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Article about the theological aspects of Bruce Coc
Here it is folks, the article from Grail. A few
introductory remarks. Grail's address and subscription
info are:
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)
In place of this false dream, Cockburn has an
alternative dream. As we have already seen in "Santiago
Dawn," this is a dream of "darkness dead and gone." It
is a dream of "all the people ... marching home." But
unlike the "sweet fantasia of the safe home" which
constitutes the naive orientation of modernity, this
dream of marching home is a vision of reorientation; a
post-holocaust dream. This is, if you will, a
postmodern vision with a liberated second naivete that
actually believes that homecoming is a genuine
possibility in a world characterized by literal and
symbolic homelessness.
But isn't the dream of such a homecoming a pipe
dream? Cockburn has heard this question and insists on
hope in the face of paralysis and numbness:
don't I hear them talking
don't I know what they say
i'm a fool for thinking
things could be better than they
were today
there must be more ... more ...
more growth more truth
more chains more loose
not more pain not more walls
not more living human voodoo dolls.
("More Not More," Humans, 1980)
But what is it that has given rise to such a hope,
or at least to the yearning that things be otherwise?
In "Where the Death Squad Lives," a song written in
1985, Cockburn indicates that hope arises in
desperation, in boundary situations of suffering and
evil.
this world can be better than it is today
you can say I'm a dreamer but that's okay
without the could-be and the might-have-been
all you've got left is your fragile skin
and that ain't worth much down
where the death squad lives.
(Big Circumstance, 1988)
From the history of apocalyptic thinking we know
that when a situation is so desperate and intolerable
that life becomes meaningless ("all you've got left is
your fragile skin"), then the context is ripe for the
rise of eschatological hope. Cockburn's hope, however,
is rooted not only in a sense of historico-cultural
dislocation and desperation, but also in a deep ethical
yearning. Indeed, hope and normativity are integrally
connected. Without a hope for that which could be and
should be, there are simply no resources for ethical
action in the face of the death squads.
It is a profound hope for that which could-be and
should-be that informs Cockburn's analysis of our
postmodern malaise in "Broken Wheel" (Inner City Front,
1981), one of his finest songs. In earlier songs from
the 1970s that gave beautiful expression to the
orientation of a Christian worldview (such as
"Starwheel" and " Lord Of the Starfields," from Joy
Will Find a Way, 1975 and In the Falling Dark, 1976,
respectively), Cockburn often referred to the stars as
a silent witness to God's sovereignty and love. In
"Broken Wheel" he returns to these images. He turns his
gaze again to the starwheel, to "the rim of the
galaxy"--specifically to the left spiral arm of the
Milky Way Galaxy. He turns his attention to planet
earth in a cosmic, galactic context. And what does he
see?
Way out on the rim of the galaxy
The gifts of the Lord lie torn
Into whose charge the gifts were given
Have made it a curse for so many to be born
This is my trouble -
These were my fathers
So how am I supposed to feel?
Way out on the rim of the broken wheel.
Cockburn's confession in an earlier song that it is
love that turns the starwheel is now matched by the
observation that this starwheel suffers from a deadly
flaw. "See how the Starwheel turns"--it bumps along on
a broken rim! There is a dialectical interplay of
orientation and disorientation in these lines.
Precisely because the artist maintains an orientation
in which life in God's creation is fundamentally
gifted, the tearing or rending of those gifts is an
occasion for disquieting disorientation.
Further, since the gifts of creation have been
entrusted to the stewardly care of human beings,
created in the image of God, the tearing of those gifts
is fundamentally a human responsibility. Cockburn is
painfully aware of this: "Into whose charge the gifts
were given / Have made it a curse for so many to be
born." And such a cursed and broken reality is one in
which the artist is totally implicated: "This is my
trouble / These were my fathers." Consequently, as
Cockburn says later in the song, "No adult of sound
mind / Can be an innocent bystander." "You and me--*we*
are the break in the broken wheel." It is human
brokenness that occasions cosmic brokenness--indeed,
the very wheel of the galaxy, the starwheel. For
Cockburn this brokenness is not merely a theological
dogma concerning human fallibility and culpability. It
is a deeply personal confession of complicity. "So how
am I supposed to feel?" How *do* we feel when we
realize not only our complicity in brokenness, but also
our willful participation in and propagation of evil?
