Sing, Muse, of the poem and the film: How does the Odyssey mean?

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A poem! A film! An argument! Sing, Muse, of the wrath of artists, critics, readers and viewers. Tell of the pains they have suffered on the wild seas of culture. It’s only been a month since The Odyssey film came out, but it feels like ten years. Attacks and counterattacks. The clashing of sharpened wits. The endless toll of wounded opinions. As our hero wonders onscreen: Will we ever get off this [friggin’] beach?

Some say a woman started the war. No, not Helen of Troy, but Emily Wilson, a British classics scholar whose popular 2017 translation of The Odyssey inspired Christopher Nolan, the maker of Memento, The Dark Night and Oppenheimer to navigate his own sea of challenges to cinematize one of the founding stories of Western civilization. Wilson’s negative reaction to the film was withering:

“I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

“Nolan lets the fragments of an incomplete set of big ideas spin around in the epic whirlpool, with no plank of solid, specific human experience to which we might cling.”

“Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours.” [i]

Wilson seems to take considerable pleasure in disliking the movie (echoes of Pauline Kael at her snarkiest), although the review that launched a thousand angry tweets has done no harm to her own book sales. In any case, as it was way back in Homer’s day, so it is for us. Everyone is spoiling for a fight, and the battles over the film and its meanings continue to rage on.

The controversies over a movie version of Homer’s classic text reminds me of the furor over controversial interpretations of the gospels in Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1989) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2006). When the former was released, Jesus made the cover of Time magazine, while picketers carried signs saying, “God doesn’t like this movie!” As far as I know, Zeus hasn’t weighed in on Nolan’s epic, but the fervor over The Odyssey has a kind of religious intensity, as if something vitally important were at stake.

The nature and destiny of human life. Our universal longing for “home”—whatever, however, and wherever that means. The curse of conflict and war. The fragility of civilization. Our fraught relationships with the “other.” Traces of divine presence and action in the visible world. The role of the arts in telling the truth about ourselves. There are many reasons to care about canonical texts and the way they are interpreted—or misinterpreted—by cinema. So much is indeed at stake, as Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky memorably insisted:  

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to the good.” [ii]

Nolan’s film didn’t do much of that for me. I was certainly entertained, but little of those three hours on the IMAX screen lingered long in my heart and soul the way the greatest films do. When I exited the theater, the spell broke quickly, and I returned to my familiar world unchanged by the journey.

At this point, another response to the summer’s most talked-about film risks being one too many. But the Odyssey’s enduring themes, however translated or adapted, invite serious thought. Now that I’ve seen the movie and read the excellent new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn, here’s what I’m musing about.

THE HERO

Who is Odysseus? Is he an Everyman who speaks to the ages, or a perplexing stranger unique to a vanished time and place? In the Proem (the 10-line prelude), his 12,000-line story is concisely summarized:

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy …” [iii]

As the narrative proceeds, this complicated (polytropos: “many-sided”) man is talked about by the people back home, but he himself has been gone for twenty years. He doesn’t take the stage as a ccollections are not always reliable. Odysseus is a cunning and resourceful trickster, who has survived many a scrape by shading the truth when necessary. As Daniel Mendelsohn explains in the introduction to his own new translation, Odysseus is a “chameleon-like hero, whose adeptness at falsifying his appearances and fictionalizing his life story makes it almost impossible to trust what we think we know about him—and hence, impossible to know who he is.” [iv]

One of the disappointing omissions in Nolan’s film is the moment when the Cyclops asks the man who has intruded into his cave: Who are you? Wishing to stay anonymous, the hero replies, “No-One is my name. No-One is what people call me.” It was a life-saving ruse (“No-One is killing me,” Polyphêmos told his fellow Cyclopes when they offered to come to his aid), but it also conveyed an existential truth about the hero, as Mendelsohn observes:

“When the epic begins, Odysseus is very much a nobody; so long absent from home that his family and friends are convinced that he is dead, constantly in danger of disappearing without a trace during his perilous return journey, repeatedly shipwrecked and cast away on distant shores that are far from the world familiar to him and from anyone who knows him.” [v]

Nolan dropped the crucial dialogue with the Cyclops, but he made up for it when Odysseus arrives back home. Disguised as a beggar, not quite ready to reveal and resume his “true” identity as Penelope’s husband and Ithaka’s king, the hero sits quietly amid the clamor of Penelope’s suitors in the royal banqueting hall. His head is covered with a hood concealing his visage in deep shadow. We strain to see a face, but only a black void looks back at us. It could be anyone—or No-One.   

THE JOURNEY

“The Prayer Book has it that ‘in returning and rest we shall be saved,’ yet there is no returning; there is no resting. It is not a matter of some original sin, separating us from authentic being to which we could return. There is a tension built into the very dynamic of being human upon this earth, ever in the world, yet never of it. The problem is not just that we are alienated dwellers, but that we are irreducibly both dwellers and wayfarers.”

— Erazim Kohak [vi]

“You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

— St. Augustine [vii]

Odysseus is a man trying to get home: a wayfarer trying to become a dweller. The journey is hard and painful (“Many the toils he suffered”) but it is also a process of learning—about the world and about himself. The journey “away from here” [viii] may be driven by curiosity about the undiscovered parts of world and self; or by the need to escape the confines of whatever is trying to kill you; or by the soul’s restless desire for what is not here and not yet.

The journey back is driven by a profound longing for home, the place of true belonging. That place may be where you started, experienced in a fresh way. It may be some new place that has been expecting you for years. Or it may be a place that always remains somewhere over the rainbow, endlessly luring us onward, deeper and deeper into the Mystery.

In Nolan’s film, the unbearable truth revealed by the Sirens’ song is that the hero’s aching for home is an illusion. It’s a story Odysseus tells himself, but it’s not what he really wants, deep down. The reasons for this are not explicitly developed, but after twenty years of battles and adventures, perhaps the weary war veteran fears that he can never fit himself back into his old life. Or maybe the commonplace experiences of ordinary life would feel thin and pale after the intensity of war, the adrenalin of wild seas and the wonders of magic lands. Such psychologizing wasn’t really Homer’s thing, but the original poem does suggest, at its midway point in Book 11, that Odysseus will never be a dweller who can stay put.

When the hero crosses the boundary between the living and the dead to converse with the ghosts of Hades, the prophet Teiresias previews the sequel to the happy homecoming. Sometime after the Suitors are slain, Odysseus will leave home again, though not by sea. He will carry with him an oar, symbol of his past wanderings, until he meets people who have never seen an oar and “have no knowledge of the sea.” And there he will plant the oar in the ground as a sign, and, presumably, relate his unsettling tales of a restless life on a restless ocean to landlocked farmers accustomed to solid ground.

In Dante’s Commedia, the brilliant Christian spinoff of the Odyssey, Ulysses (the Roman name for Homer’s wanderer) can’t stay home either.

‘not fondness for my son, nor reverence
for my aged father, nor Penelope’s claim

to the joys of love, could drive out of my mind
the lust to experience the far-flung world
and the failings and felicities of humankind. [ix]

Taking a small crew, Ulysses sails beyond the edge of the known world, catching a brief glimpse of Purgatory’s holy mountain before his ship is sunk by a fierce whirlwind from “that unknown land.” Then, as his soul in hell would later describe his last moment to Dante, “the sea closed over us and the light was gone.” [x]

Dante identified with Ulysses in that his own daring poem presumed to go “where no one has gone before,”[xi] and he worried about the perils of his own immense journey as well as the risk of excessive pride in his poetic powers. He even warns his readers, who follow “in your little skiffs the wake of my great ship that sails and sings,” to “turn back and make your way to your own coast. Do not commit yourselves to the main deep …” [xii]

The Barque of Dante, Eugène Delacroix (1882).

In Dante’s version of the hero’s fate, the crucial difference between the tragic “folly” of Ulysses’ last voyage and his own poetic trespass into divine territory was grace. Not for him the reckless, self-willed hubris of the hero’s quest, but the humility to be guided by the love and wisdom of “Another.” And while both Dante and the Greek wanderer embodied homo viator—the being who journeys—as the human condition, Odysseus’ goal was an Ithaka which, in the Commedia’s universe, could never quite satisfy. Dante, on the other hand, journeyed toward the place where every goal converges, every hunger is satisfied, and history comes home to stay.

XENIA

Xenia, the Greek term for welcoming the stranger, is a recurring theme in the Odyssey. It comes from xenos, which can mean either (or both) stranger and guest. In Nolan’s film, it’s called “Zeus’ Law,” making explicit the hospitality code as a divine command: the way things ought to be if the world is to work as intended. Ignore the way of the universe at your peril.

In the unsettled Homeric world of migration and societal dislocation, life was precarious if you were on the move. Wanderers and beggars were dependent on the kindness of strangers. The hospitality code was a social safety net. And in cultures plagued with tribalism and violence, xenia provided a measure of stability. You could knock on any door without fearing ill treatment, even if you were “other.” At a minimum, the guest could say, “Thank you for not killing me.” In the best case, the host provided a bath, a banquet and a bed. In return, appropriate decorum was required of the guest.

