A mirror in which to see ourselves as we really are

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Catherine’s Wickford:

“Do you like American music?” That’s a question that one of my favourite bands, the Violent Femmes, ask in a song which as you might expect is called American Music. American music is songs that derive from the ancient ballads of mountain music. Songs, as Bob Dylan has said, that come from legends, Bibles and plagues and that are concerned with mystery and death. The Violent Femmes say that yes, they like American music because it is like an ugly lake that reminds them of themselves.

It might seem a strange reason to give for liking a style of music but it is pertinent to today’s reading from James which says that we need mirrors in which to see ourselves as we really are. Too often we live life, James says, like people who look in the mirror and then immediately forget what we are actually like. Music can be one mirror in which we can sometimes be brought up short and see ourselves as we really are but James says that the best mirror for us is God’s perfect law.

Our NT and Gospel readings today are to do with God’s Law, the commands that God gave to the people of Israel and that are recorded for us in what we now call the Old Testament (Mark 7: 1 - 8, 14 & 15, 21 – 23 & James 1: 17 – end). How can that Law be like a mirror to our lives?

The Law shows us two things. First, it shows us what sin is and that we are sinful people. Paul says in both his letters to the Romans and Galatians that the purpose of the Law is to show what wrongdoing is and, by that, to let us know that we are sinners. This is because the standard set in the Law is the standard of God’s holiness and glory and we all fall short of that. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that whoever disobeys even the least important commandment and teaches others to do the same will be least in the Kingdom of Heaven and James says that whoever breaks one commandment is guilty of breaking them all. The standard set is God’s perfection and we all fall short. We see that in the Gospel reading in that the Pharisees who accuse the disciples of sin are shown by Jesus to be guilty of sin themselves.

But if this is all that we see in the mirror of God’s Law then it is profoundly distressing and depressing. If this is all then the mirror of God’s Law is like the ugly lake that the Violent Femmes say that American music is; something in which all you can see is your own ugliness reflected.

David Runcorn argues that if “we define sin solely in terms of wrong actions or thoughts, we trivialise it [and] our diagnosis does not go deep enough.” He says that the Pharisees trivialised sin in this way by being pedantically obsessed “with external standards of behaviour” and that that is why “Jesus furiously castigated and mocked the religion of his day.”

Runcorn says that “who we are always comes before what we do” and that “our choices, desires and actions … always flow from our sense of personal identity.” This means that “our deepest need is not primarily to stop doing or saying bad things” because the power and significance of sin “lies not so much in what we are doing or saying, but in who we think we are.” Real sin, Runcorn argues, is insisting on being what we are not; the desire for a life other than the one God intended human beings to live. As James puts it, looking in the mirror and then forgetting who we are by being the people we want to be, not the people God wants us to be.

God wants us to be different from the sinful people that we are and so in the mirror of God’s Law we can also see all that God thinks we can be and longs for us to become. James summarises it by saying that “what God the Father considers to be pure and genuine religion is this; to take care of widows and orphans in their suffering and to keep oneself from being corrupted by the world.” God’s vision for human beings is that we become holy servants.

But this is not something that we can do by ourselves. It is something that happens together with God. It is God who has provided the mirror and God who has come into our world to show us in Jesus what living as a holy servant looks like. We see in Jesus’ life what that way of being human looks like in practice. But more than that, in Jesus, God is reaching out to us to show us that we are loved by him and that he sees our potential for change and for beauty. In Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son, the son rejects his identity as a child of his Father and leaves home to waste his life. Finally, when he is eating the food of pigs the son looks in the mirror to see himself as he actually is and decides to return home to his father and ask to become one of his servants. But the Father rejoices at his return and welcomes him home as the son he has always been although for a time he rejected that identity. This is a story about us and God. We reject our rightful identity as children of God living as holy servants. We forget what we really look like in the mirror and live as we choose. But when we come to see ourselves as we truly are and return to God we are welcomed as God’s children with all of our potential for becoming the people that he wants us to be.

David Runcorn says that “the deepest awakening of all is to the discovery that we are loved with a wild, prodigal love – without condition.” We are then able to become all that God’s Law says we can be – those who love God with all their being and who love their neighbours as ourselves – because God has first loved us.

When I go away on holiday one of the things I like to do is to visit art galleries in the area where I am staying. One of the artists that I found out about when staying in the Vendée was Charles Milcendeau.