How are we to feel when we realize that our
mismanagement of the gifts of creation, our failed
stewardship, has made it no less than "a curse for so
many to be born"?
"Broken Wheel" explicitly rejects any spirituality
of escape. It rejects any separation between the world
of faith and the cosmos. There can be no bystanders,
innocent or otherwise. Indeed, in this song there is an
intensification of engagement with the world. But to
engage this world one must engage its pain. It is only
by embracing the brokenness of creation that we can
begin to affirm the possibility of change. Walter
Brueggemann sums it up well in his book on the exilic
prophet, Hopeful Imagination, when he says, "Only grief
permits newness." Those who do not want the new are
afraid of grief; they deny it to themselves and
suppress it in others. Because grief, mourning, and
tears are not expressions of powerless acquiescence.
Rather, grief, mourning and tears function as a radical
critique of the present order by bringing what is wrong
into conscious awareness. Such mourning refuses to
cover up, and insists that we confront the brokenness,
oppression, failed expectations, and empty promises of
the present.
If grief permits the newness of hope, then "Broken
Wheel" gives voice to a profound hope:
Water of life is going to flow again
Changed from the blood of heroes and knaves
The word mercy's going to have a new meaning
When we are judged by the children of our slaves
No adult of sound mind
Can be an innocent bystander
Trial comes before truth's revealed
Out here on the rim of the broken wheel.
The embrace of pain is the door to hope. In a world
characterized by "pain and fire and steel," a world
that is a broken wheel, Cockburn is bold enough to
proclaim in the second verse that the "water of life is
going to flow again." "Water of life" alludes to a
prominant biblical metaphor for God's presence.
Significantly, that metaphor is often employed in the
Bible during times of deep spiritual thirst and
desolation. It is used by Second Isaiah during the time
of the Babylonian exile (Isaiah 43:19-20; 44:3; 55:1).
Jesus refers to himself as living water John 4:1-15).
And the Book of Revelation describes drinking from the
waters of life to be one of the benefits of the
end-time (Rev. 21:6; 22:1, 17).
This water, however, is not acquired without a
cost. This is a living water that will flow again, but
it will be flowing from blood that has already been
shed, the blood of heroes and knaves. But who are they?
The presence of the metaphor of "water of life" in the
Book of Revelation suggests that we might look there to
find an answer to this question. In Revelation, before
we come to the waters of life in the last two chapters,
we have to pass through an awful lot of blood on the
way. The blood of the martyrs and also the blood of the
Lamb, the sacrificial blood of Jesus (Rev. 17:6; 7:14;
12:11). Are these the heroes and knaves? Most likely,
given Cockburn's typical iconography. After all, what
is a knave but another name for a joker, a fool? And
Cockburn has employed the image of joker, fool, and
Harlequin to refer to the Christ in such songs as
"Feast of Fools" (Further Adventures of, 1978) and
"Hills of Morning" (Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws,
1979).
In "Broken Wheel" Cockburn shows a profound grasp
of the biblical insight that waters of life flow from
the pierced side of the Christ. There can indeed be
hope in this broken-wheeled world, but it is a hope
that must walk the path that goes through Golgotha. It
is the walk of the cross.
But just as the cross precedes resurrection, so
Cockburn anticipates the radical prophetic reversals we
would expect of the messianic age. There will be waters
of life, and there will be mercy. But that water will
flow from blood and that mercy will "have a new
meaning." Cockburn's hope here is set in the
eschatological context of judgement. In a radical
reversal, we are going to be "judged by the children of
our slaves." The very children for whom our brokenness
has made it a curse to be born, now return, scathed by
that curse, but alive nonetheless, to judge us. As
Jesus said, "So the last will be first, and the first
will be last" (Matthew 20:16). It is only in a context
of prophetic reversals that there can be any hope for a
broken-wheeled world. Anything less would be cheap and
escapist.
The coda of the song brings us to new depths of
spiritual insight. In the first half of the coda
Cockburn sings:
You and me--we are the break in
the broken wheel
Bleeding wound that will not heal.
This has clear parallels with, if not dependence upon,
the words of Jeremiah. Overwhelmed with grief, Jeremiah
proclaimed to Israel just before the Babylonian
captivity:
Your wound is incurable
your injury beyond healing.
There is no one to plead your cause,
no remedy for your sore,
no healing for you.