That was the ideal, and it is echoed in biblical tradition as well. “The alien who resides among you shall be treated like the native-born. You shall love the alien as yourself, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2). “Do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

However, in Homer’s epics, xenia is frequently violated by both hosts and guests, with disastrous results. Menelaus’ guest steals his beautiful wife Helen, triggering the Trojan War. Polyphêmos the Cyclops eats the guests who have barged into his cave, and is blinded in return. Odysseus’ crew slaughter the sun god’s protected cattle, only to end up swimming with the fishes. Penelope’s Suitors drain her larder with ceaseless feasting, overstaying their welcome. When Odysseus finally gets home, he kills them all. So it goes.

The breakdown of xenia’s courtesies and protections is a key theme of Nolan’s retelling, which can be applauded as an indictment of our present-day fear of strangers, hostility toward migrants, and belligerence toward people and nations who feel alien to us.

Blind Polyphêmos guards the entrance to his cave (1806 engraving for Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey, after a painting by Henry Fuseli. Both host and guests suffer from their violation of “Zeus’ Law.”

In the United States, where we like to think of ourselves as innocent and kind, aid to desperate people at home and abroad is being slashed; migrants who manage to survive their arrest are being crammed into concentration camps; empathy and compassion are denounced by the right as weaknesses undermining civilization; and the trust-based norms of the global order, fashioned after World War II, are being shredded by a lawless and murderous tyrant. A chief White House official has boasted about these things out loud:

“We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” [xiii]

Homer’s epics describe a world in many ways incomprehensible to us today. But the disastrous consequences of violating xenia’s divine ordinance translates easily into modern reality. As W. H. Auden warned in a poem written at the start of the Second World War:

We must love one another or die.

WAR AND VIOLENCE

“[A]ny pleasure or solace [the Homeric epics] present is tainted by the horrors they depict. Extricating pure, untainted cultural and aesthetic or ethical value from Homer is an impossible task.”

— James I. Porter [xiv]

“[Nolan’s] film asks us both to be horrified at war and to celebrate the action-movie sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally gets his hands on his bow and the blood starts flowing.”

— Emily Wilson [xv]

The bloodiness of Homer’s epics has always posed a problem. “Unfortunately,” said classicist C. G. Heyne in 1801, “the main subject of epic poetry is war and murder.” [xvi] The Odyssey text is certainly graphically clear about war being “destructive,” “deadly,” “dreadful,” and “abominable.” Homer is not pro-war. But neither is he anti-war. He simply reports what he sees. And in his world, violence is one of the things that happens. And it happens a lot. Simone Weil’s remarks on the Iliad apply equally to the Odyssey’s violence:

“The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised; neither victors nor vanquished are admired, scorned, or hated … Those comparisons which liken them to beasts or things can inspire neither admiration nor contempt, but only regret that men are capable of being so transformed.” [xvii]   

The beauty of Homer’s writing has enabled centuries of readers to help digest the violence. As Nietzsche put it, the poetry “casts a spell over even the most terrifying things before our very eyes.” [xviii] In Nolan’s film, the technological dazzle of big-screen spectacle does the same. But the trauma and regret that violence produces is also reported. In the poem, veterans of the Trojan War weep copiously when they think of it. And the film makes regret a major theme with its depiction of Odysseus’s “anguish” as PTSD.

Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus and Kalypso (1882).
With eyes gazing homeward, Odysseus is longing to resume his journey.

The film hero’s long sojourn on Kalypso’s island becomes a therapeutic retreat, a seven-year blank in his story, empty of incident. In this idyllic place somewhere outside the flow of time and story, the goddess encourages him to forget his past, at the risk of forgetting his future as well. But it can’t last. An Odysseus free of trouble and longing is not Odysseus. At the insistence of the gods, his journey will eventually resume.

Meanwhile, what about the audience’s PTSD? What does all the screen violence do to us? Does it strengthen our resolve to live in peace, to resist the gods of war? The relationship between aesthetics and morality is very tricky, but in a warring age like our own, how can we represent the evil of violence without celebrating its energy? How can we refrain from rooting for one side to annihilate the other?

In Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), set in the Pacific theater of World War II, American troops are assaulting a Japanese stronghold. But the camera has no favorites. It watches, if you will, with the unblinking eyes of God as mortals kill one another. And what those eyes see is not victory or defeat, but the terrible sadness of mortal violence. The battle sounds—gunfire, explosions, screams—are suppressed, heard only faintly beneath a flowing melancholy score (Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”) that enables us to reflect on the suffering without cheering for a particular outcome. Divine compassion feels more real than human folly. Amid the swirl of action, the camera pauses to notice the lovely light filtered through palm leaves, or the surprised stare of a dead soldier’s face. And we hear these words in a contemplative voice-over by a soldier who is something of a Christ figure in the film:

This great evil, where does it come from? … How does it still enter the world? … What seed, what root did it grow from? … Who’s doing this, who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might have known? … Does our ruin benefit the earth? … Is this darkness in you too?” [xix]

THE ENDING

Odysseus on the sea (3rd century Roman mosaic).

Come, my friends, 
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

Homer’s Odyssey ends with the hero arriving home at last. After disposing of the Suitors and reclaiming his throne, he tends to neglected relationships with his wife, son and father, and begins to repair the disarray of his kingdom after twenty years of anarchy and strife. The wanderer is home to stay, exchanging the endless transitory episodes of the wanderer for the long-term commitments of dwelling in one place and living one particular life.

Nolan’s film invents a different ending. Instead of the return home completing the hero’s journey through reintegration into communal life, there is a new departure. Instead of doing the work of dwelling, Odysseus, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, is “away from here” yet again. Although he mutters something about tracking down the bodies of his dead comrades to give them proper burials, that impractical project seems just an excuse to keep wandering. The epic’s ancient pattern is thus betrayed by a romantic Hollywood ending: Odysseus and Penelope sail into the sunset to live happily ever after. Homer would demand his money back.

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

Joseph Wright of Derby, Penelope Unraveling Her Web (1783-84).
Odysseus’ wife deceives her Suitors by unraveling her weaving each night,
while the memory of her absent husband hovers in the shadows.

“And so this work, famous for its exciting narrative of the hero’s adventures in exotic worlds and among strange creatures, is in fact preoccupied above all with the business of being a human being—an identity that turns out to be defined by relationships: between hosts and guests, strangers and intimates, foreigners and countrymen, mortals and immortals; between the idealized past and the troubled present, the dead and the living; between men and women, spouses and lovers, parents and children; relationships, finally, among the myriad and sometimes contradictory elements of our own natures.” (Daniel Mendelsohn) [xx]

After seeing Nolan’s film, I refreshed my palate with Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), a modern reworking of the Odyssey by Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, whose movies are suffused with a mythical sensibility and populated by questing wanderers. The story follows a Greek-American director (Harvey Keitel) as he wanders the Balkans in search of three cans of undeveloped film shot by the first Greek filmmakers, the Manakia brothers, in 1895—the year cinema was born. During a century of regional conflicts, the film had passed through various hands, from country to country, and Keitel’s unnamed character (called “A” in the script) is trying to find where it ended up.

“A” (Harvey Keitel) is a modern Odysseus on a difficult journey in Theo Angelopoulis’ Ulysses’ Gaze.

For “A”, the undeveloped film mattered because it held light captured in the primal past of cinema’s creation—“a lost gaze,” he calls it, “a lost innocence.” Like starlight traveling through time to reach the human eye, this film had traveled in darkness for a hundred years, waiting to be seen for the very first time. It wasn’t just original cinema inside those three cans. It was something even more precious, like a shard of light from Eden’s first day, not yet muddied by history.

After many Odyssean adventures, “A” locates the cans in a Sarajevo film lab during the Bosnian war. The lab is badly battered from shells and bombs, but “A” manages to get the film developed. As he views the film in the lab’s ruined cinematheque, we ourselves do not see what is being projected. We only see “A” in the act of watching, and when the film runs out, he recites a Homeric speech, as if he has become Odysseus addressing Penelope:

“When I return, it will be with another man’s clothes, another man’s name. My coming will be unexpected. If you look at me unbelieving, and say, You are not he, I will show you signs, and you will believe me … I will tell you about the journey, all night long. And in all the nights to come, between one embrace and the next, between lovers’ calls, the whole human story. The story that never ends.” [xxi]   

Angelopoulos originally planned to show us what “A” saw—the developed footage that turned out to be (in this fictional story) the very first cinematic image of Homer’s Odyssey. Using the original motion picture camera constructed by the Lumière brothers in 1895, Angelopoulos filmed a shipwrecked Odysseus staggering out of the sea to walk toward the camera. He stops in front of the lens, staring into it: Odysseus gazing at us from the distant past. The lost gaze, visible at last.

But Angelopoulos then decided not to use this shot in his movie. “For me,” he said, “the purpose of his search is the discovery of himself … It doesn’t matter what is on the film … The journey leading to its discovery in Sarajevo today, this is the important thing.” [xxii]  His compelling image of Odysseus did not remain a lost gaze, however; in the same year as Ulysses’ Gaze, it was included in a compilation of one-minute films made by 41 different filmmakers to honor the 100th anniversary of the first movie. [xxiii]

Odysseus (from the unused shot in Theo Angelopoulis’ Ulysses’ Gaze.)

