Grail: An Ecumenical Journal
University of St. Jerome's College
Waterloo, Ont. CANADA N2L 3G3
Subscription Rates: $20/yr $38/2 yr
Institutions: 30/yr
*************************************
J. Richard Middleton is sessional lecturer and doctoral
candidate at the Institute for Christian Studies in
Toronto (address below) and Brian J. Walsh is a Senior
Member in Worldview Studies at the Institute. They are
presently writing a book on engendering a biblical
imagination in a postmodern culture.
*************************************
The Institute for Christian Studies (from their 1993-94
calendar):
"offers graduate programs which aim to help people
develop a Christian understanding of their studies and
life's work. Our approach is different from aseminary
or theological college which is devoted primarily to
training clery. Our primary interest is to help people
in almost any field of study, not only theology, to
understand their field in a Christian way...Our method
of developing a Christian perspective in academic
studies is to concentrate on those issures in a field
where theological, philosophical, and methodological
questions naturally arise."
They offer: Master of Philosophical
Foundations
Master's Program in
Wolrdview Studies
Master's Program in
Education
Doctoral Studies
Certificate in
Christian Studies
Areas of study include:
Systematic Philosophy
History of Philosophy
Philosophical Theology
Systematic Theology
Aesthetics
Political Theology
Philosopy of History and Historiography
Address:
Institue for Christian Studies
229 College St.
Toronto, Ont. M5T 1R4
CANADA
*************************************
Due to the length of this (>45K) I have split it up
into two messages in case any of it might get lost in
the transmission or anyone has difficulty handling
large files. Italicized words in the original (except
for titles) I have surrounded by asterisks (*). Any
typos are mine. (PF)
*************************************
Theology at the Rim of a Broken Wheel: Bruce Cockburn
and Christian Faith in a Postmodern World by J. Richard
Middleton & Brian J. Walsh
Copyright for all Bruce Cockburn's songs is held by
Golden Mountain Music Corporation.
In a January 1982 article in Interpretation entitled
"Who Tells the World's Story?" Douglas Hall suggested
that it was time theologians abandoned philosophy,
their traditional dialogue partner, for a new
interdisciplinary dialogue, especially with the arts
and social sciences. His argument was twofold. First,
philosophy has become so specialized and truncated that
it no longer addresses the big questions of meaning and
thus can no longer be regarded as expressing adequately
the *zeitgeist* or spirit of our contemporary age. And
secondly our times have become so complicated, with a
baffling interconnectedness of problems, that no single
discipline could possibly constitute an adequate
dialogue partner. ln his proposal for a new,
interdisciplinary dialogue that would renew theological
discourse and contribute to global healing, Hall
suggests that we follow his mentor, Paul Tillich, in
engaging the arts and the social sciences in order to
comprehend the questions, attitudes and moods of our
times.
This paper attempts to accept part of Hall's
challenge by engaging one particular artist in extended
dialogue--the Canadian songwriter, singer, and
musician, Bruce Cockburn. We have selected Cockburn not
simply because he is a Canadian artist, and is thus
uniquely equipped to help Canadian theologians in their
self-understanding but for at least three larger,
interconnected reasons.
To begin with, Bruce Cockburn is an exceptional
musician and songwriter with a mature career of twenty
albums released over twenty-two years. Not only have
his music and lyrics received continual critical
acclaim (his lyrics have been compared to the poetry of
Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot), but Cockburn has been
able to capture a significant portion of the popular
music market. Cockburn's most recent album, Nothing But
a Burning Light, received the Associated Press Award
for the best album of 1991. On Christmas Eve of that
year CBC's The Journal ran a thirty-minute special
devoted to his career. His significance as a Canadian
artist of stature is further indicated by the ten Juno
awards and six Performing Rights Organization awards he
has accumulated, as well as by his inception into the
Order of Canada in 1983. He was also recently honoured
by the release of an album of his songs performed by
various Canadian "independent" artists, Kick at the
Darkness: Songs of Bruce Cockburn. This public
recognition is simply corroboration for our judgement
that Bruce Cockburn is quite likely the most learned,
intelligent songwriter in North America today. This in
itself makes him eminently suitable as a dialogue
partner for theologians.
