Walking With Our Eyes Closed

Gungor's "Walking With Our Eyes Closed" traces a journey from willful blindness to sudden, startling sight. The opening lines confess to burning bridges well before anyone realized they might want to return, a picture of irreversible choices made in the confidence that something good waited on the horizon. The song then sets up a strange, charged chorus of voices: demons calling out while angels sing loudly, and a light that draws the travelers into itself. The central image is a people moving forward with their eyes shut tight, only to have their vision forced open by fire blazing directly in front of them. The earth splits apart, and a figure kisses the singer's lips with coal and then with water, a gesture that mingles burning and cleansing. That same face, brighter than the sun, is called "our mother," an intimate and unusual way of naming the presence that meets them. The song holds these opposites together without resolving them: destruction and tenderness, judgment and nurture, the demons and the angels all sounding at once. It ends not with clarity but with the image of fire burning right before opened eyes, leaving the listener to sit with what has been seen.