What I see in this wanderer’s gaze, captured by an 1895 camera in 1995, is the same thing I find in the Homeric texts: strange and haunting figures from a vanished past, asking us questions that leap the centuries:

What have you learned from our story?
How fares your own odyssey?
Is it leading you to your heart’s desire?

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For further reading on the subject of Homer and war, see my 2022 post, “We must love one another or die”—What Does the Iliad Tell Us about the Invasion of Ukraine?

[i] Emily Wilson, “An Uncomplicated Man,” London Review of Books, August 13, 2026.

[ii] Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, 1987), 43.

[iii] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017): Book 1.1-3.

[iv] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Daniel Mendelsohn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2025), 4.

[v] Ibid., 36.

[vi] Erazim Kohak, “Of Dwelling and Wayfaring: The Quest for Metaphors,” in The Longing for Home, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 36.

[vii] St. Augustine, from his prayer that begins his Confessions.

[viii] Phrase from a Kafka parable about a journey “away from here” which is so immense that one can take enough supplies to survive its length. You must find what you need along the way, or die.

[ix] Dante Alighieri, Inferno xxvi.89-93, trans. John Ciardi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970).

[x] Ibid., line 131.

[xi] From the introduction to Star Trek, one of many spinoffs of Homer’s Odyssey.

[xii] Dante, Paradiso ii.2-5, trans. John Ciardi.

[xiii] Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, in a January 2026 interview on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper.

[xiv] James I. Porter, Homer: The Very Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 194.

[xv] Emily Wilson, LRB review of the Odyssey film.

[xvi] C. G. Heyne (1801), quoted in Porter, 178.

[xvii] Simone Weil, The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force (1939), quoted in Porter, 213.

[xviii] Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Porter, 211.

[xix] Terrence Malick adapted his screenplay from James Jones’ 1962 novel, The Thin Red Line.

[xx] Mendelsohn, 38.

[xxi] Dialogue from Ulysses’ Gaze, quoted in Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 196.

[xxii] Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, ed. Dan Fainaru (Jackson MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 98.

[xxiii] Lumière and Company (1995).

Down River: In Search of David Ackles

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I’ve been traveling
Gone a long, long time
Don’t know what I’ll find
Scared of what I’d find
I just can’t
Just can’t walk down this road

— “Road to Cairo” (Track 1 of David Ackles’ first record)

May I write you from time to time
A picture postcard from the five and dime?
Nothing fancy, just a simple line:
‘I miss you.’

— “Postcards” (Last track of Ackles’ last record)

David Ackles was one of the most gifted and original songwriters of the last century, but relatively few know his work today. Coming of age when the American songbook was being reshaped by the fresh subject matter and unusual song structures of artists ranging from Randy Newman and Brian Wilson to Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro, Ackles didn’t really fit the accustomed categories. Some said “folk,” some said “pop.”  One critic called his music “religiously-oriented Jazz.” A British reviewer thought “he looks like a gentler, smoother Bob Dylan, with a piano instead of a guitar, … but his smoky voice and sad, bitter songs of life and love belong to the longer tradition of French chanson.” The Chicago Tribune praised Ackles’ repertoire as “Edgar Lee Masters poems set to music … by Charles Ives.” And the Village Voice was equally dazzled:

“I heard everything from Jelly Roll Morton to Kurt Weill and Charles Ives in his piano—polytonalities, freaky counterpoint, multi-rhythms and all sorts of other ‘technical’ things that make his music fascinating … He writes the kind of stuff … that owes more to the poetry of Brecht than to the usual pop influences.” [i]

Ackles’ eponymous first album in 1968 made a strong impression on rising British artists Elton John, Bernie Taupin, Phil Collins and Elvis Costello. In the U.S., Elektra Records, the hippest label in L.A. (Love, The Doors, Tim Buckley), signed him up, promoting him heavily despite disappointing early sales. As music historian Mark Brend notes, “[Elektra executives Jac Holzman and David Anderle] saw something special in Ackles and his strange songs. Songs of originality and daring, and yet songs, too, that you could have just about imagined then as hits. Songs that almost were hits, in some cases.” [ii]

The photograph for Ackles’ third album cover was taken by Michael Ross at the English country house on the Thames where David retreated to arrange the songs in a peaceful setting, far from the pressures of Los Angeles.

Released on the Fourth of July in 1972, Ackles’ next album, American Gothic, produced by Bernie Taupin and meticulously arranged by the composer, received ecstatic reviews:

“I never really thought that anyone could ever come along and make another album that would be as important—and for the same reasons that Sgt. Pepper was … but someone has. His name is David Ackles, and the album (his third) is called American Gothic.” [iii]

 “With American Gothic David Ackles has pulled together the best elements of American pop music—jazz, ‘serious composers,’ the musical theater and film music, and combined them with exquisite taste … The best album of the year? Undoubtedly. The best of the decade? Probably.” [iv]

In the London Sunday Times, Derek Jewell noticed a pantheon of influences in Ackles’ album: Gershwin, Ellington, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Bernstein, Elvis Presley, Burl Ives, Aaron Copland, and Benjamin Britten:

“It’s a masterpiece. Its achievement is comparable with Sgt. Pepper … Never has popular music sounded more dramatic … The beauty, surprise and sheer perfection of his songs will confound you.” [v]

But when sales of American Gothic proved tepid, Elektra dropped their brilliant protégé. Proclaimed a genius early in 1972, by year’s end he was “trailing around inappropriate small venues, playing out-of-tune pianos to dwindling audiences, wondering if he’d ever make another record.” [vi] In 1973, he managed, on a pittance from Columbia Records, to make one more album: Five & Dime—“a smaller, warmer, even happier record” than its predecessors. [vii] It quickly disappeared, and Columbia dropped him in early 1974. David Ackles vanished from the public eye, and never made another recording.

Why did such brilliance not have the impact it deserved? Should Ackles’ failure to “make it” as a pop icon be the principal theme of a life that was in so many ways full of grace? And what is it about his music that demands our attention and respect today? In Down River: In Search of David Ackles (London: Jawbone Press, 2025), writer/musician Mark Brend explores these questions in depth. And if you want a detailed account of the sessions that produced each album, Brend’s research, including interviews with the musicians, is fascinating and thorough.

Ackles’ American debut was in 1968 at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an intimate club venue which was part of the Episcopal Church’s campus ministry. He was appreciated in that university setting not only for the quality and intellect of his songs, but also for their spiritual themes of struggle, search and the workings of grace. Ackles was a committed Christian who looked honestly and compassionately at the brokenness of the world, and even his bleakest songs had cracks to let the light through.  

When David returned to Canterbury House in February 1970, I myself was one of the campus ministers, fresh out of seminary, collecting the $2 tickets at the door and pouring free coffee and cider for the audience. David’s performance made a deep impression on me, and seven months later he kindly agreed to sing a couple of his songs at my ordination to the priesthood in Los Angeles. [viii]

David Ackles singing for the author’s ordination at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills,
September 17, 1970 (Photo by Marilyn Robertson).

A month before my ordination, David had been the opening act for Elton John’s first performance in America, which I have written about in A Night at the Troubadour: Discovering David Ackles (and Elton John). His musical future seemed so bright on that magical summer evening in a club packed with the elite of West Coast music.

But David’s uniqueness would prove too challenging for a wider public. As Brend observes, “The further Ackles went on his journey, the harder it became to relate him to anyone else and fit him into what was happening.” [ix]

His music was often too complex to be catchy, and the breadth of his themes taxed the attention of many. Although he wrote some gorgeous love songs, he was more storyteller than balladeer, and many of his tales were replete with regret and loss. But as the New York Times noted after seeing him at Greenwich Village’s The Bitter End in 1969, “His habit of singing these [sad] songs through the smile of a very intense cherub is quite effective.” [x]  

Some of his songs verge on the apocalyptic—a mining disaster (“Aberfan”), political turbulence (“Ballad of the Ship of State”), environmental disaster (“Oh, California!”), and society’s descent into collective madness (“Inmates of the Institution”). Brend describes the latter as a chaos of “lurching tempo changes, discords, scurrying piano, declamatory singing, mirthlessly jaunty melodic choruses, abrupt stops,” with arranger Fred Myrow leading the charge “like Bernard Herrmann conducting a Las Vegas showband in a nightmare.” [xi]

Cover for Ackles’ first album. The noirish design was by William S. Harvey, who had created an equally brooding cover for The Doors’ first album. Photo by Joel Brodsky.

“Why did Ackles, who was by most accounts optimistic and cheerful, populate his albums with sorrowful tales of the lost and the lonely? People on the slide, ex-cons, drug addicts, drifters and divorcees, confused spiritual seekers, mourners. There’s no easy answer to that.”

— Mark Brend [xii]

One of Ackles’ most harrowing songs is on his first album. “His Name Is Andrew” recites a pilgrim’s progress from a happily innocent faith into the dark night of the soul, where the solemn chant of the vocal and the funereal pulsations of the accompaniment take us into the pit of despairing unfaith, where Andrew’s only choice is “to wait alone for this life to end.” But Ackles does not leave us there. Grace returns with the album’s final song, “Be My Friend.”

