Dreams of this Life, and the Next

Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, March 8, 2009

            “How can we sing the songs of God in a foreign land?” the author of Psalm 137 writes, as he laments the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people. Indeed, we might well ask how, amid the hoopla of a Super Bowl half-time performance, and an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart, and a #1 position on the Billboard 200, can we be looking to find anything terribly spiritual coming from the pen and lips of our shaman, high priest, wise man Bruce Springsteen? Certainly, Bruce has bills to pay like any of us, so he could be forgiven for hanging a “closed” sign on the Ministry of Rock & Roll, at least for a little while, and getting on with more exclusively commercial ventures. That would be his right, after all.

At first listen, too, Springsteen’s latest record, Working on a Dream might seem the least auspicious place for finding spiritual insights. The music seems too lush, too dense, almost over the top in its boldness. We who look to Springsteen as a spiritual guide have become accustomed to finding his insights in more desolate locales: the gritty boardwalk of Asbury Park ; the stark heartland of Nebraska ; the burned-out wreckage of 9/11 and The Rising; the Devils & Dust of the Iraqi desert; the decimated America of the Bush years which spawned Magic.  

But Springsteen never ceases to surprise; he is a master, of course, at delivering the unexpected. And beneath all the retro-pop and joy-filled peppiness that characterize many of the songs here, Bruce continues to ponder the most fundamental and profound of matters human and divine. It is kind of a paradox, perhaps, that here on this most earthly of albums—which explodes with the very joy of being alive here and now, and which, frankly, seems almost self-conscious in its effort to be as accessible to as large an audience as possible--  Springsteen turns his vision, more than on any other work perhaps, away from this earthly life, and toward the next.

It is as though this one life—bursting at the seams with exuberance and spirit as many of these songs are—is no longer enough to contain the weight of the message he wants to pass on. The dream that Springsteen is working on here is an eternal one, which seeks (with Thoreau) to dive deep and suck out all the marrow of this life—but which also knows that the way we live this life reverberates deeply, and far transcends our little day and hour. The songs on Working on a Dream serve as a reminder that neither the good nor the evil we do is, in fact, buried with our bones. Our actions here have consequences—profound ones, perhaps even eternal ones.

The example of “Outlaw Pete” in the album’s first song shows that once we start making bad choices, we spawn karmic ghosts who will probably, at some point, return to haunt us. Almost from his first breath, Pete has cut his “trail of tears across the countryside”; eventually, he decides to change and settle down. But a façade of simple domesticity offers only temporary redemption. Finally, the cycle of sin and retribution will lay its ultimate claim to his life, and he will vanish from this existence: leaving only the memories of those who knew him, for good or ill; those who must now remember him, and cast him in myth as sinner or saint.

Likewise, in the theme song Springsteen wrote for Mickey Rourke’s film, The Wrestler, our own bad choices all but close the door on redemption, even when it is offered to us:

These things that have comforted me I drive away…
This place that is my home I cannot stay…
My only faith is in the broken bones and bruises I display…

But people don’t need to be mythic—they need not be larger than life—in order to teach us deep lessons about the meaning of existence. Sometimes, the messengers of “divine things well enveloped” seem distinctly unextraordinary, even banal and shallow, to those who don’t realize the gifts they hold. Sometimes, the simplest people who cross our paths—a simple supermarket clerk in one of Springsteen’s songs-- is indeed, a “queen”—an angel—a manifestation of divine beauty and love. The angle from which we look at something changes it completely, and the way in which we look at a particular person changes him or her, too. “Love lifted me,” the old hymn sang, and in the presence of the one we love, we, too are “lifted up”, and the most sanitized and commercialized of public spaces (in this case, a supermarket) becomes an abode of ecstasy and abundance. Then in the smile of the beloved we see, truly, the power and glory of il sorriso di Dio, the very smile of God.

In the grace of such smile, Springsteen sings on “Lucky Day”, our own Babylonian captivity is lifted, and we are brought back into the presence of life:

In the room where fortune falls
On a day when chance is all
In the dark of this exile
I felt the grace of your smile…

 The very thought of the one we love inspires us to trudge on through the cold and darkness of life, to keep on “Working on a Dream”, striving toward that better, fuller life. “Nothing happens unless first a dream,” the poet Carl Sandburg wrote. Of course, there is always work to be done and troubles to be faced; with each new day, we swing the hammer and “climb the ladder.” But unless our labors are cast in terms of something deeper, something more abiding, something that will remain when we ourselves are gone, then all our work will be in vain, and we will grow tired and weary.

“I'm working on a dream/ And our love will make it real someday,” Springsteen sings. It is our love—the very essence of divinity within us--  that makes our dreams become real.

It is our dream that builds the bridge between our present labors and the hope that lies distant on the horizon. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Without a dream, our hopes too often lie moribund.

Of course, Springsteen still casts a cold eye on life when one is needed. As he reminds us in “Tomorrow Never Knows”, there are no guarantees of sweetness and light in this world. While we may be able to control how we view the past, we cannot control what the future will bring. Better, then, not to wait for life, but to grasp it while it is here. “He who waits for the day's riches will be lost,” Springsteen sings. Or, as William Blake wrote: “Why wait for death? Thou art immortal now.”

