Tag Archives: Dear Evan Hansen

Being found: Six things we can do to get there

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, Marriage and Family, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction,

I have a love-hate relationship going with my memory of the entry closet of my childhood home. I remember it fondly because it was the first place I was given the privilege of painting (which might have been as soon as I could hold a brush in my situation). So it is symbolically a place where I was trusted and counted worthy.

But before I was painting it, it was a place I would hide. I think one of my earliest  memories is hiding from my mother in the closet and waiting for her to find me. We weren’t playing hide and seek, I just disappeared. And she did not come to find me. I waited for what seemed like a long time in the dark before I peaked out the door. I could hear her voice in the kitchen talking on the land line. I came up to her and pulled on her dress. She looked down at me and did that sweeping up, “Shoo!” gesture and whispered, with her hand over the mouthpiece, “Go play.”  I started to say, “But you did not find me.” But she had already straightened up and was laughing that wonderful laugh of hers. So I just went to my room to look around at the toys again.

I don’t think I ever told her about that. But as you can see, I never forgot that one small moment of being lonely, invisible, and not worth finding. It is no wonder we all seem to have shame sticking to the walls of our inner selves. The tiniest things collect and build up like plaque.

Maybe your mate wants to be found

I thought of myself not long ago when a woman was lamenting how her husband seemed uninterested in “finding” her. She used the word. And she was not the first to do so. So many partnered people have trouble when they feel their partner leaves them alone; they are like babies in the crib who woke up by themselves and aren’t sure someone is coming to get them. We really want our mates to meet us there. It feels like they should do something about this attachment issue that keeps popping up. Some of us might get anxious because we don’t want to risk the possibility that they won’t find us and will never share the deep fears and loneliness we might carry.

I hope you will be found by your loved ones. But I am not counting on it. I hope you will be sensitive enough to find people, even find yourself. But I would not be surprised if you had already blown so many opportunities to do that, you’re not sure you should make any promises.

The movies don’t help. Those people are getting found all the time! We love watching it happen — why else would we watch the Hallmark Channel so religiously? The first example that comes to my mind is “Dear Even Hansen.” That might be because I’ve seen a few choirs of young people giving their hearts to singing the main song: “You Will Be Found.” The hope of being found is apparently a universal feeling, so this song has been sung around the world a few times. The other side of the song is moving, too, so people feel terrible when they realize they didn’t look for someone before they got left alone. The the song has made a lot of people cry.

But I think the song promises too much. You might not be found and need to do something about it yourself. What’s more, everyone might be waiting for you to show up rather than looking for you, or might be kind of paralyzed by the idea you might not want to be found by them, or might not be too aware or even able to notice you’re gone. You might need more than what humans can provide. Wonder about those things as you listen to the song. I provided the lyrics for you.

Have you ever felt like nobody was there?
Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?
Have you ever felt like you could disappear?
Like you could fall, and no one would hear?

Well, let that lonely feeling wash away
Maybe there’s a reason to believe you’ll be okay
‘Cause when you don’t feel strong enough to stand
You can reach, reach out your hand

And oh, someone will come runnin’
And I know they’ll take you home

Even when the dark comes crashing through
When you need a friend to carry you
And when you’re broken on the ground
You will be found

So let the sun come streamin’ in
‘Cause you’ll reach up and you’ll rise again
Lift your head and look around
You will be found

You will be found
You will be found
You will be found
You will be found

The message most people latch onto when they hear Evan Hansen sing is “You are not alone.” For all you people feeling alone even though you are in good relationships, I can say “You are not alone” – maybe you are not together with your loved one the way you wish you were, but there is more than your wishes. And for those of you who didn’t find someone who needed you, you are not alone, either. We all carry a lot of shame, but that doesn’t mean you are alone with it.

What we can do to be found and find

I remember thinking my mother decided not to find me and just left me alone. That hurt. I did not ask her about her motivation, but surely she could not have been unaware I was gone somewhere! – after all, she could hear me stealing candy from the cupboard a mile away! When I finally went out and pulled on her dress and got an irritated, “I’m talking on the phone!” That fact did not undo my feeling.

Your adult loved ones might be just as difficult. Dealing with your mate’s attachment issues can feel perilous, but it is so helpful if you do!  Here are a few things to notice and try if you’d like to feel found and like to feel adept at finding people.

