Cut To The Heart

The year was 1997. I was at a basement hardcore show in Lansdale, standing in a crowd of about 40-50 punks. I worked as a waiter at a retirement community with my friend Andy, and we also worked with another guy named Josh who was in a hardcore band--"Christian hardcore." Josh knew I was into hardcore music, and said, "you should come to our show." I didn't know what the Christian part was all about, but I was into hardcore music, so I did.

I didn't go to shows a lot back then, but I still remember coming across my first LP by an NY Straight Edge hardcore band called Youth of Today. This was back in the day when you could listen to CDs  or records at the record store (Siren Records, our local shop) before you bought them. There would be two turn tables/cd players with big headphones that you would put on and kind of enter into your own cocoon of music for a few minutes. It was like wine tasting, for music. Anyway, I found this black and white cover CD with these guys my age on the cover and when I inserted the disc and pressed play it just blew my mind. The energy was so raw, the drumming so fast, the full-throated lyrics pushing forward with such urgency...I had never heard anything like it. This band YOT's frontman was a young agnostic Ray Cappo before he found and devoted himself to Krishna-Consciousness. But Ray was a real seeker. I met guys in Philly years later who knew him. "He was real intense," they told me, "you could never really relax around him." Ray had founded the Revelation label in 1987. They would do the pressings like Rev:1, Rev:2, Rev:3 (YOT's 3 song LP that I picked up was 17th, i.e., Rev:17). A funny foreshadowing now that I think of it.

Anyway, back to the show. Back then it was common to have shows in church basements. It didn't even occur to me that I was in a church basement at first with all the punks. It was between sets, breathing heavy and sweaty. And this guy comes out and takes the mic. He was older, but not that old. I realized when he was talking that he was some kind of pastor or something. I don't remember anything he said, but what I do remember was that he started doing something on stage--he started praying over the crowd. And in not much time, and almost against my will, I had tears streaming down my face. Looking back now, I realize it was the Holy Spirit overshadowing me. It must have been vague enough, because I don't remember anything he said or prayed. But the feeling of being taken out at the knees, of coming face to face with your sinfulness for the first time...it was over-powering. For anyone who has ever been convicted by the Holy Spirit, you will know what I am talking about. It is hard to describe, and certainly at the time you don't know what is going on. That was my first encounter with the Holy Spirit but it would not be the last.

In the book of Acts, there are two instances when Luke uses the term "cut to the heart": Acts 2, when Peter is preaching to the crowds at Pentecost; and Acts 7, when Stephen is preaching to the Jewish religious leaders of the day. However, the two terms in Greek are very different. In Acts 2:37, the Jews are "cut to the heart" (katenugesan te kardia, "severely troubled and made sorrowful.") at Peter's words "God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified." They ask, "what are we to do then?" and Peter responds, "Repent, and be baptized." In Acts 7:54, the religious leaders are also "cut to the heart" (dieprionto tais kardias, "sawn asunder mentally and thus infuriated."), but respond to the gospel proclamation by becoming enraged and stoning Stephen to death.

When we encounter truth, these two responses, two sides of the same coin, indicate where we go from there. We are either cut to the heart and repent (the inward response) and seek to be washed clean, or we are cut to the heart and lash out (the outward response) to take out that truth that confronts us. Both of these responses are intense--they stone the inner sinful self to death (through repentance and baptism)  or they seek to beat to death truth itself when it gets in your face. I suppose there is a third response--indifference--which is indeed probably the worst "I will vomit the lukewarm from my mouth, says the Lord" (Rev 3:16).

As a seventeen year old, the thing that drew me to hardcore music in the first place was the energy, the straining, the intensity of desire that looking back set the stage for my Christian foundation--there was something wrong with society that needed to be fought against intensely (the Fall); there was something deeply distasteful about status quo comfort and indifference (lukewarmness); there was some purpose, some reason for being, that we needed to devote ourselves to (a moral code). On my spiritual journey, where God was leading me, this really was the first step; I was searching for the language, something that could handle and receive that intensity, something that satisfied my deepest longing and allayed my deepest dissatisfactions, something that gave me something to live for (hope) and something to fight against (sin and evil). The missing piece, the key, was the Spirit of God Himself. The Holy Spirit, that night in that church basement, was the catalyst, the match that set everything in my life on fire He cut me to the heart, filled with me with sorrow for my sinfulness, and lit the pilot light of truth to start seeking. My own personal Pentecost.