Sometimes you wake up feeling nothing but fear.
Sometimes you wonder why God put you here.
Then all at once, there comes a word—
What was that you heard?
Why someone said, from Gilead:
“Be my friend.”

This all makes David’s albums sound like hard work, and in the sense that they tend to engage the hardest things and the biggest questions, that is true. But there is also considerable wit, playfulness and warmth in his repertoire. You never doubt that he is on the side of life. And the sheer beauty of the musical arrangements delivers grace even amid the bleakest lyrics. Ackles’s recordings, in my experience, are endlessly engaging. Most reviewers of his albums—and many listeners since—have spoken of living with an Ackles album for weeks, playing it over and over. [xiii]

Publicity still for Elektra Records.

With Mark Brend’s marvelous book as a guide, you may find yourself doing the same. You can find the four albums online, or even score an original LP in a used vinyl bin. Start perhaps with “Down River” (David Ackles). After you wipe away your tears, work your way up to “Montana Song” (American Gothic), a 10-minute “elegaic widescreen tone poem” (Brend). As Bernie Taupin has said of it, “You’d have to be dead inside not to be moved.” [xiv]

David was one of the most joyful and gracious people I’ve ever met, and he didn’t harbor bitterness about his musical career. “I don’t believe anything more could have been done to make me a commercial success,” he said in 1998, a year before he died of cancer at 62. “It just wasn’t in the cards.” [xv]  His friend Douglas Graham, a screenwriter who had managed folksinger Odetta in the Sixties, summed it up as well as any:

“He wasn’t in it for stardom. He was in it for music … He probably could have compromised and gone a more popular route. But maybe not, because his music was authentic and anything else would have been inauthentic.” [xvi]  

I began this post with lyrics from the first and last songs of David’s recording career. Like every pilgrim into the unknown, the singer sets out with fear and trepidation in a disconnect from everything familiar. But in his last words, delivered from wherever he has ended up, he reaches back with a tender desire for reconnection: “May I write? … I miss you.”

Isn’t that the same narrative arc we find in the Bible, stretching from the Expulsion from Eden to the “world made new”? At the end of the road, we are gathered back into to divine community around the Tree of Life. Or as David put it so hopefully in “Family Band” (American Gothic):

And I will cherish the faith in the songs we knew then,
Till we all sing together,
Till we all sing together,
Till we sing them together again.

William S. Harvey’s more upbeat cover for the second album, Subway to the Country. Photo by Frank Bez.

[i] Reviews quoted in Mark Brend, Down River: In Search of David Ackles (London: Jawbone Press, 2025). Page numbers refer to Brend’s text: “jazz” (Albuquerque Journal, Oct. 3, 1968), p. 54; “French chanson” (Croydon Advertiser, Oct. 10, 1968), p. 62; “Edgar Lee Masters” (Chicago Tribune, Feb. 15, 1970), p. 93; “Jelly Roll Morton (Village Voice, Jan. 8, 1970), p. 93.

[ii] Ibid., 35.

[iii] Chris Van Ness (Los Angeles Free Press, May 19, 1972), quoted in Brend, p. 138.

[iv] John Weisman (Detroit Free Press, June 25, 1972). q. in Brend, p. 139.

[v] Derek Jewell (Sunday Times, June 18, 1972). q. in Brend, p. 141.

[vi] Brend, 147.

[vii] Brend, 167.

[viii] The songs performed that night at All Saints, Beverly Hills, “Be My Friend” and “Family Band,” were the same ones that would be be chosen from his recorded works for his requiem 29 years later at All Saints, Pasadena. All saints indeed!

[ix] Brend, 34.

[x] Mike Jahn (New York Times, Dec. 16, 1969), q. in Brend, p. 77.

[xi] Brend, 84. Myrow, who arranged and conducted the recordings for Ackles’s second album, was a respected composer (classical, world, and film music) whom David knew from the University of Southern California. I had the pleasure of working with Myrow as my music director for “L.A. Night,” an evening of music, spectacle and inspiration for 5000 Episcopalians at the church’s General Convention of 1985.

[xii] Brend, 67.

[xiii] The current band of Ackles devotees may be relatively small, but his fans—myself among them—are quite passionate about his work. On the Facebook page, David Ackles, the forgotten legend, people share images of old reviews, posters, master tape boxes from Elektra and other artifacts with the excitement of archaeologists discovering a rare manuscript fragment from a vanished world.

[xiv] Brend, 132.

[xv] Brend, 150. From his interview with David Ackles in 1998.

[xvi] Brend, 171. From his 2022 interview with Graham. Speaking of Odetta, she was at my table on that legendary night with Ackles and John at the Troubadour. Perhaps Graham was with her.

“They have taken away my Lord!”—The Trumpian Hijack of Jesus

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Jacopo Pontormo, The Deposition of Christ (Santa Felicita, Florence, 1528).

While my wife was studying for the priesthood in Berkeley, California, I often went for trail runs in the local hills. On one occasion, I tripped on a tree root and did a face plant. Using my hands to break my fall, I suffered minor cuts in both palms. When I returned to our apartment, I showed my bloody palms to Karen and said, “Look! I’ve got the wounds. Now all I need is the personality.”

When Donald Trump published an AI image of himself as Jesus, even his worshippers in the “Christian” right were taken aback. It was one thing to adore their dear leader as an instrument of divine will, but to equate or confuse him with Jesus Christ created some serious cognitive dissonance.

Does this look like a doctor? And who are those satanic figures in the sky?

The uproar over the preposterous image forced him to delete it from his social media, but he was typically incapable of admitting any error on his part. The blame lay with the people who misinterpreted what they saw. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better,” he claimed. “And I do make people better.” Right. I feel better already!

Of course, whatever comes out of the president’s mouth defiles him, and is rarely worth our time, except for the work of countering or limiting the damage. But this tasteless piece of kitsch does raise a question of interest to many of us: What is an authentic image of Jesus?   

Saint Veronica, Hans Memling (c. 1470/1475).
Icon of the Mandylion of Edessa (Italy?, 18th century): a copy of an ancient image.

Jesus never took a selfie, but there are interesting ancient legends about photo-like images transferred onto cloth by contact with his face. In the Christian West, the apocryphal Saint Veronica (vera icon = true icon) was said to have wiped her Savior’s face with her veil as he lugged his cross to Calvary. In the eastern version of the legend, Jesus wiped his face with a towel sometime before his Passion. The towel—later known as the Mandylion—was sent to a king as a means of his healing. In both cases, an indelible image of the Christ was left on the cloth. Whatever we may make of these legends today, they were a way of authenticating subsequent images of the Word made flesh. Iconic images of Jesus were validated by the idea that they were copies of copies of copies, traceable all the way back to his original face.

The history and evolution of Christ images is a complicated one, with many deviations from what we regard as the traditional image of a white European with long hair and a beard. Early Christian images include a young man modeled on Apollo, whose youth symbolized eternal life, and a shepherd bearing a lost lamb on his shoulders. Both were beardless. Facial hair came later, to suggest both wisdom and authority. Africans, Asians and Pacific islanders have painted Jesuses who look like them. And contemporary artists continue to explore diverse visual means to represent the confusingly “unconfused” convergence of divine and human in a single face, a mortal body.

How can the artist do justice to both the humanity and the divinity of Jesus in a single image? The iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th centuries thought we should abandon the attempt altogether. The mixture of human and divine in a single person is unrepeatable, whether in life or in art. After the Ascension took him from human sight, the eucharist was the only valid Christ image that remained on earth.

A picture of Jesus simply cannot capture the mystery of divine presence, it was argued. As a product of artistic imagination, any painted or sculpted image of Jesus would be for the iconoclast an unworthy distortion of an unrepresentable reality. “If someone makes an image of Christ,” said the Byzantine emperor Constantine V, “he has not really penetrated the depths of the dogma of the inseparable union of the two natures of Christ.” In the end, the iconoclasts lost the argument, and the production of sacred images would remain an important part of Christian devotion, theology, and imagination.

Mark Wallinger, Ecce Homo (1999).

We like to think we’ll always know Jesus when we see him. But what if he doesn’t match the image in our minds? In 1999, a life-sized figure of Jesus was displayed on a high plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Cast from the clean-shaven body of an art student, Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo (“Behold the man.”) was made of synthetic resin mixed with marble dust. The figure of Jesus, arrested and bound by the powers-that-be, was bald and beardless. Only the thorns around his head invoked traditional Jesus iconography. The rest of him was anonymously modern. In their fine book on images of Christ, Neil MacGregor and Erika Langmuir report some of the public reactions:

If that’s Jesus Christ, it’s a bloody miracle,’ a man is reported to have said … ‘You couldn’t put your faith in someone like that, he’s as weak as a kitten.’ ‘You can’t have a Christ figure like this,’ said another. ‘Where is his robe? Where is his beard? Where is his cross?’ An ice cream seller pointed out, ‘He doesn’t have long hair.’ [i]  

Movie Jesuses — Top (l-r): Jeffrey Hunter (King of Kings, 1961), Robert Powell (Jesus of Nazareth, 1977), Willem Dafoe (Last Temptation of Christ, 1987). Bottom (l-r): Enrique Irazoqui (Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964), Diogo Morgado (Son of God, 2014), Andile Kosi (Son of Man, 2006).

