Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  When I first became a Christian, I wanted to know what it was I had signed up for. I had never paid much attention to the church, the bride of Christ, with which I had now identified myself. The first time I took communion—in response to a nudge from within during a service at St. George’s, where Kitty and I were married—I felt a wondrous shiver of contact, of connection. Afterward I went and asked Father Playfair what I had done. He graciously explained the teaching around the act, starting with Jesus’s exhortation to celebrate his memory by consuming bread and wine. This was a directive I could readily picture myself following.

  I looked to the people who proclaimed most loudly that they knew what the faith was all about. These tended to be conservative evangelists, some of the television variety. That crowd is fond of translating the word of God for us, into whatever cultural context suits them. They love regulations and the passing of judgment. “God hates homosexuals!” screams one, and lo! It is revealed that he always travels with a male prostitute as a companion. Another shouts, “Don’t allow performances of a sexual nature in public!” (referring to rock and roll or rhythmic body movements), and somebody discovers him getting head from a hooker in the back of a car. The hollowness of these figures soon became apparent, as did the hollowness of their unrelenting literalism with respect to the Bible. I wasn’t cut out to be a fundamentalist. Still, a promise is a promise, and I figured the promise Kitty and I made before God to remain together, to maintain a bond unto death, was not negotiable.

  I was wrong about that, too. Kitty and I went through our separate anguish over the split. We tried to make it as smooth as possible for Jenny’s sake, and for our own, but it was still traumatic, as these things usually are. My anger and bitterness were somewhat softened by the gratitude I carried for the time we had had together. And whereas I enjoyed the freedom to spend my time however I wanted, I was lonely and forlorn. I lost two pant sizes. I prayed a lot. I asked for forgiveness for having screwed up, and for guidance in making sense of what was happening. What I got back was “Don’t worry about it. The flow is moving. Move with it.”

  I moved to Toronto, feeling, in the midst of all this, that I should be seeking community of some kind. I tended to put all my emotional eggs in one mixing bowl, allowing only Kitty and Jenny close to my heart. It occurred to me that if I accepted the notion that I was supposed to love my neighbour, I ought to know who that neighbour is. Step one would be to embrace the city. God seemed to be more interested in the next step than in where we had been, mired in place and needing relief. Kitty went through a similar process. She felt terribly guilty, but she would pray about it and get a response like “Child, it’s okay. The love in your heart is what’s important, and it’s far more complex than the promise you made in the church.”

  Occasionally I’d tune in to religious television, catching Jerry Falwell or Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, or 100 Huntley Street, a talk show produced in Canada—partly to put myself in touch with some version of the Christian community, but also to see what peculiar exhortations might be offered a searching soul. One night, on the black-and-white TV I’d brought to Toronto, a John Q. Public sort of guy testified that he had lost his job, fallen into depression, and taken to drink. He smoked too much. His marriage started breaking apart. Then he found Jesus. Now he had quit smoking, found a new job, had a solid marriage again, and drank only coffee. Good for him, but I’d had an opposite experience. After I found Jesus, my marriage fell apart and I started drinking Bell’s whiskey and smoking Gauloises.

  Because I came to believe that God had permitted this breakup, some of my other religious understandings changed as well. God is good. God is on your side, and if you believe and pray, or maybe even if you don’t, then God will help you. But what constitutes help may not be what you expect, and the same goes for believe, pray, and even good. Relationship with God is not rigid. It’s elastic. The relationship changes as you change, as your understandings deepen and expand, as new mistakes ask for new kinds of patience from him. A relationship with God is not about who lives and dies. It’s not about who suffers what. Those may be circumstantial parts of the picture, but really it’s about connection, correlation, association: with the Divine, with each other, with the planet. This is my understanding of what it may mean to have a relationship with God. It may not be your truth, and at some point it may not even be mine. I do not know, but seek spiritual truths, and in the seeking I trust that whatever is put in front of me is at least permitted by God, if not placed there by him. The challenge is to remain open, to be still and listen.

  After the breakup I remained vitally interested in maintaining a spiritual life, as I still do, though it has become less specifically Christian. I attended various churches, in Toronto and on the road. Some were welcoming; some viewed me, the outsider, with suspicion. The act of taking communion, when I could do it, always felt meaningful. I never found a church, though, that had the same feeling of community, of being filled with spirit, as St. George’s. That church, with its healing services and its congregation half made up of ex-cons, was more special than I had realized. Gradually the habit of attending worship services faded away.

  The world of human beings became the landscape of a continually unfolding adventure. I absorbed a wealth of stories from the street people who accosted me and the hipsters in the all-night speakeasies, from the bouncers at the bar next door and the men and women of diverse ethnic backgrounds who populated the shops in Kensington Market. Everybody had a story. Previously, when I was holed up in Toronto for a season, I made it a point to avoid contact beyond the one or two people I needed in order to not feel completely isolated. People had been there for me in the past, but I never appreciated them as much as I did now. I didn’t suddenly emerge as Mr. Gregarious; it was a slow and uneven process, a psychic surfing of the crowd. I decided to feel comfortable embracing strangers.

