Album Notes

Conversation with a Hidden Man

Could you help me with something? I wonder if you could stop for a moment... long enough to let me interrupt your thought process... just long enough to insert something into your heart.

Can you lay aside all that mental baggage and be still? Allow yourself to directly perceive whats going on here. I desire to get something across to you and "I see no way of communicating my thought except by inviting you to share my intuition". (1)

Why is it so hard to be intimate with you? Are you ever open to anything you can't immediately seize with your reason? Some things are impossible to comprehend... and that's O.K. "Never question the truth of what you fail to understand". (2)

Wait! Please don't go! May I have just a little more of your time? I have a poem which I would like to read, but... I'm not sure you'd be able to hear it. Why?... Do you remember when I said "that in order to experience the beauty of a poem, one must consent to its obscurity"? (3) Well, so far you haven't demonstrated to me much tolerance for any kind of obscurity.

Besides... I'm afraid you would turn around and ask me for an explanation. "Why must I always explain"?(4) I knew a godly man once who has always been an example to me: "He lived that which he was unable to explain".(5)

It seems to me that explaining requires a certain ability to stay on track. I really lack in that area. But I don't feel overly bad about it. More and more I am "finding the courage to be inconsistent".(6)

I have learned that many people are "apt to think and speak about a thing rather than bear witness to the thing itself". (7) I can't live that way. I want to be a living demonstration... to bear witness to Jesus Christ himself and not to feel an inordinate compulsion to think and speak about him. I like what St. Francis said when he enjoined us to "preach the gospel all the time and if necessary use words". (8)

I appreciate your taking the time to listen to what I had to say. I think for myself, and I hope for you also, the important thing is to find what we are destined for, "to perceive what the Lord wants me to do, to find the idea for which I am ready to live and die".(9)

- Dan Zimmerman



1. Nicolas Berdyaev
2. L. Frank Baum
3. Jacques Maritain
4. Van Morrison
5. George MacDonald
6. N. Berdyaev
7. N. Berdyaev
8. St. Francis of Assisi
9. Soren Kierkegaard