The Rose Above the Sky 8 comments

By Andy Whitman

Something jewelled slips away
Round the next bend with a splash
Laughing at the hands I hold out
Only air within their grasp
All you can do is praise the razor
For the fineness of the slash
Until the rose above the sky opens
And the light behind the sun takes all
                             —Bruce Cockburn, “The Rose Above the Sky”

One of my friends is shutting down his business tomorrow. He’s always dreamed of owning his own advertising agency, so eleven years ago he took a deep breath, maxed out his credit cards, and founded Element, a brave little start-up that garnered more than its share of accolades and awards, and whose imprint can be found in the branding and marketing materials of companies all over the United States.

My friend is talented, creative, committed, industrious, and caring, the kind of business visionary and all-around good guy for whom people love to work. None of it mattered in the end. The money wasn’t there. And tomorrow he will file for bankruptcy, and his small band of ex-employees will file for unemployment.

It’s a bittersweet little melodrama I’ve seen re-enacted again and again in the past year; the end of longstanding good. And it doesn’t stop with employment woes. 2009 will mercifully end in a couple months. Auld lang syne, and good riddance.

Some of it is simply the stage of life in which I find myself. I and most of my friends are fifty-something Boomers, and it’s not uncommon for people in their fifties to lose loved ones to cancer and heart attacks. Some of it is the inevitable personal financial fallout that accompanies the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And some of it is simply the inexplicable, mysterious outworking of a glorious, blessed, heartbreaking life, with all its attendant unknowns and questions.

The only thing I know for certain is that in the last twelve months I’ve lost my mother-in-law, my father, my day job, and a book contract that appeared to be a sure thing. It hasn’t been a wonderful year. Nor has it been for most people. Just ask my friend John.

In times like these—in most times, in fact—I listen to Bruce Cockburn and pray. I pray because I don’t know how else to process life, and because I figure that God would prefer that I moan and complain to Him rather than ignore Him and try to tough it out on my own.

And I listen to Bruce Cockburn because, more than any other songwriter I know, he seems to grasp the connection between the invisible hand of love and the all too visible scars of a messy life. Cockburn is a mystic with dirt under his finger nails, and I’ve listened to his beautifully poetic songs for 35 years now. And if he holds out for meaning, for answers, for beauty in the end—and he does—he is equally insistent that the sorrow and pain are real, and cannot be glibly explained away. These are redemption songs that ache.

The song quoted above is called “The Rose Above the Sky,” and is from Cockburn’s 1980 album Humans. It’s a divorce song on a divorce album, a harrowing catalogue of missed opportunities and soothing words spoken too late, or not at all, of rage and helplessness and, finally, of resigned acceptance.

It’s one loss I’m very thankful to have been spared in my life, but the sentiments are broadly applicable. It’s a song that is rooted in the intensely personal civil war of one man and one woman, and that is relevant to anyone who has ever mourned the passing of an irreplaceable gift. Today I listen to it, remember the jewels that have slipped away, and pray for my friend John, who is currently in the midst of pawning off a gem that cannot and should not be priced. How much is a lifelong dream worth?

“The Rose Above the Sky”—the title, the chorus, the final verse of the song—obliquely references the final lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy as well as the allusion to Dante in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, another gritty, mysterious work that is tied to a specific time and place—the England of World War II—and that is as boundless as eternity itself. Critics and skeptics bemoan the mystical vision that concludes the cycle of poems, and that is appropriated in Bruce Cockburn’s song. Instead of pie in the sky we have a rose in the sky, an impossibly romantic, florid (quite literally) vision of beauty that goes on forever.

I am a critic, but I am no skeptic when it comes to these things. Every bone within me cries out for answers, and I’ve lived long enough to know that the answers are sometimes not forthcoming. I do know that I mourn what is lost, that the tears are all too real, that the metaphorical blood-red rose in the sky is stained with blood that seems non-hypothetical.

And I live in hope, just as my friend John does. Tomorrow I’ll call him up. Maybe I’ll treat him to a consolatory beer. And in a few days we’ll meet in the same church to worship the same God. I don’t know precisely how he’s processing these painful days. But I know that he will be holding on to the same bedrock truths that sustain me. This is not the end. There is more, much more. The tears will be wiped away. We will see the face of love, the answer to all our yearning questions, a rose.