Come On Up To The House

I don't know if you've seen Wake Up Dead Man, the latest (and apparently last) film in the Benoit Blanc mystery series (the other two being Knives Out and The Glass Onion).  Each one employs a slightly different style and approach.  This one takes place in a small Catholic church and has Blanc helping a young priest who's accused of murder.

Plot-wise it's not as strong as the first two films but it makes up for in by delving quite deeply into matters of faith / spirituality / morals.  I found it quite thought provoking along those lines and if you haven't seen it yet you might want to give it a shot (it's rated PG-13 for typical murder mystery violence, nothing salacious).

The movie, however, is not why I’m posting this.  The film ends with Tom Waits' "Come On Up To The House" a spiritual he wrote and recorded in 1999 for his Mule Variations album.  I hadn't heard it before but I found his lyrics and rendition quite moving; I've listened to it at least three or four times a week since first hearing it.

It bears a closer hearing than it usually gets.  Done in the style of an old southern spiritual, it uses a phrase that means something different to southerners than to people raised outside the region.  If you were raised outside the U.S. or English is your second language, this crucial difference might have slipped past you.

Well, the moon is broken and the sky is cracked
Come on up to the house
The only things that you can see is all that you lack
Come on up to the house

“Come on up to the house” is not an invitation.

It’s not “Please…” or “If you’d like…” it’s the singer telling an audience in pain they need to come where they can be taken care of.

The mental image it conjures if of someone in distress being told to come to where they can find relief.  They’re not being sent as in “Go to…” but rather told the singer will accompany them.  A child who badly skinned their knee, an adult suffering the consequences of their own mistakes, a starving stranger.  In each case the singer is telling them “come where we can help you.”

This is not some happy-clappy contemporary Christian music crap, it’s a guttural command from someone who’s suffered through pain of their own and now possesses the hard-earned pragmatic wisdom to tell the audience to stop wallowing in their own misery and come someplace where they can be helped.

All your crying don't do no good
Come on up to the house
Come down off the cross, we can use the wood
You gotta come on up to the house

Refreshingly shocking, it’s a tough, no-nonsense approach – but it’s one that works because it actually does something.

No “thoughts and prayers” bullshit, but something real, something tangible that can help.

It makes no any false promises, it provides no namby-pamby feel good spiritual band-aid that pretends there’s a quick / easy / painless solution.

There's no light in the tunnel, no irons in the fire

Come on up to the house

And you're singing lead soprano in a junkman's choir

You got to come on up to the house

What is the house?  It’s the Church.

Not a church.

Not the church.

The Church.

The body of believers who actually follow the teachings of Jesus.

The good Christians.

The best Christians.

You rarely find them in Sunday school or singing AI generated praise songs with a mediocre guitar band or listening to some asshole in a $5,000 suit and a cheap toupee tell them how “Guh-HAWD’s…gotta a muracle…fer hew!”

No, you find them in bars.

By the side of the road.

Cleaning nursing room floors.

In domestic abuse shelters.

There's nothing in the world that you can do
You gotta come on up to the house
And you been whipped by the forces that are inside you
Gotta come on up to the house

They’re not telling anybody what to believe or how to worship.

They’re not lying to anybody.

They’re telling them the truth.

Then they do what they can to try to help that person.

Do they always succeed?

Of course not.

But they still try.

Well, you're high on top of your mountain of woe
Gotta come on up to the house
Well, you know you should surrender, but you can't let it go
You gotta come on up to the house, yeah

lyrics © Jalma Music
written by Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits
text © Buzz Dixon