John Mark McMillan - "Deliver Me"

I was listening to the new song from John Mark McMillan (who I'll call JMM from here onwards just for fun -- or should I say, JM2?) and as his rough bass surged into my ears I began to get the sense of something -- dare I say it? -- sacramental.

I was listening to the new song from John Mark McMillan (who I'll call JMM from here onwards just for fun -- or should I say, JM²?) and as his rough bass surged into my ears I began to get the sense of something -- dare I say it? -- sacramental.

Better listen to it first (and check out this fabulously evocative lyric video):

The song -- which definitely gives off some strong Coldplay vibes -- opens with the rousing line: "The sun is leaning on the darkness again," which on its own doesn't ring any sacramental bells especially, except for its figuration of the sun as a kind of Being in conflict with the darkness. (Stay tuned for a post about the relationship between figuration and sacrament). We'll hold that thought momentarily, though, because the first verse is a doozy:

I saw images of God 

Reflected out upon the deep 

By prehistoric stars 

Through millennia of grief

Hmm. So, if a sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible grace, we've got a lot to unpack here. JMM starts by pointing to the stars -- these ancient material bodies, some of which are reflecting the activity from the very earliest moment of the cosmos -- and he asserts that, reflected in them, are images of God. Like all signs, the referent here is at remove from the signifier that points to it. The star does not just signify God, but rather it is signifying an image of God. And on top of that JMM introduces this amazing idea that the gap between signifer and the signified reference, that asymptotal gap, is characterized by "millennia of grief."

I think we need to add a bit of Matthew Arnold to the mix:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

The deep sadness of the universe, the discovery of which I believe is truly a gift of modernity, resonates along this gap between the referent and the signs all around us. And, at least in part, I think JMM's song is asking that we be delivered from this -- or at least delivered from a world where the darkness is all. Hence is reminder that the Sun is leaning on the darkness again.

The second half of the first verse takes Bruce Cockburn's image of the Angel/Beast (from a song that JMM does seem to be in dialogue with) and puts JMM's neologistic spin on it as the "excarnate beast." If Jesus was "in-carnate," does this word imply (rather than a strict etymology) a going back to God while still remaining a beast? The speaker himself is this excarnate beast, feeling spiritless and haunted, perhaps listening to the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith receding, yet at the same time stirred by "the ancient lights of heaven / Pressing down on me."

I can't go line by line through this, but there is so much food for thought.

The second verse about "trading souls on the shores of Babylon" cries out for a comparison with Bo Burnham's new show, Inside. The verse also has some amazing insights into the impact of capitalism (i.e., Babylon) upon our evaluation of who we are. The way that this world minimizes individual souls to the point of making them easily exchangeable is then taken up in a later verse where JMM sings, "Every human creature is a galaxy of thought / You could spend your life on one / And it wouldn’t be for not..." To treat a human -- or the world -- as anything less is to fail to "save the appearances," as Owen Barfield would have it. It is a failure to recognize that there is an inner world beyond the surface.

To summarize, I think that the "sacramental" sense that I got from this song is grounded in that gap it attends to between the world as it appears (and how this is constantly under threat of becoming "disenchanted," as JMM puts it) and the world it points to. And, as is the case with that sacramental orientation, which perceives the world through a lens of hope -- with an expectation of God's grace permeating all things -- we believe that "the footsteps of the Midwife / are already in motion" so that our deliverance is not only a freeing from Babylon, but truly a birth, whereby the visible and the invisible become one.

(N.B.: I recognize that I was playing pretty fast and loose with my terms in the above, so don't @ me! Hopefully a future post unpacking the differences between panentheism and sacramental ontology will be helpful in clarifying my potential points of heresy/absurdity).