christopher cocca

I don’t usually post my baseball blogs here, but this is one about justice.  Kind of.

The imagery in this song is perfect.  I just got The Essential Leonard Cohen.   Video posted below.

The Stranger Song (by Leonard Cohen)

It’s true that all the men you knew were dealers
who said they were through with dealing
Every time you gave them shelter
I know that kind of man
It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone
who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.
And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind
you find he did not leave you very much
not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
that is so high and wild
he’ll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.
And then leaning on your window sill
he’ll say one day you caused his will
to weaken with your love and warmth and shelter
And then taking from his wallet
an old schedule of trains, he’ll say
I told you when I came I was a stranger
I told you when I came I was a stranger.
But now another stranger seems to want you to ignore his dreams
as though they were the burden of some other
O you’ve seen that man before
his golden arm dispatching cards
but now it’s rusted from the elbow to the finger
And he wants to trade the game he plays for shelter
Yes he wants to trade the game he knows for shelter.
You hate to watch another tired man
lay down his hand
like he was giving up the holy game of poker
And while he talks his dreams to sleep
you notice there’s a highway
that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder
It’s curling up like smoke above his shoulder.
You tell him to come in sit down
but something makes you turn around
The door is open you can’t close you shelter
You try the handle of the road
It opens do not be afraid
It’s you my love, you who are the stranger
It is you my love, you who are the stranger.
Well, I’ve been waiting, I was sure
we’d meet between the trains we’re waiting for
I think it’s time to board another
Please understand, I never had a secret chart
to get me to the heart of this
or any other matter
Well he talks like this
you don’t know what he’s after
When he speaks like this,
you don’t know what he’s after.
Let’s meet tomorrow if you chose
upon the shore, beneath the bridge
that they are building on some endless river
Then he leaves the platform
for the sleeping car that’s warm
You realize, he’s only advertising one more shelter
And it comes to you, he never was a stranger
And you say ok the bridge or someplace later.
And then sweeping up the jokers
that he left behind
you find he did not leave you very much
not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
that is so high and wild
he’ll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.
And leaning on your window sill
he’ll say one day you caused his will
to weaken with your love and warmth and shelter
And then taking from his wallet
an old schedule of trains
he’ll say I told you when I came I was a stranger
I told you when I came I was a stranger. 

Happy Christmas

Tonight was going to be a very clever post about the realized eschatology of “Happy Xmas/War Is Over” and Milton’s Nativity Ode.   I do not have this in me.  Suffice it to say that war and its personal analogues continue and most people are losing.  Wanting the eschaton has not brought it closer.  

Perhaps, as with the proclamation of liberty, Lennon and Milton are stating simple facts.   The clever post was going to say that Milton sees the Advent of Christ as a temporal collapse birthing God’s kingdom here until he remembers his theology of Easter and the unfinished work still thereafter.  At Christmas, though, he rushes to say “war is over” before withdrawing, displaced like his catalog of old gods by the inscrutable birth of God’s-self in time.  

I don’t know what good it does to say these things.  I don’t know that it does any.  I know that I hope and that I’m moved by the poetry of the manger-born.  

Today when I was shopping I saw a child, maybe four years old, saying over and over to his mother “Baby Jesus has to die on the cross.  Baby Jesus has to die on the cross.”   This is what stopped Milton from seeing it all done at Christmas; the morbid poignance of a child repeating his home-school gospel catechism, the weird blood-cult calculus of his grown peer’s crucifixion.  

And so it seemed to me that the four-year-old was not just proclaiming a kerygma.  It seemed also like a warning.  ”You have to die on the cross, Baby Jesus.  I think you need to know this.”

My God, really, what the hell is going on here?  “You have to die on the cross, Baby Jesus.  I think you need to know this. You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why…” 

As Advent ends I’m at a loss, though if pressed to answer what Christianity has contributed to the history of the world, I’d still answer with words from “O Holy Night”:   the thrill of hope, that the soul knows its worth, that “truly he taught us to love one another, his law is love and his gospel is peace/Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother/In his name all oppression shall cease….”  

Notice the tenses in the lyric, though:  He (past tense) taught us. The slave (now) is our brother. Chains (someday) shall he break.  The eschaton is realized neither in Christ’s cradle nor grave.  We live in some interim of de facto freedom and de jure struggle. The slave, now, is our brother, but he’s still a slave until chains are broken.  The resolution of Christmas is too academic.   And what about Easter?  The vindicated, risen Christ does not bring his kingdom even after clear triumph.  Away to the clouds, but why?  Why the Ascension?  To make room for us?   And what do we do with this room?  

And so this is Christmas. What have we done with the room?

In honor of “Hallelujah” reaching 1, 2, and 36 at the same time on the UK singles charts this week, I’m considering my favorite versions of what is probably my favorite song.   This list isn’t exhaustive, and it’s based on versions available on the web. On a personal note (well, these are all personal notes), my friend Andrew is a fantastic violinist and singer.   Check out his live take and click the links for amazing renderings of  Sufjan Stevens’ “Vito’s Ordination Song” and Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” (just Andrew, the violin, and the loop pedal on those two..seriously, you need to check them out).  