Milcendeau grew up in the Northern Vendée at a village called Soullans surrounded by marshes. He was the son of the innkeeper at Soullans but his artistic talents took him to Paris to study in the same class as Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse. Rouault went on to generally be reckoned as the greatest religious artist of the Twentieth Century while Matisse (together with Picasso) was one of the greatest artists per se of that century. Both Rouault and Matisse came to prominence through the Fauve movement which used strong, emotional colours in paintings at the same time as the Expressionists in Germany were doing the same.

Milcendeau would have had the opportunity to have gone in the same direction as his friends but he chose not to. Instead, inspired by Dutch and Flemish art, he returned to his own people, to the Northern Vendée to paint the people of the marsh. His painting of the flagellation of Christ still hangs in his home Church at Soullans and is one of the first paintings in which he modelled the figures in the painting on local people. This painting, which I went to see, is therefore a major milestone in his journey towards his art in which he shows a sustained and loving attention to a poor and unregarded community. His masterpieces not only capture the physical and cultural settings of his day but bring alive to us today the characters and personalities of the ordinary and unregarded people that he painted. To do this he had to pay attention not just to what those people looked like but also to what they were like and then identify how to convey what they were like as he painted what they looked like. Doing this involved sustained and loving attention to them as people.

Milcendeau’s story seems like a parable to me because his encounter with Christ (in the painting of the flagellation) leads on to him showing a sustained and loving attention to others in his paintings.

It maybe that for Milcendeau painting the people around him as the crowd abusing Jesus was his way of looking in the mirror and seeing himself for what he was; a sinner, an abuser of God. But he was also painting Jesus enduring that abuse in order to show God’s love for those who abuse him. After encountering Jesus in this way in his painting his life purpose clarified and he spent his life paying loving attention to his poor and disregarded community in his paintings of their lives and characters.

James says that if we look closely at ourselves in the mirror of God’s perfect law, paying attention and knowing ourselves to be sinners loved by God then we will go on to become the holy servants that God intended all human beings to become. May it be so for each one of us. Amen

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Violent Femmes - American Music.

Top Ten 2019

This is the music, in no particular order, that I've most enjoyed listening to in 2019:

Kiwanuka by Michael Kiwanuka - 'Kiwanuka is a contemplative song cycle intended to be listened to in one extended sitting ... At the core is Kiwanuka’s inner battle between anxiety, self-doubt, spirituality and wisdom, which is then set against racism and rueful glances at the state of the world ... for all its melancholy, Kiwanuka is never downbeat. There are moments – such as the “Time is the healer” gospel choir in I’ve Been Dazed, or hopeful closer Light – when positivity bursts through with such dazzling effect you want to cheer. Kiwanuka is a bold, expansive, heartfelt, sublime album. He’s snuck in at the final whistle, but surely this is among the decade’s best.'

Ghosteen by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - 'Ghosteen drips melody like the permanent rain. It oozes emotion from a heavy heart. It embraces the frailty of the human soul. It’s full of poetry and images that switch sometimes from the time honoured embrace of Elvis and Jesus and the icons and articles of faith whether they are god or rock n roll to a yearning deeply soulful of a very personal heartbreak with a powerful honesty and lyrical nakedness reflecting a genuine darkness and intimate honesty that is a step deeper into the personal and the intimate that is compelling and hypnotic and with an almost ambient atmospheric music to match.'

Thanks for the Dance by Leonard Cohen - Thanks for the Dance 'Opener Happens to the Heart reflects on [Leonard Cohen's] career with trademark humility: “I was always working steady, I never called it art. I got my shit together, meeting Christ and reading Marx” ... Like those of Marvin Gaye and Prince, Cohen’s oeuvre sought to reconcile the spiritual and the sensual, which both feature heavily again ... As the pace slows to a transcendent crawl and backing vocals form a heavenly choir, The Hills mocks his ageing body (“The system is shot / I’m living on pills”) and the stunning The Goal finds him “almost alive” and “settling accounts of the soul”. The last poem he recorded, Listen to the Hummingbird, implores us to find beauty in God and butterflies: “Don’t listen to me.” And, finally, there is a vast, empty silence, and he is gone.'

