Songs of '78: "Just What I Needed"

Forty years ago today, "Just What I Needed," the first single off of the Cars's first album (also titled The Cars), hit the airwaves. What were the Cars? Punk? The pounding, minimalist guitar work might make you think so, but no. New wave? Greg Hawkes's spacey keyboards sometimes sound like a preview of the synth-pop of the 1980s, but also no. Power pop? Rick Ocasek's songs didn't waste any time getting us into the music, but there was usually a coolness and reserve to them that prevent them from sounding like a proper post-Beatles rock and roll band. Ultimately, you just have to say that they were a great garage band, a bunch of musicians who knocked around, touring with different bands and one another, until the time came when they all fell together and started recording Ocasek's songs with all the aforementioned (and other) influences bouncing around inside their head. With all that, plus two great vocalists (bassist Benjamin Orr along with Ocasek), maybe it was inevitable they'd hit it big.

Or maybe not. Who knows? In any case, the Cars were part of that wonderful 1978 cohort, and they had a solid radio run for the next ten years, breaking up (and, unlike so many other bands, never really, truly re-uniting, despite a couple of half-hearted efforts) in 1988. They're not the greatest band ever, but they were solid and made great music; it's nice to be able to file them away as part of an era, one whose sound I can remember from the start.

Nature, Wisdom, Spirit, Mother

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

This is an expanded and re-written version of a Mother's Day sermon I gave in church last week, on May 13, 2018. Please see the note attached at the conclusion of the post.

I'm pretty certain that ever since I became old enough to wonder about matters theological, I hadn't been all that enthused by the Mormon idea of Mother in Heaven. The Christian message which consistently spoke (and still speaks) most strongly to me was Pauline, Augustinian, and Lutheran; I took (and still take) seriously the omniscience and omnipresence of God presented through the Biblical tradition, and saw His relationship with us as profoundly grace-centered and not at all humanist. This left little room in my thinking for the discourse about Heavenly Mother that I was most familiar with, which seemed rooted in deeply literal and humanist presumptions about God's identity, sexuality, and relationships. "In the heav’ns are parents single?/ No, the thought makes reason stare! / Truth is reason; truth eternal / Tells me I’ve a mother there"--to a great many of my fellow Mormons, for many years, the claim made in this old hymn seems both persuasive and obvious. But it wasn't for me.

I write all that in the past tense, though, because not too long ago I read an essay which made me realize that maybe, just maybe, I've actually been thinking about, and perhaps even worshiping, Mother in Heaven all along. But let me work around to that.

Over the past two years, a large number of the trees which once lined the run-off beside the street in front of our home were affected by a blight, and were removed by the city. Last summer, they were replaced with saplings--many of which, I noticed over our long dry winter, got snapped off. Maybe the wind did it, but more likely it was stupid kids wandering along the street. And yet today all of them, even those that were left stubby and close to the ground, are growing. Rain finally came to this part of Kansas, and growth has too.

One of the most common themes in our sacrament meetings is "gratitude," and this is something I'm grateful for: the abundance of the natural world all around us, the rhythm of growth that returns, again and again, even in the face of all the harm we do to creation. It's an abundance we are invited, despite all our environmental crimes, to contribute to and benefit from, and by so doing learn from as well. That's something else to be grateful for: the satisfaction--and the often humbling learning which precedes that feeling of satisfaction--of being a part of nature's cycle of renewal and bounty. I grew up working in gardens, bailing hay, tromping through alfalfa fields, milking cows by hand, and the productive interplay of us human beings with the growing, gracious things that fill our stomachs with food and our minds with beauty is something that, even as an academic, attends much of my thinking. If you're looking for a romantic agrarian, someone who enjoys weeding the tomato plants and contemplating the meaning of the soil as I turn it over with a spade, you've got one right here. 

