A review by G. Connor Salter
In the early days after his divorce, Matthew Clark wasn’t thinking of what the loss might teach him about grief and faith. “It blew everything to bits, and nothing made any sense to me,” he tells me over an email interview in spring 2025. “In the middle of that, the Samaritan woman snuck up on me.”
The story from John 4, Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a well and upending everything about how she saw the world, challenged Clark to consider what it meant to find hope after deep disappointment.
Being a touring musician, Clark began scrawling ideas for songs inspired by this biblical story. However, he struggled to find the proper form to develop the dozens of songs that had accumulated. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he organized those ideas into the Well Trilogy, three albums with accompanying essay collections. Only the Lover Sings appeared in 2022, followed by A Tale of Two Trees in 2023, and Where the River Goes in 2025. All three books were released by Panim Press and feature Clark’s lyrics from the accompanying album, essays he wrote framing the books’ vision, and essays by contributors reflecting on the book’s theme.
The last book in the Well Trilogy (full title: Where the River Goes: Meditations on the Return of Christ in Story and Song) concludes the series’ thematic arc on a high note. The essays collected in Only the Lover Sings all took inspiration from the Samaritan woman’s story, alongside various psalms about waiting for God, offering reflections that were equal parts lament and hope. The contributors encouraged readers to admit pain and recognize that there is a good ending to the story. A Tale of Two Trees was, as Clark put it in the book’s introduction, about “being in the middle” of the journey toward that good ending. The essays in both books (from musicians such as Benjamin Holsteen, writers such as Heidi White, and scholars such as Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson) provided excellent explorations of those themes.
Here in Where the River Goes, the promised ending is fulfilled. The journey ends with renewal. As Clark puts in his song “How Long”:
There’s nothing new beneath the sun
There is no song that ain’t been sung
But there is one that won’t go on forever
That song is writ in blood and tears
That beat down through these weary years
A song that burns down in our bones like a fever
His contributors find a variety of ways to explore the same theme. Malcolm Guite’s chapter in the book, “Full-Eyed Love,” offers an engaging guide to how this and other songs on the album capture the pain of struggle alongside the joy of rebirth, the moment promises are made good. Other contributors share their honest experiences of pain from the other side, reflecting on it after finding some measure of relief. Sometimes they describe crippling pain that lasted years. Ruth Naomi Floyd recalls growing up in Philadelphia while her parents performed urban ministry, learning about gang war fatalities and the AIDS crisis before she was even a teenager. Steven A. Beebe talks about the long years of helping a friend recover from drug addiction. Others tell small-scale tales about little moments of learning what renewal means. Rachel Mosley tells parenting stories about getting her children to Sunday Mass and the surprising bits of wisdom that parents and priests drop amid bustling church activities. Micah Hawkinson shares how he takes his toddler son to run around a cemetery, the conjunction of life with reminders about mortality. Each chapter offers a distinct and interesting lens for discussing what J.R.R. Tolkien dubbed “the good catastrophe,” the surprising and hopeful ending that follows after all hope seems lost.
Given the talent pool (Clark seems to know all the recent headliners from venues such as Hutchmoot and the Square Halo Conference), it is no surprise that Where the River Goes has outstanding essays. The fact that Clark writes excellent interstitial essays that connect each contributor’s ideas to ideas he describes in his songs makes it even better. The connections between Clark’s journey and the other contributors’ journeys are clearest when he discusses similar topics (for example, he and Johnson both extol their love of C.S. Lewis’ work). But even when he’s talking about something that doesn’t intersect with the other writers’ lives (for example, childhood memories of bluegill fishing), Clark finds little ways to show he’s exploring the same theological theme as his collaborators: the river of God’s grace that carries humans through hardship to renewal. Everyone in this book writes about life’s challenges with candor, but with a grace-suffused understanding that the story is not over until God says, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
Clark’s engaging anecdotes about his own life prove especially memorable. He talks about days when he felt too miserable to do much except get up at noon and eat lunch. He talks about losing nieces to illness and sharing the story of the Samaritan woman with women at a halfway house.
In the last chapter, Clark relays an image that ties all of the book’s themes together. He remembers traveling through Utah in his touring van, a camping van he built himself and dubbed Vandalf the White. He watched rain splatter a dry valley as the sun set, noticing how each droplet “held in the tension of its curve, like the water of the womb, or the spheres of a thousand beholding eyes, a tiny image.” An image like the angels and other heavenly figures in the Bible, who are described as having many eyes.
“In this world, where whatever river is supposed to be making glad the city of God appears to have been drunk up by a dragon large and languid enough to lie across seven mountains, we pant. We pant like desperate deer beside withered riverbeds that distend like promises, empty so far, by all appearances… We weep like St. John 118 and ask, “Was it really all for nothing? Can no one open up to us a better word in this valley of thirst and bones?”
And the many-eyed messenger says, “Lay your fears to rest.” He sees, he knows something we don’t. Mirrored across the conclave of a hundred corneas is a secret so deep and good that we dared not dream it could be true. A marvelous light we had thought unapproachable glimmers there, rounding the horizon of each syllable like the last, endless sunrise. “Behold, the Lion of Judah,” says the burning one. You follow his glinting gaze, for it has now moved from your face, passing over your shoulder. You turn, and in the turning, begin to see: a Lamb, or the Lion who is the Lamb, who is worthy of being called a lion precisely because he became a lamb, slain.”
Overall, Where the River Goes is a fitting culmination of everything Clark and his friends have explored over the last five years in the Well Trilogy. A moving look at what it means to believe that in Christ, new birth follows death, and dark days are not the end. Just a twist on the narrative that will not end until all things are made new.
More information about the book and album Where the River Goes can be found on Matthew Clark’s website: https://www.matthewclark.net/
The album can be streamed on Spotify and other major music streaming platforms: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3ZDiEyh3ls3lC7WEErCRC1
G. Connor Salter studied Professional Writing at Taylor University and is currently completing a Master’s of Literature in Analytic Theology at the University of St. Andrews. He is the web editor for literary magazine Fellowship & Fairydust. He has contributed articles to many publications, including The Philosophical Rambler, Christ & Pop Culture, The Journal of Inklings Studies, and Mythlore.