 I used to teach a seminary course on “Jesus and the Movies,” drawing upon 16 different Jesuses in films made between 1912 and 2014. I’d begin by showing them a short clip of each “Jesus,” and then would ask:

Which one of them is the “real” Jesus?
All of them?
Some of them?
None of them?

The students’ answers were all over the map. Some shunned Robert Powell—his eyes were too blue for a Middle eastern character—while embracing the first Jewish actor in the genre (Irazoqui). Many loved the first African Jesus (Kosi) while rejecting teen idol Jeffrey Hunter as too “Hollywood.” Some found the Swedish accent of Max von Sydow (not pictured) and the New York accent of Willem Dafoe too jarring.

As the course progressed with dozens and dozens of scenes from Nativity to Resurrection, some of these objections faded away, as each film and each actor—at least in certain scenes—showed my students fresh dimensions of the Word made flesh. It’s the same process of recognition and illumination we go through when looking at a painting of Jesus. However, while we understand and accept the artificiality of a painted canvas, we tend to ascribe realism to the film image, at least in the course of watching it. We expect a film to match our ideas of what things look like, including Jesus.

Ironically, those ideas have themselves been shaped not by historical fact—the Bible offers few visual descriptions in its narratives—but by the imaginations of artists over the centuries. The films themselves owe a great deal to religious art. Pasolini, the first Jesus movie director to use unglamorous non-actors, said that “painting is the major element in the Christological tradition.” Of course, how could anyone live in Italy and not think that!

In any case, a visual representation of Jesus can engage you—sometimes profoundly—with the story of God among us, producing an immersive encounter that may change your life. It might even, in the case of Jesus icons which simply gaze back at you instead of showing a gospel narrative, become an authentic experience of real presence. And if you don’t meet Jesus in a particular image, be it a painting, a sculpture, or a film, you still come away thinking about him. Even to say “that’s not Jesus!” is a Christological statement.

Whether in painting, sculpture, or cinema, no image can be Veronica’s veil or the Mandylion. No image—even if it were a first-century photograph of the man himself—can claim to depict the real Jesus. That would be idolatry. It would also make the mistake of seeking the living among the dead. The risen and living Christ doesn’t come to us out of the past as a memory of what was, but out of the future. The first disciples—Jesus’ closest friends—had trouble seeing the person they remembered when the risen Christ first appeared to them. There was something different about him. Recognition required something more than a familiar face—a tender voice speaking their name, the breaking of the bread in Emmaus, a strange warming of the heart—before they could say for sure, “It’s you!”

No sane or honest person could ever find Jesus in the words or deeds of Donald Trump. But some have found echoes of the Antichrist. I don’t know about that, but pretty much everything he is and does is anti-love and anti-Jesus. And God help his enablers.

It didn’t take long for this parody to appear. As Christopher Marlowe’s Satan confessed centuries ago,
“Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”.

Images of Trump as Jesus, along with their inevitable parodies, may serve to weaken his support among the religious right. Hooray for that. But I wonder about the effect of such trivialization of the way we relate to sacred images. I fear the pollution of our visual imagination. Pope Leo’s recent criticism of cloaking despicable behavior with religious language seems applicable to images as well as actions.

“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” [ii]

Well, the visage of God-among-us has been spit upon before. And faith says that nothing we do to Jesus will make him stop loving us, or stop surprising us with the next form his appearing takes. If you want to find Jesus, don’t look among the evildoers, but among their victims. The Acts of Thomas, a third-century apocryphal gospel, makes this point perfectly when a Trumpian Satan bemoans his failure to appropriate Jesus for his own malicious designs:

“For when we thought that we could bring Jesus under our power, he turned and hurled us down into the abyss; for we did not know him, because he deceived us by his humble aspect, and by his need and his poverty.” [iii]

Jesus Wept (detail of the Raising of Lazarus, Chichester Cathedral, England, c. 1140).
We may imagine his sorrow at being so poorly represented by so-called followers.

 

 

[i] Neil MacGregor & Erika Langmuir, Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000), 115.

[ii] https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-04/pope-bamenda-woe-to-those-who-manipulate-religion-military.html

[iii] Michele Bacci, The Many Faces of Christ: Portraying the Holy in the East and West, 300 to 1300 (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 106.

Marching for a Better World: A “No Kings” video from Seattle

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Some of the people I saw along the way.

For the latest No Kings March to occur on the eve of Palm Sunday seemed to me a resonant conjunction. Both yesterday’s march and the “triumphal entry” of Jesus into Jerusalem stirred the deepest hopes of people suffering under oppressive regimes. Of course not all hopes are equal, and sometimes they turn out to be, as T. S. Eliot noted, “hope for the wrong thing.” Even if the folks shouting Hosanna in Jerusalem were mistaken about what God was up to that week, I imagine Jesus still being touched by their longing, that crazy feeling that the world might just get better. The capacity for hope is one of humanity’s finest qualities.

There is some irony, of course, in linking No Kings to a biblical event suffused in royal imagery. I’ve been singing the Palm Sunday processional, “All glory, laud, and honor to thee, Redeemer, King!” ever since I was a child. But God is no stranger to irony—manifesting divinity as a helpless child, “ruling” as a servant, and dying to give life. And a line by the late great songwriter Bob Franke neatly resolves, for me at least, any tension between democracy and religious language inherited from monarchists.

Well you kneel to the Lord and you will bless yourself;
Ain’t no need to kneel to no one else.

In a week when people of my tradition walk the Way of the Cross in ritual, song and story, we know that hope is no stranger to struggle and suffering. It’s a long and winding road to Easter, passing through Gethsemane and Golgotha. Yet it remains, as the Book of Common Prayer assures us, “none other than the way of life and peace.”

On yesterday’s march in Seattle, I shot video of what I saw, and in putting it together I was struck all over again by the recurrent note of joy. Not everyone would put it this way, of course, but for one gloriously sunny day, we were, as the South Africans sing, “marching in the light of God,” and the divine future of human flourishing made a significant incursion into the present moment. As the crowd chants in the opening of my video:

We are unstoppable!
Another world is possible.

No Kings March in Seattle (March 28, 2026)

“Remember that you are dust” — Ash Wednesday and the Winter Olympics

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Jesus Falls for the Third Time, Église Saint Laurent, Eygalières, France.

Ilia Malinin is by all accounts the best male figure skater in the world. The winner of the last two World Championships has broken new ground with his technical brilliance and exquisite artistry. He was the overwhelming favorite to win the gold medal last week at the Winter Olympics in Milan. But when he took the ice as the final skater, something went very wrong. In one of the biggest upsets in the history of the sport, Malinin grew hesitant, fell twice, and never regained the timing and composure he is known for. In a disastrous and heartbreaking four minutes, he tumbled from first to eighth.

In a post-race interview, Malinin said that “going into this competition, I felt really good this whole day. Feeling really solid. I just thought that all I needed to do was trust the process that I’ve always been doing.” But “the pressure and the nerves” hit hard. “So it was really just something that overwhelmed me and I just felt like I had no control.”

As the stunned spectators began to file out, the arena DJ put Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” on the loudspeakers.

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning, I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemy’s eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing

Now the old king is dead, long live the king
One minute, I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

That may have been a harsh choice for that particular moment, but it echoed the truthful reminder spoken to us every Ash Wednesday:

Remember that you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.

The coincidence of Olympian failure and Ash Wednesday has happened before, and I believe that the falls touch us more deeply than the triumphs, summoning us to self-compassion in the dust and ashes of our own defeats. So in the light of this Olympics’ unfortunate example, I offer here the Ash Wednesday reflection I first posted ten years ago:

In the 1988 Winter Olympics, American speed skater Dan Jansen, the best in the world, was the consensus pick to win the 500 and 1000 meter events. On the morning of the 500 final, he learned his sister had just died from leukemia. With his focus clearly elsewhere, he fell on the first turn of his race and never finished. He would also fall and fail in the 1000 meters. At the 1992 Olympics, he again failed to win the medals expected of him. The 1994 Olympics offered him one last chance, and he came to the line of the 500 meter race as the clear favorite, the only skater ever to break 36 seconds, which he had done four times. But after one slight slip on the ice, he finished out of the medals yet again.

Ash Wednesday came just after that race, and during the liturgy I reflected on Jansen’s story in my homily. Although Jansen would finally win a gold medal a few days later (in the one race where he was an underdog), it was his “failures” that resonated with people. After the liturgy, a therapist in the congregation told me that many of her clients that week had talked with her about Jansen’s story, and how much it moved them. If the world’s greatest skater could fall, then maybe it was all right for them to fall as well. You don’t have to be a hero, only your own flawed and unfinished self.

In his youth, the poet David Whyte was hiking in the Himalayas when he came to a deep chasm. The only way across was a rickety old rope bridge with many missing slats. Although he was a confident, experienced mountaineer, he suddenly froze at the prospect of traversing the abyss on so treacherous a path. He sat down on the ground and stared at the bridge for hours, unable to proceed. “There are times when the hero has to sit down,” he said later. “At some bridges in life the part of you that always gets it done has to sit down.” Then an old Tibetan woman came along, gathering yak dung for fuel. She walked with a limp. “Namaste,” she said with a smile. Then she turned and limped across the bridge. Immediately, without thinking, he rose up and followed. Sometimes, he realized, it is “the old interior angel,” the unheroic, limping, unequipped part of ourselves, that gets us to the other side.

