With Grace in Your Heart and Flowers in Your Hair: Christian Imagery in Mumford and Sons

I’ve recently become obsessed with a new album: Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More. It’s a rocking, singable, exuberant and deeply visceral album. I’m no music critic, so I cannot comment in detail on the musical nuances of the album. I do know, however, that I really enjoy the banjo plucking, guitar strumming, double bass thumping, the beautifully blended four-part harmonies and the driving, boot-stomping rhythm. This is one of those albums, much like The National’s High Violet that makes me just want to sing along the whole time.

I cannot remember now exactly how I came to them, or they to me. I know my pastor, Wendy Moen, mentioned them to me once and I made a note to look into them. I did, but I did not become deeply seeped in their music until I saw the video for “Winter Winds.”

One of the most striking moments I remember from that video was Marcus Mumford dragging a chair and a guitar through a field of high grass under a cloudy sky, with the haunting lyrics of “the shame that sent me off from the God that I once loved was the same that sent me into your arms…” I found that very moving, very emotional. The “God I once loved?” Why is this mainstream band talking about God? And the more I listened to their music, the more I found deep Christian imagery (the first two words of the album are “Serve God”). I’ve looked into some of what they have said about this imagery, and about the kind of “church revival” feel of some of their concerts. They say that those themes and images come up, but it’s more a concern about spirituality instead of about dedication to institutional Christianity, and that they have each had different spiritual journeys.

Regardless, the imagery is very developed and pronounced throughout the album. The song “Roll Away Your Stone” (the title image clearly one of the resurrection – “the angel of the Lord … rolled away the stone” (Matthew 28:2); “[the women] were discussing who would roll the stone away from the entrance to the tomb … but when they arrived they saw that the stone … had already been rolled aside” (Mark 16:3)) When the singer (“speaker?”) says that all of his bridges have been burnt he is reminded “that is exactly how this grace thing works.” (A direct mention of grace reappears later in the album, in “After the Storm” – “Get over your hill and see, what you find there with grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.”) The mention of grace is fortified in the next phrase with an image of repentance and reconciliation: “It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, but the welcome I receive with the restart.” These lines, if any do, certainly seem to refer to the story of the prodigal son and when the shamefulness of his return is transformed into exuberant celebration by a merciful father.

Penance and purification dominate in “White Blank Page” where the singer asks if you can “kneel before the king and say I’m clean, I’m clean…” The later reference to “loving you with my whole heart” can be interpreted as a secular reference to a lover, but the final use of this phrase widens it to a more theological plane: “So tell me now where was my fault in loving you with my whole heart / Lead me to the truth and I will follow you with my whole life.” This is almost lifted from the Psalms: “Show me the path where I should walk, O Lord… Lead me by your truth and teach me, for you are the God who saves me…” (Ps 25: 4-5). Or Jesus’ “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Plus “disciples” were simply “those who followed.” Following someone with your entire life seems a spiritual level of devotion.

A smattering of biblical imagery emerges in “Timshel.” The mother of a “baby child” is told that this man’s choices will “make man great, his ladder to the stars.” Ladder to the stars sounds like Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven. And the final line “I can’t move the mountains for you” references Jesus’ “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed and you said to this mountain ‘Get up and move’ it would move...”

“Thistle and Weeds,” while not overtly quoting scripture, does have strong suggestions of biblical language. “I’m on my knees and your faith in shreds it seems … Corrupted by the simple sniff of riches blown I know you have felt much more love than you’ve shown. I’m on my knees and water creeps to my chest.” This sounds almost baptismal. And the corrupting influence of the excessive love of money. The refrain of “plant your hope with good seeds, don’t cover yourself with thistle and weeds” echoes of the “Parable of the Sower” who went out to sow and some seeds fell on good soil, and some among weeds, and some among the rocks. The line “There’s more than flesh and bones, let the dead bury their dead, they will come out in droves” is almost lifted directly from Jesus in Matthew 8:22 – “Let the dead bury their dead.”

The lyrics of “Awake my Soul” (at least an overtly spiritual title) have a line of “where you invest your love, you invest your life.” This is very similar to Jesus (Matthew 6:21 and Luke 12:34) “where you treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Later in the song we hear “you were made to meet your maker,” a maker we’ve heard of before in “The Cave,” where we are told “you can understand dependence when you know the maker’s hand.”

The more apocalyptic imagery is reserved for “Dust Bowl Dance” where we hear the narrator say “there will come a time when I’ll look in your eye / You will pray to the God that you always denied / Then I’ll go back out and I’ll get my gun / I’ll say you haven’t met me, I am the only son.” This seems to reference “Not everyone who cries out ‘Lord Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21) and/or the parable of the ten bridesmaids where the unprepared bridesmaids knock on the door begging entrance but are told by the groom “I don’t know you.” (Matthew 25:12). And of course the “only son” phrase summons images of Christ, who, it is said in the Nicene Creed is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father…”

All of this is to say that Mumford and Sons is not a Christian band in the strictest sense, but that their bold (and sometimes subtle) use of both scripture and references to spiritual themes will make them even more relevant to a society seemingly always in search of its soul.

