Ten years ago today, Rich Mullins died in a car wreck at the age of forty-one.

Some might remember that my first post when I started this blog last year quoted a Rich Mullins song, and I’ve mentioned him often enough that Matt has even poked a little fun for it.

I have a lot of reasons for loving Mullins. The poetry of his songs moves me in a way unlike the work of any other musician, and as a theologian I find him to be a kindred spirit. I believe the values he embodied reflect the way of Jesus unlike anyone I know personally, and I aspire (perhaps unrealistically) to model my life after his. He’s my hero.

Stories about Mullins’ life have grown into legend, but really they’re plausible enough. They’re just not common.

His hero was Saint Francis of Assisi, who started a religious order known for its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Mullins and his best friend Beaker started a sort of religious order of their own that they called the Kid Brothers of St. Frank. Their first goal was to follow Francis’ vow of poverty, which they interpreted as a life of simplicity, and a practice of sharing, almost indiscriminately.

As a result, Mullins redirected all his money through his accountant, who paid him an annual allowance of $24,000. The rest went to Mullins’ church, to the other Kid Brothers of St. Frank, or to people he encountered in need.

He also decided that God would have him use his musical gifts for something more than the Christian music industry, so in the middle of his recording career, he went back to college as a 34-year-old to earn a degree in music education. In the last years of his life, Mullins moved to a Navajo reservation in New Mexico to teach music to the kids there.

He was the best kind of idealist: he structured his entire life so that he would live out his ideals rather than just talking about them.

Ragamuffins

Mullins took the word Ragamuffin (from a book by Brennan Manning) as the name of his band, and their performances suited their name. While Mullins’ studio albums are polished enough, recordings of the Ragamuffins’ live performances reflect a mismatched group of musicians for whom community appears to have been more important than precision.

Mullins would even say in concert that he disliked anything that was too perfect, and that instead the mess of life (and, to a degree, music) is what makes it interesting.

In the end, I think he was just too passionate about his music and his message to care much for precision. He was shamelessly sentimental at times, both about life and about God, but that just reflected who he was at his core: a poet.

Maybe the thing that makes Mullins unique among popular Christian musicians is that his lyrics are so relentlessly human. He may be sentimental when he talks about God, but he is rarely simply pious. His music is compelling for me because he was utterly genuine: his non-conformity was grounded in his passion, not in a bid to attract listeners.

The lyrics I want to quote are from a song that hardly mentions God at all. Mullins died single, but at one point he was engaged to be married, before the relationship apparently fell apart.

He recounts his pain with striking passion:

Another hour deeper in the night,
Another mile farther down the road.
A man can drive as hard as he can drive
And never get as far as his heart was meant to go…

Another tune forms in my head
More harmonies, more empty words.
Oh, I could play these songs ’til I was dead
And never approach the sound that I once heard.

I remember when I was just a kid,
Listening in the sky,
Believing that the wind would stir…

Maybe she could come to Wichita
And maybe we could borrow Beaker’s bike,
Let the road-wind tie our hair in knots
And let the speed and the freedom untangle the lies

Maybe fear can vanish before love
Oh God, don’t let this love be denied––

’Cause I know the river is deep,
I found out that the currents are tricky.
And I know the river is wide,
And the currents are strong.

And I could lose every dream
I dreamt that I could carry with me.
But I will reach the other side.

Please don’t let me have to wait too long.

While I love including long quotations like this (hopefully you all will humor me), this has been a difficult post for me to write. It’s not that I’m particularly emotional about the anniversary–I didn’t really even know who Mullins was until a couple of years after he died. But even though I’ve been planning on writing this post for at least a couple of weeks, I can’t seem to capture who he was, and that’s frustrating.

I recently bought a book about Mullins called An Arrow Pointing to Heaven: A Devotional Biography; it has a lot of great material, but it is poorly written and also frustrating. (The author uses lots of quotations from Mullins, but then he explains them all with what amount to tedious paraphrases of the quotations that were clear enough already.)

It makes sense that a book (or a blog post) would only poorly capture the work of a musician, and frustration is a fitting emotion for describing Mullins’ legacy: he lived a life of pain wrapped up in a desperate desire to serve God, and the rest of us are left frustrated by his early death, wishing he could have gone on writing and recording.

I wish I could convince everyone reading this to appreciate Mullins’ music the way I do, but I know I can’t, so I won’t bother with any links. You can type his name into youtube and watch some concert clips, but he can be off-putting at times, and in any event no one of the clips will do justice to the complexity of his person and his music.

Still, this is a man who is worthy of being remembered and honored, so I’ve done what I can.