Remember that you are dust, and no hero. Whether your Lent will be a time of giving up, going deep, or reaching out, may it always be done with a generous measure of self-compassion.

Stories That Save Us: Performing Scripture as an Act of Resistance

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Biblical stories can be retold in many ways with a variety of media. This is part of The Prodigal Son parable in an elaborate and moving installation by Alexander Sokurov at the Venice Biennale in 2019. (Photo by the author)

This is the third in a series of posts responding to the alarming events in Minneapolis. It may be the most arcane, of interest only to worship planners and storytellers. I usually try to write posts of more general interest, but my long experience as a liturgical creative and biblical storyteller impels me to set this down, for what it’s worth, as a small personal contribution to the ongoing efforts of the faithful to resist public malice and hold fast to the good with all the means at our disposal.

In evil times such as these, how can churches be faithful to the Baptismal Covenant to “persevere in resisting evil … seek and serve Christ in all persons … strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being”? In recent weeks, we have seen many clergy and laity adding their voices and bodies to the resistance against tyranny and cruelty in Minneapolis, and to the increasingly dangerous work of loving our neighbor and protecting the vulnerable.

As a longtime liturgist, I find myself wondering how—and to what degree—our worship gatherings, in addition to our witness in the public square, might themselves be responsive to what is happening around us—and inside us—during America’s current authoritarian nightmare. Prayer and preaching are two vital ways, and I have given some striking examples in my two previous posts, White House Brutality (prayer as a “refusal to consent to an unredeemed world … It breaks the silence, awakens the passive, and cultivates action, both human and divine.”) and Murder in Minneapolis (featuring one priest’s prophetic sermon, forged in the crucible of tyranny and protest).

Singing is also a powerful weapon against evil and its sad progeny—discouragement, fear and despair. It’s been said that the Civil Rights movement succeeded in part because it had a great soundtrack. Its stirring adaptations of black spirituals, sung not only in the marches but also in the jails, kept voices high and spirits strong. As they say, the people united will never be defeated. And nothing unites like communal singing. The resistance to American fascism is taking this to heart as collective song becomes once again a vital part of public protests.

Prayer, preaching and singing are all powerful ways to say yes to God and no to evil. And to that list I would add the telling of our sacred stories. Creative engagement with Scripture deserves equal attention as a means to lift up our hearts and shine the light of hope against the darkness.  Week after week, year after year, Christians tell formative stories of sin and redemption, strife and reconciliation, despair and hope, losing and finding, oppression and liberation, death and resurrection. Then the preacher strives to connect those biblical stories with our own lives and times. But what if we were to make those connections not just in our homiletic reflections following the stories, but in the storytelling act itself?

As a young priest in Los Angeles during the Vietnam War, I staged a dramatized version of Jesus’ parable of the Unforgiving Debtor for an experimental eucharist. The man whose debt was very small was a draft resister, thrown into prison by an angry creditor dressed as Uncle Sam. That creditor was then reminded of the immensity of his own debt, illustrated by projected images of the atrocious violence in Southeast Asia.

Such a pointed retelling of Scripture might be too edgy for typical Sunday worship, but there are times when biblical stories really want to be heard in fresh and compelling ways. Holy Week 2026 can be a great opportunity to do that. How might worship planners think creatively about the Paschal journey from death to life in the context of our current experience of state-sponsored hate and violence?

The next No Kings march is scheduled for March 28, the day before Palm Sunday. How will it feel to reenact Jesus’ provocative entry into Jerusalem after millions of us will have shouted our own hopeful hosannas in the streets of America? What will be in our hearts on Maundy Thursday when our beautiful feast of loving one another concludes with the arrest our Lord by armed thugs? And when we come to the foot of the cross, will we see the God who not only shares our present suffering but also transforms it, making a Way where there is no way?

I love the traditional Scriptural texts for the Holy Week rites which take us on the Paschal journey from death into life. As containers for all the thoughts and feelings we bring to that journey, especially in times of immense public distress, they need no inventive retelling. They will be heard in fresh ways simply by virtue of what is in our minds and in our hearts throughout Holy Week 2026.

But when the sun goes down on Holy Saturday, and the Great Vigil of Easter begins to transport us from the world of sin and death into the realm of light and life, the world of the past is gone, and it is time to let imagination flourish, that we may find our own struggles and hopes vividly enacted in the performance of biblical narratives.

At the Easter Vigil, which I take to be the molten core of Christian worship, it is critical to experience those stories as if they are happening to us. We need to feel ourselves delivered from the flood of chaos and liberated from bondage to the powers-that-be. The dry bones of our damaged hopes need to rise again and inhale the breath of the Spirit. As the ancient Exultet chant declares at the outset of the liturgy,

How holy is this night, when wickedness is put to flight, and sin is washed away. It restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to those who mourn. It casts out pride and hatred, and brings peace and concord.

What does it take to do the Vigil stories justice? Well, it takes time and effort, a creative team, prayerful engagement with the stories, and openness to the Holy Spirit. Before offering a few tips for your own Vigil storytelling, let me give some examples from a Vigil I curated last year, as described in my April 2025 blog post, “For God so loved our stories”—Tales from the Easter Vigil:

The author as one of the dancers in the Red Sea story at the Easter Vigil 2025.

The Red Sea: Noirish projected images (from Bela Tarr’s bleak film, Werckmeister Harmonies) show anonymous figures shuffling through an imprisoning corridor, while dancers on the stage express the experience of oppression with their bodies. An offstage narrator explains:

Three thousand years ago, in the land of Egypt,
there were people who had no name.
They were the faceless many,
exploited by the powerful,
forgotten by the privileged: slaves, immigrants, the poor,
the homeless, the vulnerable, the invisible, the outcast.

Then dismissive terms for the oppressed appear on the screen in stark animated graphics: Not like us … worthless … horrible people … trash … less than human. More images of “the faceless many” are shown as the dancers continue, until an offstage choir sings a verse of “Go down, Moses.”

Suddenly, the divine breaks into this dark world: the screen flashes red, and we see the words from Psalm 68 that are always used in Orthodox Paschal liturgies:

Let God arise!
Let the foes of Love be scattered!
Let the friends of justice be joyful!

Then a song from the Civil Rights movement fills the room: “They say that freedom is a constant struggle … Oh Lord, we’ve struggled so long, we must be free.” The dancers’ bodies shift from oppression to liberation, while the screen shows powerful footage of crowds on the march for justice. As we hear a dub track with a repeated phrase by Martin Luther King, Jr.(“We cannot walk alone!”), the dancers begin their own march across the stage to the “Red Sea,” where they halt while the narrator declares:

This too is a creation story:
On this day, God brought a new people into existence.
On this day, God became known as the One who delivers the oppressed,
the One who remembers the forgotten and saves the lost ,
the One who opens the Way through the Sea of Impossibility,
leading us beyond the chaos and the darkness into the Light.
When the world says No, the power of God is YES!

As the dancers, joined by a small crowd of others, begin to cross the Sea, the choir (offstage) sings Pepper Choplin’s moving anthem, “We are not alone, God is with us …” After the song, a bidding to prayer begins:

Pray now for the conscience and courage
to renounce our own complicity
in the workings of violence, privilege and oppression.
Pray in solidarity with all who are despised, rejected,
exploited, abused, and oppressed.
Pray for the day of liberation and salvation.

The Fiery Furnace: This story from the Book of Daniel is borrowed from the Orthodox lectionary for the Paschal Vigil, and its humor (yes, the Bible can be funny) provides some comic relief after the Red Sea. The story’s mischievous mockery of a vain and cruel king, outwitted in the end by divine intention, feels quite timely. The idol shown on the screen is a golden iPhone, which will be destroyed by a cartoon explosion from Looney Tunes. The humorously tedious repetition of the instruments signaling everyone to bow is performed with the following (admittedly unbiblical) instruments: bodhran, bicycle horn, slide whistle, chimes, train whistle, and Chinese wind gong. The Song of the three “young men” in the furnace is recited by three women in an abbreviated rap version. At the end, the cast of twelve exit happily, singing the old Shape Note chorus, “Babylon is fallen, to rise no more!”

Then we give thanks “for the saints who refuse to bow down to the illusions and idolatries of this world” and pray for “the grace and courage to follow their example, resisting every evil, and entrusting our lives wholeheartedly to the Love who loves us.”

Valley of Dry Bones: Unlike the embellished retellings of the other stories, this one sticks closely to the biblical text, but is delivered in a storytelling mode by a single teller (me) in a spooky atmosphere of dim blue light. The voice of God is a college student on a high ladder. The sound of the bones joining together is made by an Indonesian unklung (8 bamboo rattles tuned to different pitches). When the story describes the breath coming into the lifeless figures sprawled across the valley, I get everyone in the assembly to inhale and exhale audibly a few times so that we can feel and hear the spirit-breath entering all of us. Then I move among them, bidding one after another to rise until everyone is standing, completing the story with their own bodies: the risen assembly itself becomes a visible sign of hope reborn.

