The Free Thinker

Ireland, in Verse

G.K. Chesteron, on the Irish:

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.

I think what he had in mind by this are the great ancient Irish myths, like that of Cuchulain.  Certainly there are plenty of sad Irish songs.  Some don't sound sad but have sad words, like "The Minstrel Boy":

The minstrel boy to the war is gone,

In the ranks of death you'll find him;

His father's sword he hath girded on,

And his wild harp slung behind him;

"Land of Song!" cried the warrior bard,

"Tho' all the world betrays thee,

One sword, at least, thy right shall guard,

One faithful harp shall praise thee!"

The Minstrel fell! But the foeman's chain

Could not bring that proud soul under;

The harp he lov'd ne'er spoke again,

For he tore its chords asunder;

And said "No chains shall sully thee,

Thou soul of love and brav'ry!

Thy songs were made for the pure and free

They shall never sound in slavery!"

One of my favorites is one I've never understood, "Raglan Road":

Something in the Night  by Bruce Springsteen  (good song)

I'm riding down Kingsley,
figuring I'll get a drink
Turn the radio up loud,
so I don't have to think,
I take her to the floor,
looking for a moment when the world seems right,
And I tear into the guts,
of something in the night.

You're born with nothing,
and better off that way,
Soon as you've got something they send
someone to try and take it away,
You can ride this road 'till dawn,
without another human being in sight,
Just kids wasted on
something in the night.

Nothing is forgotten or forgiven,
when it's your last time around,
I got stuff running 'round my head
That I just can't live down.

When we found the things we loved,
They were crushed and dying in the dirt.
We tried to pick up the pieces,
And get away without getting hurt,
But they caught us at the state line,
And burned our cars in one last fight,
And left us running burned and blind,
Chasing something in the night.

Sometimes Springsteen has a gift for expressing the vanity of this world...

Raglan Road

Just wrote up one of my favorite Irish tunes, "Raglan Road."  It's funny how I've been singing this song for years and yet I've never really understood the words.  It's funny how words can appeal to the imagination, to the heart, so much, even when one can't quite figure out what they mean.

Download Raglan Road

Over a year ago, I wrote this Christmas song.  Now, thanks to the music software I got for Christmas, here it is in PDF format arranged for SATB.  No recordings yet!

Download The Word of God Came Down To Earth

Just discovered this Bruce Springsteen song:

Bobby Jean

Well I came by your house the other day
Your mother said you went away
She said there was nothing that I could have done,
There was nothing nobody could say
Now me and you we've known each other ever since we were sixteen
I wish I would've known
I wish I could-a called you just to say goodbye Bobby Jean

Now you hung with me when all the others turned away,
Turned up their nose
We liked the same music, we liked the same bands,
We liked the same clothes
Yeah, we told each other that we were the wildest,
The wildest things we'd ever seen
Damn I wish you would've told me,
I wish I could've talked to you just to say goodbye Bobby Jean

Well maybe you'll be out there on that road somewhere,
Some bus or train, trav'lin' along
In some motel room there'll be a radio playin'
And you'll hear me sing this song
Well, if you do, you'll know I'm thinkin' of you
And all the miles in between
And I'm just callin' one last time not to change your mind
But just to say I miss you baby, good luck, goodbye Bobby Jean

It's an upbeat song musically.  But if you've been through what he's talking about, you'll feel a pang in the heart.  Sometimes you look back on life and it seems like it's just a string of partings.  And of realizing later all the things you admired about the people that, what with things to do and all that, you'll probably never see again.

Bruce Springsteen on Jesus

Every now and then a song rises to the top of my personal charts.  The latest is "Jesus Was an Only Son," by Bruce Springsteen:

Jesus was an only son
As he walked on Calvary's hill
At his side his mother Mary
In the path where his blood spilled

Jesus was an only son
In the hills of Nazareth
Reading the psalms of David
At his mother's feet

A mother prayed, 'Sleep tight my child sleep well
For I'll be at your side.
No shadow, no darkness, no tolling bell
Shall pierce your dreams tonight.'

In the garden of Gethsemane
He prayed for the life he'd never live.
He beseeched his Heavenly Father to remove
The cup of death from his lips.

Now there's a loss that can never be replaced,
A destination that can never be reached,
A light you'll never find in another's face,
A sea whose distance cannot be breached.

