If you knew what would happen and made us just the same,
You, My Lord, can take the blame.
So the evening began in song with David Bazan; the same way that my engagement with his work has always been. His challenge to the “assumed goodness” of God pushing me to search my own heart for similar untested assumptions, contradictory premises, doubts, frustrations… his courage in doing so freeing me to find the darker corners of my own mind with less fear and, in that way, greater faith.
Bazan was in Grand Rapids (as was I) to participate in the Festival of Faith and Music (of which I will write a bit more in the near future). Along with playing a set on Thursday night, Bazan talked with NPR’s Jessica Hopper about… well… faith and music. He reflected on his own history as a songwriter as well as the music he’s listened to over the years. He continued to point at moments in songs or albums that unsettled him in relationship to christianity.
Between times and during late nights, I had the pleasure of finally talking with him quite a bit about his new record, house shows, his Pedro days, christian bumper stickers and festivals we’d never play again. Those conversations only made the songs from his next release “Curse Your Branches” (August 09) more intriguing to me. He is calling “Branches” his first truly autobiographical piece. It’s an autobiography I’ve been hoping to hear for a while as it is specifically focused on his distancing from christianity.
The title track is highlighted by this masterful chorus…
..falling leaves should curse their branches
For not letting them decide where they should fall
And not letting them refuse to fall at all
While he has always been comfortable in a critical posture towards christianity for it’s … well.. being all “christian” and stuff, Bazan, in song and in conversation, does not seem at all settled on the distance between himself and God. He directs his discontent back toward the space God previously occupied, singing:
In my throat, there swells a darkness
It fills my mouth, and coats my lips
And even as the threat of Hell is disappearing,
The threat of losing you is blowing up..
For those of us who have been listeners of Bazan’s since early Pedro the Lion, this tension he creates by directing his frustration and confusion at a God whose character is awfully confusing, a God he is not sure exists and is the root of his frustrations to begin with is exactly why we love his music; because for many of us, this has been at least part of our experience of faith. For many of us, christian art, whose songs of doubt are generally tamed with an overly obvious and predictable happy ending of unwavering assurance or whose stories of tragedy are most often girded with the glaring undertone that “everything is going to be just fine in the end,” not only misrepresents our experience thus far, but leaves us with a sense that something is very wrong with our own weak faith.
Similar to writers like Frederick Buechner, David Bazan provides a place for skeptics, poets and the religiously frustrated to find some normality. A place where doubt is not a disease or a phase that needs to be medicated, grown out of or explained away but actively wrestled with; a place where frustration with God and confusion at who He is becomes part of the journey itself; where the decision to continue engaging, even if it’s only to shout into the dark space we thought God had been living all this time, is an act that is full of faith.
In William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” he uses one of his character’s voices to critique the religious compromise we make with doubt, writing
“…sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words.”
Bazan’s life and work have given shape to Sin and Love and Fear for many of us who could find few if any fleshly, mortal connections with these realities in the artistic expressions of faith offered by popular religious culture. The art he’s produced in the throes of doubt, alcoholism and folly have served as the tragedy that some of us have lacked the vitality to suffer for ourselves; in the light of which art, our own process of redemption or restoration has fuller meaning rather than being the half-lived half-truth that is the result of the half-thinking compromise we strike with our often half-conceived idea of God.
The following night after Bazan’s show, Cornell West highlighted the role of death in christian life; particularly the death of ideas, prejudices and suppositions. That same night in the middle of a conversation about the history of either losing or letting go of things he had previously thought necessary for life and faith, Bazan listed a few of the influences that had been his guides along the way; just about all of them being songwriters. He paused for a moment and then said “I guess it is through songs that I was first undone.”
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Thanks for sharing. I’ve been a fan of David Bazan for many years, although I have yet to hear his latest offering. I’ve long enjoyed the strangeness that I first picked up a Pedro album in a bookstore run by Southern Baptists. I felt (and still feel) a deep spiritual connection to the album, but know that there was no way the folks who ran the bookstore had actually listened to it. Perhaps there is a parable in that…
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David Bazan and Cornell West in the same weekend? That’s fairly fantastic. I hadn’t known Bazan was releasing a new album. Thanks for the review and the heads up. I’m thrilled.
-Chase
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Here here! Bazan seems to have found a voice that speaks for a lot of 20/30 somethings out there who have found themselves in a place that is other than Christianity as they see it but still somewhere other than atheism. I know, for me, he has found a beautifully cathartic way to communicate the dissonance experienced between the religion I was taught, the faith/spirituality I feel and the reality I experience. Pedro was probably one of the first exposures I had to good poetry that was able to express that feeling before I knew how to articulate it myself, which I guess is what art is supposed to do.
Cheers!
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Bazan through his songs expresses feelings and thoughts that all Christians have and yet dare to talk about or sing aloud.
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I agree, Clausen. I’m thankful for that very thing.
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