What Gordon Lightfoot Taught Me About Faith

In 1966, a 28-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter named Gordon Lightfoot released his debut album, Lightfoot! The very first track on that album was called “Rich Man’s Spiritual,” which feels a little as if it was written by the biblical rich man who talked with Jesus in Mark 10. Instead of the rich man selling everything he had, as Jesus told him to, he decided to seek salvation through a different direction.

The singer talks about buying his way “home,” ranging from white robes and golden slippers to silver wings and, most intriguingly, “a poor man’s trouble.” “When I get my trouble and woe/Then homeward I will go/I’m gonna get a little trouble and woe to get me home.”

I thought of that song when I learned that Gordon Lightfoot died May 1 at the age of 84. I have no idea what the state of Lightfoot’s soul was at the time of his death, of course. But I’m sure that, if he made his way “home,” there was no buying his way in.

I’ve long been a fan of folk music from the 1960s and ‘70s: Carole King, Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens. While my friends were listening to heavy metal and early-form rap, I was liable to be absorbing acoustic guitar and quiet, lyrical stories. I ran across Gordon Lightfoot when I was in high school, and I haven’t stopped listening since.

The Canadian performer was the full folk package: the songwriting, the delicate musicianship and most especially, the voice—smooth as a sunset, soft as pudding. Even before Lightfoot hit puberty, people took notice of his voice: As a kid, he sang in the choir for St. Paul’s United Church in Orillia, Ontario. At age 12, he won a contest and sang, solo, at Toronto’s Massey Hall—a venue that he reportedly performed at another 170 times during his career.

He launched that musical career in earnest with Lightfoot!. But he didn’t earn much notice outside Canada until the early 1970s, beginning with his song “If You Could Read My Mind.” That song plumbed the difficulties of his own disintegrating marriage, and certainly Lightfoot’s history of relationships was spotty. He was married three times and had numerous other relationships, and he fathered two children out of wedlock. He struggled with alcoholism, too, In 2002, he nearly died from a brain aneurism. According to a 2019 article by the National Post, he was unconscious for six weeks, and he only woke up when his sister played his own song, “Minstrel of the Dawn”.

Many of Lightfoot’s songs were about troubled folks and troubled times. He sang about racial strife and whale hunting, broken relationships and broken people. One of his biggest hits, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” asks a pointed theological question: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes/When the waves turn the minutes to hours?”

And yet, Lightfoot said he was a Christian—and perhaps he got closer to religion as he grew older.

“I can say one thing: It’s faith in God that keeps me going,” he told Broadview in a 2013 interview, one conducted in St. Paul’s United, the same church he attended as a child. “I go to church a lot more than I used to. But the faith that I got, I learned right here in this church when I was a kid. I remember the sermons, I remember the prayers, I remember the vibes. You can’t help it—you have to have faith when you get that kind of groundwork.”

As I was writing this blog, I ran across a Lightfoot song I’d not heard for a long time: “Christian Island (Georgian Bay).” The 1972 song chronicles, at least superficially, sailing a small ship christened the “Silver Heels” in and around that namesake Ontario island. But it ends poignantly and—for this Christian listening to it—with perhaps a double meaning.

She’s a good old boat and she’ll stay afloat
Through the toughest gales and keep smilin’
When the summer ends we will rest again
In the lee of Christian Island

Our faith is a place we call home, a port from which we sail into this broken world, return to for shelter and carry with us always. And someday we will sail home in a whole new way—no purchased white robes or golden slippers or anything else we can buy, but with a gift beyond measure.