Blind Faith

...and the curious case of our father.

A yen outta yen.

Caeca Fides.

Had I whispered those words to my father even as he was taking his last breaths, he probably would have emerged from his hospice haze and emphatically elucidated, “Oooo! I love the dulcet tones! That’s Latin for blind faith!” Dad was not a Latin scholar per se but he would often access the Latin or Greek he kept somewhere in the folds of his mind like calcium deposits from his college and Lutheran seminary classes. Often translating or reverse engineering English words and phrases by extracting their ancient bones, he was like an unpaid archaeologist hired by Webster. Unless he was on your team, playing games like Bluff or Dictionary might possibly suck because he could pretty much figure out any word which ultimately defeated the porpoise of the game. He loved language, etymology and traditional grammar, often using arcane words like “extant” and “remunerative” rather than just asking “is it still around?” or “did you get paid?” When we were growing up, if someone called our land line and asked, “Can I speak to Paul Christenson?” he would respond with “It is I!” which was so right while simultaneously so wrong, evoking winces from any of his 6 children and including our mother. Good grammar to him was evidently the 11th Commandment. He loved language and eventually was able to get by preaching in German and Norwegian and even attempted to learn French sometime in the late 70’s during a time when he was busier than Martin Luther scouting doors in Wittenberg.

Dad was not very funny, at least not in the traditional sense of the word but thankfully, his blind faith forced God’s hand to intervene and present him the gift of the Queen of Puns, my mother, his beloved Loey. Mom showed little restraint with humor and would often use the names Al Dente, Skip Rope or Rick O’ Shay as the return address on the numerous cards and letters she would send us. She loved the phrase, “The pun is the Lois form of humor.” She was funny haha while dad was funny funny and that’s one reason why their partnership worked so well. He would often throw out phrases that were more intended as musings and observations but inevitably would crack us all up. When he would hear our laughter he would often say, “Good thing you have your dad to make fun of!” Since he was such a grammar freak, instead of saying “Have a nice day!” he would say “Make for yourself a good day!” which was hilarious yet made perfectly good sense to him since it’s impossible to grammatically possess a day. We all knew he was correct but who in their right mind would ever say that to their kids let alone in public? Well Dad would. He didn’t care. He loved living in a household of humor yet knew deep down that his bones were not really as funny as a well placed dangling participle. But he sure appreciated and loved humor and if you said something funny to him, at some point he began saying “good one!” in full support of your cleverness. This was so sincere yet hilarious in its own right because, of course, whatever you said was funny, otherwise you wouldn’t have said it in the first place right? Despite this and as in all aspects of his life, dad was fully confident knowing exactly who he was or if he didn’t, it was this insecurity that was his ace of spades that he continued to hold close to his chest and into the afterlife.

The phrase blind faith was one of the highest tenants by which he lived. He operated on this earthly plane at full speed, fueled by blind faith and that trickster propellent called hope. Dad was an extremely gifted musician who, even at 92 with neuropathic fingers, could still improvise and play Chopin’s Military Polonaise. He pulled this feat off on the piano in the lobby of his assisted living facility in Red Wing, Minnesota after returning from a 12 day stay at the Mayo Clinic where they installed something akin to a new carburetor in his failing heart. He spent his entire life fully ensconced in music performance, arrangement and of course his favorite: theory. Music theory, to most normal humans learning an instrument is akin to having your mother with you on your first date. But he believed you needed to know theory to really know music like the need to know the periodic chart if you’re studying chemistry.

Being a proud member of the esteemed The St. Olaf College Choir with my mother in the 1950’s, choral music was probably the genre that struck the deepest chord with dad. Hearing the St. Olaf Choir sing Grechaninov’s Our Father, Op 29 No 11 would send him as close to God as a mortal could get. He also loved the early composers like Mozart and was constantly amazed and inspired by the work of Bach. His performance idol and inspiration was Vladimir Horowitz who he saw as a young boy at Northrup Auditorium at the University of Minnesota. He would still talk about that religious experience some 80 years later. The great Sergei Rachmaninoff was another one of his favorite composers but his interest appeared to wain with anything written after the Romantic Period. I think he appreciated someone like Aaron Copland or Stephan Sondheim but even those two were possibly too saccharine for his tastes. Dad’s internal stereo was never quite plugged in like it is with most of us. To him, Elvis had never even entered the building let alone left it. Dylan? The Beatles? Joni Mitchell? Marvin Gaye? The Jackson Five? Abba? Haircut 100? “Nein danke!” he might say. He diluted all popular music post Rachmaninoff down to one hilarious phrase: “It’s all just 4/4! Baby baby baby! Done!” There is zero chance that he knew that Blind Faith was also the name of an English supergroup, an influential band who put out just one amazing album in 1969 as he was too busy building churches in Wisconsin and Iowa to bother with anything outside the classical canon or the Lutheran Hymnal.

