardest things with me. They have listened to the hardest things, they have walked through the hardest season, and there is a deep trust that has developed, right? I think lament, or pouring our honest thoughts before God – our hard thoughts – also develops a deep sense of trust with God.

NORM:   I would be guessing that it also develops a great sense of trust with friends. I have always had this feeling – my Dad used to quote, “How can you say you love the God you can’t see if you don’t love the people you can see.” It’s in the Bible, so I am willing to accept it; but, my experience has often been that I can know that I am loved by the God I can’t see, because I am loved by people I can see. [Mike: Yes.] And it sounds like that in some ways has been part of your experience.

MIKE:   Yes, I can’t talk enough about that. I remember one time looking out of our house in the early days – there was actually a line-up down the street of cars, lined up to drop off stuff at our house. Yes. I get a little teary thinking about it again. There were really thousands of times that people showed love to us in a deep way. Through that, you are right, there’s a lot of deep trust that has been developed because of that. This studio that I am in right now – I actually started it right before I fell. And everything from the drywall, insulation – everything you see in here was all people doing this for me. Coming by, faithfully – emailing me, phoning me, and just dropping in. And not giving up on me. It is easy to give up on people after – when they don’t have anything to give you, it is easy to give up on them. And people just didn’t give up on me, I am really grateful to them for that.

NORM:   And it is an interesting thing that we discover about friendship, and I often will say – to people who ask, “What church do you go to?” I will flippantly say, “Well, the people who showed up when my dad died, is my church.” So, it’s often in the places where people are there when it is darkest for us, that we discover where the light really is. That is pretty cool.

I think I asked the question about Psalm 42 – how long it took before it became a fully-formed song, and then we went somewhere else with the conversation. But how long do you think that – what was the genesis of that song? And then I think I would like to talk about the genesis of some other ones.

MIKE:   After the first melody that was developed, I started reading through the entire Psalm, and just trying to put verses in; there is a bridge at the end there that more represented the full Psalm. I like the chorus, because it does lift you out of the place of questioning, of being frustrated (like: Where are you God?). It reminds you that He is near. And yes. the chords are sort of interesting, so I decided near the end of the process to put a string orchestra on it. That was tough because of the pandemic – there was not a lot of opportunity to get 20 people in a room. So, I was looking elsewhere – at Nashville and other places.

But we got a short window of about four or five weeks there (near fall) where I could actually record, so about eight months ago, I got a string session together, For me, string writing has always been something that I have loved, so there is a lot of string writing in there in parts. And then, right at the end, there’s a sense of ‘Yet will I praise you, even though things are going bad.’ There’s something very powerful about saying thanks to God and honouring God even though it’s just not working out the way you wanted it to. And for most of us (including myself) it’s easier to share the stories of when you are through the hard stuff, and now you can thank God for it; but there is just something powerful about saying those words as a thank you in the middle of the hard stuff – when life, work is just not going the way you had planned.

NORM:   It is an interesting experience that I have been through in my own journey. I have my own self-sufficiency, capabilities, and ability to push people away, and it took me a long time to realize that I would talk about struggles I had, after I had figured it all out and come out the other side; and very seldom invited people in on the process. It was a big step for me when I started being open for help.

MIKE:   That’s a really great point. I think we all tend to do that, right? Keep it inside, keep it quiet, get through it ourselves – we can do this. We are old enough, mature enough…

NORM:   You were raised in a similar tribal background as me – with the evangelical thing. Which was very individualistic. Letting people in on your weaknesses was not a high priority – at least in the culture I was raised in. Keeping problems secret, all this sort of stuff. It is an interesting thing to get to the point where vulnerability is actually a sign of strength as opposed to weakness.

Talk about next stages in this process. The two titles – Volume 1 is called ‘The Carried Words,’ and Volume 2 is called ‘The Lifted Songs.’ So – talk about the carried words and the lifted songs. Why is that significant? Because, I would not have immediately identified a big distinction between volume 1 and volume 2. I feel like volume 2 is a bit more meditative; but that is more – I have only listened to it five or six times.

MIKE:   The reason there are two volumes – I started off with one big volume of eighteen songs. And I just kept trying to convince myself that this was going to work. It is always easier to do one album than two – I only had one title, which was, “The Carried Words,” – and I just kept listening through it, and I kept getting bored. I couldn’t make it through. Song 8 or 9, I was just: “This is just so boring!” No one else is going to give it – if I can’t give it…

NORM:  If you can’t listen to your own stuff, who else was going to?

MIKE:   No one is going to give it any time of day. So – that was part of it. My mother-in-law actually passed away in September, which bought us an extra couple of months. It was a lot of feeling of grief and loss; but on the plane ride back from that funeral in Manitoba, suddenly it occurred to me that this was actually two albums. And “The Carried Words” is a little more folky; maybe a little lighter in some ways. Instrumentation is a little more folky; it’s got some drums, and guitars…

NORM:   Yes, there is some more up-tempo…

MIKE:   It is more up-tempo. The words are a little more in a place where I am being carried. As I was talking about before. And the second volume is definitely more meditative, slower moving – a lot of space, a lot of strings, a lot of ballads on there, and the words are a little more lifting thanks or gratitude to God, out of this hard season. So, there’s a little distinction there. The main distinction probably: one is more orchestral, and one is a little bit more folky.

NORM:   We’ve got to Psalm 42 so far, and we’re into the four years of recovery.

MIKE:   Right now I am about to hit the five-year anniversary. And you know what? The three-year mark – a lot of modern medicine would say: You’re not going to get much better. But I have – the last two years: both years have been huge improvements. Even this year – I am about a year away from when I drove to my first gig, after not driving for four years, and I can actually drive for a few hours. So everything just continues to get better and better, which I am really grateful for.

NORM:  Okay we have reached this point in the recording, and we are going to end with the opportunity for us to listen to the finished product on the CDs. And I am going to invite you to settle in, and as long as you are not driving your car – to close your eyes, and to listen to Psalm 42, which Mike talked about: “By day, the Lord directs his love,” and for us to take the seven minutes of the song, and sit still and be quiet, and to hear the lushness of the music, and the power of the words in a meditative moment. And so, Mike, why don’t you just guide us into that, and then we will hear the song?

MIKE:   You’re going to hear the words a lot of times: ‘By day, the Lord directs his love; at night His song is with me’. Which is intentional. The more we let the words sink in – the goal is almost to repeat them so many times, we forget that we are repeating them. So don’t be alarmed that you are going to be hearing these over and over again; it gives the chance for God to speak in to your mind, your heart, brings thoughts to the forefront, and just rest in those words that by day, the Lord is directing his love in your life, and at night, if you’re in a time of night, that His song is with you, even though you don’t feel it. And the verses are obviously questions. Why have you forsaken us?

You can think of yourself in times where you feel forsaken, maybe something where you wanted God to be closer, and He wasn’t. You can think of others who are going through hard illnesses or tough times – you can remember them during that tough time, and bring them before God, using those words. And at the end, “Yet will I praise you,” – the idea that in the season that you are in presently, and in the things that aren’t going well presently, that you still can say - Thank you. And maybe God will bring things to your mind – of what to say “Thank you” for. It’s a long section at the end there. Lots of opportunity to let your mind wander into areas where God has done stuff. Maybe He will bring stuff to your attention that you have forgotten from the past. So, I hope you enjoy as you listen.

NORM:   Be at peace with this music.

https://youtu.be/VVDbEq7Zkkk

Thank you for taking the time to read about Mike Janzen’s journey from darkness to light.
 If you would like to explore Mike’s music - visit: www.mikejanzen.ca.