Concert Review - AP & Caleb

Saturday (10/6/12) Becky & I trekked about 1.5 hrs to enjoy Andrew Peterson and the band Caleb playing in Wadsworth Ohio.  I had my expectations fairly high for this event and was only slightly disappointed.  My disappointment - it had to end.  Also we are old and couldn't hang around to pull AP aside to extort an afterglow out of him.

It was a great concert for a few reasons, Andrew Peterson & Caleb were playing.  Andrew is a seasoned performer and played great music with engaging set-up stories and humor.  Caleb consists of Caleb Chapman on guitar and belting out raw emotion and Will Chapman on drums driving the songs home. 

It was my first time seeing Caleb performing live and I was blown away.  They are excellent musicians and are still cutting their teeth as performers.  They had a 3 song set and certainly won some fans out of it.  The songs were good, really good.  Not necessarily happy or easy songs, but evoked emotion and connected on a deep level.  It feels like that brief description of "good" and "evoking emotion" is like calling E.T. a good movie about an alien.  There is just so much more to these guys.  Awesome stuff.  My rock&roll days are mostly behind me, but I look forward to hearing much more from them.



Andrew played a mostly somber set which falls in line with "Light for the Lost Boy".  (I reviewed the album here.)  The album is about the ache of growing up.  It is painted from a parent's view at a child; a grown-ups view longing for the lost childhood; and a mature view of how that experience can (and should) change us to being thankful. 

It is somber, but it is also hopeful.  The contrast of something being lost against what is found. 

My takeaway line (paraphrase) - "As parents we work to preserve Eden for our children, but the snake is going to get into the garden."


All of this echoes of a few parts from GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy:

Catholic* doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.  Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism.  We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea.  So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries.  But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.Catholic = universal

 We setup rules (and to an extent Law itself) to protect and preserve.

This is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us than ourselves.

I don't think it's a stretch to say it's something that children are closer to than us; but we can take joy in that it will be regained.

It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening,
"Do it again" to the moon.  It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.