St. Augustine of Hippo was a little too mainstream for me. I was on the lookout for a patron saint—someone whose life and legacy I could look to for guidance and encouragement in my own daily struggles. Fortunately for me, Augustine was not the only great Christian who had died on my birthday. A quick web search showed me that much.

This is how I first encountered St. Moses the Black, a robber-turned-martyr from fourth-century Egypt. The more I read about this fascinating man, the more enthralled I became with his story. I found myself in his crimes, his passions, his continued failures. I found myself in the slowness of his journey toward God. I found hope in his patient perseverance.

I wanted to write him a song, but I didn’t know how to begin. Fortunately, I met a wonderful child named Moses—a child with quite a journey behind him already, and still a full life ahead. His family called him Mosie. This song is dedicated to him and to my patron saint.

Lyrics from “Desert Father” by daniel couper

Having been met with freeing grace in the bishop's garden, Jean Valjean hastily departs in a haze of fear and confusion. After a long day spent fleeing the oblivion that threatens to overtake his mind and spirit, Valjean seeks shelter in a thicket by the side of the road, vaguely hoping to elude this newfound freedom. Utterly disoriented, he instinctively steals a coin from a young boy who passes by. Some minutes or hours later, when the chill of the night air suddenly snatches him from his stupor, Valjean discovers his theft and is seized by a violent remorse. With the nervous aimlessness of an escaped convict fleeing capture, he vainly seeks his victim. In his frantic search, Valjean encounters a priest, gives him nearly everything in his purse (“For your poor,” he says), and demands to be arrested. The unsettled minister flees this erratic lunatic, leaving him alone once more in the dark, his cheeks wet with the pent-up tears of nineteen years.

This is where “Simple Thing” finds us, bewildered by an unexpectedly disturbing experience of grace, betrayed by the apparent simplicity of that “be yourself and love.” While the previous song makes a feeble attempt at deconstructing the popular notions of “be yourself,” this song even more feebly attempts to reconstruct that disintegrated self. “Who am I?” is the central question here. How am I supposed to be myself if I if I can’t find myself?

In the quote above, Merton speaks of the human soul as a ship in motion, leaving a wake in its absence. Perhaps, for our purposes, it would be more fruitful to imagine a submarine, navigating just below the surface of the water. As we stand at the water’s edge, unsure of what lies within, we witness the impression left by the vessel. Given the disposition of our scientific age and the desire to remain quite dry, our natural response is to examine the wake itself, the visible impact of the submarine on its surroundings. By careful analysis of the data, one could presumably determine the size, shape, speed, depth, and direction of the mysterious object. Indeed, with the proper tools, one could trace with precision the object’s movement across an entire ocean without once dampening a finger.

The one unfortunate stipulation which binds this method of discovery is that it can only provide knowledge about the past. By the time we see the wake, the ship has moved on. The effects of the “principle” are only made manifest and measurable in its absence.

I don’t know who I am until I’m gone.

The easiest way to know myself is to see what has been done and to determine the causes, the motivations, the characteristics which describe the person who has done it. Hindsight is 20-20, as they say.

​But in looking back, I cannot actually be myself. I am not present with myself. Instead, I become the comfortable, dry, inquisitive scientist above the water, measuring the effects of some mysterious entity on its environment. And I am already gone.

Filled with curiosity and good intentions, I come to know a great deal, but it is a shallow knowing, a fact or action knowing, the sort of knowing the French would call savoir and the Spanish, saber. I have figured myself out, as one figures out the answer to a math problem.

I don’t know who I am until I’m gone.

In order to truly know myself, as one might know a sibling or a friend, I must enter the murky water. I must leave my dry scientist behind and become familiar with the mystery of myself. There is an element of relationship and love in this sort of knowing, this connaitre or conocer, that can never be attained by close examination alone. The complexity of analyses and conclusions must give way to the simplicity of being, loving, knowing.

But simplicity is very rarely easy.

Plunging into the water provides no immediate answers. A moment ago, in the open air, I knew a great deal. But I have abandoned all of that. My eyes shut tightly against the burning salt water. My ears clog and perhaps begin to ache. All my senses are numb. I am desperately lost and frighteningly vulnerable in the deep.
Having calculated this to be my fate, should I enter the water, I hesitate in the boat above. I cannot meet this fate on my own. I decide it would be best to stay dry. Then, even as I turn away, an impulse comes from beyond myself and throws me into the water. Was I pushed? Was I pulled? Did the boat lurch?

Whatever it was, it was grace. This is what happens to Jean Valjean when the Bishop purchases his freedom for him with cutlery and candlesticks. Valjean is cast into the water against his will, along with the rest of us.

At first, we rage against the futility of our senses, against the unknown force which thrust us hence, against our own powerlessness and bewilderment. But, as we gradually begin to make peace with the waters which envelop us, we come to a vague sense of something significant. There is something beyond ourselves, and it sees us, knows us, loves us. And we are part of this significance, somehow.

