On seeing Seeger with P, P & M

By Tom Ehrich

My early-stages search for "fresh words about faith" -- as in our new digital magazine Fresh Day -- is more an impulse than a well-thought-out plan.

I just knew I was tired of the stale and ready for something fresh.

Pete Seeger's death and a video of Peter, Paul and Mary singing "Where have all the flowers gone?" with Seeger tell me my search isn't to quash history or to live in a timeless now.

It is to see all things with fresh eyes. All things -- the new in my life, but also the old; the new music I am discovering, but also protest songs I sang "long time ago."

I see the crowd in Brooklyn singing along with the performers. Instead of seeing 1960s folks reliving their past, I see people in their 60s yearning for hope and peace and a just society. That yearning hasn't died, despite New Gilded Age nonsense. It seems more alive than ever.

I also see young adults and children, and they, too, are singing along with the quartet on stage, because the yearning for better days isn't a nostalgia trip. It is a cry from the heart today.

Searching for fresh words means seeing the new, and it means understanding more about how I got to today. In that fresh seeing lie glimpses of God.