Walter Brueggemann has written a book of theological meditations about our current state of affairs as humankind deals with the viral pandemic that has stopped the world in its tracks. Such an attention-demanding crisis has (appropriately) preoccupied us with discovering, defining, and putting into practice responsible actions that will protect people, alleviate suffering, and keep our institutions from falling into chaos. We live on the ground.
But our hearts, minds, and spirits tell us there is more. Crisis strips away the illusion of normalcy that numbs us to the vast realms of creation and divine governance in which we live and move and have our being. In our pain or even in the simple luxury of having regular life suspended, we are given space to wonder, to think, to pray, to imagine what all this may mean and what we may make of it. The ground alone does not define us.
As Walter Brueggemann says:
We linger because, in the midst of our immediate preoccupation with our felt jeopardy and our hope for relief, our imagination does indeed range beyond the immediate to larger, deeper wonderments. Our free-ranging imagination is not finally or fully contained in the immediacy of our stress, anxiety, and jeopardy. Beyond these demanding immediacies, we have a deep sense that our life is not fully contained in the cause-and-effect reasoning of the Enlightenment that seeks to explain and control. There is more than that and other than that to our life in God’s world!
• • •
Peeking into Mystery
Creator God, you have entrusted to us knowledge of
good and evil.
You have permitted us knowledge of the world in
which we live, and
that knowledge has yielded immense gains for us,
gains of control, of productivity, of explanation, of
connections of causes and effects.
Only rarely—like now!—do we collide with
your hiddenness that summons us and embar-
rasses us.
We peek into your awesome hidden presence;
we find our certitudes quite disrupted.
Thus we pause at the edge of your holiness,
finding that your unfathomable presence is an
odd mix
of mercy and judgment,
of generosity and accountability,
of forgiveness and starchy realism.
We dwell at the edge of your mystery for an
instant . . . not longer.
Then we return to our proper work of knowledge,
research, explanation, and management.
By that instant, however, we are changed . . .
sobered, summoned, emancipated, filled with
wonder
before your holiness.
It is for that holiness that outflanks us that we give
you thanks. Amen.
Most of us are familiar with Pope Francis’ comment that today the church needs to be a field hospital. What’s implied here?
First, that right now the church is not a field hospital, or at least not much of one. Too many churches of all denominations see the world more as an opponent to be fought than as a battlefield strewn with wounded persons to whom they are called to minister. The churches today, in the words of Pope Francis, have often reversed an image in the Book of Revelation where Jesus stands outside the door knocking, trying to come in, to a situation where Jesus is knocking on the door from inside the church, trying to get out.
So how might our churches, our ecclesial communities, become field hospitals?
In a wonderfully provocative article in a recent issue of America Magazine, Czech spiritual writer, Tomas Halik, suggests that for our ecclesial communities to become “field hospitals” they must assume three roles: A Diagnostic one – wherein they identify the signs of the times; a Preventive one – wherein they create an immune system in a world within which malignant viruses of fear, hatred, populism, and nationalism are tearing communities apart; and a Convalescent one – wherein they help the world overcome the traumas of the past through forgiveness.
How, concretely, might each of these be envisaged?
Our churches need to be diagnostic; they need to name the present moment in a prophetic way. But that calls for a courage that, right now, seems lacking, derailed by fear and ideology. Liberals and conservatives diagnose the present moment in radically different ways, not because the facts aren’t the same for both, but because each of them is seeing things through its own ideology. As well, at the end of the day, both camps seem too frightened to look at the hard issues square on, both afraid of what they might see.
To name just one issue that both seem afraid to look at with unblinking eyes: our rapidly emptying churches and the fact that so many of our own children are no longer going to church or identifying with a church. Conservatives simplistically blame secularism, without ever really being willing to openly debate the various critiques of the churches coming from almost every part of society. Liberals, for their part, tend to simplistically blame conservative rigidity without really being open to courageously look at some of places within secularity where faith in a transcendent God and an incarnate Christ run antithetical to some of the cultural ethos and ideologies within secularity. Both sides, as is evident from their excessive defensiveness, seem afraid to look at all the issues.
