Over at MakeJesusCulture.com we had Latiphah Alattis talk about songwriting, but in the midst of it she grew very honest about her father’s funeral. Her father died young, all things considered, and she was a younger woman when it happened. As a Christian songwriter, the despair really sang pretty deep into her melancholy spirit and festered there. Meanwhile, the parishioners and fellow citizens all passed her by ignorant of the depths of her grief. There in the corner of the funeral home sat an old upright piano, unloved and unused. This songwriter sat down at its keys and began to punch out minor chords, pressing and pausing, punctuating the moment with the minor mood, the black of ebony over the white ivory. And a song came to her quicker than any song had come before or has come since. A song she sang in her youth in Sunday School. But it came out sour, it came out bitter, it came out with the longing that CS Lewis described in Surprised by Joy: “Joy—that sharp, wonderful Stab of Longing—has a lithe, muscular lightness to it. It’s deft. It produces longing that weighs heavy on the heart, but it does so with precision and coordination…It dashes in with the agility of a hummingbird claiming its nectar from the flower, and then zips away. It pricks, then vanishes, leaving a wake of mystery and longing behind it. “It is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other...