We Get By by Mavis Staples - 'Over half a century after her voice was at the forefront of America’s civil rights era, Mavis Staples is still crying out for Change. The bluesy backbeat opening track of her 12th studio album confronts recent shootings in the US before she concludes, brilliantly, “What good is freedom if we haven’t learned to be free?”... It’s not hard to guess the subject of such pointed lines such as “Trouble in the land. We can’t trust that man.” Elsewhere, there are songs of loss, need, faith and devotion.'

Hotel Last Resort by Violent Femmes - 'More than three decades on from their 1983 debut, Violent Femmes have dished up another audio delight of front-porch folk ... The band’s juvenile charisma imbues every lyric, from a biblical satire in Adam Was a Man to humble love song Everlasting You, but Paris to Sleep is the heartbreaking hero: “Losing lost love is not worth losing for.” Deeply intuitive with a sprinkle of absurdity, the Violent Femmes’ new recipe is pure joy.'

Jaimie by Brittany Howard - 'Jaime is named after Howard’s sister, who taught her to play piano and died of cancer when she was eight years old – but “the record is not about her”, she said in a recent interview. “It’s about me.” A platter of psychy soul, gospel and funk, with melodies that tap and jitter like Morse code or pour out like silky caramel, Jaime is about tragedy, sexuality, religion, racism and poverty – all things with which Howard is uncomfortably familiar.'

Love & Revelation by Over The Rhine - 'Love & Revelation, an album of loping ballads and probing lyricism that addresses grief, loss and what it means to be an American in a conflicted country. “Let You Down” is a devastating promise to never abandon someone, with the understanding that inevitably they will do just that. “Betting on the Muse,” inspired by the writer Charles Bukowski, wrestles with finding a life’s second act after a person peaks. And “Los Lunas” is a haunting poem about a tearful drive to reckon with saying goodbye ... “The very first words you hear on the project are ‘I cried,'” says Detweiler, citing the opening lyric. “When I told my 87-year-old mother about it, she said that sounds like the Psalms.” But Love & Revelation, and the band itself, is ultimately about restoration and perseverance.'

High as Hope by Florence + the Machine - 'Welch reinforces her magnificent emoting with contemplative, intimate lyrics; the musician beckons people into her interior world with no hesitation and no cushion. “The show was ending, and I had started to crack,” Welch trills to open the album, her voice dominant above barely perceptible chords. “Woke up in Chicago and the sky turned black.” Despite that initial ominous note, High As Hope soon evolves into a treatise on what it means to embrace second chances, while trusting other people—and, more important, yourself. The cello-burnished “100 Years” exhibits a healthier approach to love and faith (“Give me arms to pray with instead of ones that hold too tightly”) while “Grace,” written as a mea culpa to Welch’s younger sister, asks forgiveness for youthful indiscretions.'

Western Skies by Bruce Springsteen - 'Western Stars ... is populated by characters past their best – the title track’s fading actor, reduced to hawking Viagra on TV and retelling his stories for anyone who’ll buy him a drink; Drive Fast’s injured stuntman recalling his youthful recklessness, the failed songwriter of Somewhere North of Nashville and the guy glumly surveying the boarded-up site of an old tryst on Moonlight Motel – all of them ruminating on how things have changed, not just for the worse, but in ways none of them anticipated.'

Three Chords and the Truth by Van Morrison - 'There’s a warmth here that recalls his ’90s highwater marks, Hymns to the Silence and The Healing Game, and connects even farther back in time to 1971’s Tupelo Honey, which balanced the charms of domesticity with R&B raves ... “It’s called ‘the flow,’” Morrison said in a recent interview, detailing his optimal conditions for making music. “I don’t know the mechanics of how that works. I just know when I’m in it.” “The flow” makes Three Chords and The Truth a deeply pleasurable listen, but it’s the moments where Morrison sounds less settled that carry the most weight. The album’s third song, “Dark Night of the Soul,” never wanders as far out as epics like “Madame George” and “Listen to the Lion,” nor does it match spaced-out gloss of his ’80s albums with trumpeter Mark Isham, but it’s gripped by the same existential fervor. Its mellow heat has a lot in common with 1997’s “Rough God Goes Riding,” a gentle midtempo cut with apocalyptic visions hiding in plain sight. Revisiting the 16th-century Christian mystic St. John of the Cross’ poem about the unknowability of God, one he’s sung about a number of times before, Morrison showcases the way his twilight years haven’t dimmed his yearning for growth, his desire for a deeper understanding.'

My previous Top Ten's can be found here - 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Violent Femmes - Everlasting You.