But secondly, Bruce Cockburn is a Christian, and a
deeply reflective one at that. Ever since his 1974
album Salt, Sun and Time, which contains, in the song
"All the Diamonds," the evidence of his conversion (or
"evolution" as he sometimes puts it) to Christian
faith, Cockburn has struggled with the relationship of
his evolving faith to this complex world of joy and
brokenness, pain and glory. Although his songs have
always creatively exploited the symbolic repertoire of
the Christian tradition, forging a unique iconography
in the process, his work of the last decade has matured
significantly, so that his songs have increasingly
brought his Christian vision to bear on the
socio-political realities of the contemporary world.
This renders Cockburn uniquely valuable as a dialogue
partner for theological reflection. Indeed, in some
ways Cockburn might be viewed as a model of theological
reflection.
The third reason for selecting Cockburn is perhaps
the most significant of all. Through an intense inner
crisis in his personal life, Cockburn was driven to
struggle with the overriding public crisis of Western
civilization, namely the breakdown of modernity and the
transition, gradual and painful as it is, to a
postmodern situation. Though modernity and
postmodernity are not his terms, Cockburn has in the
past decade come to articulate a profound understanding
of the relationship of his faith to "this world of pain
and fire and steel" ("Broken Wheel") in a manner that
makes him a most valuable dialogue partner for
theologians seeking wisdom in post- modern times.
When we meet the early, pre-Christian Cockburn in
1970-75, it is his antipathy to human culture and his
almost wiccan, neopagan reverence for nature that
stands out in his music. With the transition to
christianity, we find Cockburn dazzled with a spiritual
vision rich in Christian sacramental and mystical
imagery, yet strangely distanced from the realities of
the modern urban world. Indeed, when the Christian
Cockburn of 1974-79 actually engaged modernity it was
primarily to pass judgement, and from the outside.
Around 1980, however, a significant shift is
discernible in Cockburn's artistry. Cockburn's marriage
came apart at the seams, precipitating a major
spiritual crisis. At this time he also moved from the
Ottawa valley to downtown Toronto. This confluence of
events shattered a significant barrier, evident in
Cockburn's previous lyrics, between the safe inner
world of spirituality and familial love on the one
hand, and the dangerous socio-cultural, political
reality of modern urban life on the other.
Instead of standing at arm's length, "safe within
the harmony of kin," as he had sung in "Gavin's
Woodpile" in the mid-seventies (In the Falling Dark,
1976), Cockburn for the first time embraced the pain of
what he had once called the "outer world" ("January in
the Halifax Airport Lounge," Joy Will Find a Way,
1978). In the years 1980-85, in particular, we find
Cockburn's songs filled with a prophetic pas- sion on
behalf of those suffering the consequences of human
violence and greed, the consequences of (as he puts it)
"the grinding devolution of the democratic dream."
("The Trouble with Normal," The Trouble with Normal,
1983). It is as if Cockburn allowed his own pain to
resonate with that of others--whether inner-city
Torontonians, Guatemalan refugees or native Canadians--
allowing him to understand their plight and to take up
their cause. While there are occasional eruptions of
self-righteous anger, as in his anti-FBl song "People
See Through You," or his protest song against
right-wing christianity, "Gospel of Bondage," his
lyrics on the whole are free from strident
triumphalism.
Like the weeping prophet, Jeremiah, who grieved on
behalf of a people facing judgement, Cockburn comes to
identify himself with the crisis of those living at the
end of the modern age, those living in what Langdon
Gilkey calls, in Society and the Sacred, the "autumnal
chill" of Western civilization. Indeed, Cockburn's
identification goes so deep that in his 1981 song
"Broken Wheel," from which the title of this paper is
taken, we find him openly admitting his own complicity
and participation in the brokenness of the world: "you
and me, we are the break in the broken wheel" (Inner
City Front, 1981).