Jesus kissed his mother's hands
And said, 'Mother, still your tears
Remember, the soul of the universe
Willed a world and it appeared.'

I think that's the best portrayal of Jesus's humanity I've ever read.  That's partly because Jesus's divinity is not mentioned.  It reminds me of Bulgakov's potrayal of "Yeshua" in his novel The Master and Margarita.  Bulgakov's "Yeshua" is heart-breaking good, but his goodness is a naivete which is helpless against Pilate.  There is no resurrection.  Christians believe in Jesus's humanity, as well as his divinity-- that's the whole point-- but I wonder whether they are permanently unable to express it as poignantly as the "good agnostic" (agnostic about Christianity, not necessary about God) for whom Jesus's humanity is all that there is.  The apostles, after all, were like the "good agnostics" in the time of Jesus's Ministry: like Springsteen or Bulgakov, they recognized his goodness, but not his divinity.

Bulgakov's "Yeshua" is a fictional character, and Christians would have some reason to take offense at the liberties Bulgakov takes with the historical record.  But there is nothing in Springsteen's song, as far as I can tell, that a Christian should object to.  The second and third verses, about Jesus's childhood in the hills of Nazareth-- it is the portrayal of Jesus's childhood that makes him so human-- are not in the Gospels, which all either begin with Jesus's Ministry (Mark and John) or jump from the Christmas story to Jesus's Ministry (Matthew and Luke).  In the Gospel of Luke, there is a single episode in between, about Jesus teaching in the Temple when he was twelve.  That's all the Bible says about Jesus's childhood.  Yet Jesus must have had a childhood, and the two scenes Springsteen represents-- Jesus reading the psalms of David at his mother's feet, and Mary singing him a lullaby-- are as orthodox as you could ask for.  We know that Jesus must have read the psalms of David a lot because he quoted from them so much in his teachings.  This is more obvious from the "good agnostic" point of view than from the Christian point of view: I think Christians can have a vague notion that since Jesus was God, he was omniscient and wouldn't have needed to study.  Or maybe Jesus read the psalms for devotional reasons; we know that he prayed often during his Ministry.  And the other verse.  Did Jesus need to be comforted by his mother, like any common child, to go to sleep?  Well, yes.  That's the incarnation for you.  Yet it's amazing to imagine it.  Anyway, given how little the Bible says about Jesus's childhood, it's remarkable that Springsteen was able to write two verses about it without making anything up.

Reversing the Gospel pattern, Springsteen details Jesus's childhood and then jumps over Jesus's Ministry, straight to Gethsemane, where he mentions another astounding fact which Christian believers in Jesus's divinity would find hard to accept if it weren't there in the Gospels (though it occurs to me now: Jesus was alone, so how did the evangelists know about it?): that Jesus didn't want to go through with it!  He must have known, surely-- conceived it somehow, at least, even in his human state-- that his death was the only hope of salvation for the world.  How could he ask the Father to "take this cup from me" (even if he added "not my will, but yours be done")?  What could be more heart-breaking?  The  threads of tragedy that bind this world together broke the heart even of God.

The fifth verse is pure Bruce Springsteen, with his ethos of infinite sadness.  And if the song ended there it would quite definitely not be a Christian song (as The Master and Margarita is not a Christian novel).  But then there is the sixth verse, where Jesus, who resembles for the first time in the song the Jesus of authority-- he is calmly comforting his mother, not begging for reprieve, even though he is about to die-- reminds Mary: 'Remember the soul of the universe / Willed a world and it appeared.'  What can I add?  Rarely have twelve words evoked such a sense of wonder in me as these.  Creation!  Yet how is it relevant?  Somehow, it is intimated, the power of God ("the soul of the universe") can heal even this unspeakable grief, the mother watching her son go to die-- but nothing is said of how, no promise is explicitly made.

