Kicking at the Darkness Quotes

“A cold commodity culture in which everything is reduced to its market value will blasphemously obscure our vision that “all this earth is hallowed ground.”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“When grace is replaced by greed, and generosity is displaced by avarice, there is no limit to the depths of evil that can result.”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“Broken Wheel” explicitly rejects any spirituality of escape. There can be no bystanders, there is none who is without sin, and there can be no averting our gaze from the curse that our sin has caused. In this song we are called to engage the world in all of its pain precisely because it is only by embracing the brokenness of creation that we can begin to affirm the possibility of change. As Walter Brueggemann has put it, “Only grief permits newness.”[293] Those who do not want the new are afraid of grief; they deny it to themselves and repress it (or ignore it) in others. But grief permits newness because grief, mourning, and tears are not expressions of powerlessness. Rather, grief functions as a radical critique of the distortedness of our own lives by bringing what is wrong to conscious awareness. “Broken Wheel” refuses to cover up and insists that we confront the brokenness, oppression, failed expectations, and empty promises of our lives. If grief permits the newness of hope, then this song gives voice to a profound hope:”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“It is important that we do not attempt to freeze Cockburn’s spirituality at a particular point in time or from a particular “theological” perspective. In a 1986 interview for Nerve magazine, Cockburn said, “The fact that I’m a Christian has an obvious effect on how I see the world, which in turn shows up in the songs.”[30] But both the association of the word Christian with the religious Right in America and Cockburn’s own deep distaste for all “dogma” that ends up functioning as a violent weapon with which to attack others have led him to “rely on oblique imagery to get at the real things.”[31] While he has a profound and deep sense of “walking with God,” he also knows that such language is almost totally inexplicable to most people, precisely because such pious talk has been co-opted and defiled by a religious fundamentalism that has been at the heart of so much evil in the last few decades. Yet, Cockburn can’t help himself. He has a decidedly Christian-shaped experience of God that is caught in mere “glimpses.” Those glimpses, however, “are strong and tantalizing.” And so he confesses that the “sense of being in the company of God is continually growing. And I like it!”[32]”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“Way out on the rim of the galaxy The gifts of the Lord lie torn Into whose charge the gifts were given Have made it a curse for so many to be born This is my trouble— These were my fathers So how am I supposed to feel? Way out on the rim of the broken wheel.”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“Lament is always voiced in the hope that redemption is possible. Psalms and songs of disorientation are always rooted in a failed orientation and long for the time when we will be able to sing new songs of reorientation. Lament keeps us alive with hope when the temptation is to surrender to a defeated numbness.[273]”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“But the dream of creational dancing in respectful harmony has devolved into the disrespectful and destructive nightmare of ecological devastation. And we know that this nightmare has everything to do with one particular dancer in the cosmic ballet. Humans. When creation dreams become ecological nightmares, it is invariably the human creature who is at the heart of it all. So,”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“Escapist piety that has humans exploit and dominate this earth only to be whisked off to some otherworldly heaven has no support from an integral reading of the Bible.[217]”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“Specifically, I want to bring these songs and texts to bear on the ecological crisis. It seems to me that the environmental crisis is, at heart, a failure and a perversion of the human imagination. Our imaginations have been taken captive by an ecocidal ideology of economic growth that invariably will render us homeless in a world unfit for habitation. If imagination is the issue, then a redirection of our lives toward creation care will not emerge out of statistics of ecological despoliation, as important as those statistics might be. What we need is liberated imagination, imagination set free to envision an alternative life, an ecological imagination that engenders a life of restorative homemaking in our creational home. Cockburn’s art, especially when interpreted in dialogue with biblical visions, is a rich resource for funding such an imagination.[206]”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“The hope for homecoming is constitutive of the human condition. Like grass rising through cement, it will irrepressibly emerge and animate human action against all odds.”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination

“When we come / when we come again / to celebrate renewal / at the heart / at the heart of us / our eyes will touch Life.” This renewal of the earth is at the heart of our humanity, and in such renewal “our eyes touch Life.” In this mixed metaphor, vision and touch are united. Eyes do not just see, they also, in some profound sense, must touch Life. And note that this is Life, not life. There is something about this Life that transcends life itself.”
― Brian J. Walsh, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination