I was listening to music on my I-Phone a couple nights ago. Usually, I get it started with something like “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young, and then the algorithm of the You Tube program will pick songs that are similar. And so it did, one song after another.

And then it played a song I had never heard before. And I really liked it. It is called “Ashes and Steel” by singer Chris Stapleton. I listened to it a few times. I loved the country and blues sound. I liked Chris Stapleton’s vocals. And the lyrics were thoughtful and deep poetry. As I listened, I thought, “Ashes and Steel” would be a great illustration for Lent.

So, the next day I went to work on the song. I wanted to print out the lyrics so I could reflect on them and pick a few for this article. But I couldn’t find just the lyrics online. I looked everywhere. No lyrics. There was the You Tube video with lyrics. But no plain old lyrics. So, I thought maybe the song was so new that no one had posted the lyrics on the internet yet (but I knew that was hardly possible).

Doing a little more work online, I discovered that the song wasn’t by Chris Stapleton at all. It was Artificial Intelligence generated. AI generated the country/blues sound of Chris Stapleton. It had the strong vocals of Chris Stapleton. It had the thoughtful real life and real faith lyrics of Christ Stapleton that sounded like poetry. It even had videos of Chris Stapleton singing while the song played. But it was AI! Needless to say, I was very disappointed. I really like the song. But it just didn’t seem “real.”

“Real?” So, I did a little “Lenten pondering” about that. On one hand the song is real. You can go to You Tube and play it. But on the other hand, it just didn’t seem real to me because it didn’t come from human experience and reflection and creativity. AI just copied and put together a massive amount of information to make the song.

“Real?” So, I remembered the book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. In the story the Velveteen Rabbit asks the wise old Skin Horse what it means to be real. The Skin Horse replies, “Real isn’t how you are made. It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time – not just to play with, but REALLY loves you – then you become Real.” I think there’s some good wisdom there. Real isn’t about how you’re made (like an AI generated song). Rather “real” is about human experiences and relationship and love (which the song did not have).

There are a lot of things that masquerade as “real.” “Ashes and Steel” fooled me for a while. But in the end, I believe the greater truth is in the wisdom of the Skin Horse. “Real” is a human thing we experience in relationships of love. And maybe that’s something to ponder during Lent.

The “Real” Glenn