An interview with Dan Haseltine

Like so many, I’ve liked Jars of Clay from the beginning.
This week they release their new album Good Monsters
. Looking forward to it.

Liked is an interview with lead singer Dan Haseltine.

“The press kit for Good Monsters includes a quote from you that the album “was born out of many experiences and conversations between addicts, failures, lovers, loners, believers, and beggars.” Do all of those words describe Jars of Clay?

Haseltine: Uh, sure! (Laughter) They definitely describe myself. But it’s enlightening when you sit down with somebody who isn’t full-on into this mode of self-protection, and they’re willing to give you a picture of their heart, because it reveals so much more of my own heart. I see it in someone else and I go, “Oh wow, I deal with that too!”

and one of my favorite parts of the interview
“Let’s talk about one new song, “Oh My God.” Where’d the idea come from?

Haseltine: Matt [Odmark, Jars guitaris] came to the band with this idea to use the phrase “Oh my God” in a song. It means so many different things and it’s used in so many different contexts, but in the end, it means that at some point in every person’s life, they have to confront whether or not God is real.

In the song, you express some of your own doubts. The press kit says that as a guy who grew up in church, you never felt like you had permission to ask whether God is real. What has happened in your life to cause you to ask that question now?

Haseltine: It’s strange. The things that make me doubt God at times are really kind of mundane things. Like McDonald’s.

Huh? Not AIDS in Africa or human suffering, but McDonald’s?

Haseltine: No, it’s not the suffering. It’s the stuff that makes me go, “So this is the way the story played out. That God would have some guy named Ray Kroc start a hamburger restaurant called McDonald’s.” It’s the way our world is structured, this idea of capitalism and the lottery, that make me go, “Is this all of man, or is this God?” Those things play a weird role in the story of mankind of working out his salvation and his place in the world. And those are the kind of things that cause me to kind of have these little crisis moments.

But it’s the big things too. We just spent some time in Rwanda, and real violence makes me ask those questions too—the all-out violence of man to man. We visited this church in Rwanda where they’d set up a memorial to what happened in the genocide in ’94, where 800,000 people were killed in less than a hundred days. Five thousand people died in this one church, and they’d left the bodies there; now it’s just bones.

Gary Haugen from International Justice Mission was with us. He was the head of the UN investigation into the genocide, and he had actually visited this church in ’94 and had to go through the bodies and do the forensics of the situation. He was describing the way people would get up in the morning, and they’d kill, kill, kill, then stop, have lunch, go back, kill some more, and then have dinner. Very systematic. It began as these quick killings, and then it turned into something more primitive as the restraints came further off. It began to be torture and humiliation and mutilation. It takes a long time to kill 5,000 people in a church. Think about being in there with your family as these murders get closer and closer, and to hear the screams.

I’m sure those people weren’t praying, “God, please help me have a better car, or please increase my land.” It was, “God, please stop the hand of our aggressor,” and it didn’t happen. That prayer wasn’t answered for anybody in that church. And this wasn’t the military doing this violence; it was their neighbors. That kind of stuff really sent me into a spiral: “What is going on? How does this fit in?” It does two things. It causes a bit of a crisis of faith, and at the same time, it also makes me realize there has to be a God, because my own sense of justice does not have a context for this. Only God’s greater story of redemption can fit something like this into it, for 800,000 people to die, you know? God promises that there is redemption, so where is it? You know, it’s a lot of those kind of questions. And those are all wrapped up in that song.”

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