As I made my way into the world of alternative Christian music in the mid ’90s, I kept seeing the names Daniel Amos and Terry Taylor everywhere. (To clarify, Daniel Amos is a band and Terry Taylor is its frontman.) Both were spoken of in deeply respectful, even reverent tones, but I didn’t really understand until I randomly bought a used cassette copy of 1993’s Motor Cycle.

The album runs the gamut, musically and lyrically, skewering self-righteous Christians one minute and the next, waxing rhapsodically about childhood innocence with a barrage of eclectic, Beatles-esque arrangements. But it’s “Hole In the World”’s imaginative account of the afterlife that immediately grabbed me and has stuck with me after all these decades.

Indeed, I daresay that “Hole In the World,” which draws heavily from the writings of Frederick Buechner, helped form my notion of what heaven could be like after you strip away all of the clichés and popular iconography. Specifically, a place of reunion and reconnection filled with “mysteries and myths and wonders.”