The week before I was assigned to speak, we sang in church one of my favorite hymns: "All Creatures of our God and King." The fourth verse, in particular, caught by eye:

Dear Mother Earth, who day by day
Unfoldest blessings on our way,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
The flowers and fruits that in thee grow,
Let them His glory also show.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

The lyrics of this hymn are a slightly changed version of those composed by William H. Draper, who in the early 1900s translated St. Francis of Assisi’s poem "Canticle of the Sun," which was written around 1224, and inspired by the 148th Psalm. Here's a translation of the relevant passage from the poem:

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth,
who sustains us and governs us and who produces
varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Draper was inspired to see in that poem a hymn something he wanted to his congregation to be able to hear and sing for a Whitsunday service--Whitsunday being an old English liturgical term for the Day of Pentecost, the day, seven weeks after Easter, that the Christian world celebrates the blessing of Holy Ghost which comes to surround and sustain Jesus's disciples and all who come into His community. There is a reason, I think, why this particular work by St. Francis spoke to Draper as he made plans for this holy day--specifically, the association between the manifold gifts of the spirit, and the diverse fecundity of the natural world, which Francis placed all together in his poem as a family: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire. Note, though, that his "Nature" is not only a sibling; she is also a "Mother," by which and through which the governing, productive rule of life--the fruit and herbs we consume from the world, and the flowers by which it is decorated--is sustained.

Where did this idea come from, that the natural world, the world we work in and are sustained and enlightened by, is both feminine and maternal? If you turn to non-Christian history and mythology, there are plenty of ancient examples: Durga in Hinduism, Gaia from the Greeks. But these deities often are understood as embodying the wildness of the natural world, and are indifferent to, or often hostile towards, actual human beings. What of the image of nature as something which mothers us, feeds and teaches and overseas and loves us, and to which we owe the respect that we do to a mother?

The earliest example of a "Mother Nature" that I know of came from the pen of the French cleric Alain de Lille, who wrote, perhaps 60 years before St. Francis's "Canticle," a Latin work of theology titled (in translation) The Plaint of Nature. There is much in this work of prose and verse which audiences today might find strange or offensive--but it also gave the Christian world, for the first time we have record of, the idea of Nature as a ruling, feminine figure:

O child of God, the mother of Creation, bond of the universe and its stable link....you, who by your reins guide the universe, unite all things in a stable and harmonious bond and wed heaven to earth in a union of peace; who, working on the pure idea of Divine Wisdom, mold the species of all created things...

In the words of James Sheridan, translator of The Plaint, Nature comes to declare that "it was God's will that by a mutually related circle of birth and death, transitory things should be given stability by instability, endlessness by endings, eternity by temporariness, and that the series of things should ever be knit by successive renewals of birth." The idea of an immanent order, always linked, always disciplining, always rewarding.

I learned about Alain de Lille's Plaint from a long essay by Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, critic, farmer, and agrarian, who once famously declared “I’d rather rely on Mother Nature’s wisdom than man’s cleverness.” Contained in his latest collection, The Art of Loading Brush, "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World" is a deep dive into the depictions of nature in the history of English literature, and its influence on consequent writings about conservation and farming. His study is often a tendentious one (he doesn't like industrial agriculture, or tractors, for that matter), but it is revealing nonetheless. His aim to remind his readers that observers of the natural world have consistently recognized that there is an order to it, a miraculous rhythm that follows a mysterious logic which we can learn from, but never master.

Berry is a Christian, a man who knows the Bible very well, but who sometimes has a problem with the conventionality of Christianity in America. He is drawn to those who seem to him to respect the mystery, the glory, the stern wonder of creation, rather than those who want to explain it all in some tidy ideological or theological package. Thomas Merton, a French Catholic who settled in a monastery in Kentucky, where Berry also lives, wrote a prose poem about the “Hagia Sophia” or “divine wisdom,” an ancient Christian idea found in 1 Corinthians 2:7 ( “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory”) which Alain de Lille associated with the "mother of Creation," and Francis of Assisi with "Sister Mother Earth": "There is," Merton wrote, "in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans."