What must we do preventatively to turn our churches into field hospitals? The image Halik proposes here is rich but is intelligible only within an understanding of the Body of Christ and an acceptance of the deep connection we have with each other inside the family of humanity. We are all one, one living organism, parts of a single body, so that, as with any living body, what any one part does, for disease or health, affects every other part. And the health of a body is contingent upon its immune system, upon those enzymes that roam throughout the body and kill off cancerous cells. Today our world is beset with cancerous cells of bitterness, hatred, lying, self-protecting fear, and tribalism of every kind. Our world is mortally ill; suffering from a cancer that’s destroying community.
Hence our ecclesial communities must become places that generate the healthy enzymes that are needed to kill off those cancer cells. We must create an immune system robust enough to do this. And for that to happen, we must first, ourselves, stop being part of the cancer of hatred, lying, fear, opposition, and tribalism. Too often, we ourselves are the cancerous cells. The single biggest religious challenge facing us as ecclesial communities today it that of creating an immune system that’s healthy and vigorous enough to help kill off the cancerous cells of hatred, fear, lying, and tribalism that float freely throughout the world.
Finally, our convalescent role: Our ecclesial communities need to help the world come to a deeper reconciliation vis-a-vis the traumas of the past. Happily, this is one of our strengths. Our churches are sanctuaries of forgiveness. In the words of Cardinal Francis George: “In society everything is permitted, but nothing is forgiven; in the church much is prohibited, but everything is forgiven.” But where we need to be more proactive as sanctuaries of forgiveness today is in relation to a number of salient “traumas of the past”. In brief, a deeper forgiveness, healing, and atonement still needs to take place apposite the world’s history with colonization, slavery, the status of women, the torture and disappearance of peoples, the mistreatment of refugees, the perennial support of unjust regimes, and the atonement owed to mother earth herself. Our churches must lead this effort.
Our ecclesial communities as field hospitals can be the Galilee of today.
They claim that only an enlightened few know what is actually going on in the world and what almost everyone else knows is a lie; that the knowledge available to the average person on the street is unreliable
The true believer who spreads these conspiracies is like the member of a mystery cult: in the “know” no matter how disconnected from important events he or she may be, no matter how unreal their imagined scenarios are in the face of realities.
And by implication, most people trying to make their way in the world and care for their families, who have almost no time for anything but work, and precious little time for reflection, have not the first clue (again, according to the conspiratorially-obsessed).
Only the most centered and widely-informed persons can resist the temptation to superiority, false certainty, and preoccupation that often follows this phenomenon.
The theories prey on those who live in understandable apprehension (in moments like this one) and increase the every day anxiety of many. Conspiratorial whispers and broadcasts are a scourge, as destructive on human trust and brotherhood as a virus to the human body.
I cannot believe how many who trust in Christ are manipulated and misled in their daily lives by what is so often nonsense.
And obsession with wild speculations steals energy from the sort of practical imitation that the Spirit empowers in us when we take time to contemplate the life of Jesus: care for the stranger, the prisoner, the sick, the hungry and thirsty, the naked, the sex slave, the widow, and the orphan. It’s sexier to tell others about a fearsome secret cabal that controls everything and everyone.
The good news is that the Gospel — the things that God has done to make the world right again, what God has done to secure everyone’s future — is public information, available to everyone. And this Gospel, this Love, casts out fear.
The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) has an article by Donald J. Boudreaux entitled, “Science and the Pandemic”. AIER is the same organization that promoted the video, now gone viral, of two private urgent-care physicians, Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, discussing whether the societal shutdown is still necessary. The Erickson/Massihi video argued that the severity of COVID-19 as revealed by the data gathered since the shutdown does not justify the severe isolating that has also shut down the economy. They say the shutdown may have been initially justified due to the lack of data concerning COVID-19, but now that the “numbers” are in; the quarantine of essentially the whole population is no longer necessary.