Truly beholding life—seeing it as it is in its immortal essence (as God sees it perhaps), means seeing it with both eyes wide open, both to the pain and to the joy. If, like the singer in “Good Eye”, we insist of casting everything before us in darkness, then the heavenly light is extinguished, our riches lie in waste, and our relationships are poisoned.

“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground,” Dante proclaims in The Divine Comedy. As Springsteen writes in “Life Itself”, we human ones too often choose to give in to the claims of gravity and inertia, and dwell in that valley of darkness, where destruction and despair grow. We too often choose to abide in that “curve of darkness where the flowers of temptation grow”. Then it is that the demands of life wear us out; they make us blind to God’s beauty and deaf to the divine song all around us.

But when all else has been taken away, or has been squandered by our own poor choices, an even greater power still abides. In Springsteen’s eyes, even this often sad and fallen world yet burgeons forth with the evidence of “What Love Can Do”:

When the bed you lie on is nails and rust
And the love you've given has turned to ashes and dust
When the hope you've gathered has  drifted to the wind…
 Here our memory lay corrupted and our city lay dry…
 Here where it's blood for blood and an eye for an eye…

Even here, he sings—

Let me show you what love can do…
 
   “ Here [where]  we bear the mark of Cain,” here in this earthly vale

 of tears, only that power of love, Springsteen sings, can transform our sadness into joy, our despair into hope. Truly, only love can change the world, and change our lives.

But it’s not enough merely to dream. Vision alone is not enough. We must also have venture. As Vaclav Havel reminds us, “We must not only stare up the steps. We must also step up the stairs.”

Springsteen’s faith declares that once planted, the seeds of love can yield a blossom that is beautiful and strong—even eternal. But those seeds do first need to be planted—by our hands, in our lives. God’s love can only empower us if we let it flow through us, and energize our hearts and minds. When we plant our holy seedlings well; and care for them, and nurture them; and meet our obligations to one another; and stand together and support one another— “For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”—then we build in our midst a “Kingdom of Days” which transcends the minutes and hours of mundane existence. When our love is lived, and proven, then we will certainly yet grow old, and wrinkled, and gray. But our voices will still resound with a timeless, ageless song of life; and the little earthly realm we have built and defended will become a sign visible of that greater kingdom—the Kingdom of God—which is in our midst (though our eyes often do not see it), but which the ways of the world can neither give nor take away.

Those who love one another are bound, as Springsteen sings, in “this life, and then the next.” They have also been bound from the very beginning of time: from the very “bang” that brought all life to birth, and blest us from the first:

A bang then stardust in your eyes
A billion years or just this night…

 All existence hurtles forth from that moment of creation; all eternity coalesces and abides in the very moment we hold, right now:

The stars a brief string of shining charms
Rushing in and out of our arms into the drifting dark…

 We find our sense of rest—our sense of home—only by living that eternal moment fully, only by holding close the one we love most dearly. Then we finally transcend all of our searching and striving, and even death itself, and know at last that our exploding, expanding universe is finally “at rest”, and that all will be well.

The choicest gift we receive in this life is the living presence, the deep and abiding love, of those precious women and men with whom we are called to share this earthly journey. Each of these precious souls deserves to be celebrated in his or her own right. If, as we say, “Each night a child is born is a holy night,” then each birthday that follows is a holy day—sacred in the eyes of Life, a blessing to all who share in that life. That is the sacred “Surprise, Surprise” that lies at the heart of life.

This is one of the great wonders of our existence: that we have before us the opportunity to share our lives with such a marvelous diversity of fellow pilgrims—with that cherished procession of those we have known and cared about, in whose lives we have seen our own days reflected, in whose lives our own lives have been so intricately interwoven.

Working on a Dream is dedicated to Danny Federici, Springsteen’s deceased bandmate, who died of cancer in April of 2008. When Springsteen delivered the eulogy at Federici’s funeral, he said:

“[E]very night at 8 p.m. , we walked out on stage together and that…is a place where miracles occur…old and new miracles. And those you are with, in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you…  you are honored to be amongst…

Of course we all grow up and we know ‘it’s only rock and roll’…but it’s not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.”

“We won't be dancing together on the high wire
Facing the lions with you at my side anymore
We won't be breathin' the smoke and the fire
On the midway,”

For Dan, there will be no more daredevil antics; his carnival is over; his earthly journey has ended.

But the train keeps moving—the train which is life—this circus train that life often is. We all will die; but life goes on. But we are bound in this life more intimately and more profoundly than we can ever realize:

Hangin' from the trapeze my wrists waitin' for your wrists
Two daredevils high up on the wall of death
You throwin' the knife that lands inches from my heart,”

We hold the lives of one another in our hands. The things we do and say can either build up others, or break their hearts. When we are gone, what will matter most is the clarity and care with which we have touched others, and how well we have handed the great gift of life down to them.

When the final notes of our lives’ songs are played, may we, too, hear them echoed back to us in the voices of all we have loved, blended as one, like a heavenly choir, calling us forth to our final rest.

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