‘In 2019, Natalie Bergman was poised to step on to the stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall with her brother Elliot and their band Wild Belle. It should’ve been a glorious night for the siblings, but before they could play even a single note, they received earth-shattering news: their father and stepmother had been killed by a drunk driver.
Bergman was especially close to her father, considering him her mentor and biggest fan, and his sudden death left her isolated and adrift. “We ended the tour immediately. It also seemed to kind of end my musical ambitions all at once,” she told NPR’s Simon Scott. “I felt as though I lost my identity with his death. I just didn’t really understand who I was.”
After months of grieving, Bergman decided to embrace her sense of isolation even more fully and visited a monastery in the remote California wilderness. During that time of silence, prayer, and reflection spent observing the monastery’s rituals and listening to the monks’ chants, music slowly began easing its way back into her life. Thus were sown the seeds for what would become Bergman’s first solo album, titled simply Mercy’, from which we have just heard the song ‘Home At Last’.
Natalie has explained simply and clearly how it happened: “When I began writing, I had already lost the greatest love I’ve ever had, so I had nothing else to lose. I went for it. I sang from the depths of my sorrow and I witnessed a little light while doing so.”
On the album, she finds different sources of hope and help. ‘Talk To The Lord’ quotes Psalm 23 – ‘Though I walk in shadows, I won't be afraid / I will fear no evil / For You walk with me’ – in order to state that:
‘When you are scared, reach out your hand
Talk to the Lord, talk to the Lord
If you are sad, He'll dry your tears
Talk to the Lord, talk to the Lord’
In ‘I Will Praise You’, she says ‘When I'm broken, I will sing Your name’, while ‘Shine Your Light On Me’ also quotes Psalm 23 in a prayer for light as she cries like a ‘mourning dove’ for her ‘greatest love’. ‘Paint The Rain’ documents difficult days but discovers that:
‘In this pain, you make me sing
When I am blue, you take me in
My little ways, they feel strange
You give me a little bit, and you take it away
You paint the rain’
In these ways, she has been enabled to live again and to find joy particularly in family life. These can all be significant helps for us in our journeys through grief as well. There is one more specific help that Natalie Bergman received from her time at the Chama Valley Monastery:
‘one of the most important answers that I got from the heavenly father is that heaven is a realm that exists and we have no idea what it is. I did a lot of reading there, and one of the scriptures I read was that, “Everything the eye has seen, and the mouth has tasted, and the heart has felt, that is not what heaven is.” Heaven is such a different realm than anything we’re even capable of experiencing, and it’s this great mystery, which is why it’s so hard and challenging to have such a strong faith because no one is promised this. I really needed to know that it existed because I need my father to be there and I need my mother to be there, whether it’s a physical place or a spiritual one. Whatever this place is, I learned that it indeed exists and that was the greatest comfort to me. That was the biggest thing I took from the monastery.’
It is this understanding that she explores in ‘Home At Last’. The song begins:
‘I come to You to answer my prayer
I long to know about Heaven
After the body dies
Where does the soul begin?
Where have all the good people gone?
The people that I love
Have they gone to the Garden
Where the tree of life grows tall
And the weeping is no more?’
In the song she asks specifically of her father, ‘Is he home at last?’, and ends the song with the repeated assurance that ‘Yes’, ‘He is home at last’.
This is the assurance that Jesus gave to his disciples in the teaching he gave them at the Last Supper before his own death on the cross (John 14.1-7). He said then that he was going from them into death to prepare a place for them among the many dwelling places in his Father’s house and that if he was going away from them for that task, he will come again and will take them and us to himself, so that where he is, there we may be also.
This is the promise that Natalie Bergman came to realise was true for her father, as it is also for us and for those we have lost. This is why at the end of every funeral I take I pray these words: ‘Lead us to a place of peace and refreshment; guide us to springs of life-giving water; wipe away the tears from our eyes and bring us to heaven where there is no more death, no more grief or crying or pain in your presence, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’ Heaven is the place where ‘Where the tree of life grows tall / And the weeping is no more’.
Jesus describes being with God in homely terms that we can all understand. He says it is like being in God’s house with a special room already prepared for us. Our homes are usually where we feel most secure – we feel “at home” there – and our rooms tend to reflect our unique personalities as we fill them with things that we like and which interest us. So, Jesus is talking here about the way in which God knows each of us, knows what we need and is actively preparing for when we go to be with him.
So, God is prepared to welcome us but have we prepared ourselves to meet with God? Often, we are like Thomas in this reading and like Natalie Bergman before the death of her father, we don’t know where we are going or who we will meet when we get there and so we can be afraid of death and of dying.
God has given us a way of getting to know him before we die and that is by coming to know Jesus Christ for ourselves. As Jesus says in his reading, he is the way we can come to know God for ourselves because he is God himself. He is the truth about God because when we look at Jesus, we see what God is actually like, someone who is prepared to sacrifice everything in order to show his love for us. And he is the life of God, the one who can take us by the hand and lead us into everlasting life together with God.
So, as Natalie Bergman discovered and as she sings in ‘Talk To The Lord’:
‘When you are scared, reach out your hand
Talk to the Lord, talk to the Lord
If you are sad, He'll dry your tears
Talk to the Lord, talk to the Lord’
See also my review for Seen and Unseen of Natalie Bergman's recent gig at Union Chapel
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Natalie Bergman - Home At Last.