We have said that Cockburn's personal spiritual
crisis parallels the public crisis of the end of
Modernity. It is of theological significance that it is
precisely through an engagement with suffering that
Cockburn experienced a profound renewal of faith. To
use the categories that Walter Brueggemann developed in
The Message of the Psalms, Cockburn's marriage
breakdown functioned as the catalyst for an experience
of *disorientation*. This disorientation shattered his
previously settled and secure Christian *orientation*.
Through the embrace of pain--his own and that of the
world--Cockburn came to what Brueggemann would call a
*reorientation*, a transformation of his previous
inadequate stance of faith into one that takes
seriously the broken and dislocated character of life,
without accepting the resignation of despair as final.
What Brueggemann calls *reorientation*, Paul Ricoeur in
The Symbolism of Evil names "second naivete." Yet in
this case it is a naivete that has passed not through
the criticism of Enlightenment rationality, but (more
profoundly) through the crucible of suffering, life in
disarray, and the loss of personal and cultural
meaning. For those of us in a theological tradition who
have been tempted in the past to embrace the autonomous
values of modernity, shrugging off the naivete of
pre-critical faith, it is time to listen to Cockburn as
he profoundly exposes the malaise of modernity and
dismantles its optimistic myths of progress and
rationality. Indeed, for those of us who have been
"doxified" by the *doxa* of modernity (as Roland
Barthes would put it), Cockburn is a good antidote. He
engages in a therapeutic act of "de-doxification." Or,
to put it differently, Cockburn participates in the
postmodern "de-naturalization" of some of the dominant
assumptions of modernity that have been taken for
granted. In biblical terms, he strips the idols of
their pretensions.
For those of us, on the other hand, who have
always been suspicious of modernity, living either in
an uneasy compromise between its claims and those of
faith, or in a myopic stance of avoidance, eyes averted
to the inner world of faith and theology, it is also a
time to listen. For the truth is that neither those who
embrace nor those who avoid modernity will be able to
address adequately our contemporary postmodern climate.
Having never come to grips with the modern project, we
are in no position to deal creatively with its demise.
In Brueggemannian/Ricoeurian terms, we are stuck in a
naive orientation, whether of modernity or of faith.
Like Cockburn, we require a reorientation, a
dynamic processing of the disorientation of postmodern
brokenness, that moves us on to the sort of second
naivete that allowed Cockburn to juxtapose hopeful
images from Isaiah's vision of the light of Yahweh
shining in the New Jerusalem (in chapter 60) with the
grim realities of Pinochet's Chile in "Santiago Dawn,"
written in 1983:
I've got a dream and I'm not alone
darkness dead and gone
all the people are marching home
kissing the rush of dawn
Santiago sunrise
see them marching home
see them rising like grass through cement
in the Santiago dawn.
(World of Wonders, 1985)
What is it that allowed Cockburn to articulate
such a powerful eschatological hope in the midst of an
oppressive military dictatorship? We receive a hint in
the previous verse where Cockburn sings of church bells
in a Santiago slum ringing out protest against, and
triumph over, a brutal military crack down. As mass is
celebrated in the midst of soldiers, dogs, smoke, and
gas, the sounds Cockburn hears are "bells of rage ...
bells of hope." Hope is integrally connected to anger.
A close reading of Cockburn's lyrics, especially from
1980 on, reveals that it was anger at injustice and
suffering that opened him up to the possibility of an
alternative future, to hope in a vision of a better
world rooted in the loving action of God.
To explicate the dynamics of the move from
disorientation to reorientation, we need to begin by
noting that anger is a natural response to a situation
of disorientation, whether it be the disorientation of
a marriage breakdown or the demise of modernity. It is
even an appropriate response, since one's "world",
one's prior orientation, worldview, and grounding have
been disrupted and called into question. Cockburn
eloquently captures the appropriateness of anger in his
1979 song "Grim Travellers," written during his
marriage crisis, which comments on the near universal
hardness of heart that produces a world characterized
by terrorism, commodity capitalism, and environmental
destruction. Anger is an appropriate response to such a
world:
grim travellers in dawn skies
i see the beauty-makes me cry inside
it makes me angry and i don't know why
we're grim travellers in dawn skies.
