R.I.P., Larry Norman
[UPDATED: I was in a lhurry to say something and didn't have much time. So I ended up being rather trite. This trubute is a bit less embarrassing.]
You can’t be a forty-something (ex-)Evangelical Christian and not have heard of Larry Norman, but if you haven’t, read this or this.
These articles give you some taste of what he was; but they can’t convey the faith impact he had on me and mine. By asking the musical question, “Why Should the Devil Have all the Good Music?” Norman gave teenagers something to listen to that would annoy our parents and yet support our faith.
And more than that, he gave us a more real and gritty, a more deeply layered, kind of Christian music. Songs like “So Long Ago the Garden” were not simply about how great it is to love Jesus. They were about the evils that we could see in the world around us, the hypocrisy and the emptiness of the prevailing culture that teenagers are so sensitive to in the adults areound them. But in spite of the darkness, he assured us of the victory of Christ, and in that sense, I find his music very Catholic.
Not actually doctrinally Catholic, however. Decades before the Left Behind books, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” painted a bleak picture of the time after the Rapture. As an anxious and immature junior high kid, if I came home and my mother wasn’t home, yet the car was in the driveway, my first thought was not “Mom must be at the neighbors’” but, “Did the Rapture happen while I was on the school bus?”
I was touched to read in his obituaries that he lived with bipolar disorder, the effects of head injury, and heart disease. Life was often hard for him. He recently told his friends,
I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God’s hand reaching down to pick me up. I have been under medical care for months. My wounds are getting bigger. I have trouble breathing. I am ready to fly home.
My brother Charles is right, I won’t be here much longer. I can’t do anything about it. My heart is too weak. I want to say goodbye to everyone. In the past you have generously supported me with prayer and finance and we will probably still need financial help.
My plan is to be buried in a simple pine box with some flowers inside. But still it will be costly because of funeral arrangement, transportation to the gravesite, entombment, coordination, legal papers etc. However money is not really what I need, I want to say I love you.
I’d like to push back the darkness with my bravest effort. There will be a funeral posted here on the website, in case some of you want to attend. We are not sure of the date when I will die. Goodbye, farewell, we will meet again.
Goodbye, farewell, we’ll meet again
Somewhere beyond the sky.
I pray that you will stay with God
Goodbye, my friends, goodbye.Larry
Larry, may God give you healing, blessings, rest, and reward. I don’t believe in a Rapture these days, though I do believe Jesus will return. Whether on his return, or at the end of our lives, we will all see him face to face. And for that, I believe you were indeed ready.
Not goodbye, Larry. Till we meet again, God willing.