Easter Vigil 2025 at St. Barnabas, Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Many churches don’t do the Easter Vigil, and of those that do, all too few give it proper attention as the richest and most luminous liturgy of the entire year. It requires a lot of preparation, effort and energy at the end of a very labor-intensive week. It also involves a long-term project of educating a congregation to understand the Vigil as the preeminent Easter rite.

You can celebrate the Resurrection gloriously on Sunday morning, but if you want to experience Resurrection in a kind of Christian dreamtime, come to the Vigil as well. And if you are in a community which already knows the unique power of the Vigil experience, I encourage you to explore the potential of its stories to empower our bodies and restore our souls in this dark and dangerous age.

If you are not part of a community that does the Easter Vigil, I thank you for reading this far anyway. But if you are in a position to shape a creative Vigil, here are some suggestions to get you started.

You may want to begin with just one or two stories. Find the creatives in your community and form a team to study the texts and discern what they are trying to say now. And think about the connections they make with our lives and our society. For example, footage from the Minneapolis protests could be part of the Red Sea saga, or the king’s ruffians throwing their victims into the fiery furnace could be dressed like ICE agents.

Decide for each story whether to use simple storytelling (one or more voices, scripted or retelling freely) or more theatrical means (scripts, actors, visual design, visual media, singing, musical score, sound effects, etc.). Think about ways to involve children (e.g., animals on the ark, or part of the Red Sea march to freedom) and even the whole assembly, through singing or collective reading, like a Greek chorus, of projected words on a screen. Involving as many people as possible in creating and performing the stories bolsters both attendance and enthusiasm. Play with ideas, images and words until the stories take shape. Then provide sufficient time for learning lines and rehearsals.

Ideally, the Story Space will be separate from the worship space. A parish hall is usually more flexible than a church interior in terms of seating and a stage area. If there is a screen or a large white wall, large images can be projected. Strings of party lights on a dimmer and LED spotlights with variable colors are easy ways to restrict light to the stage area and establish the mood for each story. The other advantage of a separate Story Space is that a liturgy conducted in a sequence of spatial locations underscores the Vigil as a journey—from the New Fire outside to the Story Space to the font to the altar and finally back into the world.

And let each story be followed by an appropriate song (I use both folk music and contemporary songwriters to fit the relaxed spirit of “tales around the sacred campfire,” in contrast to the chant and hymnody in the church portion of the liturgy). Then comes a bidding to prayer, summarizing the themes of the particular story.

Let me close with the bidding I wrote to follow The Valley of Dry Bones. It expresses everything I want to say about the liberating power of our stories to resist evil, proclaim hope, and lift up our hearts:

Dear People of God: There are those who tell our story as a history of defeats and diminishments, a narrative of dashed hopes and inconsolable griefs. But tonight we tell a different story, a story that inhales God’s own breath and sings alleluia even at the grave. By your baptism, you have been entrusted with this story, to live out its great YES against every cry of defeat.

Psalm 68:3, one of the texts projected in the background of the Red Sea story.




Murder in Minneapolis: “It is not okay to be silent anymore”

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Minneapolis Diptych: ICE killers (anon. 2026) and Descent from the Cross (anon. 15th century)

There is no suffering which in the history of the world is not God’s suffering, no death which has not been God’s death in the history on Golgotha.

— Jürgen Moltmann

Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time.

— Blaise Pascal

It is not okay to be silent anymore.

— Jeanelle Austin

In the face of the barbaric cruelty and violence by the lawless agents of a rogue administration, the voices of resistance, justice and love are crying “No!” That cry is taking many forms, and as a Christian I am thankful that so many people of all faiths are making their voices heard and putting their bodies—and their belief—on the line. I know that many passionate voices were raised in pulpits across the land last Sunday, one day after Alex Pretti was killed by ICE. Let me share with you one particular example from St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

January 25 was the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, whose Scripture readings included Isaiah’s “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” and Jesus’ call to “Follow me.” The guest preacher was the Rev. Mike Kinman who, like many other clergy, had come from afar to join the mass protests in the Minneapolis streets. In an apostolic spirit, he told the rest of us what he had witnessed there: crucifixion, yes, but also resurrection—and the stirrings of the Spirit—in the solidarity of the people.

I encourage you to listen to Kinman’s urgent and inspired words in the 22-minute video below, and to keep the conversation going wherever you are as you continue to forge your own godly response to these harrowing times. Be yourself God’s candle in the darkness.

And don’t miss the sermon’s stunning ending, when the preacher exits the pulpit, leaving the final word to Jeanelle Austin, a theologically trained activist for racial justice in Minneapolis. She herself was not physically present. Her prophetic plea for justice, recorded a day earlier on Nicollet Avenue where Pretti died, was played through the church’s sound system.

Jeanelle Austin, Executive Director, George Floyd Global Memorial.

This sermon’s striking final image—an empty pulpit as we hear Austin’s words ring out—strikes me as a compelling analogue of divine speech: a message delivered by a human voice, but coming from a transcendent source beyond our sight—not just from Nicollet Avenue, but from the heart of the crucified God.

The Rev. Mike Kinman preaches at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in St. Paul, MN), on January 25, 2026, one day after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents.

White House Brutality: The Death of Renee Nicole Good

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“It’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” According to video allegedly taken by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, those were Renee Nicole Good’s last words, addressed directly to him, with a smile. Seconds later, Ross shot her in the face. Three times.

Ross didn’t murder her because his own life was being threatened. All the video evidence available so far contradicts that lie. Perhaps a serious investigation—if there ever is one—will uncover the details of his personal role in Renee Good’s death. But he did not act alone. The White House gave him the gun and, through its policies and its rhetoric, encouraged him to pull the trigger.

The fact that the murder of an American citizen was immediately condoned by the highest levels of government—and continues to be defended, without the slightest trace of remorse, as the right thing to have done—should be a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 moment for our country. If it isn’t, if it just further normalizes our national descent into evil and madness, then God help us.

Matteo di Giovanni, Slaughter of the Innocents (c. 1480s), Siena Cathedral.

The shocking brutality of Good’s murder is not the work of a single bad actor. It is the expression of national policy under Donald Trump, whose murderous cruelty, by his own admission, knows no bounds. As he made clear in a recent New York Times interview, he is accountable not to Congress, the courts, international law, common decency, or any other norms or considerations beyond the seething cauldron of impulse and rage going by the name of Donald Trump. His only limitation, he claims, is “my own morality, my own mind. Nothing else can stop me.”

Such malignant and dangerous narcissism invites comparison with C. S. Lewis’ chilling description of Satan:

“[He is] no longer a person of corrupted will,” but “corruption itself, to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person; but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation.” [i]

For more on the dis-ease and dis-order spawned by Trump’s furious negation, see my 2019 post, “The Worm That Gnaws the World”—Trump and the Problem of Evil.

Evil is contagious, and the toxicity level among the ruling powers has become so high that it never seems enough for Trump, or his collaborators and enablers, merely to initiate, condone and encourage acts of hatred and violence. They also have an insatiable compulsion to smear and assault their victims with absurd lies and vicious abuse.

Vice President J.D. Vance, a nominal Catholic who cares little for his church’s teachings, provides one of the most egregious examples of this shameless evacuation of human decency. He shed no tears for Renee Good, preferring to revel in making vicious and unfounded attacks. He congratulated her killer and warned the rest of us, in effect, that we too must obey or die.

Religious journalist John Grosso wrote a scathing rebuke to Vance’s despicable rhetoric in the National Catholic Reporter:

“The vice president’s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith. His repeated attempts to blame Good for her own death are fundamentally incompatible with the Gospel.” [ii]

Dominant predators devour a helpless lamb (Abbey Sainte-Marie-de-Souillac, France, 12th century).

The violence done to Renee Good in Minneapolis is part of a virulent malignancy raging throughout our body politic, in both domestic concerns and our foreign policy. In defense of Trump’s imperial fantasies about Venezuela and Greenland, a Republican congressman epitomizd our sickness when he boasted that “the U.S. is the dominant predator … in the Western hemisphere.”[iii] In other words, it is the right of the rich and powerful to devour the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable. Resistance is futile, and punishable by death.

Well, we may not be quite there yet, but every day of silence or passivity moves us closer to a fascist nightmare. It is time to take on the urgency of the biblical prophets, as in the alarm sounded long ago by Joel in a text still read in the penitential rites of Ash Wednesday:

Sound the trumpet in Zion;
    consecrate a fast;
call a solemn assembly;
gather the people.
Consecrate the congregation;
    assemble the aged;
gather the children,
    even infants at the breast.
Let the bridegroom leave his room
    and the bride her canopy.

 Between the vestibule and the altar,
    let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.
Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord.”  (Joel 2:15-17)

Visiting an Episcopal church in California this past Sunday, I heard that same urgency in the Prayers of the People. After the formally composed intercessions from the Book of Common Prayer, the priest read handwritten petitions and thanksgivings submitted that morning by the assembly. There were lists of those who sought healing, compassionate pleas for those in need, and general longings for peace and justice. But there was also a notable number of prayers addressing the current outbreak of hatred and brutality.