In the centuries between Alain de Lille of the 12th century and Berry and Merton of the 20th, many other authors strove to capture the order, surprise, and wisdom of nature--and again and again, their intuition of such took feminine and maternal forms. Geoffrey Chaucer's poem The Parlement of Foules presents Mother Nature as the "vicar of the almighty Lord" who "hot, cold, heavy, light, moist, and dry / Hath knit by even numbers of accord," bringing a wise balance to the renewing, reproducing processes of of nature. Edmund Spenser's Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, which were appended to The Faerie Queene, also gives us the "great dame Nature / With goodly Port and gracious Majesty / Being far greater and more tall of Stature / Than any of the Gods or Powers on high," who, when confronted with the challenge of Mutability, imposes a larger, deeper, unseeable order upon the changeableness of creation. John Milton’s allegorical poem Comus presents us with Nature ("the Lady") wisely resisting those that would indulge in nature’s bounty, instead insisting on "Temperance" so that "Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed in...even proportion."

This only scratches the surface of this one linguistic, poetic tradition (Berry goes on to consider the realization of Nature, and its wise discipline, in the works of Pope, Wordsworth, and Ezra Pound as well), but the themes, I think, are clear. For many Christian artists and thinkers, to take seriously God's creation is to take seriously the idea that some part of God, or something suitably God-like, overseas it, blesses it, makes it meaningful and a source of bounty and wisdom to those who tend to it, and issues a reproach to those who do not. Is this Mormon doctrine, or even Christian, for that matter? Not directly. But the more that I think about it, the less I can read any of revelations of Joseph Smith dealing with the natural world, with their insistence upon bounty, respect, patience, and humble and equitable use--see Doctrine and Covenants 49:18-21, D&C 59:15-21, or D&C 104:14-18--without imaging a distinctly maternal, a loving but also wise and watchful, eye behind them. It is the same loving (but unsentimental) eye I think sometimes I can see through, when I look upon our often frustrating, but just as often rewarding, front yard flower and strawberry patch, when it is weeded and well-watered and flourishing. In it, I sometimes see something more than my work--I see labor in the soil made meaningful. Guided, one might say, to becoming a part of the abiding spiritual rhythms of the natural world.

I realize that if this is an argument for Mother in Heaven, it is a distinctly panentheistic one, with some feminine element of the divine being made manifest through (though not necessarily being identical to) God's creation. I'm happy with that accusation, though. I think it is necessary, if one insists upon doing theology, to be willing to consider such categories, or else one is going to be stuck with a terribly reductive literalism (case in point: the plain comment by Mormon apostle Erastus Snow in March 1878 that "I must believe that deity consists of man and woman" and that we Mormons worship a "Godhead composing two parts, male and female" causing a minor hermaphroditic freak-out in the footnotes to the BYU Studies article cited above).

In the same way that we Christian believers need to be willing to think expansively about we mean when we talk about the Holy Ghost in the connection with Pentecost--remember that in the Fifth of Smith's early Lectures on Faith the Holy Spirit, which in Biblical history begins with the idea of the ruach Elohim or the Breath of God, was identified with the mind of God the Father--we similarly need to think expansively about Heavenly Mother. Might She be that title which we could give (and maybe, through Mother Nature, always have given) to that part of God which is invested in creation, in the wise, tutelary, fecund impulse which governs nature and those of use who live off of and through its creative rewards? No scriptural account that I consider at all inspired says so, in so many words. But lately, I find I'm persuaded that it makes sense.

In the Mother's Day service where I gave the original version of this sermon, the Primary children sang two songs: "Mother Dear" and "My Heavenly Father Loves Me." Both wonderful, sweet songs. And yet, the association they make together--one song about the love one has for mothers, the other about an appreciation for creation--can be achieved much more directly, I thought, by just one song, one of the wisest Primary tunes of all:

I often go walking in meadows of clover,
And I gather armfuls of blossoms of blue.
I gather the blossoms the whole meadow over;
Dear mother, all flowers remind me of you.

O mother, I give you my love with each flower
To give forth sweet fragrance a whole lifetime through;

[And this, right here, I think, is the key verse, the one that really brings it all home:]

For if I love blossoms and meadows and walking,
I learned how to love them, dear mother, from you.

