Music

Sunshine, sunshine
Sunshine, sunshine

Oh, oh
You know your name so punch it in
Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak
Shush now
Oh, oh
Then don’t move or say a thing

The opening moments of Unknown Caller by U2 brings to mind the closing moments of THX38 by George Lucas. In the closing moments of the film, the Robert Duvall characters is running through the outlaying section of the enclosed society where he has been born and bred.

He outruns robotic police and climbs of long stairway to emerge at the dawning of a new day. The first new day he has ever witnessed. This scene brings to mind Plato’s Cave as a person emerges from the Cave to behold real light for the first time.

Unknown Caller opens with a sunrise.

In the opening moments of the song the soft hum of an alarm clock drones against a a canvas of birds chirping, a simple yet layered melody, and eventually and a chorus singing, “Sunshine.”

A new day is dawning.

The vocals interplay between the lone voice of Bono singing verses about an awakening with the voices of a chorus (of angels?) calling through the interface of a computer to shout out, rise up, escape yourself (and escape the crashed program), reboot the computer, to shout for joy, and to enter your password and name. Again and again the chorus tells him (us) to hear me, cease to speak and don’t move and don’t say a thing.

In this “hymn for the future,” I hear rhythms of the ancient psalmist crying out through modern technology. Awake. Wait. Be quiet. Listen.

The still small voice of the “unknown caller” is speaking. I can’t help but think of the anonymous mystical work, “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Where the Spirit of God calls the pilgrim beyond the edge of knowing into the way of unknowing, the apophatic path of pure love, pure light, pure life.

In a world that is bombarded day in and day out with endless bits of data, the “Unknown Caller” could very well be calling us beyond the comfort of our shallow pools of endless knowledge an into the deep wells of unknowing.

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While my wife delivers a late night training session, I sit here in the hospital lobby listening to Bob Dylan’s recent release Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol 8. After listening to most of the album, I get stuck on the song Series of Dreams.

I can’t move on but listen over and over and over. When songs like this impact me, I am always asking myself, “Why?” Not sure I can explain, but here are thoughts echoing through my head. The rhythm is relentless forcefully driving the melody forward. The lyrics and the melody are repetitive, interacting with the dramatic tension of the drums to arrest my attention–much like some of the surf songs in the mid-60s. With minor variations in the melody at the end, Dylan brings a limited resolve to the tension, but it is incomplete.

For me, this tension highlights the spoken/sung lyrics that paint a series of pictures about unresolved tension within dreams. In these dreams, “time and tempo fly” as the dreamer is left running, climbing, and witnessing troubled scenes.

“And there’s no exit in any direction, ‘cept the one you can’t see with you eyes.”

In the middle of the song, Dylan offers this one line of transcendent hope. And I am reminded that in the middle of this life of struggle and doubt and fear and pain, hope may be the one real thing penetrating the illusions that so often pervade my thoughts. Oddly enough, as I’ve been listening to this tune over and over, I’ve also been reading St. Paul’s discussion of Abraham’s hope beyond hope.

The future was hopeless. Yet Abraham persisted in trusting the promise of God’s goodness. In this hope that endures the dark nightmares of failure, the future shines out with the surprise of love.

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While I’m working on business KPIs and online marketing, I listen to the Grateful Dead belt out Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.”

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

I feel a bit foolish as tears fill my eyes and a deep ache fills my heart because something, someone “calls for me.”I don’t always understand what makes me cry so easily. One minute I in the midst of promotions and products and schedules, and the next moment, I’ve slipped over into a thin place.

This joyful pain seems out of place in the cold light of fluorescent rows, staring down on endless cubicles of people pounding out metrics on laptop machines. And yet, the voice still calls.

Beneath our engines of enterprise and above our monuments of marketing, the still small voice is wooing, drawing and stirring us to love. Maybe the match I strike does not burn up this material world around me. Maybe instead I leave the cold, relation-less sterility of business behind, and remember once again that I am a lover and called to love and embody love in the midst of every place–whether lush green valley or a cynderblock room of cubicles.

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Don’t throw out your discarded Cell Phones and MP3 players. EMusic is offering cash, paypal and even charitable donation options. That charitable idea is great, and I’m glad they’re offering it!