Jeremiah 30:12-13)
In another place the prophet, standing in solidarity
with the brokenness of his people, says:
Since my people are crushed, I am crushed;
I mourn and horror grips me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then is there no healing
for the wound of my people?
Jeremiah 8: 21-22)
Like Jeremiah, Cockburn finds the human condition
to be critical. In such a context a physician is
desperately needed. Here, in the midst of his deeply
painful identification with the brokenness of the
world, Cockburn addresses Christ as the Great Physician
and ultimate source of healing. In the depths of his
disorientation he thus returns to his most fundamental
orientation in order to find restorative reorientation.
It should be noted, however, that Cockburn is well
aware that such a reorientation is not to be found
simply in a more entrenched restatement of the previous
orientation. In "Justice" (which immediately precedes
"Broken Wheel" on Inner City Front) he places himself
in opposition to any and all kinds of absolutist
sloganeering, whether it be of religion (even "the name
of Jesus"), revolution, or the state. Such slogans will
not awaken us from our tragedy because they result not
in the flowing of waters of life, but in more blood.
The only light that Cockburn can discern in this kind
of absolutism is the light shed by flames of violence.
But although Cockburn opposes this absolutism, he
doesn't self-righteously exempt himself from critique:
"We all have to live with what we've been." We cannot
escape the brokenness of our past. Indeed, we have to
begin dealing with our own brokenness.
Got to search the silence of the soul's wild places
For a voice that can cross the spaces
These definitions we love create--
These names for heaven, hero, tribe, and state.
The artist tells us that we need a revelatory voice
that can traverse the distant spaces we have created
between each other by means of our definitions. But
that revelation cannot come to us from outside our
present situation. That revelation needs to be found
precisely within "the silence of the soul's wild
places." Any other voice would be a counsel of escape.
But in "Broken Wheel" Cockburn explicitly rejects
this option. In the second half of the coda he sings:
Lord, spit on our eyes so we can see
How to wake up from this tragedy.
Cockburn alludes here to the healing story from the
gospels in which Jesus made a paste of mud with his own
spittle and applied it to the eyes of a blind man. Upon
washing off the paste, the man could see (John 9:1-12;
cf. Mark 8:22-25). It is for such renewed sight that
Cockburn prays.
But he then goes on in the next line to mix the
metaphors of blindness and sleep. He wants God to give
us back our sight so that we can "wake up from this
tragedy." Our problem isn't just that we are the break
in the broken wheel. It is compounded by the fact that
we are asleep to this tragedy. We have numbed ourselves
to sleep. Our bleeding wound will not heal because we
are unaware of it in our anesthetized slumber. So
Cockburn asks that we regain our sight in order to be
awakened to our predicament.
This is a profound prayer to be uttered by an
insomniac. Many of Cockburn's songs throughout the '80s
are situated at night. It is hard to sleep when you are
deeply troubled. But the artist doesn't ask for the
peace of a good night's sleep. Rather, he wants to be
awakened. In this world, sleep is inappropriate. At a
time of crisis we need to keep awake.
To be awake "way out on the rim of the broken
wheel" is to feel the pain of that brokenness. So the
coda doesn't ask for a healing that will necessarily
alleviate the pain. It asks for a healing that is
deeper--a healing that will be awake to the pain and
conscious of the brokenness. The song then concludes by
structurally manifesting brokenness. The third verse,
with the exception of the second-to-last line, ("in a
world of pain and fire and steel"), consists of
disjointed quotations from the rest of the song. This
is, indeed, a broken verse for a broken wheel!
A broken-wheeled world is an appropriate
description of the postmodern malaise. This song is
Cockburn's reflection on our cultural reality from the
perspective of the margins, indeed, nothing less than
the very margins of the galaxy. Yet it is clear that
what goes on at the rim of the galaxy profoundly
affects the whole.
"Postmodern", however, is a very slippery term.
The way we have used the word in this paper has been to
describe an overall cultural mood. Another way to say
this would be that by "postmodernity" we are referring
to a cultural *ethos*, indeed, a *zeitgeist*. It is
characterized first of all by a feeling of cultural
exhaustion. Postmodernity refers to the crisis of the
modern worldview, to a process of cultural
dissemination and deconstruction that finds itself
disillusioned with modernity and its heroic
pretensions.