Blossoms and meadows and walking. Which mother did that teaching, do you suppose? The child's, presumably. But also...maybe, another One as well? Some patient mothering spirit or thought, some sehnsucht that calls to us, without us knowing why or how, helping us see something meaningful, something orderly, in every spring surprise, in every growing and good thing. In the Book of Mormon, Alma claimed that "the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it...denote there is a God." He didn't know the half of it, perhaps. Paying attention to, and learning to be properly grateful for the other Half, the Half that we've always known, and named Mother Nature, and yet not always fully seen, may be one of our tasks today. It is one that I long thought I'd dismissed--but yet, I think now that I've been looking for Her all along.

PLEASE NOTE: It has been pointed out to me that the initial premise behind this whole post--seeing Heavenly Mother in and through the concept of Mother Nature--was originally suggested to me by another Mormon blogger, Cynthia Lee, and in writing it, I had completely forgotten her contribution. For that I want to apologize, fully and sincerely. Moreover, the fact that I did that, and probably have done so many times before, particularly in regards to matters involving women in the church, is not only a terrible--and likely much too frequent--mark on my character, but it is reflective of so much casual, oblivious sexism in the way both theological speculation and ordinary practice is performed in the Mormon church. I first thought to take the whole post down, but other female bloggers I know have suggested leaving it up, as an opportunity for conversation and learning. I am one of the first in need of that, and I am grateful for their understanding.

Songs of '78: "Sultans of Swing"

Dire Straits is one of those bands that crept into my consciousness, with me only realizing years afterward that I'd been listening to them for a long time. "Sultans of Swing" is a great example of this. ("Brothers in Arms" is another.) It's a fine, sharp, groovy song, almost as much jazz-fusion as rock and roll, which is characteristic of so much of Mark Knopfler remarkable guitar playing; it's the sort of intricate, unfolding, clever composition which rewards re-listening. Maybe that's why it took it so long after its release as a single on May 19, 1978--the first release off their first album, Dire Straits, which didn't appear until October of that year, and didn't make it to the United States until "Sultans" caught on and started getting radio play later in 1979--to finally get some recognition. But that's been Knopfler's fate from the beginning, hasn't it? He's the pop musician's pop musician: playing with everyone, adding his quiet, unexpected turns of phrasing and layers of sound to recordings across a dozen genres (I didn't truly and fully become of Knopfler fanatic until I heard his magisterial recording of the old folk broadside "Lily of the West" with The Chieftains), doing lovely, incredible work in his own unobtrusive way. Somebody should have seen it coming right from the start of his cool playing, with his smart lyrics floating above the chords. Well, lots of people probably did; I had to figure it out later. But that's the thing about 1978; there was so much more going on than most of us could have realized at the time. "Sultans" was a part of that, for certain.

Songs of '78:"Life's Been Good"

I've never smoked, never consumed any kind of alcoholic beverage, never taken any drug that wasn't an over-the-counter painkiller or something prescribed by a doctor. I've been married to the same woman for 25 years this August, and I was a virgin when she and I married. The only time I've ever been arrested was when I participated in a political at an old nuclear weapons testing site on Native American land. My preferred way of staying up late is binging stuff on Netflix. Plus, I'm a Mormon. So, in other words, I really can't relate whatsoever to the whole romantic rock and roll lifestyle. Some people for whom all of the above applies can perhaps can pull it off nonetheless, but not me, and I certainly couldn't as a kid just beginning to absorb these rock and roll legends in the late 1970s. But that doesn't matter, not for me, not for anyone--because we can just listen to Joe Walsh's ridiculous, wonderful, "Life's Been Good," and we can understand the whole thing just fine.

He first contributed the song to a film soundtrack that disappeared almost as soon as it was released, then stuck it on his album But Seriously, Folks, which hit the shelves 40 years ago today. The version on the album was over 8 minutes in length; it was cut to 4 1/2 minutes for single release release, but this rambling, self-referential rock and roll anthem--maybe the greatest of all time, though later this year there will be at least one more serious contender--deserves to be heard in all its stoned glory. Like right here.

