GARY LIGHTBODY - THE FOREST IS THE PATH

Will Campbell College teacher Mark McKee ever get the thanks or credit he needs to be given to waking up just one teenage boy to literature? In one class, one particular year, Mr McKee read Seamus Heaney and one particular boy’s soul lit up like he had been blinded like St. Paul on the Damascus Road.

Words became the reason that Gary Lightbody had been given a space on planet earth. Many of us have been touched and blessed by the poetic songs that he has created with his band Snow Patrol. Now his first book that will be of fascination to many in so many different ways.

Unlike the vast majority of rock stars, Lightbody’s shift from lyric to prose is not a rock biography. Yet, at its very basic level fans will enjoy the Snow Patrol stories and the wee sneaks into the songwriting process of the most recent record, the book’s companion The Forest Is The Path. 

There are a few precious musical memories threaded in here. Another conversion moment for a teenage Lightbody is listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind on the day of its release. That fifteen years later David Grohl walks on to the stage and hugs him as he’s dedicating Chasing Cars to the former Nirvana man. Wonderful.

Or his dad meeting Bono at Ward Park in 2019. Priceless!

Yet, the music side of the memoir is not the raison d’être. This is a book about grief. It is all built up around his father dying and the aftermath. It has me deep in reflection about my own parents dying. They leave behind more than grief. We go on untangling the regret and love and stretch to come to terms.

In the grieving sense, I was reminded that this is the same genre as another classic on that subject by another Campbellian, CS Lewis with A Grief Observed. Like Lewis’s this makes for a very spiritual book, though not “official” spiritual as Lewis’s was.

I rarely read books twice but this one will get another intentional call, while I am on holidays this summer. I’d like to read it with more time and silence to ruminate. 

There are many little depth charges to return to. Lightbody surmises things like time, home, Belfast in fact, love of others, loving of self, the life beyond, how it might be impossible to actually grasp other people’s perspectives and things are only heavy only when we try to lift them. So much in such a small book. There will so many blogs I sense!

Most of all I am taken with Gary’s fascination with the things that need die within us to help us live:

There is a good death in the end of anger, in the end of resentment, in the end of jealousy. Dying so one can live is the best kind of death. All those things made in the fire serve us not one bit. But sometimes in my life I have felt holding onto that fire feels like the only way to stay alive. I know now I was just plain wrong. But it took me way too long work that out.

Preach it brother. This is something of what I as a preacher am on about every single Sunday. It’s simple wisdom. It is profound. I am thrilled it is here in this book. 

Yet, I am, again as ever, distraught that Gary is unaware of that Biblical idea or indeed that he never even considered looking to find it. Even with Granny Wray’s impression on his life, her life built on that Bible that Gary read at her funeral, the church has done such an awful PR job on Jesus that Gary doesn’t seem to have looked at the ancient wisdom from that resource. I don't blame him. This is a scandal and tragedy of the church.

This is a special book. A helpful book. A book to ponder… and ponder again. Thank you Gary Lightbody for being prepared, yet again, to be vulnerable and honest with us. File it under spiritual!