How a Song From My Youth Became a Doorway
This morning started like any other.
A quiet drive, early light, and a playlist I hadn’t touched in years—
songs from a time I rarely revisit,
songs that never seemed to ask anything of me.
Then Welcome to the Black Parade came on.
I sang the intro the way I always have,
out of habit more than memory.
The song played on, familiar and unremarkable—
until suddenly,
I began to cry.
It wasn’t sentimental.
It wasn’t nostalgic.
It came fast,
as if something deep within me
recognized a truth
my mind had not yet reached.
And because I didn’t understand
why I was crying,
I restarted the song.
This time, I opened the lyrics.
The marching band line hit first—
a quiet ache for a moment I never had,
for a father who wasn’t there
to take me into the city
or offer the kind of guidance
the song assumes every young boy remembers.
And right behind that ache
rose another truth,
soft but unmistakably familiar:
The Christ of Proximity
had been that presence for me all along—
the One who walked beside me
through every quiet migration,
across oceans, across years,
across seasons where I drifted
without knowing I had drifted.
But it was the next section of the song
that shifted everything.
**
“He said, ‘Son, when you grow up,
would you be the savior of the broken,
the beaten, and the damned?’
He said, ‘Will you defeat them—
your demons, and all the non-believers,
the plans that they have made?’”
**
Those words did not sound like the father
whose voice I could never quite hear.
They sounded like the voice
that has been guiding me quietly
through every distance—
the One who carried me
long before I knew I needed carrying.
Hearing those lines,
I felt something inside me settle—
not as memory,
but as recognition.
The spiral continued to turn.
When I found out I was going to be a father,
Christ helped me practice a forgiveness
I didn’t yet understand—
a forgiveness reaching backward
to heal a root I had never tended to.
That’s why I gave my children my father’s name.
I didn’t know it then,
but that was the first step home.
A seed of return planted in the future,
stretching toward the past.
Years later, the glioma
pushed that forgiveness deeper.
It stripped away the distance,
leaving only love,
only grace,
for the man whose absence shaped me.
And this morning—
hearing the song again,
reading the lyrics with unguarded eyes—
the pieces shifted.
Like a kaleidoscope turning one click,
everything I had been carrying
arranged itself into a new scenery.
What began as a root torn away
now stands as a root restored—
held together by grace.
Only then did the tears make sense.
Only then did the song make sense.
Only then did I understand
that I had been returning
long before I ever recognized the distance.
Nothing in this moment moved in a straight line.
Everything formed the shape of coming home—
emotion before explanation,
forgiveness before awareness,
restoration before understanding,
presence before naming.
I didn’t seek it.
I arrived inside it—
a slow spiraling parade
carrying me back
to a place I didn’t know I had left
and didn’t know I was missing
until I saw it again.
And sitting there after the tears,
I realized why this moment had found me at all.
A song I’ve carried since I was young
had been carrying me, too—
through distance, through drift, through all the places
I didn’t know I’d wandered from.
It brought me back today, gently,
the way grace always does.
And without trying to,
it became my discernment song.
Welcome to the Black Parade