(Humans, 1980)
Although Cockburn's anger here is expressed with a
sense of poignancy, in other places it erupts into
coarse language, into the sort of expletives that got a
consumer advisory warning slapped onto his 1984 album
Stealing Fire in American record stores. But unlike
Eddie Murphy's movie Harlem Nights, which uses the word
"fuck" as punctuation (one reviewer stopped counting
after eighty occurrences), Cockburn's expletives are
well-chosen and optimally sparse. His coarse language
expresses not a limited vocabulary, but moral and
emotional outrage at the "extremes of what humans can
be." ("Rumours of Glory," Humans, 1980). From his 1971
response to the Vietnam war, "God, damn the hands of
glory that hold the bloody firebrand high" ("It's Going
Down Slow," Sunwheel Dance) to his 1983 description of
the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan as "so full of
shit his breath makes acid rain" ("Put Our Hearts
Together," The Trouble with Normal), Cockburn is
articulating his gut reaction to evil. Whether it is
his famous song written in 1983, where he admits that
"if I had a rocket launcher ... some sonofabitch would
die" ("If I had a Rocket Launcher," Stealing Fire,
1984), or his 1985 expose of Third World exploitation
disguised as "democracy" when he sings "it's just spend
a buck to make a buck, you don't really give a flying
fuck about the people in misery" ("Call it Democracy,"
World of Wonders), it is outrage at suffering that
generates Cockburn's critique and his language.
One might legitimately argue about the
appropriateness of such language in some contexts, but
if we cannot appreciate the depth of emotion and rage
out of which such language is forged, we are likely to
have a blissfully naive view of the world. In
particular, we are likely to have disqualified pain as
illegitimate on the basis of a prior, naive
orientation, rather than to have taken seriously the
fact that something is terribly wrong. And if we
disqualify pain, we suppress it. The result is
numbness, not anger--certainly not the sort of anger
that we find in Cockburn's song "If I had a Rocket
Launcher." When he introduces this song in concerts,
Cockburn has been at pains to point out that he doesn't
counsel violence. The song is not meant as a statement
of his position on violence, but rather as a testimony
of what he felt, standing in that Mexican refugee camp
when the Guatemalan helicopter came in, "second time
today," strafing the refugees with automatic weapon
fire. Cockburn says both that he was surprised at his
rage that day and that he doesn't like to perform the
song thoughtlessly, because it trivializes the
experience. He therefore tries to relive the painful
emotions of that day in 1983 every time he sings the
song. Here is the last, climactic verse:
i want to raise every voice-at least i've got to try
every time i think about it water rises to my eyes
situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry
if i had a rocket launcher .
some sonofabitch would die.
Cockburn is on to something important with his
anger. In "Call it Democracy," the song with the "F"
word, which goes on to call the IMF (Inter- national
Monetary Fund) "dirty MF," Cockburn reveals that he
understands the source of his coarse language. It
arises from the response that injustice and oppression
elicit in sensitive people who insist that things ought
to be different. Cockburn sings of those who, under the
thin guise of "democracy," are really "international
loan sharks backed by the guns / of market hungry
military profiteers," who "rob life of its quality /
who render rage a necessity." And in doing this they
also render necessary a certain kind of language to
articulate this rage.
Our point, however, isn't the language; it's the
rage. Injustice renders rage necessary. But rage can
move in at least three quite different directions, all
of which are illustrated in Cockburn's lyrics. In his
1976 song, "Gavin's Woodpile," we meet Cockburn with
his barrier between the inner and outer world still
intact. While splitting logs one evening, Cockburn
reflects on a series of hopeless scenes culminating in
the mercury poisoning of the English River on the
Grassy Narrows reserve in Northern Ontario and the
callous insensitivity of the government to this
tragedy:
and the stack of wood grows higher and higher
and a helpless rage seems to set my brain on fire
and everywhere the free space fills
like a punctured diving suit and I'm
paralysed in the face of it all
cursed with the curse of these modern times.
(In the Falling Dark, 1976)
This rage is helpless; it is a disempowering rage,
precisely because of the barrier between the safe inner
world of faith and the dangerous outer world of
Realpolitik. And although that barrier, described as a
protective in a diving suit, begins to crack in the
song, the initial response is paralysis. Anger is not
always liberating.