Ten Years of War, An Imagined Forgiveness Unbound and a Truly Radical Response to 9.11.01

Ten years. It's remarkable. With all the hype of this last week I am hesitant to add even more to the 9-11 remembrance frenzy. But I have been thinking about this event and wanted to put down some thoughts.

We were attacked that day. As a nation it seems, we were struck. Almost three thousand people lost their lives. It was a horrible, jaw-dropping tragedy of tremendous proportions. Everyone walked around like they had knives in their hearts. I remember going, instinctively, to St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, my church in Charleston, and sitting at a wooden pew, amid the calm and colorful stained glass, the vaguely indifferent Christs with their hands weakly raised in blessing (why isn't he ever smiling?). Rhett was there too, wandering among the stained glass. And I sat alone and wept. The people outside walked around like they were in a daze or actual shock. The dead eyes. The distant looks. The slow walk. The noticeable absence of laughter and smiling.

At church this Sunday we had a remembrance service at the National Law Enforcement Memorial. Prayers for peace. For healing, for restoration. For love. For forgiveness.

The lessons I read that morning were all about forgiveness. Joseph forgives his brothers who threw him in a well and left him to die but thought better of it and instead sold him to an Egyptian slavers. Years later when Joseph becomes powerful and his brothers are the epitome of the powerless, dusty and starving and begging for his forgiveness, he pardons them. In the Gospel we hear Jesus' parable about the slave who was forgiven a 10,000 talent debt (an unimaginable sum) who refuses to pardon the 100 talent debt of his peer.

Pastor Tom noted in his sermon the unplanned but significantly important occurrence of these texts on this day. Forgiveness. Are we to forgive? How? Who are we to forgive? Those who wrong us? Al Qaeda? Terrorists? Peter asks Jesus how many times he is to forgive a brother who wrongs him. Jesus says if you are counting you’re missing the point.

And yet what did we do? Did we turn the cheek as a nation? Or did we cry out for revenge? Three thousand Americans lost their lives that day. An eye for an eye mentality (to many not a very “Christian” response) would have said we should have killed three thousand terrorists in return. But we did not take an eye for an eye. For our eye we took an eye and a tooth and a tongue and an ear and both legs and an arm. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of them civilians: children, women and the elderly. Killed in the night in terrifying aerial attacks, some not even delivered by fighter pilots but by armed and silent drones in the sky. Were we going to win the “war on terrorism” by ourselves using the tools of terror? Night time raids, terrifying drone strikes from the sky, holding prisoners without cause or reason almost indefinitely? This is who we are?

What else could we have done? It seems now that there was only one response. This was an act of war. And so: “they will have war.” I think history will remember this first war of the 21st century as a 20th century reaction to a 21st century problem. We thought to solve a transnational problem of international scope like terrorism we would invade a nation. That a plot that unfolded across the globe in wide variety of countries (including Germany!) would suddenly be seen as rooted in just one state? It was a state reaction to a non-state actor. (Such a funny phrase, “non-state actor” – I imagine freelance Soviet theater bums; fired by the state, they have become “non-state” actors.)

The technological execution of combat however, would be highly 21st century, though. An analyst in Langley, VA, types in some coordinates in a computer. An armed, unmanned drone in the sky above Afghanistan drops a hundred pound bomb at those coordinates. The explosion is mostly unseen from an American point of view, the consequences even more so. What does a hundred pound bomb hitting the ground look like? What does it do to buildings? To people? To lives? We are totally removed from it. War and human suffering made even more distant, made even more detached, trivialized. Made into a video game.

In a sort of sense, this was the non-war. The nobody’s war. (With of course the notable exception of those executing it). This was the war that really seemed to be so far removed from the general populace’s consciousness that it wasn’t even happening. This was a war that the media only covered extensively when things were really bad, and I guess there is not much you can blame them for, given that it was a decade long. We had prosecuted this war, with its duration and scope, with fewer men and women than any previous war, so very few of us know the sons and daughters who have gone off to fight in it. It hasn’t scarred our consciousness the way Vietnam did. No one even had to pay for it. We weren’t asked to give a patriotic contribution or a “war tax.” The war would be free! We had a surplus! (Remember those days and the “problem” of what to do with it?).

