What Godspell Knows That We’ve Forgotten

In the Wings

I was never one of the stars. In high school, I worked stage crew for our production of Godspell — moving props, running cues, staying mostly invisible in the wings. But the music found me anyway. I went home and listened to that cast recording on repeat. During the hard stretches — the kind that feel enormous at seventeen — “By My Side” and “Day by Day” became something I returned to without fully understanding why. They weren’t hymns exactly. Nor were they pop songs either. They were something quieter. Something that felt true.

It Keeps Finding Me

Years later, my son was five or six years old when he noticed I was having a particularly hard day. He looked at me and said, “Put on that song that makes you happy. The day song.” He didn’t know the name. He just knew that music helped his mom, and he wanted to help her too. I put it on. It worked, like it always does. There is something about “Day by Day” that refuses to let you stay in the dark for long.

And then there are the days when gratitude doesn’t come easily — when the world feels heavy and being thankful feels like a stretch. On those days, I notice I’m humming “All Good Gifts” without even meaning to. It rises up on its own, like a gentle reminder from somewhere deeper than my mood. That’s what Godspell does. It doesn’t lecture you into a better state of mind. It just quietly finds you where you are.

Still Relevant Today

Recently, I was helping prepare end-of-life planning for my mother-in-law. In the middle of that tender, difficult work, “By My Side” kept surfacing in my mind. Not for her — she isn’t gone. But I heard it differently, suddenly, as a song for a funeral. A song for the moment when someone we love is no longer beside us, and we are asking — maybe for the first time with our whole heart — to not walk alone. It is one of the most quietly devastating and beautiful songs I know. I had just never heard it that way before.

All of this is to say: Godspell keeps meeting me at the door of whatever I’m going through. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

What Gets Buried

Let’s be honest about the moment we’re living in. For many of us, organized religion has gotten very loud. Loud and sharp-edged. What once felt like an invitation to something larger has started to feel, for a lot of people, like a gate — with hard rules about who gets through. Fundamentalist voices dominate headlines. Faith gets weaponized in political arguments. And somewhere in all that noise, something essential gets buried: the actual, simple message at the heart of most spiritual traditions. Love one another. Show up for each other. Try, imperfectly, to do better.

Godspell cuts right through all of that. The show is based loosely on the Gospel of Matthew, but you don’t need to be Christian to feel it. You don’t need to believe anything in particular. It doesn’t ask you to. The characters are clowns and wanderers. The staging is spare. The message is delivered in parables, in laughter, in movement. And then a song begins, and something in you shifts.

The Radical Act of Simplicity

“Day by Day” is, at its core, a simple prayer. Not for certainty, not for doctrinal correctness, not for victory over anyone. Just: let me see more clearly, love more fully, follow more honestly — one day at a time. In a world that feels increasingly fractured and frantic, that simplicity isn’t naive. It’s radical. It asks nothing of your denomination or your theology. It only asks you to show up.

“By My Side” asks something even quieter. It asks: will you stay with me? Not will you fix it. Not will you have the answers. Just — will you stay? That question sits at the center of what so many of us are hungry for right now. Not certainty. Not someone to tell us what to believe. Just presence. Just the sense of being accompanied through the hard parts.

Godspell understood this long before we had language like “spiritual but not religious.” It offered something that transcends denomination — the feeling of being gathered together, of mattering to each other, of shared and very human longing. You find joy, sorrow, funny and aching, sometimes all at once. It does not oversimplify. It just refuses to over complicate.

Day by Day

Whether you first encountered Godspell in a high school auditorium, or a regional theater, or through a cast recording playing in someone’s kitchen — let it back in. Let it remind you that spirituality doesn’t have to be loud or righteous or tribal. Sometimes it’s a five-year-old saying “put on the day song.” Often it’s a melody that rises up when you’ve forgotten how to be grateful. Sometimes it’s a song that breaks your heart open, gently, at exactly the right moment.

Day by day. That’s all it asks. That’s everything.