Pop-rock star and philosopher-believer BRUCE COCKBURN says he's politically correct with no one
Near the end of a long conversation, Bruce Cockburn suddenly leans over to his black satchel and pulls out a New Testament. The brown-green cover of the Bible is camouflage design, suitable for guerrilla warriors. Cockburn couldn't resist it when he saw it in a U.S. Cavalry mail-order catalogue.
This legendary Canadian performer, one of the precious few rockers who count themselves as Christians, rarely talks about his faith today because there is so much potential for misunderstanding.
The word, Christianity, now has too many twisted, televangelistic, right-wing connotations, he says in a Vancouver restaurant. Even after he picks up his New Testament to check a passage about love from the Gospel of John, he seems shy about what stereotypes people may have about a guy who carries around a Bible.
Although Cockburn has rarely attended church for more than a decade, Christianity has carried him through a career in which he has sold millions of copies of his 22 wide-ranging, passionate, tender, poetic, political, spiritual albums. He has won 10 Juno awards, played at President Bill Clinton's inaugural ball and received wide spread acclaim throughout North America.
To draw attention to issues ranging from clear-cut forests to thinning ozone, gay rights to unexploded land mines, issues that he sometimes calls "lost causes," Cockburn has traveled widely and taken numerous public stands. He usually works one or two issues into each album.
His fans love it. But he pays for it. Comedians -- such as those from This Hour Has 22 Minutes -- are not without precedent when they recently lampooned him as a bucktoothed soldier of the politically correct.
But whether or not you agree with Cockburn, the beauty of his moral vision is that it comes from a source that's deep and lasting. His passion for social justice is fueled not by the fashion of the day, but by his evolving, non-rule bound Christianity.
Blessed are the poor in spirit
Blessed are the meek
For theirs shall be the kingdom
That the power mongers seek.
Blessed are the dead for love
And those who cry for peace
And those who have the gift of love
May their gene pool increase
-- Shipwrecked at the Stable Door
Although his political stands sometimes seem predictable, in this era when many cynical musicians (and not a few of the rest of us) sacrifice values for the sake of career success, Cockburn has stood for something beyond his own comfort and glory.
He knows he can sound too earnest, but he is consciously using what he believes are his God given abilities to do something for the world's underdogs, whether they're Canadians who lose their jobs because of free trade or Latin Americans who lose their lives because of oppression.
He's nobody's person but his own.
He's trying to be nobody's person but God's.
He's not considered politically correct in any camp, he says. Many Christians can't stand his politics. And many political radicals can't stand his Christianity.
Even progressive Christians have trouble with the way, for example, he refers to God as "He." And others are disappointed he rejects pacifism. He's an expert marksman and a weapons aficionado who wrote a famous lyrics about how, if he had a rocket launcher, he would use it to blow up Latin American death dealers.
He doesn't have the right to stand idly by if he can stop a loved one, or someone else, from being killed, he says in his quiet but decisive way of speaking, which alternates between blunt denunciations and quiet self-deprecation.
To Cockburn, following God, following Jesus, may at times mean being something other than a meek Christian. In exceptional cases, he says by way of example, following God could mean fighting child prostitution by lobbing a grenade through a porno parlor.
"You know, anything's possible. There are no rules. This is what gets me in trouble with certain members of the Christian community. I really don't think it's about rules."
There are codes of behavior that help humans get along with each other, he acknowledges. But when it comes to finding one's true place in the universe, he says sometimes you have to act in a way that may be perceived as outrageous.
"I think it's wrong to ignore what's going on around you. We purport to believe in the concept of loving your brother, which we're told in the Bible is everybody. And I don't see how you can sit and think you're loving your brother when your brother is starving to death or killing his brother or keeping his wife behind a veil," he says.
"That seems unfair to me. Some of these things touch me for some reasons. I couldn't tell you why, without psychoanalysis. But for some reason the abuse of human dignity is something that matters to me. I abhor it."
When he was a youngster, Cockburn's conservative parents, even though they were agnostics, compelled him to attend Westboro United Church in Ottawa.
"It wasn't really a spiritual involvement, except kind of accidentally." However, he feels grateful to the church's organist, who encouraged him to write his own compositions, including jazz service.
Cockburn drifted away from church in his teens and didn't return until his late 20s, when circumstance, which he is inclined to spell with a big "C," led him to St. George's Anglican church in Ottawa.
