I am taking time on Sunday evening to attend the concert,
probably sponsored by AARP or Centrum Silver, I suppose, of Bruce Springsteen.
I am not going to claim him as a secular saint, or even as a good Catholic. When
Daughter #! was young, she asked me why I liked someone who couldn’t sing. she
thought for a minute and brightened: “you like his words, don’t you?” I am
asserting that he is a thoughtful man who struggles with deep and abiding
spiritual themes in his long career. He is going to play his double album, The
River, in its entirety, so I will focus on some of those songs.
His concerts are staged with some of the feeling of a
revival, but a “rock revival.” Religious imagery appears in his songs with some
startling frequency. “Roll the stone away/It’s independence day” has to be a
bow to the Easter story. Its use in the song takes the theme of death into new
directions in the midst of a transition form one point in our pilgrimage to the
next. I admire his ferocious insistence on the constant tension between vice and
virtue, of aspiration amid the hard realities of adult life. In the pop song
Hungry Heart, he realizes St Augustine ’s
assertion that “our hearts our restless until they find their rest in God.”
Springsteen realizes that “everybody’s got a hungry heart.”
The River is a long ode to the lost and the possibility of redemption.
The title song itself charts the start of a young marriage that is a sign of a
too early adulthood and its broken dreams. It concludes with a secular baptism
where the singer wants to: “drive to the sea/to wash these sins off our hands.”
He is clear that cheap grace is hard to find and redemption
may have a heavy cost. He takes the tragic inability of Moses to see the
Promised land and adapts to it to unfulfilled dreams. “Little girl down on the strand With that
pretty little baby in your hands, Do you remember the story of the promised
land? How he crossed the desert sands /And could not enter the chosen land/ On
the banks of the river he stayed /To face the price you pay.” –
For him, life is a precious, but
tenuous thing. Life is haunted by the past. Again in a song from the River” But I ride by
night/ And I travel in fear/ That in this darkness/I will disappear.”
In Stolen Car: “We
got married, and swore we’d never part/Then little by little we drifted from
each other’s heart/At first I thought it was just restlessness/That would fade
as time went by and our love grew deep/In the end it was something more I guess/That
tore us apart and made us weep. Springsteen is a romantic but he has an
awareness of original sin. We can take what is pure and love-filled and find it
poisoned, not only by our own decisions, but by the wounds and half-steps we
share in relationships.
He closes the
album with an awareness that life is filled with random, tragic, occurrences: Sometimes
I sit up in the darkness/And I watch my baby as she sleeps/Then I climb in bed
and I hold her tight/I just lay there awake in the middle of the night/Thinking
'bout the wreck on the highway
I suppose he will close with some
of his great songs including, perhaps Badlands .
There he takes the Pauline triad: “I believe in the love that you
gave me/I believe in the faith that could save me/I believe in the hope/And I
pray that some day/It may raise me above these/Badlands .
Springsteen’s song The rising
(Easter is approaching) ends with what could easily be termed a benediction,
and when he sings it, he raises his hand as if he were giving a blessing. For
me, his great blessing is to give voice to an American set of dreams and
struggles during the course of a lifetime.
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