Top Six Hallelujahs:

Number 6:  MSU’s Accafellas.

Just watch it.  There are days when this is much closer to the top of the list.  It’s so good.  

Number 5:  Rufus Wainwright.

This is a great piano-based take.  It’s the one from Shrek. 

Number 4:  John Cale.

Cale was the first person to re-imagine this song toward what would become its most famous interpretation.  Cale’s version is just a little fast and manic for some, but the passion is awesome and the melody inspired Jeff Buckley’s similar (but very basic by comparison) cover a few years later as well as more literal (though still stripped) versions by Wainright (see above) and Allison Crowe (see below). You can feel how much Cale cares about this song and he did very right by it.  If you’re used to the slimmer arrangements the strings here might offend, but upon repeated listen this take really stands as its own cohesive whole. I give him the edge over Rufus in part because he means it so damn much.  There’s no detached hipness here.  As I’ll explain further below, I think a lot of it has to do with age.   I also love the sparse, picked string part starting around 2 minutes.  

Number 3:  Allison Crowe.

I’m not going to lie.  I get a little crush every time I hear this.   The interpretation owes a lot to Cale, but Crowe has this voice…I also like that she doesn’t change “Holy Ghost” to “holy dark” or “holy dove” as some other versions do. 

Number 2:  Jeff Buckley.

It’s too evocative for me to say much about.  You just get it.  It’s young and tentative and frail but also strong and sometimes committed.  It’s your 20s.  Jeff Buckley drowned to death a few years later.  He was 30.   Jeff said this song was an ode to sex, but it’s also a dirge and a prayer and many other things.  

Number 1:  The Original. 

Cohen’s gravity and the choral lifts make this so unnerving and raw.  Even the synth works.  The fact that he’s middle-aged here adds something to the song’s power:  it’s not plaintive and delicate or tragic beyond resolution, but it is vulnerable, and it’s vulnerable in way that’s sly and authentic.  Sort of like David.  Sort of like Cash.  Sort of like Cohen.  He’s too young for this to be lion-in-winter, but he’s too old for it to be only be about heartache or sex. There’s a depth of knowing here, and there’s power.  I still get chills at a very specific point in this video. 

Mr. Cohen, thank you.

If you’ve read this blog more than once you know of my abiding respect for and appreciation of Leonard Cohen.   His classic “Hallelujah” (which we often incorporate into the liturgy of the emergent community I’m part of) is this very instant both the #1 and #2 song on the UK Christmas singles chart.  I was just checking out Damien Rice’s version of the song (which he name-checks in his own brilliant song “Delicate”) last night, and I saw this link a few minutes ago and got very excited: “Hallelujah!  Cohen classic dominates British music charts.”   

The story behind this story is that a top-selling version of the song by talent-show winner Alexandra Burke looked set to be named this year’s top UK Christmas single (a big deal there), and fans started a grass roots campaign to make Jeff Buckley’s transcendent 1994 cover #1 instead.   Cohen’s own version (actually my favorite) hit the charts at 36 — 24 years after its first release.   Great work, sir.  Great work. 

Chad of The Blogg has outlined 4 criteria for a good book.  I commented thusly:

“My only criterion is this:

Is it evocative?

Popular fiction may certainly need to meet each of your criteria and others to be marketable or successful for the purpose it serves. For me, the “truth” requirement falls into the realm of literary fiction (”real” writing). If a piece of literary fiction evokes a sense of what it’s trying to say, that is, if it leaves me having felt it, then it’s a success.”

Visit The Blogg to share yours.

I gave the message at last Sunday’s Gathering.  My text for the second Sunday of Advent was Isaiah 11:1-5 and the theme I was asked to talk about was prophecy.   The previous week’s focus was on the idea of “family tree” and that message dealt  in part with Matthew’s account of Jesus’ supposed legal linage from the House of David through Joseph.  

Matthew’s deal insists on showing Jesus as a legitimate claimant to David’s line and there’s a literary device going on with a repeating 14 generations rhythm.  It’s worth noting that Matthew’s account includes (and names) women, and these named women (with the exception of Ruth?) were the subject of scandal in their own ancient stories.  Each were also foreigners, “other” in the ethnic sense but brought into the covenant of Abraham through relationships.  Even so, Matthew is preoccupied with preserving the legal lineage of Christ in the beginning of his gospel, even as the inclusion of Tamar and Rahab and Bathsheba undermine a certain prudish piety good-intentioned (and not-so-good-intentioned, I’m sure) people are sometimes drawn to.

Thematically, the beginning of the Isaiah piece seems to rehash the importance of the bloodline we see in Matthew, and I’m suggesting that the writer of Matthew is positing Joseph as Mary’s kinsman-redeemer on the order of Joseph’s (and David’s) ancestors Boaz and Ruth.  Matthew is, then, anticipating the need to express that the birth of Christ fulfills the prophet’s expectations of the One as a shoot blooming from the cut-down stump of Jesse’s (that is, David’s father’s) line.