There were phrases and words he would unconsciously come up with that still keep on giving. One evening, back in the Chicago days, dad and I cracked open a couple of father/son beers and sat down to watch The David Letterman Show in the living room of the parsonage in Evanston. After Letterman announced that the musical guest was none other than Tom Waits, a hero of mine, my beer began tasting even better. When Tom finally walked out on stage looking like he had just stepped out of a garbage can, he sat down at the piano and began playing with those straight, rigor mortised fingers as if he was suffering from a rare neurological condition. Dad taught all of his 6 children (plus some grandkids and numerous others) over the years and one technique he would use was to imagine holding a tennis ball in our palms for correct hand position. I could see that the sight of Tom’s straight fingers was an abomination to him going against every musical grain in his body. To add salt to the wound, Tom is known for singing like a frog who has a frog in its throat and using his diaphragm correctly was out of the question so dad looked over at me and once again, in all sincerity asked, “Is this good?” I started laughing and confidently stated, “Yes dad. This is good.” And with this blind faith in one of his children and the trust that I mostly know what I’m talking about regarding modern music, he believed that I was correct in my judgement or maybe I fooled him. Despite a severe lack of wisdom, he somehow took my word as the Gospel truth even though it was The Gospel According to Doubting Thomas which is a pretty dodgy Gospel even on a good day.

When I was living in Australia, dad called and informed me that Rusty Kephart had just phoned him on behalf of the Nordic Fest Committee in Decorah, Iowa curious if our family would be up for reuniting for the 50th anniversary that year of the Nordic Fest. In some cheugy circles, this would be like reuniting Blind Faith or even The Beatles. I told him that it would be pretty expensive for me to fly back at which point he blurted out, “Rusty has a budget!” which made me laugh out loud which in turn got him laughing and realizing that, once again, he was the King of Funny Funny. We have gotten so much mileage out of that phrase that I once put it on a T shirt for one of my brothers. But dad really meant it. He was dead serious and maybe Rusty did have a budget after all because for him, it seemed as though Rusty was just code for God and dad’s God always had a budget. This was the way he and mom led their family of 8 through life. Amongst many adventures, we went overseas three times, driving around in a van, surviving on bread and cheese, singing songs from musicals like the Sound of Music and Oliver as well as Scandinavian folk songs throughout Scandinavia and Europe in ‘74, ‘77 and in ‘81. The latter was the year we snuck behind the Iron Curtain, crossing barbed wire borders with machine guns clicking and German Sheppards sniffing. We sang our way through East Germany and Poland where we eventually escaped from the grip of the newly installed martial law by the skin of our teeth via a ferry to Sweden and the help of a random hitchhiker. One phrase that he would often use was “we’re living on the edge…with plenty!” said like a true preacher, one on a mission with God on his side.

I told him once about this popular, bari sax driven indie band brilliantly named Morphine who I thought was pretty cool and he said, “Oh! What a terrible name!” And then it happened again. I laughed and then he realized that he had said something funny without trying to be funny. Thankfully, in his relatively painless few final days in hospice, morphine became his friend, working side by side with blind faith and hope just like the original Holy Trinity that kept him going for 92 years.

Blind Faith’s biggest hit, which is still played live on countless stages around the world, is “Can’t Find My Way Home”. Stevie Winwood, a prodigy on multiple instruments, was only about 21 years old when he wrote it. He wrote a lot of those annoying “4/4! Baby baby baby! Done!” songs, the ones that would make dad slightly disgusted. Ironically, I, his own son, have gone on to compose and record albums full of these 4/4 songs referencing babies but he was such a devoted father that I’ve received nothing but praise and encouragement from him and my mother over the years. “Fine musicianship!” “Perfect intonation!” Well done son!” is what he would often say. Forever the supportive optimist and completely biased father.

Archer Monk groupies forever.

In our nearly daily conversations over the past few years when I would ask “How’re you doing dad?”, his pat answer was “Well..quite well!”, his glass was always half full while mine is often half empty. We would begin with topics as mundane as “How’s the weather out in Minnesota dad?” “It’s pretty cold here. How’s it out in California?” but then would move on to more arcane topics which were, just like the weather, varied and fluid. We never did speak though, about how Stevie Winwood was actually similar to him as a young lad. Dad was playing in churches for weddings and funerals at just 15 while Stevie was around 15 when he began playing in clubs with the explosive Spencer Davis Group. He and Stevie were born in different eras, wore their hair in slightly different styles (ie Stevie had a lot of hair and dad barely had enough to even create a style) and took very different paths but dad surely would’ve appreciated his unlikely bedfellow’s musicianship. Dad’s blind faith and trust in my judgment of popular music might have made him appreciate that which, seemingly, was anathema to him. As a 21 year old, maybe it was just a turn of phase or perhaps Stevie really was lost and trying to find his way home. Dad, on the other hand, always seemed to know exactly who he was and where he was going and this was tied securely to this unwavering faith, albeit blind, in God, family and humanity. He recognized his life’s mission as preaching the social Gospel, creating positive change, spreading peace, living in fellowship and having fun from his first parish fresh out of seminary to his final breath. He always knew exactly where home was and he’s certainly there now, wherever that is, inadvertently being funny.

I love you dad.

Paul Henry Christenson

September 9, 1933 - April 29, 2026

Stay artful…