Under-appreciated songwriters

One of the great pleasures of 2012 for me was discovering the music of Bill Fay through Life is People. 

Fay's songs are simply astonishing - simple and melodic yet with unusual imagery and insights (both whimsical and surreal bearing comparison with Syd Barrett and Nick Drake) delivered with gravity and grace. 'Cosmic Concerto (Life Is People)' is a highlight from a collection of stand-out tracks; a celebration of the miracle of ordinary life, the infinite variation in each human face, which stirs his soul. I'm currently absorbing his classic Time Of The Last Persecution; empathy in the face of apocalypse. Humility seems to run throughout his music; both in his low-key, almost hesitant and weathered delivery and in lyrics such as "The never ending happening / Of what's to be and what has been / Just to be a part of it / Is astonishing to me" ('The Never Ending Happening') and "I don't ask much, for myself / But for the one's I love" ('Thank You Lord').

Following on from that discovery, here are some other stunning songwriters who, like Fay, have not achieved the attention that their work actually merits:  

Michael Been, The Call's singer/songwriter, was born in Oklahoma City but migrated to California before forming The Call with Scott Musik. Sin and salvation are staples of the diet that The Call served up. Been thought that every fault in the world was within him and said that he had had "hundreds of born-again experiences" needing them because he was dead a lot of the time: "I believe in truth. Whatever is necessary for a person to experience to find the rock bottom, to know the darkness of his life, that's right. A lot of our music is confrontational, it deals with the dark side of life because that teaches us something." Red Moon and Reconciled represent the peak of The Call's work combining literate lyrics with powerful anthems and genuinely encompassing despair, ecstasy and the stages in between.

T. Bone Burnett creates ridiculous satirical morality tales - the marijuana smoking computer operator paying through the nose for free love (The Sixties), the millionaire buying culture in massive fashionable chunks (A Ridiculous Man) and the émigrés selling soft sentiment and soft porn to children (Hefner and Disney). Burnett knows though that judgements are precarious - that what we think we know and what we actually know are often in opposition - so he balances his tales on the jerky, anxious, angular rhythms of his rock 'n' country hybrid, almost like stiltwalking.

Peter Case neatly summed up the dual strands of American music when he wrote in the sleeve notes to Peter Case that he didn't know any songs about America but that these songs were about "sin and salvation". Like Bruce Springsteen, Case has an ability to speak in the voice of those people struggling for a nickel, shuffling for a dime who find themselves caught in relationships that have ensnared them. Theirs is the voice of hope deferred - to someone else (Turning Blue), and the voice of harsh experience - "You don't know it but it's plain to see/You can't tell when you're workin' for your enemy" (Workin' For The Enemy). His eye for colourful detail authenticates his character's tales and adds extra layers of meaning - "So we made love in that place out in back/The last time that we took off our clothes/We took other things and took more than that/I took off with my clothes in a sack and I froze"

Rated "rock’s last great obscurity" by Melody Maker Bruce Cockburn has quietly made a living as a singer/songwriter since 1970 and his self-titled debut while never going all out for fame and fortune. As literate a guitarist as he is a lyricist he fuses sparklingly complex jazz/rock rhythms with metaphor loaded lyricism, as often spoken as sung – "sometimes things don’t easily reduce to rhyming couplets". Forty years plus of consistent, intelligent exploration of the personal, political and spiritual, often within the same song, is no mean achievement. When combined with both an honesty about his own relationship and faith frailties and a willingness to campaign with the likes of Oxfam raging against US and IMF oppression in the two-thirds world, you have to give the man respect. In 1992 in a song, Closer to the Light, written following the death of Mark Heard, Cockburn wrote the line - "There you go/Swimming deeper into mystery" – which seemed to sum the direction in which Cockburn’s work has headed over the course of his long career.

Like Gordan Gano of the Violent Femmes, David Eugene Edwards has a preacher in the family - in Edwards case, his Nazarene preacher Grandfather. Edward's songs not only oscillate around the twin poles of sin and salvation but use the language of the King James version as they do so. If any current music fully inhabits the Southern mindset then surely it is this. 16 Horsepower released their debut album Sackcloth 'N' Ashes in 1995 and, after the eventual demise of 16 Horsepower, DEE continued in similar vein with Woven Hand. As he has said: 'The myths of our country are in the songs. The untold stories and gaps in history books are in the songs – our recollection is preserved in this music. Those songs as well as the stories that my parents told me, the bible and the books I read, all this is the foundation of my imagination of America.'