A very different kind of anger is revealed in
"Tropic Moon," a song written in 1982 about guerilla
resistance fighters living on the run. Cockburn sings
that "in the rage in the hearts of these men / is the
seed of a wind they call kingdom come," (The Trouble
with Normal, 1983). This is the sort of rage that leads
desperate revolutionaries to blow someone to kingdom
come, in the name of a coming kingdom. Rage is a seed
that can grow into the ugly tree of violent revolution,
where the fruit is often more suffering and oppression
than before. But that is a simplistic externalization
of rage against the Other. That is the direction of
anger outward, against that which we oppose, against
those whom we oppose. Unlike the helpless rage of
"Gavin's Woodpile," this is a rage acted out. The
trouble is that such acting out simply perpetuates the
mirror image of the enemy. Instead of a passive
inner/outer split resulting in paralysis, we are left
with a strident us/them opposition, generating
violence.
But there is a third direction in which anger can
move. Instead of paralysis or violence, rage can open
us up to the suffering of others and to our complicity
in their suffering. Rage can be the beginning of
feeling the pain of the Other, the signal that we have
let the Other in. Rage, in other words, can be a form
of compassion for, and solidarity with, those who
suffer. And Cockburn has a large repertoire of
critical, political songs in which there is no trace of
strident self-righteousness, in which he does not
simplistically bring an external critique to bear on
the world. Take, for example, a song like "Stolen
Land," which addresses the European colonization of the
Americas and the plight of native peoples "from Tierra
del Fuego to Ungava Bay":
Apartheid in Arizona, slaughter in Brazil
if bullets don't get good PR there's other ways to
kill
kidnap all the children, put 'em in a foreign system
bring them up in no-man's land where no
one really wants them
it's a stolen land
stolen land-but it's all we got
stolen land-and there's no going back
stolen land-and we'll never forget
stolen land-and we're not through yet.
(Waiting for a Miracle, 1987)
Notice the unstinting use of "we" in the chorus. There
is a clear perception here of complicity in a situation
of brokenness. Further, there are no simplistic answers
offered. And while this song does call for action in
the final questioning line, "what steps are you gonna
take to try and set things right / in this stolen
land," the overall tone of the song is one of pathos
and solidarity, not of unthinking activism.
Such pathos is powerfully expressed in "Planet of
the Clowns," which pictures Cockburn standing on the
seashore, overwhelmed by the suffering of creation:
This bluegreen ball in black space
filled with beauty even now
battered and abused and lovely.
And as Cockburn's heart goes out to a broken world, he
wonders at his own place before God in the plight of
creation:
Each one in our own heart
Desperate to know where we stand
Planet of the clowns in wet shoes.
(The Trouble with Normal, 1983)
There is not an ounce of triumphalism in that song.
Instead, Cockburn weeps over planet earth, much as
Jesus wept over Jerusalem.
That this is not a passive, paralyzed weeping is
evident in the title track of the album on which this
song appears. Cockburn's complaint in "The trouble with
Normal" is that "it always gets worse." Cockburn
neither accepts the present state of the world as
normal or normative, nor does he simply grieve over its
plight. Instead he engages in prophetic criticism, as
in "Candy Man's Gone" which insightfully declares the
ending of the dream of modernity. Cockburn portrays the
modern, idealized dream as a "sweet fantasia of the
safe home / where nobody has to scrape for honey at the
bottom of the comb." He goes on to describe the
universal appeal of the modern dream of progress in
terms of prostitution and sales pitches, concluding by
declaring it a false faith:
In the bar, in the senate, in the alley,
in the study
Pimping dreams of riches for everybody
Something for nothing, new lamps for old
And the streets will be platinum,
never mind gold
Well hey, pass it on,
Misplaced your faith and the Candy Man's gone
I hate to tell you but the Candy Man's gone
(The Trouble With Normal, 1983)
Philip Feeley
"...there are numerous compensations, even apart from the fact that it is
possible to look at oneself in the mirror without too much shame..."
Noam Chomsky, on why he protested the American invasion of South Vietnam.