There is a sense, I think, in which this song is wiser than the ancient Church Councils: wiser, because it says less, because it uses the details of the Bible to evoke the humanity of Jesus, because it juxtaposes heart-breaking sadness on impossible hope, because it opens the mind to the great mystery without trying to formulate it.  The ancient Churchmen knew they could never put into words "the mystery of faith," that the best they could hope to do was to put a hedge against error.  Praise God for their work, and I am in their debt for guidance.  I do believe they got it right.  They were trying to express, as this song does in its way, the mystery of the incarnation, and they came up with dogmas like:

• the Son of God is true God, born of God the Father before all ages, and is eternal, as is God the Father; He was begotten, and not made, and is of one essence with God the Father. (First Ecumenical Council, Nice, 325 AD)
• the equality and the single essence of God the Holy Spirit with God the Father and God the Son. (Second Ecumenical Council, Constantinople, 381 AD)
• united in Jesus Christ at the time of the incarnation were two natures, divine and human, and that one should confess Jesus Christ as true God and true Man, and the Holy Virgin as the God-bearer (Theotokos).  (Third Ecumenical Council, 431 AD)
• as God Jesus Christ is eternally born from God. As man, He was born of the Holy Virgin and in every way is like us, except in sin. (Fourth Ecumenical Council, 451 AD)
• in Jesus there are two wills, Divine and human, and in these two natures there are two wills, but... the human will in Christ is not against, but rather is submissive to His Divine will. (Sixth Ecumenical Council, Constantinople, 680 AD)

(All quotes from The Law of God, Archpriests Seraphim Slobodskoy, 1996.)  But even if the Councils were right, was it worth it?  Each council was a source of schism, with some who had been at peace with the Church becoming heretics.  Had they stayed in the fold of the Church they would have been a source of confusion, but sometimes, perhaps, sometimes, of insight too-- as Bruce Springsteen and other good agnostics sometimes have been.  Would it be better if the Church had more room for them?

I owe this song a person debt: it opened my eyes to the cult of the Virgin Mary, which I had never quite understood.  There aren't many stories about Mary in the Bible.  She mostly does only one thing, though of course that one thing-- bringing Jesus into the world-- is very important.  She deserves our respect, to be sure, but why is she honored above the Apostles, who spread the Gospel and died as martyrs, or above any of the prophets and saints?  What was the sense of making intercessory prayers to the Virgin Mary?  Imagine her trying to cope with all those millions of prayers!  It's one thing for God, an omnipotent Being, to hear so many prayers, but poor Mary-- just a simple Jewish girl, with so much responsibility!

But think of Mary singing a lullaby to Jesus-- to God-- in the night, to comfort his childish fears and help him sleep.  Mother of God.  Moses saw God in fire and cloud on Mount Sinai, and in the Burning Bush, and only a few times.  Mary-- she spent thirty years of her life with him, with him every day, not fully understanding who he was, to be sure-- we learn that from Luke-- yet she was able to bear the divine presence.

If I could write one song like this my life would not be wasted.

A Christmas Song

I just wrote a Christmas song. I've wanted to do that for a long time but I haven't been able to. No title to this one yet.

(Christmas Song)
The Word of God came down to Earth
Upon a starry winter's night,
To teach to men of their true worth
And call them back to Heaven's light.
For generations, men had trod
'Neath Adam's curse, doomed to return to clay,
A chasm cut 'tween man and God
And all good things on Earth must pass away.

A conquered people were the Jews,
Beneath the cruel Roman yoke,
Yet still they held to ancient truths
And prophecies still gave them hope.
A king would come to set them free,
The long-foretold Son of Man,
And unto them restored would be
Their former glory and their Promised Land.

He made the loaves and fish increase,
He healed the sick and calmed the storm.
He taught them, "Love your enemies,
And pray for them who do you harm."
And he proclaimed a mighty mystery
To mortal men and ghosts in Sheol:
There is a strait and narrow Way
Where God will welcome back the sinner's soul.

It's incomplete in a way but the melody would get old if I kept going  so I think I'll stop there.  One irony is left unresolved: the prevailing interpretation of the prophecy is mentioned, but not that that was (as it turned out) a misinterpretation.  Christians, perhaps, will recognize the double entendre in the lines: "And unto them restored would be / Their former glory and their Promised Land."  The Jews generally dreamed of the restoration of the kingdom of David, said to be (with some exaggeration) "from the Nile to the Euphrates"; but it was the glory of unfallen man and the Promised Land of edenic bliss, not temporal power, which Christ would restore unto them.  Also, it tells of Christ's ministry but not his crucifixion.

