Review of “O Sun O Moon” by Bruce Cockburn
While some revert to sentimentality and nostalgia in their later years, Canadian singer-songwriter, Bruce Cockburn, continues to face this world in all of its threat and beauty. Cockburn’s 2023 album O Sun O Moon (True North) begins with howls of anger and grief and ends with a vision of the resurrected dead and return of Jesus. From howls to singing, from grief to joy, from lament to dancing. These are the realities of our lives and they are all captured in this stunningly beautiful album.
From the opening track, “On a Roll,” Cockburn does not avert his gaze from the civilizational, ecological and political collapse happening all around us. In a culture that manifests “social behaviour/beyond belief,” it is not surprising that the artist had a dream in which, “There was a storm/And all the earth was without form.” Echoing the prophets, Cockburn identifies a sense of de-creation that permeates our time; a cosmic, societal and spiritual dissolution is afoot. Nonetheless, he proclaims: “Time takes its toll/But in my soul/I’m on a roll.”
In the song, “To Keep the World We Know,” Cockburn teams up with Inuit singer, Susan Aglukark, to address the apocalyptic reality of a “world gone up in flames.” In the face of the climate emergency, they long to somehow “keep the world we know.” A world of fire and drought is a world in desperate need of water. And both Indigenous and Christian spirituality insist that this kind of drought needs deeper sources of living water if the watershed is to be healed.
The drought is both ecological and cultural. There is a drought of kindness, civility, and generosity that afflicts our political, cultural and even familial discourse. So Cockburn offers us an uncompromising meditation on the love command of Jesus in his song, “Orders.” Cockburn lists different kinds of people and insists that we must love them all:
The just the merciful, the cruel
The stumbling well-intentioned fool
The deft, the oaf, the witless pawn
The golden one life smiles upon. . .
The pastor preaching shades of hate
The self-inflating head of state
The near impossibility of such a radical call to love each other as Jesus has loved us, is starkly put before us in this disquieting song.
These themes of love and attending to the reality of life in a world falling apart come together in the beautiful love song, “Push Comes to Shove.” You see, when “reality calls” it all comes down to this:
The place that you hold in my life
Is the axis it all spins around
Push comes to shove
It’s all about love
The ring of your laugh is the sweetest of sounds
Here we come to the very foundation of the world, the heart of Cockburn’s spirituality, the witness of love against the hateful evidence all around and deep within each of us. Looking for hope? Listen to this album. Need a good cry? Listen to this album. Want to check out Bruce Cockburn for the first time? Listen to this album.
A longer version of this review was first published by Christian Courier earlier this year. If you’d like to read more articles like this one and support redemptive journalism, go to christiancourier.ca to get a one-year print subscription (12 issues) for $65 with the code: CPJ5.