We have not yet discovered ourselves, perhaps―we certainly have nothing to report to the scientific community―but we have begun to be ourselves.
​
We have no answers, but we are beginning to ask the right questions.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained,
Here at the end of one more empty day;
And tomorrow's always just the same:
One more nothing on my resume.

I can't keep up with never-ending lists of 
Stuff to do and folks to see,
Time to use and things to be, oh

Would you hurry up and slow down?
You don't gotta change the world;
You don't gotta be someone,
Just gotta be yourself and love.

My ambition's running wild,
Here at the start of one more sleepless night;
All the things I wish I'd tried,
All these dreams to live before I die.

I can't keep up with my own striving after
Fantasies of epic deeds,
Of great acclaim and living easy.

Would you hurry up and slow down?
You don't gotta change the world;
You don't gotta be someone,
Just gotta be yourself and love.

​
Just gotta be yourself and
Would you hurry up and slow down?
You don't gotta change the world;
You don't gotta be someone,
Just gotta be yourself and love.

Would you hurry up and slow down?
You ain't gonna save the world;
You don't gotta be someone,
Just gotta be yourself and love.​

Perhaps instead of quoting Emerson we should seek the more culturally relevant wisdom of Disney pop star Bella Thorne: "Don't try to impress people. Always be yourself!"

While good and true in essence, statements like these have become trite and platitudinous in Western popular culture, serving largely to give chronically bored people permission to be random and rebellious. You want to eat whipped cream on your PB&J? Do it. Don't let anything stand in your way. You want to play ukulele in a heavy metal band? Yes. Always. Express your true self. You want to wear mismatched shoes? You do you, my friend. It is the heartbeat of hipsterdom, the guiding precept of the cutting edge: Be yourself.

But there is both something more and something less to Emerson's words than to this popular notion of the phrase, I think. Indeed, the permission to be oneself is a grace and a freedom to be celebrated, as so many cheery pop stars understand. But there is also something solemn in the mandate--a significant but subtle something we tend to miss.

Emerson and Bella both begin with the same premise: Don't live your life based on someone else's standards or expectations. It is in determining what that means―what it demands, in fact―that these two philosophers diverge. Bella Thorne ends with an exclamation point, a happy mark foreshadowing many happy days ahead. Emerson, on the other hand, not at all denying the nourishing necessity of such a self-reliant lifestyle, still moves with haste to the metaphorical toiling and tilling required of those who wish to be fully themselves.

​This song bears a similar haste, a rather ironic anxiety that it might be too easily misinterpreted. Thus, the majority of the song is spent meditating on what being oneself does not look like, rather than on what it does. Being myself does not mean filling every day with resume-worthy accomplishments, with all the things that will impress or satisfy those around me. But neither is being myself about chasing down every dream that comes into my own head. Being myself means relinquishing even my own pre-conceived (and probably appropriated) notions of who I should be.

I must be content with who I am in this moment, stripped of experiences and expectations, unmoored from my competence as well as my inadequacy. I must shed even the masks I've fashioned to hide me from myself. I must, in short, become completely vulnerable to myself, to the universe, and to God.

This is not easy to achieve; and even when it is achieved in part, when my true self begins to be revealed, I hesitate for fear. What will I find inside? What then is left for me to be? I begin to feel almost too free. In this void within myself, as I begin to realize how poorly I know myself, how poorly I am myself, what remains for me to cling to? What will anchor me?

Like dawn and dusk, an answer comes slowly, from afar off, perhaps, but evoking something of itself even within my inner emptiness: Love.

But this answer does not put an end to these questions. Indeed, love is hardly an answer at all. Love is itself the question. Love is tension. Love is always beckoning us into unfamiliar territory, beckoning us to seek, to search, to yearn. Love is an invitation to a long and perilous adventure with only a very vague idea where we may be headed.

And here is found the true grace of this be yourself, because grace, like love, is always the beginning of a journey. Grace is never cheap or easy. Grace must be grown into, even as we must learn to grow into our true selves.

This is the grace Jean Valjean finds when he meets the bishop. He is first welcomed in for a night of shelter from the cold―a small grace in itself, and one that Valjean cannot even endure through the night. In the morning, when he is forcibly returned to the bishop's door, having stolen the poor priest's silverware, the convict is met with another grace, stronger and fiercer than the first. It is this second grace, this welcoming outward into freedom and mystery, that takes hold of Jean Valjean in such a way that he can never shake it free. Valjean, nineteen years a victim of his society, has been welcomed into a new world altogether, one in which everything that has hitherto defined him is washed away, and he must begin to discover himself anew.

Thus begins Valjean's true quest, and thus begins our own. May we travel this road slowly and deliberately, filled with mindfulness and love.

The following are the notebook pages whereupon I first scribbled out the semblance of this song.

Below are just a few songs that complement and contextualize "Be Yourself and Love" in my mind. If you use Spotify, click the link below the videos to listen to a full playlist with pairings for the entirety of Bienvenu.