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First Posted: 7/2/2013 After the tragic shooting in Connecticut claimed the lives of 20 schoolchildren in December, musician Doug Hutchings expressed his anguish and confusion about the hardest questions.
&#8220;Where is God when terrible things happen? I started to write a song about that well before Sandy Hook happened,&#8221; he said, explaining the loss of innocent lives prompted him to complete the piece.
&#8220;The best way to describe it is in the lyrics of the chorus. &#8230; There&#8217;s so much beauty in this world, especially in the young, the innocent. Why are there people who think beauty is something to destroy?
&#8220;The song basically says I don&#8217;t have the answers,&#8221; Hutchings said in a telephone interview. &#8220;I&#8217;m not sure why God allows bad things to happen to good people. What I do know is tragedy makes us more human. It draws us closer to God, and when we lean into him, the answer isn&#8217;t always clear, but he grows closer to us and touches our hearts.&#8221;
Touching hearts is a goal shared by Hutchings and the other members of Full Armor, a Catholic/Christian band scheduled to play acoustic-driven, folk-style music during a 4 p.m. Saturday Mass at All Saints Parish in Plymouth.
A concert of the group&#8217;s music, including selections from the recent album &#8220;None the Same,&#8221; will follow immediately. The public is welcome, and admission is free.
Calling themselves &#8220;a band of best friends,&#8221; members of Full Armor have been playing together since they were high-school students in the Middletown, N.Y., area. The musicians include Tara Lakeman, Kyle Hancharick and Doug Hutchings as vocalists with Hancharick also playing acoustic guitar and Hutchings on keyboards. Rounding out the sound are Francis Zelinka with his electric guitar, Matt Juliano on drums and Matthew Lee occasionally providing violin harmony.
Their name came from a letter of St. Paul, in which he advised the Ephesians to &#8220;put on the full armor of God.&#8221;
Does that mean the musicians, all of them in their 20s, feel as if they&#8217;re going into battle?
&#8220;Jesus won the battle,&#8221; Hutchings said. &#8220;All we have to do is go out and show Jesus to other people through the way we love and treat each other.&#8221;
Members of the group do try to treat everyone as a friend.
During one concert in a small venue, Hutchings remembered, &#8220;There were about seven kids, high-school age, all up front. They didn&#8217;t seem to be as joyful, or having a good time, as I would have expected. I told myself, &#8216;This is the Holy Spirit. You just have to be courageous.&#8217; We approached them and asked what was going on and found out that a year ago, a good friend of theirs had died in a car accident.
&#8220;We said, &#8216;Come step aside and pray with us really quick.&#8217; Tara and I put our arms around them. We cried together. We prayed together. We tried to show our faith in action.&#8221;
No stranger to larger venues, Full Armor received national attention when the band played for Pope Benedict XVI&#8217;s youth rally in New York, which was attended by 25,000 young people in April 2008.
&#8220;There was so much energy there,&#8221; Hutchings remembered. &#8220;It was really intense. When (the pope) came in, he was such a humble, quiet presence, and he spoke very gently but very powerfully about peace.&#8221;
Spreading peace is one of Full Armor&#8217;s goals, as Hutchings expressed in the song &#8220;Let Me Sow Love,&#8221; which he wrote based on the prayer of St. Francis.
&#8220;Let me sow the love that you&#8217;ve put into me,&#8221; he wrote, &#8220;to make me an instrument of your joy and your peace.&#8221;

An Armor of faith and love