‘Desparado’ – The Eagles

David reflects:

My travel communion box lay open on her kitchen table. The now faded, embossed image of a circuit-riding preacher glistened in the afternoon sun. My host had found a small piece of west African kente to use as a communion cloth. I had poured the grape juice into two small cups, placed a wafer on the tiny plate. We talked a while over our make-shift altar — about her family, her faith, her life ‘back home’…

From the radio in the next room I could hear BBC Radio 2 chiming three o-clock. Against the muffled backdrop of the headline news, we prayed an opening prayer. Travel news babbled through the scripture lesson. Then some requests. Oldies music, a soundtrack to our sacrament.

A familiar piano introduction wafted down the corridor. Then, Don Henley’s raspy voice, like an old friend calling from the distance: Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses…. Suddenly, I was back in 1970’s New Jersey, listening to DJ Don Imus on WABC. Here I was in a south London flat in my ministerial role, but my mind wandered back to a time of proms and pimples…

I wondered if my host was noticing this song. I sensed not. How can the same song awaken one person’s memories and drift by another in static? But then again, I might have missed her inner reminiscences of an earlier song?

Snap back to the present. On the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread… I reached for the plate.

…Now it seems to me, some fine things have been laid upon your table…

I looked across at my host. In a practical sense we are foreigners. In a theological sense, family. In essence, however, we are complete strangers. Just behind the door of her memory is a whole warehouse of memories I will never know. Nor could she understand what the Eagles evoke in me. How can we have grown up to such different music, but for this three-minute span, be listening to the same melody?

The middle age minister chastened the day-dreaming teenager back to the task at hand.

Later, when the supper was over… I handed her a cup.

Desperado, O you ain’t getting no younger…

As I prayed for her, for her family, for the community and congregation, I paused. “…and for all those who are out riding fences…” I’m not sure if she caught the reference, but inwardly, I smiled. I’m sure I’d transgressed all kinds of liturgical guidelines. But in some strange way, it felt like reaching across time and space to bring something together, back together. And one song had opened the gate.

If you want to know more, follow the link to the Eagles website https://eagles.com/