Formed in 1982 and discovered by Chrissie Hynde busking outside a Pretender's gig, the Violent Femmes were among the first to combine punk's frenzy with country's resignation and gospel's jubilation. That full on clash of contradiction is the raison d'etre of the band (and something they were into long before the idea featured in U2's third coming). "That's the thing about this band," said Gordon Gano their singer/songwriter, "in the songs, in the whole performance of them, there's all different levels of total contradiction going on at the same moment where we are serious and as far from being serious as possible, it's important and also far away from being important". It's also part of the "American tradition" - "Country music has a long tradition of singing horrible songs about drinking and sinning and then doing some sincere gospel numbers". This is where 'Country Death Song' gets its dark inspiration from - "I even think 'Country Death Song' is happy because all the awfulness of the song, it came out of my love for country music and I feel happy when I sing it. I must have a different perspective".

Mark Heard wrote, in 'I Just Wanna Get Warm', "The mouths of the best poets speak but a few words/Then lay down, stone cold, in forgotten fields" - in retrospect that seems prophetic. Just a glimpse into the soul of a man known by so few and yet so deeply missed by so many. The liner notes from the tribute album say it best: "Mark Heard left behind a legacy of music that will undoubtedly impact the lives of many, just as he has impacted the lives of the artists who participated in Strong Hand of Love. The testimony of his brilliance as a poet and artist is undeniably evident throughout this inspiring tribute."

Los Angeles group Love were, in the words of David Fricke, 'the bi-racial folk-rock pirates who made Love and Da Capo in 1966, then the silken psychedelia of Forever Changes in 1967.' 'Although Arthur Lee was the main writer, [Bryan] MacLean contributed some fine songs, including Orange Skies, Old Man and the haunting Alone Again Or, with its flamenco-style guitar and dramatic trumpet flourishes.' ifyoubelievein is a collection of MacLean's music written when he was in the band and written with Love in mind. 'After an aborted attempt at a solo career ... [MacLean] joined a Christian Fellowship Church called the Vineyard ... During Friday night Bible stints [MacLean] took the concert part of the session and was so amazed at the reaction he gradually assembled a catalogue of his Christian songs.' Taken from the Latin and literally meaning 'within the walls', Intra Muros is the album of "spooky" Christian music MacLean was completing at the time of his death. Due to 'the great strength of songs like the amazing Love Grows In Me and My Eyes Are Open', Intra Muros 'stands as fine testament to the ability of a great songwriter.'

Michael McDermott's trademark embrace is "of faith and hope in the face of adversity." His lyrics are "uniquely evocative" as he "sings in poetry", his tunes being "literate story-songs." Stephen King wrote of him: “Michael McDermott is one of the best songwriters in the world and possibly the greatest undiscovered rock ‘n’ roll talent of the last 20 years.” In “Mess of Things,” McDermott sings, “the trouble with trouble is that it sometimes sticks/plays tricks with your mind while it gets its kicks/And slowly there’s a momentum shift/And the weight becomes too great to lift.” McDermott sings about a world where “everybody is bleeding, or everybody is filled with doubt,” and yet he sings, “say the word/And I shall be healed.”

'After the Flood' from Lone Justice's debut album neatly fits Maria McKee's description of country music - "originally Country music was very raw and very spiritual and very gut-level". With a half brother (Bryan MacLean) from seminal 60s LA band Love and Victoria Williams as a next-door neighbour growing up ("she taught me my first guitar chords", McKee has said and they sang briefly together before their separate careers took off), the emphasis was always likely to be on the raw, spiritual and gut-level rather than the country aspect of the definition. By the time McKee recorded her second solo album You Gotta Sin To Get Saved, with a band that included Jayhawks, Gary Louris and Mark Olson (then Williams' husband), she felt she was standing still, merely reprising her work with Lone Justice. She responded by recording the critically acclaimed album Life Is Sweet. Here she felt her songwriting becoming "crystal and dramatic ... this larger-than-life grandiose thing, sort of riding the fine line of bad taste". Grunge based and coruscating on tracks like 'Scarlover', Life is Sweet sounds a far cry from the cow-punk of Lone Justice but it remains "very raw and very spiritual and very gut-level". At the end of the day that's what matters.