The “Science and the Pandemic” article argues whether government policies should be crafted only, or even mainly, by epidemiologists and other public health physicians. The effect of the extreme social isolation policy has spread throughout society, affecting much more than the health of the population or the health-care system alone. The economic effects are just as widespread, the article argues, and just as devastating. Andy Zehner, Damaris’ husband, makes similar arguments in his article on Damaris’ Integrity of Life blog.
On the BioLogos Forum, the Erickson/Massihi video came in for some severe criticism. Forum moderator, and medical doctor by profession, Phil McCurdy said:
One of my friends posted this also. These guys are a couple of low level walk in clinic owners, and have no credibility or training to be putting this out. The population they serve is low risk, the really sick people go to a real ER instead of the doc in a box. They are a good example of the malignant narcissism that has emerged from all this. Social isolation is a narcissist’s nightmare, and I see it bursting forth on Facebook like an erupting volcano… I refuse to watch it again, but the big things I remember that bothered me was the error in extrapolating their limited experience into a general recommendation, and the bias in the population group they “studied.” But Phil then goes on to say:
That said, in a low risk population, re-opening may be possible earlier. One problem we seem to be having is treating the US as a homogenous group, when there are wide variations in risk of disease, making a blanket policy inappropriate.
Last Friday, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb announced a phased plan for reopening the state. On the official Indiana State Department of Health site, one can see by the graph of cases that Indiana (as of May 4th) has not peaked yet.
I would like to ascertain the opinions of the Imonk commentariat. I must admit to going back and forth on the issues raised both by the AIER articles, and their critics. To wit:
Decisions must be made on the basis of solid science. Epidemiologist’s judgment should have the pre-eminence since it is a viral pandemic we are dealing with.
Science is not just a set of facts- those facts must be interpreted.
As Andy Zehner says, “Experts know one thing. The more vaunted their reputation as experts, the more specialized they are apt to be. Turning over the whole of society and the whole of the economy to any single group of experts is a bad idea. And that is what has happened during the present coronavirus crisis.”
As social isolation is ended, it seems manifestly obvious the number of cases– and deaths– are going to increase. Most projection models have been revised. The revisions reflected rising mobility in most U.S. states with an easing of business closures and stay-at-home orders expected in 31 states by May 11. The revised models forecast a surge in fatalities to 3,000 a day – Italy levels.
So what is the “cost of doing business” versus the cost of continued economic shutdown… And what is the ‘currency” we are using to measure those costs?
So what say you? What is the best course of action? And who should get to decide?
Well, well. A significant breakthrough on justification?
This fourth edition thus represents a complete reappraisal of every aspect of previous editions, including their structure and format. Those using this work for teaching purposes should thus ensure that they familiarise themselves with these structural and scholarly changes. My continuing engagement with both primary and secondary sources in this field convinced me of the need to rewrite the book, retaining what was clearly sound, reliable and useful to its readers, while correcting or modifying whatever was open to justified criticism.
In brief, McGrath has come to see that a key point in the Protestant historical argument no longer holds water.
That point is this: Protestants have long held that the Catholic understanding of justification as “infused righteousness” — that is, God actually makes the believer righteous — is the result of misunderstanding the meaning of the original Greek language when it was translated into Latin. When the Reformers restored the study of the original Greek NT, they pointed out that the Greek word δικαιοῦν meant “to reckon (or count as) righteous, whereas Catholics like St. Augustine interpreted the Latin iustificare as iustum facere (‘to make righteous’).
The Protestant tradition therefore has taught that there is no transformative element in justification (although we have emphasized here that the early Luther seems to have believed differently). Justification involves our sins being imputed to Christ’s account and, in exchange, Christ’s righteousness is imputed to the believer’s account. Through justification, we have a righteous standing before God, but we have not in any sense been made righteous.
