2,4 Son of My Father

UNDER THE SAME SKY Two sides. One sky. Two men stand on opposite sides of the same war. One carries the cross of the Knights Templar. The other stands to defend the land, the people and the faith he has always known. Both believe. Both pray. Both are certain that God understands why they fight. And both grow old enough to remember. *UNDER THE SAME SKY* is a story told through two lives. The first begins with an old Templar looking back on the young man he once was — a man who left home believing that faith, duty and the cross would lead him toward something greater. He found brotherhood. He found war. He found blood. And eventually, he began to see something in the eyes of the men he had been taught to call his enemies. Fear. Faith. A desire to live. Things he recognized. His story follows the rise of that certainty, the first cracks in it, the fall of the Templars, imprisonment, forced confession and finally the long silence of an old man left with questions he can no longer answer. Then the story crosses the battlefield. The second man remembers the same world from the other side. He did not leave home searching for a holy land. He was already home. His faith came from his family. His sense of duty from his father. When war reached his world, he believed he was standing for everything he had been taught to protect. Then he heard the prayers of the men coming against him. The words were foreign. The fear was not. And eventually he looked directly into the eyes of one of them. For a moment there was no Christian and Muslim. No East and West. No invader and defender. There were simply two men who believed. Two men afraid to die. Two men calling upon God. That moment follows him for the rest of his life. This album does not try to decide which man was right. It does not ask the listener to choose a side. It asks something much simpler — and perhaps much harder: When faith teaches love, mercy and compassion, how do human beings reach the point where they can look across a battlefield at another frightened man, hear him pray, and still raise the sword? Centuries later, the two old men are left beneath the same sky. Neither has all the answers. Perhaps there never were any. They only have their memories of what they believed, what they did, and what they finally saw in the eyes of the men standing opposite them. *Two sides. One sky.*