Songs from '78: "Miss You"

This is the big one, folks--or at least, the beginning of the biggest, the first single from the band and the album that looms larger in my mind than almost anything else I associate with listening to rock music on AM radio as prepubescent kid in 1978. It's not hard to find praise for Some Girls; it is often labeled the final great Rolling Stones album, and maybe even their greatest ever (an opinion I concur with). And "Miss You" is a terrific song, making use of Jagger's preternaturally tired and lecherous vocals, Ron Wood's guitar meshing with Keith Richards, and Bill Wyman and Charlie Watt's providing an almost-but-not-quite disco beat. After "Miss You" came a host of other great songs, and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to avoid talking about how they hit me, and continue to hit me, over four decades of time. Thus far I've only highlighted one single by each artist, and I'd like to stick with that--but I don't think I can with the Stones.

Why? Why wasn't I, the good Mormon boy, as freaked out by music from the Rolling Stones as I was by Van Halen or Rush (don't worry; we'll be getting to them later)? I suppose it was pretty simple: there was no easy or obvious hook upon which a Christian kid like me, taught to be suspicious of possible Satanism, could have hung this iteration of the Rolling Stones when I first heard them (yes, I hear you all shouting about Their Satanic Majesties Request and "Sympathy for the Devil," but I didn't connect those with the Stones until sometime later), and anyway, I was just too young to appreciate how creepy the Stones's lyrics here and elsewhere really were. At the same time, their melodies, their riffs, their energy (even when it was coiled and louche like it is here) was able to capture my still-forming pop music sensibilities. These guys have something going on, is what I suppose I thought about at the time. I knew little about the history of rock and roll, and I probably didn't start to piece together the story of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and all the rest for quite a while. Still, there I was, listening to KJRB 790 and getting my kicks from these songs that had such--though I wouldn't have used these terms back then even if I'd known them--bluesy, sexual, and ass-kicking power to them. And that power endures. I like the early Stones, sure, and I actually have a lot of fondness for some of their early 90s work, like Voodoo Lounge, which was the point, nearly 25 years ago, when I suppose you could say that Jagger and Richards came to an agreement that they were just going to consistently play the best damn Rolling Stones Tribute Show imaginable for the rest of their lives, and you have to admit: its worked really well for them so far. But 40 years ago, the power of the Stones was still fresh enough, and challenging enough, I think, to set a kid's mind on fire with their tunes. They did me, that's for certain.

Songs from '78: "Runnin' with the Devil"

No tricks here, folks: Van Halen's second single, "Runnin' with the Devil," released 40 years ago today off of their debut album, Van Halen, was the first heavy metal/hard rock song I can remember hearing, and it scared the crap out of little 10-year-old me. Why? At one point or another in those early radio-listening days of mine, I heard the Rolling Stones, Journey, Cheap Trick, and more; why were these power chords and guitar pyrotechnics so unnerving? Heck, I'd probably already heard Van Halen's blistering cover of "You Really Got Me" by the time I heard this song, and despite Eddie Van Halen's amazing fingerwork, I probably didn't even put it together in my head that they were the same band. Why not? Duh--because the "Runnin' with the Devil" people were obviously Satanists, that's why. 

I mean, of course they aren't. But while my Mormon home and Mormon parents were never as freaked out by rock music as many other conservative Protestant and Catholic families were (it was Dungeons and Dragons, rather than stuff on the radio, that caused the most contention over church standards in my teen-age years), still, it was pretty clear to only-barely-adolescent me that long-haired men with no or open shirts singing about "the Devil" were obviously working for Beelzebub. The fact that the lyrics to the song itself provided no evidence for such whatsoever was, of course, something that I only realized years later.

When, exactly? Maybe four or so years later, by which time anyone who paid any attention to "Entertainment Tonight" or read People magazine or were one of the early adopters of MTV--which I probably first watched at a summer debate camp which included staying in dorm rooms which had cable television--already knew that there were tensions in the band (I have no way of proving it, but I swear my memory tells me that some Boy Scout on a campout around 1983 or so told me and a bunch of others that Sammy Hagar was auditioning to replace David Lee Roth--all this before 1984 was even out!). I don't know--maybe just I figured that any band which could record such a rocking, wonderful, and (from the perspective of today) ridiculously crude version of "Pretty Woman" can't be all bad. Going back and appreciating the power of those late 70s songs made me feel like a mighty grown-up 14-year-old. I don't feel the same today, obviously...but "Runnin' with the Devil" still rocks.