In the earlier editions of his work, McGrath promulgated this understanding, giving Protestants ongoing ammunition in their animus toward a Catholic teaching that they perceived as threatening the very foundations of the gospel, and therefore the Church. If justification is “the article by which the Church stands or falls,” then the Catholic Church, following the Council of Trent rather than the teachings of the Reformers, got it wrong and should be judged heretical at the very heart of the gospel.
Apparently, however, Alister McGrath did something remarkable. He read the Greek Fathers. And when he did, he realized that they themselves interpreted the Greek language of justification in a surprisingly non-Protestant fashion. For example, he quotes Chrysostom:
It is like the declaration of God’s riches, not only in that God is rich, but also in that God makes others rich; or in the same way about [the declaration of God’s] life, not only in that God is living, but also in that God makes the dead to live; and of [the declaration of God’s] power, not only in that God is powerful, but also in that God makes the weak powerful. So the declaration of God’s righteousness is not only that God is righteous, but also that God makes those that are corrupted by sin immediately righteous.
…the Greek Christian preoccupation with the strongly transformative soteriological metaphor of deification appears to have led to justification being treated in a factitive sense. This is not, however, to be seen as a conceptual imposition on Pauline thought, but rather a discernment of this aspect of his soteriological narrative.
In other words, not only did the Greek Fathers interpret justification in this fashion on their own, but they were offering a faithful reading of Paul himself as he discusses it in the New Testament. For me, nothing has ever said it much clearer than 2 Corinthians 5:21 — “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Perhaps another brick in the wall that has divided Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox believers through the centuries has come loose?
Tuesday with Michael Spencer It’s going to take courage (from a post in 2008)
If the truth about Christianity turned out to be very different from what we’d been taught as young Christians by people we look up to as mentors and authorities, would we stand up and tell the truth? Would we make the turn and go the other way?
Every so often, this situation occurs. Take, for example, the infamous inter-racial dating rule at Bob Jones University. Through whatever process- enlightenment, epiphany, embarrassment- it became obvious that the school’s prohibition on interracial dating was wrong, even though it had been taught as part of a “godly Christian witness” for decades.
On the day that became clear, someone had to come to this conclusion:
Jesus never endorsed this prohibition.
It’s counter to the Gospel to have this rule.
But our pastors, teachers, mentors, parents, grandparents, ancestors and culture have taught us that this kind of segregation is right.
They used the Bible to prove their point, but they used it wrongly.
If we are going to do what is right, we have to say that those who came before us were wrong.
It will be embarrassing, and some people will get angry.
Get that next to last sentence: If we are going to do what is right, then those who came before us are wrong and we must, in one form or another, say so.
Christians struggle with this because their concept of truth makes them largely slow to comprehend the human, historical and cultural element in their perception of truth.
They are slow to see that their version of Christianity is very white, upper middle class and American.
They are slow to see applications of the gospel that require them to repent of the way they’ve treated people with whom they have some issue.
They are slow to admit that what was preached and taught was wrong because the use of scripture (or lack of scripture) was wrong.
Many conservative evangelicals have a “thing” about the past. Maybe it’s the reformers. Or the confederacy. Or the last pastor. Or Puritans. Or some preacher of the last century. Or Christians who were right about many things but wrong about some things.
It takes courage to stand up and tell the world that Christians are wrong. It take even more courage to tell Christians that they are wrong. But if we are going to follow Jesus, we have do it and keep on doing it.
And we have to give our children permission to stand up and say we were wrong.
We were wrong, and Jesus is right. It’s an ongoing process of discovery, repentance and ownership.
It’s taken us through slavery and civil rights. Now it’s time to have the courage to say that we as evangelicals and establishment Christians have been wrong about many things.