Julie Miller writes nakedly emotional songs which in their aching beauty combine perseverance and faith with sorrow and heartache. Her songs have featured in her solo work, her husband Buddy Miller's solo albums and on several jointly recorded albums. An early song reflecting on the crucifixion asked, 'How can you say No to this man?' The same question can be asked of Miller's confessional work - how can you say no to the grace and openness found therein?

Neal Morse is a US prog rocker who first made his mark in the band Spock’s Beard and then formed the prog-rock supergroup Transatlantic. Following his conversion to Christianity in 2000, he left both bands and has since produced a substantial and well-regarded body of solo work exploring different aspects of his faith. His fourth solo album Sola Scriptura, across four tracks and 76 minutes (this is prog rock we’re talking here!), tells the story of Martin Luther and the Reformation. Morse says, “The point of it is to point us … toward the light of God's truth which is laid out wonderfully before us in the scriptures. Of course, this is a lofty goal for a mere CD, but, with God anything is possible!”

Over The Rhine's Linford Detweiler and Karen Bergquist say: "... we try to write music that in little ways helps to heal the wounds that life has dealt us or the wounds we’ve dealt ourselves. We try to write songs that can hum joyfully at the stars when something good goes down. We try to write tunes capable of whispering to a sleeping child that in spite of everything, somehow, all is well. We try to write words that help us learn to tell the truth to ourselves and others." “We’re really only reflecting what we’ve already heard,” Detweiler explains, “a mix of all the music we grew up with and were drawn to: old gospel hymns, the country and western music on WWVA, the rock and roll records the kids at school passed around, the symphonic music that my father brought home, the jazz musicians we discovered in college, the Great American Songbook performers that Karin’s mother loved, and of course the various singer-songwriters that eventually knocked the roof off our world. But when this music is reflected back to the listener through the filter of our own particular lives, hopefully it becomes a much different experience (maybe even somewhat unique) for those with ears to hear.”

The Innocence Mission hail from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and own up to a "religious upbringing where our parents lived out their faith rather than evangelised". They formed in 1982 and initially attracted the support of Joni Mitchell and her then husband, Larry Klien. Mitchell called Karen Peris "one of the most interesting  singer/songwriters around at the moment", while Klien produced their first two albums (The Innocence Mission and Umbrella). Peris summed up the band's approach when she said "I saw something in a book Float Planes. In the beginning there's a quote from a hymn that said, "When I die hallelujah! Bye bye I'll fly away ..." and that's exactly what I think we want to say." In 'Wonder of Birds', from the first album, they talk of building homes with windows to fly through and this is an apt description of their songs. 'Bright As Yellow' for example, from their third album Glow, is a joyful celebration of that open-handed, open-hearted approach to life, as exemplified by Peris's mother. Peris writes conversational songs that draw significance from the everyday while the band on the earliest albums set these to a swirling, chiming, transcendent version of the 'big' music.

Leslie Phillips sang in Sunday School with Maria McKee and recorded several albums for the CCM label Word before a name change to Sam, a marriage to T-Bone Burnett and a series of critically acclaimed albums often produced by Burnett. Phillips combines a cool pop sensibility with razor-sharp lyrics. A mix that finds her ethereal voice, tinged with melancholy, soaring over like a seagull skimming waves.

Jim White inhabits a world where the natural and supernatural are intertwined and where the ordinary slips seamlessly into the extraordinary. White says in 'Still Waters', "Well, don't you know there are projects for the dead and projects for the living?/Though I must confess sometimes I get confused by that distinction". White's characters have ghosts in their homes, curse ships which promptly sink and serenade the dying ('Still Waters').

Victoria Williams has a naive, folky style which uses images and characters that would not be out of place in a painting by Marc Chagall. This style, however, conceals a great subtlety of approach and a willingness to experiment with musical form in a similar to fashion to that of Van Morrison. Williams builds songs that are not simply a melody running through verses and chorus but which, in tandem with the lyrics, veer off in directions that are consistent with the emotional ebb and flow of the song as a whole. She sees the divine through the local, the ordinary, the common-place, and the natural finding the wind of the Holy Spirit blowing through the building of a raft and duets with a fellow-traveller on the New York underground ('Holy Spirit').

I write more about some of the above in my co-authored book 'The Secret Chord'.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Fay - I Hear You Calling.