1) See one another. In my opinion, Mom should have put down the phone and given me some loving eye contact. That might have demonstrated I was important and not just a nuisance. Same for mates; they need validation and reassurance.

She also could have kept track of me. It is OK to keep track of your mate; you’re not impinging upon their freedom or losing your own if you do. You might need to negotiate how much closeness and how much distance your relationship needs in order to get to your “happy medium.” But you’ll probably be happier if you try.

I have known a few people who say, “I think I will be happier if I don’t try. That kind of noticing is way too much to ask.” In that case the song would be “You are alone.” Because everyone is working out how to attach their whole life. They at least need to be seen.

2) Be yourself, not God. If someone asks to be seen it does not make you God, as if you could be all-seeing, all knowing and the answer to someone’s prayers. Don’t say “No” because you already think you will fail. Everyone fails. You’re probably good enough, even if you are facing a need in your partner that demands more than you have.

Facing the “demand” is what a lot of people mean when they talk about “showing up.” You stop hiding and risk finding. Just don’t take on all those expectations as if you are responsible to succeed at them. Just keep moving into your true self.

3) Listen. Listening for someone matters. They might be making a distant noise in their closet. If it seems too demanding to be so intense, your heart might need to get bigger. All intimate relationships grow our hearts. For instance, a client assumed his wife was self-reliant, but she was really a person who had to fend for herself because no one else did. She would say how needy she was and then behave like she was not needy. It was easier to relate to the unneedy one. But she was left feeling the ancient feeling of being left alone she hated so much. He learned to listen better and to move into what he heard.

4) Try not to hide. When I expected my mother to find me when she did not have a clue about what I’d decided to to, it was a recipe for not getting what I wanted. Fortunately, I did not hide in the closet every day trying to train her to find me on demand! But it would not be surprising if you and I were stubborn enough to try something like that.

We feel it is unjust to have to change rather than someone else changing. “Others seem to get found, why shouldn’t I be cared for like that?” If we just suffer the injustice of it all, the person who is loving you the best they can becomes someone who just holds out on you, but all the while you’re the one in the closet. It may pain you to do so, but you may need to come out and make yourself known, rather than insisting someone else has to do the work.

5) Make sure someone is listening. It takes quite a bit of humility to ask for what we really want. When you dare to do it, be sure to help the one you’re asking hear you. If I say, “I want to feel found. I want you to see me” in a way they can’t hear, that’s not really their fault. If I am just hurt and angry and I make them seem like a fool or a fiend when I tell them, their defenses will spring into action. Then we won’t be on the subject of what I am really hoping any more. We need to help people hear us now that we are adults. The crib is long gone. Being weak in a strong way is rarely a good  way to get what we need.

6) Be found by God. Jesus is well known for saying he is seeking the lost in order to give them life and joy. So there is ONE person who is interested in finding you. There is a hopeful verse in Jeremiah about this big part of God’s love:

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.  I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity. — Jeremiah 29:11-14

I love “I will be found of you.” The best way to be found by some one is to be found of them. You are more likely to be found if you let them see you and struggle gracefully with them. To be fair to Evan Hansen, the movie goes on to teach just that. He needs to let himself be known and go through the pain of being accepted as he really is. He gets way down the road to being his true self, as a result.

Artists like the people who made “Dear Evan Hansen” keep coming up with ways to tell the parables of living in love because 80% of us are preoccupied with how to be known and loved and how to know and be loving every day. We’re the sought seekers we were created to be.

Music matters: A message to Boomer prison guards

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, Music, , , , ,

Is it just me, or do you sometimes feel like you will never be released from your Boomer music prison? I was in the dim sum restaurant celebrating 8th-grade graduates and one of them stopped eating dan dan noodles as soon as “Build Me Up, Buttercup” came on the background music. We belted out, “I need you (I need you) more than anyone darling,” which was sweet. But I also thought, “Will we never be free of this song?”

Graduation Day

I went to two commencement ceremonies (loved them!) and heard 8th graders singing Boomer anthems to Boomers. But most of their parents were born in the 70’s and 80’s, weren’t they? In the first ceremony  the kids actually sang “Graduation Day” which was a hit for the Four Freshmen in 1956! I went down to gym floor as the director was cleaning up the band music to congratulate her, “Extra points for ‘Graduation Day.’ Where did you discover that?” She said, “Oh, we always sing it. It’s a tradition.”