Not wrong about the essentials of the Gospel, though we have a lot of problems related to the Gospel that we need to confess. And not wrong about the Bible or the Cross.
But we need to say we’ve been wrong about all kinds of things related to institutional and establishment, status quo Christianity. Those who came before us saw things in the Bible that weren’t there and used the Bible to prove things that were far from the ecclesia vision of Jesus.
It’s going to take courage. I hope we have plenty to go around.
For those who don’t know Bruce Cockburn, he is a Canadian folk / folk-rock singer / songwriter / political activist, who between the years of 1970 and 2019 has released 36 albums.
There were a couple of things that first attracted me to him. He was someone who said he was a follower of Jesus, but had an expression of faith that looked very different to my right wing view of the world. I saw someone who had thought long and hard about what he believed, sought to learn more, and acted on what he had learned. While we were at very different places to begin with, I wanted to be open to what he had to say, and have come to understand many things through very similar eyes.
I had been asked by an Internet Monk reader, who shared my love for the music of Bruce Cockburn, to come up with a list of my top ten Bruce Cockburn songs. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it would be an impossible task.
Instead I decided we needed a list of the top ten Bruce Cockburn albums, and I thought that a dialogue between two devoted Cockburn fans would be the best way to come up with this list.
The first fan, Peter Heath, won a game of Jeopardy at his own wedding reception, where every category was related to an aspect of Bruce Cockburn and his music. He won despite the Quiz master having fed some of the answers to his competitors in advance, just to make the game a little more “fair.” The second fan is yours truly, Michael Bell, and in fact I created the game for the wedding reception. Peter and his wife Krista celebrated their 28th anniversary on Saturday so congratulations to you both!
Peter and I attended our first Cockburn concert together with friends when he came to our University in 1983. The music was absolutely transfixing, and I must admit I was in awe of Bruce’s silver parachute pants. I had heard some Cockburn music before, but after the concert I was totally hooked.
Let the dialogue begin…
Mike: Peter, give me your list of your top fifteen Cockburn albums. He has 25 studio albums, the rest are compilations or life albums, so let’s limit ourselves to the 25. I will do my own ranking and then combine into a composite score.
Peter: Yeah, that would be fun.
Narrator: Twenty minutes pass
Peter: Here you go!
Mike : Wait! I am still doing supper dishes! Ok I won’t look at your list until I have my list done.
Peter: Okay,
I’ll put some random stuff here
To shift my list
Further up
wards
😀
Just
trying
to
be helpful
Mike: Let’s also include a list of our favourite songs
Peter: Sounds like scope creep…
Narrator: Here is what they came up with along with their comments. They will discuss the first five albums this week, concluding with Peter’s favourite album.
Next week they will cover Albums 6 – 10, along with some honourable mentions.
Finally, in the third part of this series they will discuss some of the songs that are important to them that are important to them, but are on albums other than their top ten and honourable mentions. Mike might just attempt his own rendition of a song or two!
Mike: Humans was an album born out of difficult circumstances. In 1980, his marriage with his wife Kitty ended, and you can hear the anguish and grittiness expressed throughout the album. Several of the songs lament the end of the relationship. From the cry of “What about the bond? What about the mystical unity?” to “Something jeweled slips away… laughing at the hands I hold out… Gutless arrogance and rage… Burn apart the best of tries.” We hear him as he tries to make amends in “Fascist Architecture of my own design.” He concludes with a lyric like “so I find out what the luxury of hate is… telephone snarls don’t touch me”.
And we observe his grey, raw world expressed in Grim Travellers and Tokyo. Tokyo, incidentally was just the second song I learned how to play on the guitar. (John Denver’s West Virginia was the first.)
Peter: While much of this album covers hard themes, there are scattered moments of hope. Rose Above The Sky may be the most amazing song Cockburn ever wrote, full of desperation and haunting and yet clinging to a faint hope. Rumours of Glory hunts for hope through pain, “You plunge your hand in, you draw it back scorched. Beneath it’s shining like gold.” Even More Not More points toward the good, like “more current more spark, more touch deep in the heart” while balancing that off against “not more thoughtless cruelty, not more being this lonely”.
