-- Reviewed by Paul Koptak
IVCF staff in New Jersey
© 1981 HIS Magazine
But I did know about Bruce Cockburn. He's a Canadian guitarist-songwriterwho sings of his beloved country and makes me long to see the places he describes.
Cockburn's guitar work is excellent and manages to float gracefully from hard licks to flowing lyrical accompaniment. His sound is lean and free of a lot of intrusive orchestration. It's basically guitar and piano with marimba and dulcimer thrown in occasionally. If you haven't heard Cockburn, imagine Jackson Browne singing songs written by Joni Mitchell. He's hard to pin down, and each album has a sound of its own.
God the Artist
The songs have a different direction than most music by Christians. They have little evangelistic emphasis. Jesus is only referred to once on the album. (He is the one "dancing in the dragon's jaws.") Yet Cockburn's music *is* Christian because it expresses what it's like to live in a world where God exists and is involved as Creator and Lord.
Cockburn's past albums (*Circles in the Stream* and *In the Falling Dark* are two) point to God as the artist points to what is around him in creation. He looks at water and sky and sees jewels, starfields, sea mirrors and sparks, all shimmering with divine light.
There's plenty of this imagery in *Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws*. For example, consider the lyrics from a a song called "Northern Lights":
"Sky full of rippling cliffs and chasms That shine like signs on the road to heaven I've been cut by the beauty of jagged mountains And cut by the love that flows like a fountain from God"But the message goes a step further in this album. Cockburn has been reading the novels of Charles Williams and he acknowledges them as an influence on his songwriting.
Williams carried a personal philosophy of the "coinherence" (his word) of all things. In other words, the spiritual and physical realms are one - not separate. This is similar to the teachings of the reformers who taught that God is the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, neither being more important than the other.
Today, however, we make a distinction between the two worlds. We speak of our spiritual lives and our workaday lives, Christian things and secular things. But when Williams wrote heaven refused to be boxed in that way; it kept making little appearances, much to the surprise of people on earth.
One novel, *Many Dimensions*, describes the discovery of a stone that sends people through the dimensions of space and time. It gave people the ability to step out of time. This is both similar and contrasting to Jesus, who stepped into time. To him, both the eternal and the temporal were equally real worlds.
Physical and Heavenly
That's quite a digression, but it helps us to understand why Cockburn's lyrics can seem almost surreal. Take "Incandescent Blue" for example. One minute he's standing in a New York subway ...
"Watch those black kids working out Kung Fu moves If you don't want to be the horse's hoofprint you've got to be the hooves"And in the next:
"Hear that lonesome violin play See the notes float up into the overcast And change to white birds as they sail on through And soar away free into incandescent blue"Not only does the physical drift off into the heavenly, but the heavenly turns around and breaks in on us. From "No Footprints":
"Mist hangs above hills Above mist hangs stone face of mountain Above mountain face hangs a net of sky Crack! There are wings that rip the net!"These images are not surreal, because to Cockburn reality is more than what we are uses to seeing. He seems to wonder why we try to make our world one in which spiritual realities are separate, or even worse, nonexistent from others. He speaks to a culture that only acknowledges what can be seen and heard, by setting up a cross traffic of images that refuses to sit still before our eyes and ears.
Open Your Eyes
The song "Wondering Where the Lions Are" has gotten some FM airplay. Again there's an interplay, this time between the temporal and the eternal:
"Sun's up, uh huh, looks okay The world survives into another day And I'm thinking about eternity Some kind of ecstacy got a hold on me" "Huge orange flying boat rises off the lake Thousand year old petroglyphs doing a double take Pointing a finger at eternity"What he's saying is that there's more to what *is* than what we normally perceive. To the secularist, Cockburn says "You haven't seen it all." To the Christian who's too heavenly minded to enjoy what's around him he says "Open your eyes." We need to hear this so we can take time to get excited about God's world, to understand that it's not unspiritual to climb a mountain with a thankful heart, to live our daily lives joyfully.
Our friends need to hear about this way of looking at things. This is a good album to lend them and ask them what they think of it. Interesting discussions might start about a reality we've ignored.
Christian songwriters and musicians also need to hear it. At first it may be frustrating that the biblical message isn't clearer, more direct. But take a look at the lyrics and music. *Enjoy* it. It might make a difference in what you play and sing. Let's sing about living God's way in God's world:
"Maybe to those who love it's given to hear Music too high for the human ear And clear as hydrogen to go singing"