Down There by the Train

The first time I sang Down There by the Train in public was not in a bar or on a stage, but in the chapel of the K–8 school I lead in southwest Philadelphia. It was a Friday morning. I started quietly, almost speaking, and the room changed. It wasn’t because I can sing. It was because the song carried something profound and holy.

There’s a place I know where the train goes slow,
Where the sinner can be washed in the blood of the Lamb…

The holiness felt audacious. Tom Waits’s outlaw hymn, carried to many through Johnny Cash, is solemn, but it doesn’t merely mourn; it proposes a hope that widens until it presses against our instincts to exclude, a radical credo of salvation for all. It keeps naming those we would keep out – betrayers and assassins, the notorious and the unknown – and insists that mercy still has them in view. If the banquet is Christ’s, the guest list does not read like one we would have drawn up. Scattered amidst the names of New York gangsters, the pronoun you sounds loudest. The “you” echoes until it sounds like “all.”