We pray for all those unlawfully detained by ICE … for the family of Renee Good, and for the repose of her soul … for grace and healing in our nation, … for our children and grandchildren as they see our country changing … for all citizens and immigrants … and we give thanks for brave witnesses, and for the renewal of hope that loving acts inspire.

I was particularly struck by a petition asking our prayers for certain individuals with Hispanic names, followed by “and for all those who fear us.” That simple prayer made a bridge, however slight, across the void between “us” and “them.” And for one precious moment, its explicit hope for an end to fear and the beginning of reconciliation filled the church with the sweet fragrance of possibility

Prayer is a refusal to consent to an unredeemed world, and for people of faith it is foundational for an ethical existence. What St. Paul said about love applies equally to prayer. It “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (I Cor. 13:7). It breaks the silence, awakens the passive, and cultivates action, both human and divine.

So don’t despair, or give in, or give up.
Look for the ones who are called
into the righteous flow
of prayer and action.

And join them.

[i] C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943).

[ii] John Grosso, National Catholic Reporter online, January 8, 2026: https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/ncr-voices/catholic-vice-president-vance-takes-social-media-justify-killing-renee-good

[iii] https://www.commondreams.org/news/andy-olges-greenland-predator

Meeting the World with Courage and Love on New Year’s Eve

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“[Humanity] is suspended in the present, between the past and the future, as if on a rock between two chasms. Behind and ahead, all is darkness.” — Chateaubriand

A year ago, on the eve of 2025, America and the world faced the prospect of evil times ahead. In my New Year’s Eve post of 2024, I tried to look beyond the imminent calamities to the luminous horizon of divine intention.

“The evils of the coming days will be phenomenal and accidental. Though they will hurt, they will never be quite solid or real or enduring in the way that the Love, Justice and Mercy of God are, now and forever. We shall not remain silent about the damage, or complacent about the consequences of those evils. But we must not give them the power and glory which are God’s alone.”

We all know how hard it has been to remain grounded and trusting in the carnival of cruelty and madness that was 2025. The way forward appears equally perilous. It is hard not to feel ourselves in Delacroix’s frail boat with Dante and Virgil, tossed by the turbulence of hell, struggling with outer demons and inner fears.

Eugène Delacroix, Dante and Virgil Cross the Lake of Hell (1822).

But on the eve of a New Year, I choose to dwell in a different image: Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. The hiker has risen above the fray of history to stand on a lofty summit, surveying the world before him. We can’t see his facial expression or know his inner thoughts, but his body language conveys a state of contemplative stillness. He is not contorted by fear of what is, or what may come.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817).

What is out there in the mist, hidden from his eyes and ours? If it’s the future, will it be better, or worse? Or more of the same? Whatever it may be, will we—can we—meet it with hope, courage, and love?

One of Friedrich’s contemporaries, the Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorf, said that we can, and that doing so will make a difference in the outcome.

“There is a sleeping song in all endlessly dreaming things,
and the world will begin to sing if you find the master word.”

Dear reader, in the New Year 2026 may you find that word, and make it your own.

I am so grateful for all of you who have stopped here to read and reflect in 2025, and for all the comments and sharing you do to keep the thoughts circulating. May the days to come bring you many graces and blessings. Happy New Year!

Christmas Carols: Shining Through the Gloom

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Adoration of the Christ Child, Gerrit van Honthorst (1619-20)

There within a stable, the baby drew a breath:
There began a life that put an end to death.

— Bob Franke, “Straw Against the Chill”[i]

In the dark days of 1943, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane wrote the most melancholy Christmas song I know, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” It made its debut in the 1944 film, Meet Me in St. Louis, when Judy Garland sang it to cheer up her little sister. Their father had taken a job in New York, and the world they knew was about to end. The fact that it was Christmas—their last Christmas in St. Louis—only intensified their sense of loss. As the sisters gaze down from an upstairs window at the family of moonlit snow figures in the front yard, Garland, her moistened eyes seen in gorgeous Technicolor close-ups, delivers the song.

The film’s director, Vincente Minnelli (who would marry Garland the next year), thought the original lyrics too depressing, so he told the writers to make some changes. The line, “It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past,” became “Let your heart be light / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” But that did little to stop the tears of homesick soldiers viewing the film in distant war zones. In 1957, Frank Sinatra requested another change when he included the song on his holiday album, A Jolly Christmas. He asked Hugh Martin if he could “jolly up” the lyrics a bit more. Thus “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow,” became “hang a shining star upon the highest bough.” Even so, the tune’s slow pace and moody melody have continued to suffuse the song with the seasonal melancholy which for some is the shadow side of Christmas cheer. If you’re feeling alone, sad, lost, anxious, or afraid, it’s hard to share in the holiday spirit. When your personal world—or our public world—lies in darkness, how do you “let your heart be light?”

A few centuries ago, Turlough O’Carolan, the blind harper and last of the Irish bards, was sitting in a tavern with his friend, the poet Charles McCabe, who said, “Your music, sir, is grand and lovely stuff; but it’s too light-hearted. This is a dark time we live in, Mr. Carolan, and our songs should reflect that.” The harper replied, “Tell me something, McCabe. Tell me this: Which do you think is harder—to make dark songs in the darkness, or to make brilliant ones that shine through the gloom?” [ii] 

Some of the instruments from our caroling party.

For the last half-century, I have gathered instrumentalists, singers and friends to lighten up the long night with carols and wassails from seven centuries and a dozen countries. “The Praise of Christmas” sums up the spirit of these evenings:

This time of the yeare
Is spent in good cheare;
Kind neighbors together meet
To sit by the fire
With friendly desire
Each other in love to greet;
Old grudges, forgot,
Are put in the pot,
All sorrowes aside they lay;
The old and the yong
Doth carol their song
To drive the cold winter away.

The old tune is appropriately vigorous, and the lyric by Thomas d’Urfey (1653-1723) is from his aptly titled songbook, Pills to Purge Melancholy. We do sing our share of quiet songs (“Hush! Hush! See how the child is sleeping.”), as well as wistful and mysterious carols in minor keys and medieval modes. But the predominant note is one of joy and wonder. As William Morris declared in his Victorian carol, “Masters in This Hall,”

Christmas is come in
And no folk should be sad.

Of course, no one should, but many are. Even in the best of times, there’s going to be some sadness in the room. As Henry Nouwen said, “No one escapes being wounded.” So we don’t sing our carols expecting present reality to be suddenly freed from every sorrow. But singing touches and heals the mind and heart, offering relief and comfort to “those who sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79). As Robert Burton insisted in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), music is “the sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy … a “tonick to the saddened soul.” And W.E.B. DuBois, writing in the last century about “The Sorrow Songs” of African-American spirituals, said that “they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.” In other words, even laments can be agents of hope. As DuBois put it,

“Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence.” [iii]

Compared with the emotional and social realism of black spirituals, what can we say about Christmas carols? Do they have a similar healing power? Or is their bright spirit in denial of the “two thousand years of wrong” which have followed the miraculous “midnight clear” in Bethlehem? Can we who dwell in the shadow of death still sing about joy and peace with whole-hearted conviction? As the Psalmist wondered, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” And yet, we sing. We sing because carols gladden the heart and bring us together. And we sing because carols are eschatological anticipations of God’s unfolding future. They don’t put an end to our troubles, but they give us a foretaste of glory, reminding us that we belong not to what is dying, but to what is being born.

Gabriel’s message does away
Satan’s curse and Satan’s sway;
Out of darkness brings our Day:
So behold,
All the gates of heav’n unfold.

“O radiant dawn, bright splendor of the light eternal.” (8th century ‘O Antiphon’ for December 21).

In my Los Angeles days, I’d rise at 4 a.m. at the Winter Solstice, toward the end of the longest night, and drive to a peak above the ocean in the Santa Monica Mountains, where I could see the newborn sun rise over desert peaks 100 miles to the east. But in the Northwest where I live now, a winter sunrise can be a rare sight. This December’s relentless stretch of rain and thick clouds seemed to doom my chances. Still, I awoke at sunrise out of habit, and when I glimpsed the Douglas firs on a hilltop ablaze with fiery light. I jumped in my car and raced to the edge of the island to see the gloom on the run. It was the perfect Advent sign: The people who have lived in darkness, and in the shadow of death (umbra mortis, as the 8th-century O antiphons put it), have seen a great light.

Did it matter that by the end of the day the sun had vanished and rain was pouring down? Not at all. I had received the gift of light as an eloquent sign: Don’t forget what you have seen. Remember hope.

Sunrise after the year’s longest night (Puget Sound, Washington).

Dear reader, I wish you a most blessed and merry Christmas. Let your heart be light!

[i] Bob Franke’s “Straw Against the Chill” (Telephone Pole Music) is a beautiful contemporary carol. I recently posted a tribute to Bob’s legacy. You can listen to the song here:https://youtu.be/N-VXxACc4U4?si=Xn2O1qZgr01O5ckr

[ii] I heard this story in the California Revels CD, Christmas in an Irish Castle (2001).

[iii] The Nouwen, Burton, and DuBois quotes are from Kay Redfield Jamison’s powerful and moving book, Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). It is a fascinatingly documented and beautifully written treatise on the spiritual and imaginative dimensions of healing body and soul.