People might suspect that it's the economist in me that devoted the first and longest line about Jesus's ministry to the phrase: "He made the loaves and fish increase."  Actually I just needed a rhyme for "Love your enemies."  But I can go with the other interpretation.

UPDATE: Hmm...  Most of the rhymes in the song are slant rhymes.  I guess rhyming is not my forte.

Psalms 98 and 43

I noticed that Psalm 43 uses some of the same words as Psalm 42. So I echoed some of the melodies I had used. I also borrowed from my own Psalm 27.

Download Psalm 43.mp3

Download Psalm 98.mp3

Psalms 51, 36 and 76

Download Psalm 51.mp3
Download Psalm 36.mp3
Download Psalm 76.mp3

Psalm 107

Psalm 107 (Download Psalm 107.mp3) is full of vivid stories of people in trouble who called on God. My favorite one is the merchants on the deep:

Others went out to the sea in ships;
they were merchants on the mighty waters.
They saw the works of the Lord,
his wonderful deeds in the deep.
For he spoke and stirred up a tempest
that lifted high the waves.
They mounted up to the heavens and went down to the depths;
in their peril their courage melted away.
They reeled and staggered like drunken men;
they were at their wits' end.
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
and he brought them out of their distress.
He still the storm to a whisper;
the waves of the sea were hushed.
They were glad when it grew calm,
and he guided them to their desired haven.

I've always been an admirer of the seafaring peoples. The Greeks. The Venetians and the Genoese. The English. The Hawaiians. Travel generally broadens the mind, but there's something about sea travel especially. The solidarity of sailors who sink or sail together. The sailor requires courage in the face of the storms of the deep, but courage in this case is detached from the bloodshed which is too often the context for exercising that virtue. And sailing peoples can't usually dominate the landed peoples they encounter, so trade rather than conquest tends to be their usual mode of relating to each other.

UPDATE: A cynical take on this psalm: it is a case study in (a) religion as social control, and (b) the "God in the gaps" argument. The psalmist goes on to exhort the merchants: "Let them exalt him [the Lord] in the assembly of the people and praise him in the council of the elders." This exhortation is not given after the other vignettes. The merchants, having made their voyages successfully and enriched themselves, now have access to the council of the elders. Let them not use their influence for greedy ends, but to exalt the Lord, which may imply charity towards the poor, since the Old Testament is endlessly repeating that the Lord is "the protector of the fatherless," "he shall adopt for his own the orphan and widow," etc. By reminding the merchants of their former peril, and attributing their good fortune to divine intervention, the psalmist wants to convince them to contribute to the Social Democrats' campaign chest (speaking figuratively, of course).

Second, the psalmist calls storms "the Lord['s]... wondrous deeds in the deep." It is the modern custom to attribute storms to the workings of natural laws, with the corollary that the former attribution of these to God or to gods was simply a failure of the ancients and medievals to understand the causes of storms. Since we now know why storms are really caused, we don't need to attribute them to divinity. The funny thing about this argument is that those who make it wouldn't usually claim to know how storms are caused, themselves, in any thoroughgoing way: rather, they attribute this knowledge to "science." Yet the attempt to predict and control weather using science has been a long-standing chimera: we can occasionally seed snowclouds, but the weather forecast is notoriously unpredictable to this day, even when it is looking only a day ahead. Indeed, if you combine the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle with "chaos theory," nature may well be not only non-deterministic but radically contingent. There are plenty of gaps for God to be in, after all.

Another objection to the "God in the gaps" argument is theological: it seems inconsistent with divine justice. Indeed, in the passage above, why should the merchants "give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds to men?" God calmed the sea for their benefit, but he was the one who called up the storm in the first place. The best you can say for him is that the seas are his, and he has a right to stir up "wonderful deeds" in them whenever he likes, so it was kind of him to take a break so that the merchants could get to their "desired haven" and make money. But that doesn't quite seem like "unfailing love." Even God's courtesy seems a bit inconsistent.

Understandings of God have certainly changed since then, since the advent of Christianity. To me though, there's still a grandeur in the older conception of God in the psalms-- something fiercer, and at the same time more whimsical. It is a credit to the Jews that they persisted in loving this God when they perceived so imperfectly the benevolence of his ultimate design. "The cut worm forgives the plow."