The Music That Arrived Before the Road
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Some words arrive before we know what they mean.
Sometimes we sing an image for years, only to realize much later that we have already been living inside it.
That happened to me recently when I listened again to “De trem” (“By Train”), one of the songs from the album Contraste. Written by João Alexandre and Luciano Garruti Filho, the song speaks of life as a journey: the train keeps moving, the landscape changes, people draw near and move away, and the traveler tries to understand the direction while remaining in motion.
Listening to it now, more than forty years later, I had an immediate reaction:
This could be the music of Teleiós.
Not because we needed to choose an official song for the site. Nor because its composers had somehow written about the story Val and I would eventually live.
The connection came from somewhere else.
I recognized in its poetry a grammar we are only now beginning to name: road, seasons, encounters, missed connections, departures, and returns.
The song was there long before our vocabulary.
Contraste
Grupo Pescador began meeting in 1983. We were Davi Kerr, Luciano Garruti Filho, João Alexandre, Rogério Boccato, and me. We recorded Contraste at the end of that year, and the album was released in 1984.
I was just over twenty years old, and I was Zé da Flauta—Zé the Flute Player.
I had begun wearing that garment a few years earlier, when my father, at considerable sacrifice, managed to give me the flute I had longed for. Then came the lessons with João Dias Carrasqueira, the Brazilian music that filled his home, the rehearsals, the friendships, and eventually Pescador.
It is difficult to look back at that album without noticing how many things were already coming together.
There was a desire to make Christian music with biblical depth and musical beauty, but also with a distinctly Brazilian accent. There was friendship, youth, discovery, and a restlessness we did not yet know how to explain.
Even the name Contraste suggested that faith did not remove us from the tensions of life.
It invited us to move through them.
The group came to an end before the album had really reached its audience. Some of those paths separated; others would cross again.
João and I would go on to MILAD. Years later, Rogério and I would meet again in the original formation of the Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo. A companion from a small Christian music group would reappear beside me in a professional setting among extraordinary musicians.
But when we recorded the album, none of that could be seen.
All we had was the stretch of road in front of us.
A Journey We Did Not Yet Know
When we recorded “De trem,” Val and I were not yet married. My father was still alive. I had not boarded the MILAD bus, traveled across Brazil, studied theology, or become a pastor.
I did not know Costa Rica, Africa, East Timor, or the backlands of northeastern Brazil.
I had not waited at airports for refugee families, opened houses of welcome, or arrived in Greater Curitiba.
I did not know how many times I would change cities, roles, and plans. I did not know that some people would enter our story for only a few miles, while others would remain with us through many seasons.
I did not know that some roads would end abruptly, that there would be walls built by people and stones no one had placed there.
I did not know that, at certain moments, moving forward would mean going back.
None of this was available to that young musician.
And yet he played his flute inside a song about a journey.
Perhaps that is why the song reaches me differently now.
It does not hand me a secret map that had somehow been lying before my eyes all along. It does something simpler and, for me, more truthful:
it gives me an old language with which to recognize an experience that only time has made visible.
There are roads we can understand only after we have traveled them.
Salvation Does Not Interrupt the Journey
There is something in the song that still moves me: finding direction does not mean getting off the train.
Faith does not remove the traveler from the landscape, from questions, from change, or from the company of people who are different from us.
The journey continues.
For a long time, some of the religious language I heard seemed to suggest otherwise. As though spiritual maturity would eventually lead us to a safe platform from which we could finally explain the road to everyone else.
As though coming to faith also meant arriving at the end of doubt, fragility, and change.
Our experience was different.
Faith took us deeper into the journey.
It brought us close to people, conflicts, and realities we had not known. It led us to leave without having all the resources we needed, to receive help from people we did not expect, and to discover that some of our convictions still needed to mature.
It did not eliminate missed connections.
Sometimes it taught us not to let them have the final word.
The road changed us too.
The garments of musician, pastor, teacher, mission-agency executive, researcher, and network builder did not simply replace one another. Some were worn over those that came before. Others ceased to fit.
All of them carry marks from the places we have traveled through.
We are still on the train—but we are no longer the same people who boarded it.
Listening Again
To encounter an old song again is also a form of return.
The recording remains almost the same.
The listener does not.
The young man who took part in that album heard possibilities. The man returning to it now also hears losses, encounters, detours, reconciliations, and a faithfulness that can only be recognized over time.
A work of art can hold more than its author or performer knew they were placing inside it.
Not because it contains a detailed prediction of the future, but because some images are larger than the moment in which they were born.
They keep traveling while we travel too.
“De trem” does not need to become the theme song of Teleiós.
I would rather leave it as I found it again: a reference, a companion, an open window onto the beginning.
It reminds us that the road did not begin when we started talking about it.
When we found the words ROAD, SEASONS, ENCOUNTERS, MISSED CONNECTIONS, and RETURNS, we were not inventing a new identity.
We were learning how to conjugate an old story.
Perhaps this is what we do when we return to a song, a photograph, or a place: we are not looking only for what happened.
We are listening for what that experience may still have to say.
And sometimes we discover that, long before we understood the road, a song had already boarded the train with us.
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