Looking Up In Lockdown

Reality

14 Jun

By Seán Mullan

(From the April - June 2021 issue of VOX)

What do a singer songwriter from Belfast and a philosopher from Los Angeles have in common? Maybe many things but in the 5k circle of my lockdown life they have this in common, they have become my close companions. One has accompanied me as I sanded, painted, scrubbed and repaired the cafe space where I work and that in normal times houses a thriving social business. The other has kept me company on early morning strolls “all along the banks of the Royal Canal” – yes, all within the 5k statute of limitations.

Van “the Man” Morrison is the singer who energises my efforts at sanding skirting boards and scrubbing dark kitchen corners, especially his album “Hymns to the Silence.” It is 30 years old I was horrified to discover but is a piece of melodic craft that has worn well. It contains his musical musings on childhood experiences and some of his formative influences, from Jelly Roll Morton to Debussy. And permeating all the reminiscences is an awareness of something bigger going on, what he refers to as light, as silence and as grace.

My other companion is the late Dallas Willard, an academic philosopher by profession, who also gave a lot of time to teaching ordinary people how contemporary life might be lived following Jesus of Nazareth. It’s these talks rather than any lectures on philosophy that I listen to on my canal walks. I wouldn’t want you to have an over-inflated view of my intellectual capabilities.

“They can both sing or talk about big things but root them in the ordinary and the everyday, in quiet city walks and floors that need scrubbing.”

Willard had great intellectual capacity but also the ability to make complex truths easily understandable. And here’s where he and Van have connected in my limited lockdown life. They can both sing or talk about big things but root them in the ordinary and the everyday, in quiet city walks and floors that need scrubbing.

In “Hymns to the Silence” Van sings of the ordinary places of his youth, of Hyndfort Street and Orangefield, of North Road Bridge and Mrs Kelly’s lamp. And he sings of ordinary days and times. But all of this ordinariness is suffused with a sense of wonder. He sings of “early morning when contemplation was at its best”, of living where “dusk had meaning” and of late summer nights when “we sank into restful slumber in silence and carried on dreaming in God.” All of life is sacred in these lyrics, every place holy.

Dallas would agree. I have no idea if he ever listened to a Van Morrison album or if Van ever attended one of Dallas’s talks but I like to think they would have had a lot to chat about. I think Dallas would chat about the idea that grace was at work in those times of silence and light Van sang about. Grace, Dallas used to say, is God acting in our life to achieve what we cannot achieve on our own. It is the activity of God in the course of the everyday to which we can learn to pay attention. “Ah yes, learning to feel the silence,” I could imagine the Belfast man respond.

They could certainly have had an interesting conversation about Jesus. He is the smartest person ever to live, Dallas would assert. The person who chooses to follow Him is choosing the good life, learning from Him to live a life free from fear and anger and a life of becoming all that we are intended to be. Van might draw Dallas’s attention to the old hymn lyrics included on this album: “Just a closer walk with thee, grant it Jesus if you please. I’ll be satisfied as long, as I walk dear Lord close to thee.”

And finding more common ground in their love of old hymns they might well have gone on to listen together to Van’s recording of “Be thou my vision” with those musical maestros, The Chieftains providing a magnificent interlude that would set an atheist’s heart soaring. And the old philosopher might offer his definition of beauty as God’s goodness made manifest to the senses. Van’s album, in my limited musical opinion, provides a resounding affirmation of the definition.

One of Dallas Willard’s most treasured themes was the “Kingdom of God.” It is, he would say, the range of God’s effective will and the natural home of the soul. It is immediately and directly accessible to us through Jesus of Nazareth. As I wrote this piece I realised that the only time I ever met Dallas Willard was in Belfast. He was there to speak at a conference but I imagine him also taking time to stroll the streets of Van’s Morrison’s Belfast childhood with his Walkman and headphones and “Hymns to the silence.”

I like to think he might have walked Hyndfort Street and that, as he did, the Los Angeles philosopher listened to the grainy tones of the Belfast minstrel singing “You’ve got to try for the kingdom on high, by His grace.”