The Messenger

This is a song about something that happens to too many people.

Atheists will disagree with what I'm about to say, and that's cool, but it would seem as though we were made to worship someone or some thing. Maybe it's only some of us, but that's how we were made. The problem with the poor girl in this song is that she, like so many millions of others, takes God's messenger for God Himself (or Herself, or Themselves, or however you would have it).

Funny, but that might be at least part of what atheists find so alarming about religion: this worship, not of God, but of a preacher who's no more sinless than we ourselves are. A messenger is a messenger; nothing more.

I don't believe Sally Simpson ever learned that. If there's such a thing as hell, it feels like what the Sally Simpsons of the world -- the seer-suckers and the guru-chasers -- go through as they stumble from idol to idol, never able to touch the One. It feels like the endless, aching desire for the communion that preachers -- whether power-hungry, or just sleepwalking like Sally herself -- snatch out of reach with every Sunday sermon.

This is The Who with "Sally Simpson".