What else could we have done in the face of this attack? We could have said: no more. Three thousand people have died this morning. We will mourn those people. We will support those families. But we will also be more vigilant. We will defend ourselves, so that no future blood will be spilled. That shall be our prime goal. We will launch a “war” to save lives and prevent bloodshed. We will build up our security at ports and harbors and airports and train tunnels. We will spend as much as it takes. We will work with international partners to beef up our understanding of this group, this non-state actor known as Al Qaeda and we will bring them to justice. We know the world is chaotic – it was on September 10, 11 and 12. And it will continue to be. We will not try to dupe you into thinking that the chaos and the danger of the world can be driven back completely. But as long as we are not afraid, they have lost. We will respond to their radicalism of hatred with a radicalism of love. Our forgiveness, foolish as it may seem or be, will, in its quiet, soft way, break their hatred and their fear. As Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, “The soft overcomes the hard… the gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.”

What would the consequences of this kind of radicalism be?

We cannot know. What is done is done. And in this sense this is all just idle imagining. The unbinding of an irresponsibly loving forgiveness. I can’t see that response ever coming from any president.

And this is where we hit on the real fact that this is not an American response to an American tragedy. This is a human response to a human tragedy. I remember looking at the TV with those smoking towers and thinking, “Send me to war.” That seems unbelievable now. But that was my first reaction, a human reaction, and the reaction of millions. Immediate vengeance. You did this to us, and we will do this to you. This is simply human. Who could forgive in that moment?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how (could?) the same scriptures I read on Sunday could be used not for forgiveness but for vengeance. How a more conservative reading of the Bible would find “evildoers” and praise the wars as patriotic defense of our nation, despite the hundreds of thousands of casualties. How do you “read around” forgiveness? How does a language of forgiveness and peace get converted into one of retribution and war?

Ten years later, can we forgive? If we can, what would that mean? And if we can’t?

Always We Begin Again

It seems odd or at least unexpected to restart this blog after such a long break. It was designed to be a travel blog, a record of my thoughts and experiences while on the road in Guatemala and Mexico. And I guess I liked the idea of it and the name of it, the sense of it, enough to decide to write on it again.

I wonder why now. Today seems like such a significant date. But it's really the physical new start to an idea I've been toying around with for some months now.

Why blog? Why write? Why say anything? Aren't there already too many people saying things? Aren't we already drowning in the shouting idiocy of our political class, the media and the writhing mass of the Internet, with its accusations, recriminations and outbursts? Why add another voice? Wouldn't a voice of silence, in some sense, be appreciated? One not talking, the silent one amid the chanting crowd? There is also a sense of "look at me" millenial type navel-gazing involved with writing about yourself.

I've thought seriously about these questions. And yet I've decided to come back to it. I guess I just like writing and I have been told by some they enjoy reading my writing. So why not keep writing? And maybe someone will read it. Maybe someone will respond to it. Maybe it will resonate with someone. Maybe a conversation could get started.

I don't know what will happen here or what I'll write about. Probably about the things that interest me. Politics. The environment. Religion and spirituality. History. Economics. Society. Art, theater or film. Maybe some of all of that.

The last post was from November of 2007. This blog is four years old?

There is a sense of risk here, too. Writing. Putting out on the Internet the wandering, rambling thinkings of this 28 year old version of myself. I'll probably look back on much of this with the awkwardness and slight embarrassment I get from reading things from my past that I once thought were so great, so well written. My senior thesis. That essay I wrote in high school AP English. Really? This? But hopefully I can keep a bemused sense of detachment from it. To think, Ahh, yes, this - I remember this.

This was meant to be a travel blog. I was on an interesting and different road. Central America! Spanish! Bringing your own roll of toilet paper with you! The stream of interesting and engaging things was seemingly without limit. Now it's "Just here." I'm "just here" in DC. And yet, I'm only here for a while. Unless I die here. I'm really just passing through. Oh, those were my eleven years, my three years, my forty one years in DC. Now this is the new period of my life, in London, in Mobile, in New York, in Arrequipa. How funny. The illusion of permanence. I'm here forever! Simply because I'm here now. There is no sense of end or terminus because this is "home." But in the long term, who knows how long this home will be my home. Until I have to pull up the stakes, pack up the tent and move on.

So a renewed sense of wonder. Of engagement. My life as a 28 year old unmarried man in Washington DC, the nation's capital, in these the years just after the end of the twenty first century's first decade. A brief moment. A window in time. A statically irrelevant blip on a geological timeline the expansiveness of which is beyond my comprehension...

And yet. (Always, "and yet") Here I am, writing in a park on a brand new and very tiny Toshiba laptop computer, seated on a bench in Kalorama Park in DC, wearing shorts, flip flops and a T-shirt, with my legs crossed, on this warm and humid September day that really is just the final waning (one expects? hopes?) experience of summer. Before the chill, the leaves, the darkness of fall...


(The post title comes from the Rule of Benedict; it's a phrase I find particularly lovely, a way of forgiving yourself and beginning anew.)