Josh Ritter, Escapism, and Heaven meeting Earth
I have recently been listening to Josh Ritter’s Thin Blue Flame (you can listen to it above, I linked it from his site) and can’t help but be struck by its beautiful and haunting exploration of God, the afterlife, and how our perceptions of the afterlife shape our ethics and our politics. Thin Blue Flame is a vision, ala John’s Revelation, that draws the reader/listener in with its compelling and disturbing imagery meant to shake us into a realization of our negative human tendency towards escapist conceptions of the afterlife that in turn negatively affect our ethics. If we, of course as the chosen ones, are escaping to a heavenly dwelling where we, along with God, will simply exist as energy ”mixing with nitrogen in lonely holes where neither Seraphim or raindrops go” then who cares if we spend our earthly time ”bringing justice to the enemies and not the other way around”….enemies defined of course by their lack of adherence to our particular God ordained “laws”, those things that we “loose on earth”. But as the song says, “If what’s loosed on earth will be loosed up on high
It’s a Hell of a Heaven we must go to when we die”. Who can dispute this when God’s laws explained on earth are often used to justify war against the “enemies” of God.
Throughout the song, there is a counter-appeal (over against the dualism of body-soul) to a heaven that is far more earthly; a heaven that is shaped “like the hips of a girl”; a heaven that is like a city where “the weddings in pollen and the wine bottomless And all wrongs forgotten and all vengeance made right The suffering verbs put to sleep in the night The future descending like a bright chandelier” (See Rev. 21:2
)
What is left of our goodness as created beings if all we can do is wish to escape the home which God has given us? What if redemption is the culmination of creation and not escape. What if heaven is “the world just beginning and the guests in good cheer”?
But, the alternative is to believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and thus Thin Blue Flame mourns: “Oh it’s hell to believe there ain’t a hell of a chance”
Throughout the song, there is also the constant refrain: “Only a full house is gonna make it through”. In other words, only a world that is full of created matter — body, earth, wilderness, diversity, — only a world where “heaven is so big there aint no need to look up”, only THAT world is anything worth hoping for in the afterlife. A different, redeemed world to be sure, but a world that can be called a “full house”, not just the emptiness of “a cold dark room”.
What do you think?
Recent Entries
- Who is in charge of the mission of the Church?
- Vatican Revises Abuse Process, but Causes Stir
- How Should We Pray?
- The “Childishness” of God
- The Alpha and The Omega
- The “God Hypothesis”?
- Noahs Ark Found in Turkey?
- BBC News – Does Catholic celibacy contribute to child sex abuse?
- Miserere – Psalm 51
- Court: Hare Krishnas barred from LAX solicitation