How did that piece of fluff become a tradition? You could say, “The same reason your son  makes the Jello dessert for Thanksgiving your mother’s family still calls a salad.” Touche. But still, any use of that song does not make perfect sense to me.

I was out in the Redwoods with ten-year-olds where we discovered our cool farmhouse VRBO had a TV in their room with the Disney channel. We turned it on and there was the new Beach Boys documentary being headlined. I was interested in the Beach Boys, so we watched a bit. But I thought, “The Beach Boys hold some interest for the Disney Plus watchers?”

The Boys also came to mind during the first commencement, since Brian Wilson was obsessed with the Four Freshman and much of the brilliant harmonies he built into surf music were directly from them. The Beach Boys also recorded “Graduation Day.”

The first record Brian Wilson bought when he was a teenager in Hawthorne, CA (about an hour from where I lived), was the Four Freshmen’s 1955 album Four Freshmen And 5 Trombones. The story goes that 30 years later he still loved the album. He told an interviewer, “They had a demonstration booth where you could listen in the store and I found the Freshmen album. My mother said, ‘Do you really want to hear this?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ So I went into the little booth and played it and fell in love with it.”

I aspired to BE one of the Beach Boys when I was young. So I find them very appealing and have almost all the songs from Pet Sounds on my playlist. But “Graduation Day” was a bit of nostalgia when the Beach Boys were young! What was it doing in an amazingly diverse class of 8th graders in Philly in 2024? Has it become “America the Beautiful?”

I turned to the grad’s older brother and said, “Couldn’t they find a more representative song than that?  Do they think people have stopped writing music?” He wasn’t really listening to me complain but he was polite. I went on to suggest, “How about ‘What Was I Made For?’” (which I recently Smuled for my sister). That would be a great commencement song for the present generation, some of whom were dressed like Barbie before our very eyes.

Forever Young

The next day we celebrated with an even more diverse class of 8th graders and they were also programmed to sing for us, which they did very nicely. But what song did their Boomer teachers (or were they GenX?) pull out for them to learn? — the classic “Forever Young” by Bob Dylan, written for his son in 1974. He recorded a couple of versions but, honestly, I have never been able to listen to him sing. Here’s my favorite of his interpreters:

Last year there was a Joan Baez documentary, too: I am A Noise. I watched part of it because I have always admired her voice and activism. She’s inspiring. It ends with her dancing in a field as an old woman, but much like any hippy would imagine Joan Baez dancing.

But what was Dylan’s song doing in a commencement ceremony 50 years after it was written? Has it become classic, like the “Hallelujah” chorus? I looked at my wife when the kids first sang, “Forever young,” and said, “No thank you.” Who in the world would want to stay young, especially always in 8th grade? I want them to be full of the brightness and hope of that moment, but I am not sure they’ll make it if they are stuck in Dylan prison.

My mind turned to all the other, more recent, sentimental music they could have used. I think Dear Evan Hansen’s  “You Will Be Found” from 2016 would have been much better. It is just like Disney but always makes me cry. This year’s grads endured the pandemic, after all.

Music matters

We live in an environment in which every sound wave is monetized. Molecules will probably soon come with pop-up adds. There is a lot of competition for our attention, which means were are mostly not attending at all. But we need to listen to the music. Music matters. The Boomer/GenX teachers keep sampling the past for feel-good nostalgia, for the muffled sounds they heard in the womb, I suspect. That’s OK. But that’s not real enough.

Music is such a wonderfully integrative art, especially singing, if we let our whole bodies get into it. That’s why churches are holding out as a place where singing in public still happens (well, there is the Phillies games and Luke Combs concerts, too). Singing is a spiritual discipline. But even if you aren’t disciplined, or aren’t really listening, it is still a spiritual experience.

The teachers, it seems to me, chose to keep their kids enclosed in a small space — the kind of space stores offer when they dish up more “Build Me Up Buttercup” while you’re looking for polenta (which they keep moving around!). The kids of the future will need a lot more than sedation or amorphous feelings of well-being. They will need a lot of spiritual imagination to get out of the mess they are in. As the atmosphere gets warmer and the warzones get wider, they will need real music to live on, not just leftovers. I hope they learn to remember way beyond 1956 and dare to write the soundtracks of healing and building way into the future.