How I heard of Mary Gauthier I forget. Somehow in the ever-changing flood of CDs and Ipod tracks and MP3s and, of all things now again, vinyl records. But what above all caught my attention was that here was someone who believed in and offered grace. The years and even the decades have passed and Gauthier seems only to double down on grace with every move our culture makes to double down on violence.
In her memoir Saved by a Song: The Power and Healing of Songwriting (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), she says this quite directly when she reports being in prison for a wake-up DUI in her late 20s. She tells her attorney she doesn’t care what he does if it gets her out:
I didn’t know I’d had a spiritual experience in the jail cell. I wasn’t aware that Grace had entered my life. But from the moment I truly saw myself laying on the floor of that holding cell, my life changed. Brutalized by the truth, I hung my head and surrendered.
So when I ran across a notification that she would be playing at our local concert venue, I did what I rarely do: stirred myself to jump immediately on tickets and even buy some for friends. The night came, and as the world outside unfurled its ever more violent self, inside Gauthier, no stranger to suffering and trauma, created something as close to a worship service as I’ve probably experienced outside of a church–and more worshipful than church often is.
There were a number of key factors. For one, in her faded jeans (I think torn but maybe my memory is just filling in that expectation) and white sneakers (that I do remember, or running shoes, or whatever), under a face ever older, hair ever grayer, Gauthier testified to the reality that you don’t have to be a billionaire to offer something to the world.
For another, though you can never really know when a performer is performing a performance versus sharing truly from the heart, she seemed more reliably to be driven by heart and soul than I’ve experienced in a long long time. Especially in an era in which the very concept of being true to anything other than destroying bad others and demonstrating why you should be running the world and acclaimed for it has turned into something like a mysterious dialect we can no longer enter.
I’m reminded of the Greek I myself now struggle to grasp even though I learned it briefly almost half a century ago. We know there might still be wisdom and insight and how-to-live-our-best-lives guidance in the old languages of virtue, but our minds can’t quite decipher them anymore.
In contrast, song after song Gauthier and her partner, Jaimee Harris, opened us to suffering but always to wrap it in grace. Grace and grace and more grace. The virtues of forgiveness, of mercy, of love and kindness larger even than each day’s daily hates. Just the titles of the songs speak volumes: “Dark Enough to See the Stars. Rifles and Rosary Beads. Stronger Together. Drag Queens in Limousines. Our Lady of the Shooting Stars. I Drink. Between the Daylight and the Dark. Walking Each Other Home. Mercy Now. . . .”
What I didn’t know at the time, but found out after searching the Internet for more of Gauthier’s history, is that she is, as the title of one of her albums puts it, “The Foundling,” the baby her mother gave up and whom Gauthier longed for year after year, chasing in so many ways what she felt at some deep, not fully knowing level, had been taken from her. She yearned for home, as her songs often describe, and particularly for a primal home in her birth mother’s heart.
Finally in the early 2000s she not only found her biological mother. She phoned her. And her mother, as Gauthier reports, just could not, could not, find a path fully to reengage this daughter she had given up for adoption in circumstances that were probably horrifying for her. Now Gauthier had to go on not only with the sense of abandonment she had long felt but also with the reality that her biological mother simply was unable , as Jesus says so hauntingly of a Jerusalem falling into nightmare, to take Mary under her wing.
It pierced my own heart to learn that Gauthier, beloved by thousands or maybe even millions for her from-the-soul singing and, in effect, ministry to all of us who yearn within our broken selves for grace, did give her mother her website URL and enough clues to learn about this woman, her lost child, if she chose. But apparently, and Gauthier offers grace once again in the telling, even knowing more about the child she had once borne was too terrifying for her mother to do more than touch the holiness then mostly draw back lest she be burned.
In Saved by Song, Mary describes the effect as
when I woke up, right before I opened my eyes, I felt an aching emptiness as though in my sleep I’d gone back to the orphanage and sat alone in my crib again, waiting, hoping that she—my mother, myself?—was coming back.
But Mary would need to let a spirit “Bigger than parental influences or biology” bring the healing she ends up testifying to and singing into being in “The Foundling” album. As Mary puts it,
I’d found my birth mother, but she did not want to be found. I called her one last time and asked her if she would please tell me who my father was. She said she didn’t remember. I knew she was lying, but I also knew she was terrified. It was time for me to let go, move on.
Mary’s mother, who told Mary she’d had a beautiful marriage with the man she married after having Mary but he died and she had his “grown kid that I raised on my own . . . and I can’t do this with you” wasn’t able to welcome this foundling, this other child.
Yet what a blessing Mary could have been to her and maybe even was, in ways we can’t know. Though she never felt able to meet Mary in person she did stumblingly connect, even sent her a picture of herself and of her sister (Mary’s aunt) with a short note concluding “We are both short. I have a brother. He is also short. Love, Yvette.”
In the picture, says Mary, there is a cake that says “Happy Birthday,” she doesn’t know for whom, “but it wasn’t for me.” Her birthday, Mary observes, was always her least favorite day; “I was starting to understand why.”
How do I, I wondered, how do we each, I wondered, struggle to let in the grace so ready to flood us? Such mysteries of life I guess will follow me and us into the grave and beyond. In the meantime, what a gift Mary Gauthier gives us by herself wading deeper and deeper into the grace and the mercies we need now, as we long for home and for what we can’t even name even as we can, says Mary as her memoir draws toward its close, know one “simple, vital truth: we are kindred with other souls.
“We are not alone.”
—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co. He is experimenting with integrating and complementing his blogging with Substack posts.
Experiencing the known world as falling apart is no new thing. That’s what reading Dead Wake, in which Erik Larson tells of the German sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania and how this drew the U.S into World War I, reminded me. To be suddenly plunged into World War I or II would stun us.