The church was a hodge-podge of refugee Catholics, West Indians and people out of prison on parole. "The spirit was very alive and very viable in that place -- not every time you went, but enough times to remind you what it was. And I've never found another church like that, although I can't say I've honestly made an exhaustive search. I feel if a church wasn't really being offered to me, it probably wasn't necessary. And I feel that way about a lot of stuff."
The closest thing he now has to a faith community is the Greenbelt music festival in England, where he feels sustained and inspired by fellow alternative-Christian performers. It's the kind of non-pious, non-evangelistic Christian music festival he says you'd never see in North America.
These days he acknowledges receiving as much guidance from the world, the people around him, including the non-Christian woman with whom he lives, as he does from the Bible. He only reads his camouflage-design New Testament off and on -- when he has a burning need for inspiration, or, frankly, when he's bored.
But he prays constantly. Prayer for him is a kind of ongoing conversation with God in which he keeps before his mind's eye the phrase: "Your will be done," from the Lord's prayer.
He tries to submit to the will of God. The trick, however, is discerning what God's will is. "If I don't get a gut reaction, then I just wait in as calm and quiet a state as possible. Some times you wait a long time. But part of the waiting is trusting that God is part of the process."
It's not necessarily a wimpy trust. The restaurant's pleasant jazz music and linen table cloths seem far removed from Cockburn's raw fear of being maimed during a recent fact finding trip to Mozambique, where he has traveled several times on behalf of a Canadian Mozambique coalition called Cocamo.
He's helping the group publicize the fact that two million abandoned land mines still plague the poverty-stricken country. When he was there, two Mozambique police officers stopped him in front of his hotel and threatened to pull out his fingernails and castrate him if he didn't hand over his money.
He handed over the money. At the same time, he silently repeated a mantra he had kept in mind during his stay in the chaotic country:
"Total trust. Total trust."
His trust in divine providence is embedded in his soul. But his doctrine is hard to pin down in a neat way, which is a characteristic of a mystic.
He follows what he believes God puts before him -- no matter whom it displeases or how it may make him uncomfortable. In some cases, he believes, trusting in divine providence, following what God puts before him, could lead to his death.
Such is the depth of Cockburn's commitment to his God, whom he describes in abstract, philosophical terms. His understanding of the divine has been shaped by an eclectic group of thinkers (many of whom he learns about when fans send him books) including author C.S. Lewis, Catholic thinker Teilhard de Chardin, Canadian Jungian analyst Marion Woodman and St. Francis of Assisi, "the patron saint of the good guys."
Everything is motion
To the motion be true
-- The Gift
Motion, he says, is the essence of life.
"Whether you're looking at subatomic particles or at the regeneration of life, you're looking at the need of the universe to move forward. Perhaps it's fanciful to call it forward or backward, but there is that invisible motion that's central to existence. And it might even be true to say that is what God is."
Cockburn thinks it's unnecessary to narrowly define God. "For me it's just important to feel that I'm part of a process and that process exists because of God. And it's a process in which God can take a hand anytime He wants, and presumably does," he says.
"What's important to me to remember is that the process is there, even at times when you think it's not or when you've done something totally wrong and there's no recovery from it. But that process is sort of what forgiveness is about. The process is redemptive, even when you lose sight of it. "
At this point, Cockburn apologizes for being impossibly vague. But he makes sense. His cosmology grows out of a learned, informed approach to the world, an approach he often downplays in our conversation by saying how little he knows about things he knows a lot about; everything from making plastic explosives, to what's in the Bible, to the policies of the International Monetary Fund.
Despite taking strong stands, he tries to avoid being self-righteous. Divorced, with an 18-year-old daughter, he is honest enough to acknowledge that part of his penchant for public crusades probably comes from awkwardness in personal relationships.
"You've got to go with what you're good at. I have an easier time relating to people at a distance than to people up close, I guess."
While he admires those musicians he thinks put their money where their mouth is, such as Jackson Browne and Neil Young, he's trying not to be too judgmental about the majority of musicians who could not care less about what's happening to the world. He knows he can come off as a scold.
It is more blessed to give than receive
Especially when it comes to free advice I believe
Here I go anyway, back seat driving tonight.
-- Tie Me At the Crossroads
Millions of his fans applaud him for offering advice to the world. The rest may simply have to get used to it. Cockburn will be preaching until the day he dies.