Move forward to Luke’s account of Jesus reading from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue in Nazareth.   Publicly identifying himself as this One foretold by the prophets, Jesus choses a section of Isaiah that’s shorn of the Davidic language of the earlier incipit.  In the spiritual economy of Isaiah 61, the prophet defines the prophetic role as falling on those whom the Spirit of God presses to preach freedom to captives and good news to the poor.   Isaiah 11 ties the prophetic role to the future messiah-king of David’s line, but Jesus’ proclamation in Luke conspicuously ignores the earlier passage in favor of the latter.  

It’s true that traditional studies of the canonical Gospels delineate specific audiences for each missive, and that Luke’s retelling has been seen as one meant to appeal to non-Jewish audiences (as opposed to Matthew’s, although Luke also includes a less elegant genealogical account tracing Jesus’ ancestors to David).  It’s also true that Luke (also the probable writer of the book of Acts) is seen by many Christians as a consummate historian.  If he was,  it’s no accident that his historiography has Jesus eschewing the Davidic claim in such a public (and Jewish) place and moment.  The claim of Luke’s Jesus as messiah rests squarely on his mission — to proclaim liberty to the captives, to preach good news to the poor, and to announce the era of God’s favor–and seems to have nothing to do with his legal ancestry as claimant to David’s throne.  (This is not, by any means, an eschewing of Jesus’ essential Jewishness.  On the contrary, it is his understanding of fidelity to the ethos of Israel’s God — an ethos, for Jesus, of freedom, justice, and embrace — that make his claim compelling). 

Perhaps Luke understood that any number of men in those days could claim a lineage from David, but that didn’t stop him from including an account of Jesus’ royal ancestry in his Gospel.   So while Matthew, Luke, and, if you like, Isaiah 11 are very concerned with explaining who Jesus is,  when Jesus speaks in the synagogue, he frames his prophetic identity solely in terms of what he does.  And what he does is freedom.  Libertas et fidelitas.  Freedom of God and from (that is, given by) God.  

 Isaiah 11, Isaiah 61, and Luke 4 all predicate this gospel of freedom on the resting of the Spirit of God upon the speaker.  Later, the apostle Paul will say that where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom and that in freedom, we have faces reflecting God’s glory and being transformed. 

I’ve been thinking of changing my image header on the blog for Christmas, and I toyed with a few Advent kinds of images before I came across the one you see now.  This is a picture taken by my sister at the Liberty Bell center in Philadelphia and it captures my Advent sentiments (and my status as what my friend Joe calls a “facebook Libertarian”) exactly.  It helps me think about the long Advent of the prophets and about the long Advents we suffer through before moving toward freedom.

For me, Christmas is a microcosm of Jesus’ itinerancy:  the good news of liberty proclaimed for the oppressed and captive and poor or poor of spirit. It’s about bolstering the causes of justice, heartening those who struggle for it, realigning the ontologies of oppression and transaction into ontologies of freedom and intrinsic worth.  Freedom of God and from God.  Fidelitias in its truest sense. The a priori libertas (liberty, freedom [civil, political, moral], and something even akin to candor) of the created before and from the creator.  

This is something to celebrate, yes, but it’s an incomplete Advent even now.  There’s a tension between that which we know and expect and that which we experience.  (Consider in a similar way Jefferson’s Declaration or Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, each asserting the truth that men were free but actually freeing no one).  And so we keep our watch like shepherds or we seek like Magi or we proclaim like prophets, but in any case we live in spaces between freedom’s true indwelling, half-realized, half-hoping, half-healthy, wholly bound.  And so we need the hearing and the moving past it.  We must risk embrace.

My grandfather’s bookshelf and many of his books and mine lit by our Christmas tree.  

Rudolph and Pslam 37

Lights In The Parkway

Driving home from Jersey a little while ago my wife and I were listening to Pet Sounds because 1) it’s probably the best album of the 20th century and 2) (and more importantly in this instance) it’s our toddler’s favorite album.  We have the 40th Anniversary CD which as the whole track listing in mono and stereo, which means it plays through twice with two bonus tracks.  The third time through “God Only Knows” I said that it was probably the most beautifully sung song of the 20th century and then we started trying to come up with a list.  For me, “Good Vibrations” (our son’s favorite song, but it’s on Smiley Smile which was at home) is a close 2nd. 

“Scarborough Fair/Canticle” by Simon and Garfunkel is probably 3rd for me but it gets pharisaical after that.  Other songs we came up with, in no particular order:

“Helplessly Hoping” by CSNY

“Love Me Tender” by Elvis Presley

“In The Still of The Night”  by the Five Satins

“Tears On My Pillow” by Little Anthony and The Imperials 

“Anything You Want” by Roy Orbison

“Stand By Me” by Ben E. King

“When A Man Loves A Woman” by Percy Sledge

“Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers

and others that are certainly among the best vocal performances of all time, but best sung and most beautifully sung aren’t always the same thing.  I’m not sure what the aesthetic difference is, but when I hear Carl Wilson and his brothers singing Brian’s arrangements, I’m in another place.