  Above the dark town

  After the sun’s gone down

  Two vapor trails cross the sky

  Catching the day’s last slow good-bye

  Black skyline looks rich as velvet

  Something is shining

  Like gold but better

  Rumours of glory

  Smiles mixed with curses

  The crowd disperses

  About whom no details are known

  Each one alone yet not alone

  Behind the pain/fear etched on the faces

  Something is shining

  Like gold but better

  Rumours of glory

  You see the extremes

  Of what humans can be

  In that distance some tension’s born

  Energy surging like a storm

  You plunge your hand in—you draw it back scorched

  Beneath it’s shining

  Like gold but better

  Rumours of glory

  “RUMOURS OF GLORY,” 1979

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/39.

  Bernie helped me land in Toronto by offering me a room in his house. The timing was good. He had just split with his girlfriend, so he was there by himself. He lived uptown in the Yonge-Eglinton area. (In Toronto, uptown is actually up.) I bought a big Dutch one-speed bicycle and rode it downtown and back every day, which put me in pretty good shape. After a while I found a place of my own: a small flat on Spadina Avenue next door to a chicken slaughterhouse and around the corner from Kensington Market. I walked the city, watching, learning, discerning, wondering, wandering, open to incoming information, swapping the bonds of isolation for the infinitely elastic bag of human absurdity. It was a conscious flipping of a switch. What I found wasn’t so surprising. People were basically the stumblers I had thought they were, but so was I. There was solidarity. And there was something to love there because we’re all in the same boat.

  Woman cry—chase man down street crying,

  “No Chuckie, no, please don’t”

  Another girl comes they run along St. Andrew,

  t
urn south on Kensington

  Meanwhile Chuckie beats it down the alley by the chicken packer’s

  By the time I reach the corner they’ve all vanished

  Just a deaf kid talking like Popeye to a large fleshy

  laughing man in a blue shirt

  You pay your money and you take your chance

  When you’re dealing with love and romance

  Down the alley past the fire escape a woman is talking on the telephone

  Kitchen light spills out, laughter riding on its beam

  In the maze of Moebius streets we’re trying to amuse ourselves to death

  Under the deep sky that’s squatting so close over us tonight

  You’d think it was trying to hatch us

  The numb and confused

  The battered and bruised

  The counters of cost

  And the star-crossed

  You pay your money and you take your chance

  When you’re dealing with love and romance

  Confused and solo in the spawning ground

  I watch the confusion of friends all numb with love

  Moving like stray dogs to the anthem of night-long conversations,

  of pulsing rhythms and random-voltage voices

  In spite of themselves, graceful as these raindrops creeping spermlike across the car window

  Stay or leave, give or withhold, hesitate or leap

  Each step splashing sparks of red pain in every direction

  And through it all, somehow, this willingness that asks no questions

  You pay your money and you take your chance

  When you’re dealing with love and romance

  “YOU PAY YOUR MONEY AND YOU TAKE YOUR CHANCE,” 1981

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/40.

  By chance, I reconnected in Toronto with the former operators of a folk club that had been part of my little gigging circuit ten years earlier. John and Joanne Smale had run Smale’s Pace in London, Ontario. John was now running a restaurant, and Joanne seemed to be involved in just about everything that was going on in town. They welcomed me in, and I became a frequent visitor at their third-floor flat next to the El Mocambo, at the time the premier rock club in the city. It was Joanne who, for Christmas of 1980, gave me a gift certificate for an ear piercing. Two in the right ear, it said, so that’s what I got. I thought about the symbolism. An earring in the right ear was supposed to indicate a homosexual leaning. Maybe two in that lobe would cancel each other out. I didn’t much care if I was taken for gay or not. Why would I? I just liked the earrings.

  I also became a frequent visitor at the topmost apartment, immediately above the Smales, the home of Judy Cade. Judy and Stuart Raven-Hill were on the outs. I didn’t really know her, but as we became acquainted I experienced a growing attraction to a woman whose physical beauty was matched by her warmth and humanity. We started dating and eventually moved in together. I wrote “Inner City Front” on the rooftop deck behind Judy’s place. Her presence looms large in the songs on the album of the same name.

  I wanted to be accepted into the society of hip, arty folks I was meeting in Toronto, at the Smales’ parties and elsewhere, but they weren’t very receptive at first. The ones who interested me were operating in the outer orbits of the arts scene, challenging the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in visual arts, in songwriting, in style . . . perhaps also in good taste. They were generally disdainful of this folksinger in a tweed jacket. After the earrings, I began wearing leather and mascara and they started talking to me. Which doesn’t say much for the depth of people, but that kind of tribalism shows up everywhere. A door opened. I changed my way of living, as they say. More important, my music changed.

