Down There by the Train

The first time I sang Down There by the Train in public was not in a bar or on a stage, but in the chapel of the K–8 school I lead in southwest Philadelphia. It was a Friday morning. I started quietly, almost speaking, and the room changed. It wasn’t because I can sing. It was because the song carried something profound and holy.

There’s a place I know where the train goes slow,
Where the sinner can be washed in the blood of the Lamb…

The holiness felt audacious. Tom Waits’s outlaw hymn, carried to many through Johnny Cash, is solemn, but it doesn’t merely mourn; it proposes a hope that widens until it presses against our instincts to exclude, a radical credo of salvation for all. It keeps naming those we would keep out – betrayers and assassins, the notorious and the unknown – and insists that mercy still has them in view. If the banquet is Christ’s, the guest list does not read like one we would have drawn up. Scattered amidst the names of New York gangsters, the pronoun you sounds loudest. The “you” echoes until it sounds like “all.”

There’s room for the forsaken if you’re there on time,
You’ll be washed of all your sins and all of your crimes…

That hope needs careful speech. The church has never spoken with one voice about the scope of salvation; from Gregory of Nyssa to Julian of Norwich, saints have prayed toward a universal reconciliation while others have warned against presumption. I do not offer the song as a proof of any doctrine. I offer it as testimony – hope in Christ’s victory, grounded in the cross and resurrection, voiced with humility before the mystery of judgment and mercy. I am asking us to pray as if Christ’s arms are as wide as they were on the cross. However we parse the texts, they press outward. The song gives me the courage to let them press.

Scripture gives us reason to hope large: that God “desires all people to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4); that in Christ, God will “reconcile to himself all things” (Col. 1:20); that when Jesus is lifted up he will “draw all people” to himself (John 12:32). Some Christians will interpret these texts differently; still, the song helps me pray these verses without trimming the edges.

Photograph by dvande / Adobe Stock.

Part of the song’s power is its pace. The train never races. It moves as if each wheel-turn were a decision to make room. Slowness is not hesitation; it provides time for gathering the late, the shackled, the ashamed, the exhausted.

The church’s confession of Christ’s descent into hell after the crucifixion means there is no place so low that Christ has not entered it. If he went down, then there is a floor beneath our floors, and even that has a door. The song trusts this. It lets grace begin in places that do not look like beginnings. In the depths, Holy Saturday is not a moment of abandonment but of presence, a love that will not give up on anyone dead or alive. In that light, the slow train is not a loophole. It is a reckoning that refuses to end in annihilation. It is the herald of a mercy that keeps searching the field until no one is left behind.

I know you will be cared for
I know you will be safe
All the shameful and all of the whores
Even the soldier who pierced the heart of the Lord
Is down there by the train…

The geography matters too. Not Jerusalem or Calvary, but an American edge-land by a river and a trestle, with dogwoods and willows. It is the kind of place we pass without naming. Placing the song inside American letters means placing it in a long and honest argument – one about how a country baptized in revivals and drenched in blood might speak of grace without lying. Tom Waits joins that quarrel from a riverbank beneath a trestle. He does not paint over the rust. He lets a whistle blow through the rotting driftwood and says: Even here. This is the warp of grace – always warped, never natural. The list includes those we fear, those we loathe, and those we dread becoming. The bell of mercy rings for all without exception.

You can hear the whistle, you can hear the bell
From the halls of heaven to the gates of hell…

The song also refuses the safety of abstraction. The line “I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth” sends a shiver down my spine. Waits places an assassin in the arms of a betrayer, threads in figures from the underworld and from our headlines, and will not let history blur. Naming is a form of mercy because naming refuses to discard.

None of this denies the reality of harm. Quite the opposite. If the gospel’s final word is welcome, then the road to that welcome includes truth. A hope this wide is not without a price. It does not step over wounds or silence the voices of victims and survivors, whose losses and scars demand attention. It does not pretend that repentance is optional. Repentance is not the price of grace; it is the shape grace takes in a sinner who has stopped running. Where there has been violence, the response must be healing. Where there has been theft, there must be restitution. Where there has been lying, there must be confession. Mercy without truth is counterfeit. Truth without mercy is not the gospel. The song imagines God’s persistence like a bell keeps ringing. It does not toll to forget; it tolls to remember, again and again, until we can speak the whole truth.

When the song suggests that a criminal record is not the end of the story, it does not mean that crimes dissolve into mist. It means that at the end of time there will be a roll call, and the voice reading it will know exactly who is being named.

In our chapel, the resistance to this hope is not theoretical. My students carry quiet indictments: names they have been called, what has been assumed because of their home address, what their parents have not been able to shield them from. A promise that says you without trimming the edges is not a poetic flourish or a parlor trick to them. It is survival. When the hymn offers safety, it is not a platitude. It is a claim about God’s character. If the table is Christ’s and not mine to curate, then “all are welcome” is not a foyer banner. It is a description of the kingdom as it will be and, by grace, as it begins to be among us. If our table never embarrasses us a little, we may be at the wrong table.

If this is what we dare to hope, what then does it require now? Habits that match the speed of the train: visitation more than condemnation; meals carried into halfway houses; schools that resist the carceral reflex and keep short accounts without closing doors; tables that seat former enemies side by side; pulpits that preach Christ crucified without turning the cross into tribal vindication. This hope is not a policy program, but it will not remain apolitical. If the bell rings for all, laws and budgets cannot be deaf to that ringing. We cannot sing “all” and then disappear when parole boards meet, or committees draw zoning maps that silently push out the poor. There are a thousand clever ways to curate a smaller table. The train goes slow. Our excuses go fast. This hymn asks us to switch their speeds.

The slow train doesn’t delay justice or forget victims. A church that hopes this large must mourn with those who mourn, stand with them in courtrooms and clinics, listen without defensiveness, and advocate for protection, restitution, and repair. Repentance is a path with steps. Truth-telling is how the Spirit starts making anything new. Wideness does not shrink these demands; it makes it possible to face them without despair.

In the chapel, after the second pass through the chorus, I saw an eighth-grade girl mouth a single word – two times, before I caught it: “All.” She had heard the hinge. If Judas is remembered, if the list is not exclusionary, then the church’s work is not gatekeeping. Its work is to tutor hearts to trust that the table will be crowded. At the center of Christian faith, there is a table set by someone who did not screen the guests. He washed the feet of a betrayer, broke bread for a man about to deny him, and prayed forgiveness over men casting dice for his garments at the foot of the cross.

The song closes without theatrics, with an invitation to meet by the tracks where mercy arrives. That is where I want to be found. I have heard a whistle in the distance calling names we would rather forget. With fear and with joy, I have learned to hope that no one will be missing when the roll is called, and that the one who reads the names will know what each of us has done, and yet say, “You are mine. Come and eat.”