Frank – Yes. I pretty much do that more than I write music. It’s a relatively private affair in terms of the fact that I don’t do it to publish books or to sell it. It started out in the late 70’s as a method of writing letters to people. People would ask me a question and rather than just answer it, I would write these really long letters. They were kind of like essays, based on the subject material. Eventually I started to keep all of these letters in a file and it became this basis for a never-ending book. As I gained more understanding of what I was saying, these letters began to multiply. Now I don’t even do it as letters anymore. I just write it. Every night, before I go to sleep, I go through an entire dialog that, in and of itself, could be another essay. This is what I’m interested in, more than anything else. Other than my children, who are my number one thing in life in this world, my number one interest is my Christianity, even more so than my music. If I’m awake for 12 to 14 hours a day, I’m spending pretty much 10 to 12 of those hours in some form of prayer. If I’m not interacting with anyone else, where my attention is required, I’m contemplating that stuff. It’s very much a part of my life. Having said that though, having done this for 30-35 years, and having the views that I have, a lot of fundamentalists, especially western fundamentalist Christians, might find some of my views about Christianity quite a bit different from what they feel in their own faith. Like I said, it’s very orthodox. What that means is sometimes it doesn’t subscribe to all of the criteria that (sometimes) Western fundamentalists tend to put on people with regards to Christianity. It’s simpler and not as technical. It really deals a lot more with what a person is and how they can get something done rather than why. The Bible is an instruction manual, not a science manual. With the exception of a few times, the Bible doesn’t ever deal with the question of why. I think that one of the few times it actually answers the question why is when it says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”. The rest of the book deals with how you do things. It’s really not as complicated as it has been made out to be. This is the difference between straight Orthodoxy, which means “original” and the different branches of Christianity today and how people tend to view it. Consequently, I’ve kind of become a man in the middle, like Paul. As you know, Paul’s situation was, well the Jews didn’t trust him because he was no longer a Pharisee (although he was), and the Christians didn’t trust him because he had killed them. I’m sort of the same way. Here I am, a rock musician, who’s espousing a form of Christianity that to straight ahead rockers, is some kind of wimpy thing, and to Christian labels and publications, is not Christian enough in their sense because I also do other things that they think aren’t Christian. Actually I don’t, but because of the doctrine, they think that I do. So I have become a guy in the middle. That’s largely the reason that I’ve become kind of a hermit. I have three kids and a wife, but I pretty much live in the basement for 12 hours of the day. When I’m out, I don’t mind meeting everybody, but when I’m home, I pretty much never leave the house and it’s been like that for years. We’re not a family with money. We don’t have it and when we do, we use it for what we need, or the children, or who we can help. I don’t really care about fame or amassed wealth … me or my wife, and we’ve been together for 24 years. We just don’t think along the usual lines of other people.
Do you ever go back and re-read the things you’ve written to see how far you’ve come?
Frank – Frequently, for revisions. It’s not so much that I ever said anything different than I do today, because if you go back to the beginning it’s almost identical. It comes about by the way that we now use language. Over 30 years the language of expression has really changed its focus in the world. This is why they revise the Bible. Scripturally we used to use words in society that meant totally the opposite of what we now use them for. One for instance is the word “convict”. A long time ago, if you wanted to convince someone of something you would tell them “I want to convict you of something”. Older translations of the Bible would use the word convict and everyone would understand that it meant convince. But if you used it today, people would be getting the wrong idea! The word for “ask” used to be “demand” and there’s a different connotation between ask and demand. The way we use words today really change the way we have to say something. So if I said something in 1973 and used the kind of vernacular of that time, if someone reads it today, they’ll say “Hey, what’s that guy saying?” That’s why I go back and read them.