Apocalypse Now (3)

On Saturday I led a workshop entitled 'Apocalypse Now' at the excellent Exploring Spirituality day in St Albans Diocese,, which began with a wonderful address by Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans. 
In my workshop sessions, we began by exploring popular understandings of the word 'apocalypse'. The first items to come up on a google search for ‘Apocalypse’ map out these popular understandings of Apocalyptic well:

1.                              Apocalypse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse - CachedSimilar

You +1'd this publicly. Undo

An Apocalypse (Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil" or "revelation ") is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era ...

Four Horsemen - Year 6000 - Apocalypse (disambiguation) - Apocalypse Revelation

►

2.                              Apocalypse (comics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_(comics) - CachedSimilar

You +1'd this publicly. Undo

Apocalypse is a fictional character who is an ancient mutant that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics.

Show more results from wikipedia.org

3.                              Apocalypse 2012  

skeptoid.com/episodes/4093 - CachedSimilar

You +1'd this publicly. Undo

25 Mar 2008 – The real science behind the events predicted in 2012.

4.                              Apocalypse Now (1979) - IMDb    

www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/ - CachedSimilar

You +1'd this publicly. Undo

 Rating: 8.6/10 - 808 reviews

During the on-going Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Green Beret who has set himself up as a God among a local tribe.
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall.

5.                              CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Apocalypse  

www.newadvent.org › Catholic Encyclopedia › A - CachedSimilar

You +1'd this publicly. Undo

The name given to the last book in the Bible, also called the Book of Revelation.

6.                              Apocalypse not now: The Rapture fails to materialise | World news ...  

www.guardian.co.uk/.../apocalypse-not-now-rapture-fails-materialis... - Cached

You +1'd this publicly. Undo

21 May 2011 – Christian doomsday prophet Harold Camping had predicted the world would end at 6pm on Saturday.

It’s a similar picture when you google images of Apocalypse; you get images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, apocalyptic cityscapes, and apocalyptic games and films.

Mervyn Bendle has written, in his paper entitled ‘The Apocalyptic Imagination and Popular Culture’:

“Popular culture is awash with images and narratives of the apocalypse in various forms. These range from war and acts of terrorism involving “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” to religious, science-fiction, horror and fantasy representations of the “End Times,” depicted in a wide range of media including novels, comics, film, television and video games. They include also “biblically based” presentations, notably the Left Behind series of 12 best-selling novels based on a fundamentalist application of millennialist teachings to the contemporary world.”

David Dark writes in ‘Everyday Apocalypse’ that:

“Our ability to recognize apocalyptic is, in our day, often most hindered by the popular, best-selling misunderstandings of biblical witness. Confusing the death-dealing forces that enslave, exploit, and crucify (what our biblical translations sometimes render ‘the world’) for the created world itself, such so-called ‘apocalyptic’ is a negation of this-worldly experience. It tends to view the physical as only fit for burning.” 

“In a kind of Gnostic-style-propaganda, creation is deemed a sort of waiting room, irredeemable and best discarded. Confusing redemption for escape, real injustice – political and personal – goes mostly unengaged, and the actual, everyday world gets left behind. In this view, apocalyptic is simply equated with disaster and destruction …” 

So, where can we look to find a better understanding of apocalyptic? Leon Morris’ Apocalyptic is a standard work on apocalyptic writings. In this brief introduction to apocalyptic, Morris brings together the results of a great deal of work that has been done on the subject by himself and others. In a clear and lucid style, he addresses himself to the characteristics of apocalyptic writings, the world from which they arose, and their relations to the gospel.

N.T. Wright has written helpfully about apocalyptic in ‘The New Testament and the People of God’:

“In a culture where events concerning Israel were believed to concern the creator god as well, language had to be found which could both refer to events within Israel’s history and invest them with the full significance which, within that worldview, they possessed. One such language … was apocalyptic.” 

“the word … denotes a particular form, that of reported vision and (sometimes) its interpretation. Claims are made for these visions; they are divine revelations, disclosing (hence ‘apocalyptic’, from the Greek for ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’) states of affairs not ordinarily made known to humans. Sometimes these visions concern the progress of history, more specifically, the history of Israel; sometimes they focus on otherworldly journeys; sometimes they combine both.” 

“As a literary genre, ‘apocalyptic’ is a way of investing space-time events with their theological significance; it is actually a way of affirming, not denying, the vital importance of the present continuing space-time order, by denying that evil has the last word in it.” 

