Mixing Emotions in Art

(2007 was a year of very mixed emotions for the Stockmans. In April our good friend Lindsay Emerson, wife of one of our dearest friends Alain, died after months battling a brain tumour. She was 23. After reading poems at Lindsay's funeral I fell inconsolably into my wife's arms and cried my heart out. In June we married, literally, two other dear friends Lynn Ferguson and Chris Guiney.I smiled all day long. In November my daughters performed a wonderful dance in front of our students with their friends Alice and Lucia. We were very proud, smiling inside and out! We were totally unaware that two weeks later the eight year old Lucia would be going through a liver transplant. We sat on our bed in tears again wondering how to break it to our daughters. In December Lucia got home and we cried happier tears and I graduated on the same day as two of my work colleagues and we were celebrating again.

I wrote this piece for an event that Alain was having to raise money for a school being built in Lindsay's memory in Uganda. It was for a concert where we wanted to mix all the emotions of Alain's year and somehow for that to have a healing effect. I believe that Christians need to learn to live in the midst of both emotions, embracing them both as simply the way it is before the Kingdom finally comes in all its glory!)

I have a strong belief that art in general and music in particular can transform and that that transformation can be personal or social. Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff spoke of a world formative Christianity that all of us should be vocationally part of. He concentrated much of his thoughts on how artists fitted into such a Kingdom bringing mission. The music I love is music that is not just good but good for something. It is not just technically good but has something that contributes to transformation. So, tonight is not just about good music. It is music that we believe can do something within us and out of us. We want to bathe ourselves in spiritual potency, coming to us and surrounding us through the music in the ether.

We have thought lots about tonight about what it is or what it could be or what we could miss if we just entertained. We are at a place in our lives and in this community that most times we deny, try to avoid, squander. Yet, Alain has never allowed us to forget. He has been as honest as any man I have ever known. He has walked through the valley of the shadow. He has stared eyeball to eyeball into the hole in the ground. He has faced his loss and pain without analgesics. He has suffered and continues to suffer the searing pain of Lindsay’s absence from their blessed love. We have watched with worry as his head has been bent over, his eyes hiding from the world that he usually gave brightness too. We have feared for him as he has gone AWOL from pulpits and guitars. We have been relieved as his head has lifted, he has laughed with us again and lifted the guitar or re-entered our pulpits. But don’t be fooled. The old Alain is not back. Lindsay is not back. The pain is no less. The Alain who held the love of his life as she passed into eternity last April will never be back the same as before.

Tonight is another moment for us all as we continue to deal with Lindsay’s loss and how we honour her memory as we celebrate her life and friendship. How do we deal with the wonder of life in the midst of the shit that happens? How can music open the pores, heal the sores and express the celebration and lamentation that we can feel all at once. Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions has taught me much about what it takes for music to be robust, transformative and lasting. Particularly in the 5 Negro spiritual hymns that were on the studio album and the 7 that he did on the Seeger Sessions Tour I have found some of the things that need to be under the surface of the melody to solicit change of soul or society. I call them prophetic stimulants; hope, restoring human dignity, carrying Bible story and theology, bringing catharsis, awakening society to its injustices, alternative imagination and the unity of people and emotions.

We hope that many of these characteristics will be alive and well tonight in poems and cover versions and the prophetic stimulus so prevalent in the music of our good friend Brian Houston. Let us not be confused as to how we should feel or be constricted in our enjoyment of the art because of the melancholy of some of the feelings we will go through. Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions brought home to me the truth of the Negro spirituals’ ability to mix emotions and the powerful effects of doing so. When Springsteen took these Spirituals on tour he gathered around him an 18 piece band with strings, brass, backing vocal gymnastics, banjo and honkey tonk piano alongside his usual guitars, bass, drums and keyboards. It was in many ways a musical party with great instrumentalists literally making music as they went along with a tangible sense of enjoyment. Black theologian Professor Cornell West’s description of the gospel as viewed by Afro- Americans could not have described it more succinctly: “The gospel in Afro-America lauds Calvinistic calls to transform the world, yet shuns puritanical repression… Life is viewed as both a carnival to enjoy and a battlefield on which to fight.” Springsteen’s Seger Sessions Band could be seen as a Carnival band. The music was joyful and celebratory yet heavy with political pathos and earthy reality.

So tonight you have the permission to smile and laugh and frown and cry. The mixing of these emotions is the reality of living this life in all its fullness in the midst of the reality of sin and sickness and death. When the mix is given a place in the art that God has gifted us, it might just be one of the things that strengthens us, heals us and transforms us as we head towards a glorious reunion with Lindsay Emerson… and Jesus himself!

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