Musically, Humans Cockburn sticks with his acoustic guitar but brings a very fine band along and starts walking away from any sort of folk music sensibility. In hindsight, it’s the last primarily acoustic album he did before leaping into electric guitars with The Trouble With Normal. Who would have guessed?
Some of the most meaningful songs for Peter or I:
Rose above the Sky
Tokyo
Grim Travellers
You get bigger as you go.
Rumours of Glory
What About The Bond
How I Spent My Fall Vacation
Fascist Architecture
Number 2 – Stealing Fire – 1984
(Mike’s #2, Peter’s #4) Peter: The pinnacle of Bruce’s commercial heyday, Stealing Fire sees him rocking out after a life changing trip to Central America. Lovers and Rocket Launcher are classics. Lovers includes maybe Cockburn greatest single turn of phrase (Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight). Rocket Launcher is 5 minutes of rage propelled by electric guitars (one hundred thousand wait to fall down from starvation, or some less humane fate). Frankly, I question the wisdom of recording a song so focused on murderous vengeance, but for all that, it does kick down the door on the suffering of warzone life, and reminds us to be skeptical of power brokers and political solutions. Fortunately, Cockburn shows us the beauty of that trip on Nicaragua and the rolling Dust & Diesel (I feel like I’m in the back of a pickup just from the music alone).
Mike: This album, along with Trouble with Normal, really introduces us to Bruce’s full throated political activism. Nicaragua was clearly pointing a finger at the U.S. policy and action in the area. Those who remember Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair will remember how this story played out.
Lovers in a Dangerous time would be in my top ten list of Cockburn songs if I had one. I like to think of this song being about Christ and his Church, even if that may or may not have been Cockburn’s original meaning. It came out just as Music videos were starting to come into their own. Let’s just say it was a developing art, and Lovers went in a very unexpected direction.
Dust and Diesel did make it into the Jeopardy game with the cryptic clue “small particles with a petroleum product”.
Peter: Bruce leaves the countryside and parks himself in urbania, grabs an electric guitar and a band, and gives us ICF. Cockburn paints a nuanced and detailed portrait of downtown life and invites us to tour it with him, especially with Pay Your Money and All’s Quiet. Radio Shoes is unique among his instrumentals as it showcases the whole band. Eventually tourism gives way to anger at governmental and individual savagery in Justice (Can you tell me how much bleeding it takes to fill a word with meaning?) and a challenge to live as light in Broken Wheel (Lord, spit on our eyes so we can see how to wake up from this tragedy). He closes by retreating to longing and observation in Loner (men’s faces, women’s bodies on the magazine stand), heightened by Hugh Marsh’s violin. And we are left wondering … whatever happened to Chucky?
Mike: What happened to Chucky? I want to know why he was being chased down the street! What did he do? A very visual song if there ever was one.
The song that has really stood out to me over the years is “The Strong One”. I just sent it to our HR manager as a show of support after she had to lay off a third of the company. It would be one of my go-to songs when I am feeling burdened.
You help your sisters, you help your old lovers,
you help me but who do you cry to?
‘Cause isn’t it hard
To be the one who gathers everybody’s tears
Isn’t it hard
To be the strong one.
Top songs:
Broken Wheel
All’s Quiet on the Inner City Front
Loner
You Pay Your Money And You Take Your Chance
The Strong One
And We Dance
Justice
Coldest Night Of The Year *on rerelease
The Light Goes On Forever *on rerelease
Radio Shoes
Peter: Do you realize that between us, we have chosen every single song on the album as a top song?
Mike: As you will see this won’t be the only album that this happens for!
Mike: This album is significant in that it is the first album in the list that predates both of us. That is, it was recorded long before either of us had our first interaction with Bruce Cockburn. It is also interesting that these first four listed albums made it into both of our top five selections.