Slavoj Žižek is a contemporary philosopher who, although an atheist and Marxist, has worked with this understanding of apocalyptic in a recent book ‘Living in the End Times’:

“the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.” 

“… the truth hurts, and we desperately try to avoid it … The first reaction is one of ideological denial: there is no fundamental disorder; the second is exemplified by explosions of anger at the injustices of the new world order; the third involves attempts at bargaining (if we change these here and there, life could go on as before”); when the bargaining fails, depression and withdrawal set in; finally, after passing through this zero-point, the subject no longer perceives the situation as a threat, but as the chance of a new beginning …” 

Bob Dylan is a contemporary artist for whom the apocalypse is key to understanding his work and who, like Slavoj Žižek uses the apocalypse as a frame for viewing contemporary events. “Dylan's vision is essentially apocalyptic; again and again he tells of an evil world which is soon to be both punished and replaced tomorrow, perhaps, when the ship comes in” writes Frank Davey in "Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan: Poetry and the Popular Song".

Dylan's manifesto for his work is 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall'; a song about walking through a world which is surreal and unjust and singing what he sees:

"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..."

This is a song which has been interpreted as dealing with events that were contemporary to the time such as the Cuban missile crisis and, more generally, the threat of a nuclear holocaust. That may well be so, but I think a more straightforward interpretation and one that is closer to what the lyrics actually say is to see it as a statement by Dylan of what he is trying to do in and through his work. In the song he walks through a surreal and unjust world, ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to walk in the shadow of the storm and sing out what he sees:

"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".

What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.

Over the course of his career Dylan has travelled the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world weary blues. On his journey he: sees "seven breezes a-blowin'" all around the cabin door where victims despair ('Ballad of Hollis Brown'); sees lightning flashing "For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse" ('Chimes of Freedom'); surveys 'Desolation Road'; talks truth with a thief as the wind begins to howl ('All Along the Watchtower'); comes in “from the wilderness” to receive shelter from the storm from a woman with “silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair" ('Shelter from the Storm'); feels the Idiot Wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognises himself as an idiot and feels so sorry ('Idiot Wind'); finds a pathway to the stars, can't believe he's survived and is still alive ('Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat'); rides the slow train up around the bend ('Slow Train'); is driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief ('I Believe in You'); hears the ancient footsteps join him on his path ('Every Grain of Sand'); feels the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire ('Caribbean Wind'); betrays his commitment, feels the breath of the storm and goes searching for his first love ('Tight Connection to My Heart'); then at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but:

"The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes.
Everyday your memory grows dimmer.
It don't haunt me, like it did before.
I been walking through the middle of nowhere
Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door." ('Tryin' To Get To Heaven')."

Apocalyptic change in Dylan's work can be understood as generational confict, Cold War conflicts, nuclear holocaust, Civil Rights struggles, the imminent return of Christ, and more. The generic message throughout is that apocalyptic change is coming and we need to think where we stand in relation to it. That message is as relevant today in terms of economic meltdown, climate change or peak oil, as to the Second Coming, whether imminent or not.

David Dark, drawing on the writings of N. T. Wright, argues in ‘Everyday Apocalypse’ that:

"We apparently have the word "apocalypse" all wrong. In its root meaning, it's not about destruction or fortune-telling; it's about revealing. It's what James Joyce calls an epiphany - the moment you realize that all your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obsessive vanity. It wasn't about her at all. It was all about you. The real world, within which you've lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It's starting to come to you. You aren't who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypse has just occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer."

“Joyce … said that he intended Dubliners "to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city “... Joyce therefore conceived this work as a sequence of fifteen epiphanies “… which were written to let Irish people take “one good look at themselves in his nicely polished looking-glass.”

Similarly, Walker Percy wrote about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; an everyday apocalypse in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace.

Thinking along similar lines Flannery O’Connor wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ.

In the American South, there is a tradition of Appalachian country death songs; gothic backwoods ballads of mortality and disaster. The Violent Femmes took that tradition and used it in Country Death Song to confront their audience with an epiphany of the reality, ugliness and consequences of sin.

This song leads us to a place of realization about the abhorrence and reality of sin and its consequences. Possibly, even to a place of acknowledging that the story could be about us. We all have that potential in us; for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.

Flannery O’Conner wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In that situation she said, you have to make your vision apparent by shock and that is what the Violent Femmes did.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Violent Femmes - Country Death Song.