The Lights that Shine in the Darkness

Something ain't right.

That's the chorus of a song by a singer named Sharon Van Etten. We saw her live at the 9:30 club last week. I joked afterward that she and her amazing band ripped my face off.

It's an awkward phrase. I was caught up in the moment. But what it means is that the glaze of life — the stress, the worry, the artifice, the boredom, the frustration, and even the pleasures — was stripped away, removed, blasted off by the power of Van Etten's voice, the passion with which she sung, and the incredible momentum that each song gathered unto itself. It was like watching a group of five people assemble a freight train in front of your eyes, and then feeling the vibrations of the behemoth vehicle on the tracks as you are pulled on board and carried along at breakaway speed.

But that glaze, a veneer of numbness, was also ripped away by the cathartic act of watching an artist express the anger we can often feel that things are not as they should be. This is a feeling specific to our distracted, superficial and self-damaging age, but also something of a universal and timeless frustration.

Anger is a clear and sharp current running through Van Etten's songs. But what makes her a great artist is that she stacks many emotions on top of one another in just one song. Her song "Something Ain't Right" is an example. It's a lament, really. And it ends with a line that I hadn't noticed until we saw her perform the song live: "It's the same. Same as it ever was." Heavy.

But there is also hope in the song as she asks: "What you want for your friends? What you want for your family?" This only exacerbates the heartbreak of the song. We've brought children, she is saying, into this story of cyclical and seemingly never ending heartbreak and despair. We are doomed, in a sense, to suffer and to see those we love suffer.

Van Etten breaks through that gloom with the kind of counterintuitive gesture that has characterized the best of the great religions: "Do you believe in compassion for enemies?" And she shifts quickly to a call for responsibility, accountability, and justice: "Who is to blame when it falls to decay?"

All relevant thoughts and questions: more than ever in some ways. In another sense, it's the same as it ever was.

These themes had already been pressing down on me when I knelt in my pew at a Good Friday mass, ten days before the concert. I joined the Catholic church last fall, and it was my first Holy Week as a new member (convert still feels like the wrong word). So I wanted the full experience. I went to Mass on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and then to a prayer service Saturday morning because one of our teenage children was set to be baptized at the Easter Vigil Saturday night, a three-hour mass in which the church receives new members above a certain age with the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and first communion.

My overwhelming emotions during mass on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday? Anger and despair. The liturgies are meant to evoke the desperation of Christ going to his place of torture and execution, and I felt that. But more so, I felt the darkness of our time: the dignity of the individual — based in the Christian belief in Imago Dei — is being erased and replaced by a nihilism in which might makes right and the weak get what is coming to them.

My despair and anger were compounded by a feeling that it has almost always been thus throughout human history. A recent trip was in my head. Just a few days prior, on Palm Sunday, I had been in Athens, Greece, where I was struck by the fact that the achievements of the Acropolis had been torn down and blown up too many times to count, by the dumb and powerful hubris and folly of men.

On the plane ride home, I watched "The Return," a retelling of the story of The Odyssey in which Ralph Fiennes plays Odysseus, opposite Juliette Binoche as Penelope, his long-suffering queen. I will say the same thing about "The Return" that I would tell you about a Sharon Van Etten concert: you should really make every effort to see it.

Fiennes, first of all, is a marvel. His acting is a wonder, through gesture, expression, and physicality. His muscles look like those of a man who has been away, at war and on adventure and through hardship, for many years, without the marvels of 21st century advances in medicine, weight training, and diet. One reviewer compared his body to a worn out and used up piece of leather. His arms are sinewy. His ribs jut out.

For much of the film, Fiennes' Odysseus is like Hamlet: dithering, uncertain. He is ashamed of what he has done on his way to Troy and his meandering way back. Binoche's Penelope is the true hero of the film, and its conscience. She calls on Odysseus to come forth from his shattered shell, to reclaim his throne and his identity. But she also mocks and rebukes the vainglory of men that has driven so many off to seek renown and make their name, only to find themselves sowing death, destruction and suffering.