Anybody who offers Larry Norman downloads is already rocking in my book!

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Lucinda captures a certain grief in the fading of old relationships with her song “Out of Touch.”

Once in awhile we might pass on the street
We nod we smile and we shuffle our feet
Making small talk standing face to face
Hands in our pockets cause we feel so out of place

This simple song reveals the uncomfortable feelings of relationships that have lost the reciprocity of life. No more shared stories, no more share love, no more shared pain. There is a fading past but no hope of a shared future. Lucinda describes minor details of a meeting between two people who once knew each other to magnify the sense of loss.

Our paths may cross again in some crowded bar
We feel a little lost cause we’ve drifted away so far
Hoping to find the right words to say
We joke a little and then go on our way

The uncomfortable laughter covers our loss. Without the living memories of shared life there simply isn’t much to say. And so,

We speak in past tense and talk about the weather
Half broken sentences we try to piece together

Even the pain of physical death and suicide becomes simply information submerged beneath this cry out into the emptiness of lost love.

I ask about an old friend that we both used to know
You said you heard he took his life about five years ago

As she utters the final lines, I feel the ache of loss inside. I am made aware of friends that I once dreamed beside who have become simply another person in another car going to another place.

We may pass each other on the interstate
We honk and cross over to the other lane
Everybody’s going somewhere everybody’s inside
Hundreds of cars hundreds of private lives
We are so out of touch yeah

And as I grieve the lost relationships from yesterday, I ache for restoration and world where love never fades.

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If you want to listen to the heart and soul of country music, give a listen to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams. True to her namesake, Hank Williams, Lucinda captures the pure essence of country music: human grief and joy reaching out for some sense of transcendence through ballads rooted in people and places.

Forget the radio and take a listen to Lucinda.

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Bob Marley sings:

Wont you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.

If you listen to Marley, Dizzy Gilespie, Stevie Wonder or a host of other musicians, you’ll get the sense that song is at the heart of everything. They may not be so far off. Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien envision the Creator calling all things into being through a song. The Bible reveals this as a Creation song (six days of creating, one day of rest). The song can be broken down six separate stanzas with a Sabbath bridge, or two sets of three (three days forming, three days filling, one day of rest/celebration).

But we live out of sync with this creation song. Instead of forming, filling and celebrating, we tear, break apart and criticize. Our choices and actions reveal chaotic dissonance that hurts ourselves, the people around us and the creation. Celebration turns into lamentation.

In the Silmarillion , Tolkien reveals this dissonant strain that threatens to unravel the stunning harmony of the creation song. Enter Bob Marley and the redemption song. The Bible reveals YHWH singing a new song after Adam’s calamity in the garden: the redemption song. I’m still trying to think through the structure of the song, but at a high level the song is about death, burial, and resurrection. YHWH sings an incarnational song where He enters into the suffering that echoes through humanity’s dissonant strains.

Bringing the dissonant strains of suffering into Himself, He heals the breach and ushers in new creation. Both the creation song and redemption song reverberate through all creation. particularly in the human heart. The redemption song tunes the whole human person to the glory of the creation song.* But the redemption song doesn’t stop. Both songs move from counterpoint to resolution, revealing a stunning polyphony.

So keep singing Bob and Dizzy and Coltrane. By YHWH’s grace, the Holy Spirit will “stir us up” and reveal the glory and wonder of these two loving songs in us, in our relationships, and in all creation.

*I remember some of the Christians Celt speaking of spiritual formation as the tuning the five-stringed human instrument (taste, touch, sight, hearing, smell) to the song of God’s glory.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH5pFQ9PEQU&rel=1]I first stumbled across Larry Norman’s “In Another Land” LP in the early 1980s, and I played it over and over and over. Those songs made an indelible imprint upon me and the way I think. I rapidly snatched up all the Larry Norman music I could find. During the last month, I’ve been listening to his music over and over again.

Today in the age of mp3s, there is so much music abounding everywhere, I rarely have the same experience with music becoming deeply ingrained in my memories like they did back then.

I am grateful to Larry and the music he produced and pray blessings upon him and his family.

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Tags: larrynorman, Christian Rock,

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