“Clearly: Love”

It has been a while since I first met him. We still meet. Again and again. We talk about life. About art. About what we believe. And just before he speaks, something happens. It grows quiet. You can hear him breathe. He turns inward. As if a thought needs silence before it can become a word. Space to deepen. Space to become clear.

…

This verse came to mind when I thought of Moses. At first, I couldn’t tell you why.

Maybe because so much of life is unclear while we are living it. We sense things long before we understand them. We carry thoughts we cannot yet put into words. Like an image behind a fogged-up window. Something is there. We know it. We just cannot see its shape yet.

And then, sometimes, we meet someone who finds the words. Or we hear a melody. A line. A work of art. Something gives shape to what was invisible. Language to what had gone unspoken. And suddenly we can touch what we could only sense.

Not because something new was added. But because someone breathed life into what was already there.

This is what Moses’ art does for me. It gives shape to things I had only felt. It brings them to the surface.

And perhaps this is where its clarity comes from. Not from explaining everything. But from making something so true that we can finally encounter it.

This is why I am writing about him. Because something in my own life has become clearer through what he has made. His art has given me words, images, and sounds for things I could only sense before. And with them, so much beauty. So much clarity.

In the Beginning

… there was no single moment that set the course. For Moses, there were many. “Countless moments, countless decisions, often unconscious ones,” he says. He no longer remembers many of them. But he is certain that each had its effect. What they spared him and what they denied him is difficult to say from where he stands now.

I think of water making its way through stone. You never see the single drop that changes it. Only the shape that appears over time.

He remembers his first album, “Raining Rhymes.” Back then, he had focused on his lyrics and nothing else, and he was, as he puts it, “terribly unhappy” with the result. Out of that unhappiness grew a decision: to take responsibility. Without it, Moses says, there would be no 3p, his label Pelham Power Productions¹. And nothing that followed.

Sometimes, I think, something new begins right where something else fails.

Responsibility

Something new emerged when he began to take that responsibility seriously. As he speaks about it, it becomes clear that “taking” responsibility is not really the right way to put it. “I had that responsibility anyway. I just hadn’t lived up to it until then.” Now he knew that if things were to improve, he would have to live up to it. Another decision that shaped his life.

This is how I know him. He takes a word. Turns it over. Tests it. Until it is right. Maybe that is the silence I hear before he speaks. Not hesitation. Care. The work of finding a word that can carry what he means.

Roots

If we want to understand what shaped him, we have to go back to his roots.

His father was a musician. He came from a Jewish-Christian tradition. And that, Moses says, shaped him deeply. “From an early age, I grew up seeing that talking to God and trying to write a song were simply the most natural things in the world.”

The most natural things in the world.

Talking to God. Writing a song. That is exactly what moves me so much about Moses. To me, both are the same attempt: to give a voice to what has been placed in one’s heart. And perhaps this also makes clear where his inspiration comes from.

If singing is praying twice, what is rap then? I don’t know. But I have a feeling Augustine would have loved it.

Footprints in the Sand

When we talk about difficult times, Moses says: “There is always something we find difficult, but the Lord has always carried me.” Then he asks whether I know the short poem “Footprints in the Sand”³. It does not surprise me that he thinks of a poem. He is a poet himself.

I do know it. A person walks along the beach with God, and scenes from his life pass before him. Most of the time, he sees two sets of footprints in the sand: his and God’s. But in the hardest times, only one set can be seen. Why, he asks, did you leave me alone precisely then? And God answers:

Fascination

Moses is fascinated by art. He is constantly doing something different, he tells me, moving from one thing into the next. Rather, he eventually notices when something is not right for him. He has known that he wanted to be involved in art since he was twelve or thirteen. “I follow the fascination.”

From one thing into the next. I know Moses’ talents because he shares them with all of us. And I believe each of them could fill a portrait of its own.

When something comes into being, Moses calls it “a gift, a miracle, every time.” And with it come joy, gratitude and wonder.

He believes that feelings find their own way. How, he does not know. If he knew, he says, he probably would not be so fascinated by it. And he would not still be doing what, in essence, he was already doing as a teenager.

There is something beautiful about that. Something childlike about following curiosity wherever it leads. In a way, he is still doing what he did as a boy. Only now he is grown. Maybe wonder is the most honest way to look at the world. And at the One who made it.

Vulnerability

To wonder is to stay open. And to stay open is to be vulnerable.

Showing himself vulnerable in his art? “Absolutely wonderful,” says Moses. He believes that only those who know that vulnerability in themselves notice it in the first place.

I kept thinking about that. Maybe this is why his art reaches some people so deeply. It meets us where we are open, too.

I remember an evening when Moses played me one of his new songs. I was so fascinated that I asked him how something like that could come into being. He simply said:

And if all his music disappeared and only a single sentence of his remained? That is easy, he says. He has thought about it for a long time.

The Good Life

A good life in one word? “Gratitude,” says Moses. “I believe grateful people are happy.”

And what we truly need in life, above all, is love. “And this is where it comes full circle,” he says, thinking of the letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 13.

And, as “chance” would have it, it is the very next verse after the one with which I began this portrait.

Vision

So it is hardly surprising that, when he thinks of the future, there is one thing he wishes for above all: love. So much love …

Afterword

In the end …

… things are clearer.

And it is good. Because it is love.

Thank you, Moses. For the silence before your words. And for the words after.