Jeff Buckley and Jesus

August 2025

How is it that Jeff Buckley, his music, his legacy, his idea, can connect so deeply to a part of me and yet have nothing to do with the glory of Christ Jesus? If I were continuously as amazed and awestruck by Jesus as I am by Jeff Buckley, what would I be?

How can it be that Jeff Buckley satisfies or intensifies a desire or longing, puts a smile in my mind or a tear in my eye, when it has nothing to do with Jesus? Is not the highest and most full life one spent at the feet of Jesus?

Does the very fact that I'm able to point out this "contradiction" make the contradiction valuable, or is it the reality of the contradiction? I hate thinking forward and seeing myself solve this by dismissing the weight of the other side. "The Jeff Buckley connection has no real bearing," I can hear myself saying. When really, there are three options:

  1. I was being deceived that it does. An almost certain, brutal reality.
  2. It's true that I deeply connected with that man, and it was a misguided thing. Then why was it possible?
  3. The in-between, which says: you don't know everything. So in marveling at who Jeff Buckley is, use that as a reference for who Jesus is. Meeting someone even one step past Jeff Buckley would blow my mind.

To be clear, I'm not infatuated with Jeff Buckley's character and everything about him, only his musical and artistic output and legacy. There is no other. How could somebody be that amazing artistically? When I ask myself the same about Jesus, I catch myself thinking, yeah, but Jesus didn't write "Lover, You Should've Come Over." And I conclude that the right thing to do is understand that Jesus wrote and spoke things far past the philosophical, emotional, and revolutionary connections a Jeff Buckley song transmits. For some reason, I just can't feel that yet. I think of Jesus as Jesus, and Jeff Buckley as wow.

I would love to have a conversation with me 10 or 20 years from now about this. Mostly I wonder what he would wish I did right now to capitalize on my unique experience, that I would actually be able to do.