  Blue billboard on the roof next door

  Makes a square of light on the kitchen floor

  Smoke rises from a cigarette

  There’s a dull glisten where the table’s wet

  Soft breath rises from the bed

  A thousand question marks over my head

  Turn on the tube but there’s nothing new

  The usual panic in red, white, and blue

  “Military advisors” marching in the square

  Knife-sharp trouser creases slicing air

  Private armies on suburban lawns

  Shoulders braced against the tidal dawn

  All’s quiet on the inner city front

  I don’t know why I should but I feel content

  Bell in the fire station tower

  Rings out the measure of the racing hours

  I slip through the door to the roof outside

  To gaze at the sign hanging in the sky

  That sailor on the billboard looks so self-possessed

  Doesn’t have a thing to forgive or forget

  All’s quiet on the inner city front

  “ALL’S QUIET ON THE INNER CITY FRONT,” 1980

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/41.

  The direction of my work shifts from album to album, but the changes between Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws and the next album, Humans, were radical. Humans had more instruments, more of a rock sensibility, more drums, more electric guitar. In the lyrics, the prevalent nature imagery of the previous decade gave way to cityscapes, mercenaries, skylines, car crashes, barbed wire, the architecture of suffering, the buzzing anguish of men and women desperate for love. It was reportage, the documentary approach to poetics I’d absorbed from Ginsberg et al., taken further than I had before. Literary influences were as likely to come from the leftist bandes dessinées of Christin and Bilal as from Doris Lessing and Edward Whittemore. And Christ? He didn’t go entirely missing, but he showed up as his cosmic self, or in the faces of strangers. As always, I rummaged for answers through alleys of the spirit, but now humans—lots of them—and their habitat became central to the explorations. Unlike my Salt, Sun and Time response to the success of Night Vision, with Humans and the next album, Inner City Front, I wasn’t running away from the success of Dragon’s Jaws but continuing to move toward the next thing, allowing scene and circumstance to flow into and through the music. I never wanted to do the same thing over again, no matter how successful it was. If you repeat something simply because it sells, it stops being art and becomes product, like hair gel or Rubik’s Cubes.

  Some of my listeners weren’t pleased. Just as I lost a few fans when Jesus came into the songs, some of the Christian fans fled when he stopped looking like the man with the robe and the halo. Then a few more fans fell away as the songs began to express political positions and occasionally employ less dignified language. But even more came on board: win some, lose some.

  I did care. It felt good to know the audience was growing, but it hurt to think some people were being alienated. The songs have to be true, though—true to the heart and vision of the writer. Take that away, and they have no value at all. After a show in the early eighties, a young Christian fan scolded me for smoking a cigarette and thereby polluting God’s temple. He was pretty taken aback when I retorted that it was none of his business. My temple, my smoke. I quit smoking for the last time nearly twenty years ago, but I don’t think that had much to do with salvation.

  It may seem pat to analyze my life in terms of decades, but my life and the songs that come out of it have worked that way. If the seventies were marked by a deep introspection, the eighties were largely characterized by a more exterior orientation. While retaining the necessary inward gaze, I began looking outward with intention, trying to turn my mind’s eye like an owl’s head, completely around, pulling in the uncharted view and reporting it in songs. This redirection reflected the teachings of Jesus—reach out to your fellow humans, love your brothers and sisters and serve them—but ironically, it also led to a weakening of my attachment to the language and imagery of mainstream Christianity.

  I began to discover in my secular friends approaches to spirituality that were unlike the Christian one but very real, very appealing. Prayer bec
ame a way of breathing and seeing, and of caring, a means of giving thanks and opening the mind and soul. Rather than isolating me from humans, my prayers now connected us. Prayer may be offered in a church, a synagogue or a mosque, in a temple, a pagoda or a stupa, or in an alley or a public toilet. The place is less important than the sincere intent. The Divine infiltrates our being and manifests, as it must, through the electrochemical processes in our brains.

  These days I’m inclined to think of Jesus as a collective animus figure, an archetypal image God has used to make real the possibility of being in a personal relationship with him. Jesus the revolutionary leader of the poor, Jesus the Son of God—both or neither. The point is not who or what Jesus exactly was, or whether he even was, but how we embrace what is offered. Three thousand years before Jesus entered history the Egyptians worshipped Horus, a son of the god Osiris, who was miraculously conceived and performed healing miracles. If we clutter up our line to God with cultural concerns and the stories we tell ourselves, we miss the point.

  Christianity is based on the Divine touching a human. So is Islam, so is Taoism or Shinto, and so are the animist beliefs that are all over Africa. But the Divine is there in any case, no matter the ism or structure that goes with it. It’s as if God is the matrix in which we move, if we were only aware of it. The Divine touches us. We feel it as a species. We hunger for it. Sometimes we run from it. A distortion occurs when the gifts of God are translated by cultural gatekeepers who don’t always include the notion of authentic access to the Divine in their schemes, no matter their claims. The problem is intensified when the Talibans of the world, the Sunnis or Southern Baptists or Jim Joneses, seek to usurp divine power, make it their instrument, and crown themselves God’s regents. They murder homosexuals, throw acid in women’s faces, stone adulterers to death, and bomb clinics that perform abortions, then demand your tithes. Brutal deeds are done under the banner of God, fueled by men’s ego, greed, and fear. If we truly believe in a Supreme Being who is omnipotent and all-seeing, how is it he needs us to protect his interests? Could it be that what we worship is so much a product of our shame-covering pride that its face is no more than the face of our own pathology?