Peter: Meeting an artist and becoming interested in their work can really depend on when you meet them – where you are in your own life and tastes, where the artist is as well. Falling Dark would not have been an entry point for me into Cockburn’s world, but once I got interested in his music, I am glad I backtracked a bit and gave this album a listen.
Mike: Lord of the Starfields is probably the most meaningful song to me of all the Cockburn songs. The refrain, repeated over and over, “Oh Love that fires the sun, keep me burning” is what I cry out over and over when spiritually I am in a dry and desolate place.
Peter: Like Mike, I love that key line from Lord of the Starfields, as it opens up how I think about God’s love. The musical setting, especially the intro riff, sets you up for something positive without being formulaic.
Mike: Gavin’s Woodpile is still very apropos when we look at the high rates of incarceration of African-Americans in the U.S., and indigenous people in Canada:
I remember a bleak-eyed prisoner
In the Stoney Mountain life-suspension home
You drink and fight and damage someone
And they throw you away for some years of boredom
One year done and five more to go —
No job waiting so no parole
And over and over they tell you that you’re nothing…
Peter: Gavin’s Woodpile gives an acoustic voice to Cockburn’s (barely) simmering rage at injustice within the justice system. Other Canadian songwriters like Steve Bell have taken on this theme as well. We’d all benefit from listening to this song every now and then.
Mike: Steve’s album “My Dinner With Bruce” is my favourite Cockburn tribute album, and he gives you quite the insight into his own journey with Bruce. Plus he has a great preview of all the tracks of his cover songs!
The song incidentally was written at a penitentiary just south of Ottawa in 1975. I was invited into that same institution in 1987 to help lead the music for their Chaplaincy service. I don’t think I had made that connection until just now.
Festival of Friends is one of two songs by Cockburn that I would like played at my memorial service. (The other is Joy Will Find A Way from the album of the same name in our honourable mentions section). He wrote it for friends who had just lost a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Like an imitation of a good thing past
These days of darkness surely will not last
Jesus was here and he’s coming again
To lead us to his festival of friends.
Peter: Silver Wheels foreshadows future travelogue songs that put the listener right in the car/train/truck with Bruce. His description of the outskirts of any Canadian city still rings true: “The skin around every city looks the same, miles of flat neon spelling well-known names: used trucks, dirty donuts, you you’re the one”. You’d think we’d have done something different in 45 years! And Vagabondage provides a wonderful twist to the “band on the road” song, putting all the lyrics in French (“Toujours en route, Nous sommes encore en route”). I miss the French songs that formed a consistent element of his earlier work.
The title track, In The Falling Dark, also taps into frustration, grasping the willfully earthbound ways we live:
Light pours from a million radiant lives,
off of kids and dogs and the hard shell husbands and wives.
All of that glory shining around and we’re all caught taking a dive.
And all the beasts of the hills around Shout, ‘such a waste,
don’t you know that from the first to the last we’re all one in the gift of grace.’
Peter: Wondering Where the Lions Are is a wonderful song, Cockburn’s first real entry on pop charts, bouncing along while mocking militarism and “pointing a finger at eternity”. But what I really love is the way all the other songs hold together thematically and musically. It’s like Bruce and the band got into one musical headspace and just ripped through all the songs at once. It’s something you don’t hear very often. And lyrical gems pop up throughout … Centred on silence, Counting on nothing, I saw you standing on the sea … Maybe to those who love is given sight, To pierce the wall of seeming night, And know it pure beyond all imagining … But everything you see’s not the way it seems, Tears can sing and joy shed tears. This album is a masterclass in writing and assembling an album as an album, not just a collection of songs.
Mike: For me, Creation Dream is wonderful imagery of Christ calling the world into being. And the guitar work that accompanies it is so full of energy, that it meshes beautifully with the lyrics.