Penelope is clear: the very ethos of ancient Greece is a farce. The quest for fame and renown through conquest is a fool's errand, a mirage that should be pounded into the dust. She might have quoted Thomas Merton if he'd been around then: "We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great ... The reason why we do things so badly is that we are not content to do what we can."

David Brooks wrote on this very same theme this week. I came across his piece after I'd penned most of this essay, but clearly we were on the same wavelength, as he devoted a column to the ethos of what he calls paganism. "The pagan culture is seductive because it lures you with images of heroism, might and glory. Think of Achilles slaughtering his enemies before the walls of Troy. For a certain sort of perpetual boy, what could be cooler than that?" he wrote.

In fact, we watched the first 20 minutes of Brad Pitt's star turn as Achilles in "Troy" while we were in Greece. But we couldn't make it any farther as we laughed out loud at the sophomoric simplicity of the characters. None is so foolish as Achilles, who ponders his mother's prophecy but for a moment: Go to Troy and die a hero, or stay here and live a long, happy life. Hmmm. Tough choice. Well, we all know what he chose.

However, part of the brilliance of "The Return" is that Odysseus' response to Penelope is equally adamant: I will do what you ask. I will throw off my regret, my shame, and my hesitancy, and reclaim my mantle. But you will not like how I do this. For the only way to restore justice to Ithaca is to have some unpleasant business that does not fit into neat ethical categories.

The movie does not answer the question of whether Odysseus is right, in either pragmatic or moral terms. It simply leaves the question hanging, unresolved, as it probably should. And it is foolish to casually dismiss the yearning for greatness and meaning that burns in the heart of so many. The path of wisdom is the quest to discover contentment and happiness that is not attached to our ego and our accomplishments. It takes most of us decades to make any progress.

But in the absence of a clear resolution, a deeper truth is left unsaid but hanging in the air: in the war of man, as Neil Young sang, no one wins.

The movie ends on a touching note of reconciliation in which Penelope promises to come alongside Odysseus as he remembers his past, to help him face his sins, own up to them, and seek redemption with and through her.

As Penelope and Ven Etten show, the cycle of same as it ever was can be met with a resolve to love our friends, family and even our enemies.

And we should not lose perspective in a haze of historical relativism that judges all epochs the same. Despite all the suffering that has remained, our age has been a golden one that is now threatened by those who seek to throw reverence for each human life to the wayside. "The callous tolerance of cruelty is a river that runs through human history. It was dammed up, somewhat, only by millenniums of hard civilizational work. The pagan ethos — ancient or modern — always threatens to unleash brutality once again," writes Brooks.

We have been the great beneficiaries of this imperfect dam. Perhaps I am feeling the dread of what it means to see the dam falling apart. If the dam is a word- and print-based culture built around ideas, giving way to an image-based culture built around emotion, I have been watching that dam fall apart my entire adult life. It feels as if we are watching a return to a pre-Enlightenment, pre-printing press age, a slow motion car crash. Ever since I read Neil Postman in my 20's, I knew it was bad that we were reading and thinking less, but only recently have I begun to conceive of it as the kind of shift that only happens every few hundred or thousand years. This is the anger I felt on my knees on Good Friday, and in the dark at the 9:30 Club watching Sharon Van Etten sing.

But on Easter morning, I did wake joyful, more so than any year in which I'd skipped, evangelical style, straight from Christmas to Easter. I had gone through the twilight of Lent, into the darkness of Holy Week, and then into the celebration of Easter Vigil, where we sang alleluiah's we had not allowed ourselves to sing for all of Lent.

The alleluiahs celebrate the hope of the resurrection: perhaps this will all be set right some day. Perhaps, if Christ is who he said he was, death and evil have been defeated. May it be so. For if it is, then the "inversions" of Christianity that "make paganism look pompous and soulless" are not just lofty thoughts that may or may not be pragmatically useful, but realities that carry the full freight of true power. Brooks again: "Paganism says: Make yourself the center of the universe. Serve yourself and force others to serve you. The biblical metaphysic says: Serve others, and you will find joy. Serve God, and you will delight in his love."

And so on Easter morning, as I woke dazed and coming down with the flu, it was the alleluiahs that were still ringing in my ears.