Furthermore, recognizing that the world in which
we live is a cultural construct, postmodernity is a
*zeitgeist* stripped of any sense of being at home in
this world. Our constructs are too precarious (and too
bent on self-destruction) to provide us with much sense
of the security of home. Finally, admitting that
worldviews are rooted in human decisions, not in the
structure of an objectively realist world,
postmodernity finds itself lost in undecidability. As a
worldview crisis which *de-doxifes* that which
modernity has naturalized, postmodernity finds itself
experiencing a profound and disturbing sense of anomy
in which no totalization of truth and no grand
narrative can serve to ground and guide any normative
stance.
In this paper we have attempted to situate Bruce
Cockburn's artistry in the context of this kind of
cultural dissolution. So, for example, Cockburn gives
voice to what has become the typical provisionality of
postmodern affirmation, when he sings:
weaver's fingers flying on the loom
patterns shift too fast to be discerned
all these years of thinking
ended up like this
in front of all this beauty
understanding nothing.
( "Understanding Nothing", Big Circumstance, 1988)
In another song on the same album he admits, in good
postmodern style:
The gift
keeps moving
never know
where it's going to land.
You must stand
back and let it
keep on changing hands.
("The Gift")
And in his most recent album, Nothing But a Burning
Light, Cockburn sings:
There's roads and there's roads
And they call, can't you hear it?
Roads of the earth
And roads of the spirit
The best roads of all
Are the ones that aren't certain
One of those is where you'll find me
When they drop the big curtain.
("Child of the Wind," Nothing But a Burning Light,
1991)
Yet the very affirmation that in this beautiful world
the weaver's fingers move too fast, that this world is
received as a gift--not a commodity to be owned and
exploited or as a merely human construct--and that even
the uncertain roads *call* us, and we can hear them and
respond, is all indicative of a stance that goes
*beyond* postmodernity.
Cockburn's work goes beyond postmodern exhaustion,
postmodern homelessness, and postmodern anomy. Cockburn
goes beyond exhaustion, with its cynicism and parody,
to an experience of the world as "some kind of
never-ending Easter passion" in which there is the
expectation of resurrection because "around every evil
there gathers love" ("Where the Death Squad Lives," Big
Circumstance, 1988). Cockburn's artistic vision is
faithful to the prophetic transformation of numbness by
passion, the sort of passion that permits hope. He goes
beyond homelessness to a confession that homecoming is
a genuine possibility because this world, as battered
and abused as it is, is nonetheless God's creation.
And Cockburn goes beyond paralyzed postmodern
anomy by insisting on a radical and liberating
normativity. This is not, however, a going beyond that
is untouched by the postmodern malaise:
Sometimes i feel like there's a padlock on my soul
if you open my heart you'd find a big black hole
but when the feeling comes through, it
comes through strong--
if you think there's no difference between right and
wrong
just go down where the death
squad lives.
Bruce Cockburn knows postmodern despair. But in the
face of the Other, and in the face of radical evil that
admits no postmodern deconstruction, he has a feeling--
granted it is no absolute moral order, but just a
feeling--that comes on so strong that he cannot deny
it. This is a feeling of profound ethical normativity.
Cockburn can deconstruct the lies of modernity
with the best of them. Yet he goes beyond
deconstruction. And this "beyond" is rooted, most
fundamentally, in a radical eschatological hope. Here
Cockburn is blissfully unpostmodern. Such a hope
requires a decision in the face of undecidability, a
place to stand in a world that seems to be composed of
cultural quicksand. And that decision and that standing
seem to us to be inextricably connected to embracing a
grand narrative and to being embraced by that
narrative. Simply stated, without a metanarrative,
without an overarching vision of the story of the
world, hope is literally impossible.
"Who tells the world's story?" Douglas Hall asked.
If we listen to Cockburn's telling, it is clear that
his metanarrative and his hope are not naive,
blissfully unaware of the fires of cultural decline and
personal failure and brokenness. Rather, this is an
eschatological hope for a broken-wheeled world. It is a
hope, like all biblical hope, born in suffering and
tested by fire. It is the hope of a second naivete.
This is a hope that can passionately ask:
so how come history takes such a long, long time
when you're waiting for a miracle?
("Waiting for a Miracle," Waiting for a Miracle, 1987)
Cockburn can ask the question honestly and passionately
precisely because he has a genuine hope in a God who,
beyond modernity and postmodernity, brings life out of
death. Such honest questioning and radical hope are
indispensable if there is to be Christian faith in a
postmodern world.
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