Centred on silence
Counting on nothing
I saw you standing on the sea
And everything was
Dark except for
Sparks the wind struck from your hair
Sparks that turned to
Wings around you
Angel voices mixed with seabird cries
Fields of motion
Surging outward
Questions that contain their own replies…
Top songs:
All of them … seriously
Peter: Mike, thanks for inviting me to join you on this journey. It’s great to relisten to these albums and recapture why they captured my imagination over the years.
Mike: Peter, thanks for your contribution. You made this post so much better than I could have created on my own.
So that is it for Part One. Five amazing albums. All very much worth purchasing and listening to. Stay tuned for the next two Mondays as we do some further exploring into the music and world of Bruce Cockburn. There are some real gems in our next list as well.
Perhaps we all need a bit of respite from the heaviness of this pandemic. Enjoy a laugh and perhaps shed a tear of gratitude or two on us today.
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Dedicated to all those working in virtual spaces these days…
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Dedicated to all those pacing the cage at home (language alert)…
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Dedicated to all those faithfully socially distancing and staying “out of touch”…
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Dedicated to families finding creative things to do together…
A family from Kent who shared a video of their living room performance of a lockdown-themed adaptation of a Les Misérables song have become a sensation online. Ben and Danielle Marsh and their four children changed the lyrics of “One Day More” to reflect common complaints during the Covid-19 lockdown. They say the video, which has gone viral, was intended to give friends and family a laugh during this stressful time
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Finally, let’s join a parade of thanks to all on the front lines, sacrificing and serving…
This is a “Thank You” parade that was held by the City of Lawrence (Indianapolis) for healthcare workers at one of the Community hospitals in the network in which I work.
Liminal space is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where we can begin to think and act in new ways. It is where we are betwixt and between, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next. We usually enter liminal space when our former way of being is challenged or changed—perhaps when we lose a job or a loved one, during illness, at the birth of a child, or a major relocation. It is a graced time, but often does not feel “graced” in any way. In such space, we are not certain or in control. This global pandemic we now face is an example of an immense, collective liminal space.
The very vulnerability and openness of liminal space allows room for something genuinely new to happen. We are empty and receptive—erased tablets waiting for new words. Liminal space is where we are most teachable, often because we are most humbled. Liminality keeps us in an ongoing state of shadowboxing instead of ego-confirmation, struggling with the hidden side of things, and calling so-called normalcy into creative question.
It’s no surprise then that we generally avoid liminal space. Much of the work of authentic spirituality and human development is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough that they can learn something essential and new. Many spiritual giants like St. Francis, Julian of Norwich, Dorothy Day, and Mohandas Gandhi tried to live their entire lives in permanent liminality, on the edge or periphery of the dominant culture. This in-between place is free of illusions and false payoffs. It invites us to discover and live from broader perspectives and with much deeper seeing.
In liminal space we sometimes need to not-do and not-perform according to our usual successful patterns. We actually need to fail abruptly and deliberately falter to understand other dimensions of life. We need to be silent instead of speaking, experience emptiness instead of fullness, anonymity instead of persona, and pennilessness instead of plenty. In liminal space, we descend and intentionally do not come back out or up immediately. It takes time but this experience can help us reenter the world with freedom and new, creative approaches to life.
I imagine that even if you’ve never heard the word liminal before, you likely have a sense of what I’m talking about. It would be difficult to exist in this time of global crisis and not feel caught between at least two worlds—the one we knew and the one to come. Our consciousness and that of future generations has been changed. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004), 135–138.
This fourth edition thus represents a complete reappraisal of every aspect of previous editions, including their structure and format. Those using this work for teaching purposes should thus ensure that they familiarise themselves with these structural and scholarly changes. My continuing engagement with both primary and secondary sources in this field convinced me of the need to rewrite the book, retaining what was clearly sound, reliable and useful to its readers, while correcting or modifying whatever was open to justified criticism.
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