Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water - Rev. Brian Moodie

Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water - Rev. Brian Moodie

​​In His 2018 book, “When Darkness Seems My Closest Friend: Reflections on Life and Ministry with Depression”, Mark Maynell wrote the following words on friendship - 

Some years ago, a British newspaper invited readers to submit their best definitions of friendship and friends. Thousands of suggestions flooded in. Some of the best included: One who multiplies our joys, divides our griefs and whose honesty is inviolable. One who understands our silence. Friends are like good health: you don’t realize what a gift they are until you lose them. Prosperity begets friends; adversity proves them. Friends do their knocking before they enter, instead of after they leave. 

C. S. Lewis was someone who deeply understood and appreciated friendship. He knew how vital it was, but also how it gets forged: ‘Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.’…But Lewis’s most famous insight on the subject is even more relevant: ‘Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, “What! You, too? I thought I was the only one.”’

Indeed, there is a wonderful joy when we discover that someone else shares our own interest and who sees the world in much the same way as we do. Friendships born of common interests and a common outlook to life help us all to feel that we are not alone…

I’m not so sure though about CS Lewis’s assessment that friendship is not necessary for survival… Evidence from studies suggest that social isolation leads to earlier mortality? And indeed there are many people who might say that without a special friend or perhaps a special group of friends, they might never have made it through a particularly dark and difficult part of their lives. 

Today we come to explore another well-known song by Simon and Garfunkel which speaks of the kind of friendship that stands by someone else even in through the darkest of times.  In the end it is only these kinds of friendships that have deep and lasting value. And so we come to explore the song: “Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water”.

The song was written by Paul Simon, and was inspired by an old southern gospel song, by the southern gospel group Swan Silvertones’. It was their 1959 song “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.” And one line in particular stood out for Paul Simon,— I’ll be your bridge over deep water / If you trust in my name—.

Paul Simon said, “It was the music that was in my mind most of the time, and every time that I came home, I put that record on, and I listened to it.” He went on to say that he thought that song must have subconsciously influenced him, as I started to play around with gospel chord progressions in his songs. 

And so out of those gospel song lyrics, “I’ll be your bridge over deep water / If you trust in my name—,” Paul Simon wrote the song “Like a Bridge over Troubled water”, that itself has a decidedly religious feel to it. 

Paul Simon says that though he himself wrote it, and it all came together quite quickly, for some reason he says that he couldn’t completely identify with the song himself and so asked Art Garfunkel to be the one to sing it.  The song became one of Simon & Garfunkel’s biggest hits and one of their signature songs, topping the U.S. and U.K. charts and picking up five Grammy awards in 1971

And the central theme of the song is about the kind of friendship that sticks around when times are dark.  And the central line of the song, found in the chorus “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down” is a metaphor that expresses the willingness of a friend to lay down their lives like a bridge to enable another to cross over the troubled waters of life in order to get safely to the other side.  It has echoes of those familiar words from  John 15:13 “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.”

Whatever else friendships may be, friendships at their most valuable, are like bridges that help one to cross over to the other-side of a difficult, dark or particularly turbulent time. 

I find it interesting that the ancient Latin meanings of the word priest is to be a bridge-builder.  The idea was that a priest should be one who helps to build a bridge between people and God.  This suggests that when we are involved in building or being bridges in this world, we are playing the sacred role of a priest. It was the conviction of the early Protestant reformers that we are all meant to be priests – they referred to the priesthood of all believers.  And I believe that this song by Paul Simon shows us that when we stand by a friend in hard and difficult times, we are playing a priestly role. There is something sacred about being the kind of friend who becomes a bridge over troubled water for a friend. 

And so in verse 1 we hear these words: 

When you're weary
Feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all
I'm on your side
Oh, when times get rough
And friends just can't be found
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

Wendy was listening to the radio recently and they were talking about grief. One man phoned in and told of his experience that when he lost his child, he also lost half of his friends. They just vanished.   They didn’t have it in them to stand with him in the pain. Perhaps they felt awkward, didn’t know what to say or do? Their solution was to abandon him. But the true friends are revealed when the times get rough and many other so-called friends can no longer be found. 

In verse two:  
When you're down and out
When you're on the street
When evening falls so hard
I will comfort you
I'll take your part
Oh, when darkness comes
And pain is all around
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

It is a verse that reminds us that everyone goes through hard and difficult times, when we feel down and out and metaphorically ‘on the street’.  And often the most difficult time, is at night. Paul Simon captures it so well in the second half of the verse: 

When evening falls so hard...
Oh, when darkness comes
And pain is all around...
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

A true friend is willing to sit with us and simply be with us even in the darkness.  And the darkness may come to us in different forms: as weariness, sadness, grief, depression, or heartache. And the hope and reassurance that comes in the chorus is that ones struggles are seen and understood by someone.  It reminds me of Hagar  in that Old Testament story when the angel of the Lord comes to comfort her after she and her son Ishmael have been sent away into the desert by Abraham and Sarah. In response to the angel of the Lord, she says:“You are the God who sees me,… for I have now seen the One who sees me.” Friends are often Angels of the Lord through whom our struggles are seen and understood by the God who sees us. 

The last verse is an interesting one.  It seems that it was only added a little later after the initial part of the song was already written. The words read as follows:

Sail on silver girl
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way
See how they shine
Oh, if you need a friend
I'm sailing right behind

And they are followed by a slightly reworded chorus - 

Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind

Apparently, Paul Simon had been unsure as to whether to include this verse. He says that his girlfriend at the time was feeling particularly down upon finding a few grey hairs in her hairbrush, lamenting that she was getting older. And in response he said that he wrote that lyric as a tribute and inside joke to her because after that incident, he began to call he his ‘silver girl’, taking something that was worrying her and turning it into a term of endearment and even encouragement, “Sail on by, your time has come to shine, and if you need a friend, I’m sailing right behind”. 

The song would have been incomplete without those words, because a friend is not only someone who gets us through troubled times, a friend is also someone who stands on the sidelines of our lives, cheering us on, helping us to shine, encouraging us to be all that we can be.  

This is a love song, but a love song with a difference. When we think of the word love we have been conditioned by modern society to equate the word with romance. But this song reminds us that love comes in different forms and one of the most beautiful forms is friendship.  And the truth is, once the fuel of romance has burned itself up, the real test is whether a romance can become a long lasting and deep friendship. When the fireworks have begun to die down is there enough in a relationship to become a friendship that is willing to be like a bridge over troubled water… I will lay me down?

Last week, I quoted Nick Cave who said that every love song is ultimately a song for God… God, the Infinite, is the true goal of all our deepest longings.  And that is true of this song too I believe.  Any true friendship is ultimately an expression of a love much greater than our own, a Divine Love that promises to be with us even to the end of the age, a Divine love that promises to carry us when we are unable to make it on our own, A Divine Love that wills the best for us and Whose deepest wish for us is that we should shine, a love revealed in Christ that journeys with us even through the valley of the shadow of death, and which is willing to lay itself down, for the life of the world. 

I end with a few moving words from Isaiah 43

43 ...“Do not be afraid, for I have ransomed you.
    I have called you by name; you are mine.
2 
When you go through deep waters,
    I will be with you.
When you go through rivers of difficulty,
    you will not drown.
When you walk through the fire of oppression,
    you will not be burned up;
    the flames will not consume you.
3 
For I am the Lord, your God,
    the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour.
Amen. ​