Thursday night, I saw The Civil Wars perform at The Town Hall in midtown Manhattan. I wrote about this young mountain-music duo last spring (here and here) after I saw them at the Festival of Faith and Music at Calvin College in Michigan.

Let me start this review over again.

Thursday night, while watching The Civil Wars perform, surprise took hold of me a few songs into their set, as I realized that what I was seeing from Joy Williams and John Paul White, and what I love about them, and maybe, I wondered, why they have been selling out show after show on their tour, including tonight’s, is because when they play, they do something like blessing each other.

During songs, they will often turn toward each other, singing to and beyond each other, and then they will back up from the microphones and keep playing while face to face, bodies nearly touching, swaying and stomping and leaning into and across each other, as if through this intimacy they find out where the song lives tonight.

And so a few songs in, and this is happening, and Williams raises her hands, one toward White’s face, and the other toward his guitar, in a gesture of blessing, of too-muchness, of erotic seismography, of shaping the air around White as music. And it was as if his bent head and the presentation of his guitar under stress of a heavy strum were returning the blessing – or had it been the initiator?

And I realized I had never thought that band members might be understood to be blessing each other in performance, despite having spent a considerable portion of my life as a bass player interacting with drummers, guitarists, and vocalists in live performance in all manner of exchanges of creative spirit.

And after tonight’s show, I wondered what we are saying theologically by the language of “blessing.”

Blessing retains more than a trace of ancient practices of drawing down divinity through ritual gesture (in other words, what many theologians today would dismissively categorize as “magic”).  These associations are never completely left behind, even if rarefied theology takes pains to distance itself from this past.

In academic theology, there is the language of sacramental action, of a performance in this world that conducts something of the character of transcendence in and through this world. Theologies of sacramental action vary considerably in the Christian tradition, but if I might too briefly suggest a potential meeting point among them, it is that they have to do with the formation, information, and transformation of sense on the part of practitioners; these theologies of sacramental action reproduce and rework the idea, the hope, the wager, that God is present here, in this action, and our senses, rational and emotional, can learn to pick this up.

It is fascinating to me that these gestures migrate from religious contexts into musical contexts. It is fascinating to me that these gestures are found both in religious and musical contexts. To ask which migrated from where is probably to engage in the kind of sloppy thinking that presumes religion and music are discrete and ahistorical realms of experience.

So one way of beginning to make theological sense of this dimension of The Civil Wars is to sit with these ideas. Another way, of course, is to allow whatever blessing they are doing to each other to become a possible blessing for us, too.

Tommy Beaudoin, New York City

2 Comments »

1. 

   Great post, Tom – I have seen The Civil Wars live here in Seattle and know exactly what you are describing. To push your point a bit perhaps, I would even go further in saying that the blessing is beyond the capacity of the agents involvement in that the event of the show for me transcended the quality of the music and certainly beyond what is captured on their CD. True, they harmonize well and JP does a great job on the guitar. But other than “Barton Hallow” and their cover of “Billy Jean” I wasn’t left with a memorable song lyrically nor musically. But I was left with a concert experience that was simple, joyful and transcendent in so many ways. In short, a blessing beyond those enacting blessing to be sure.

   Comment by jkeuss — October 31, 2011 @ 9:25 pm

2. 

   Jeff, thanks for your interesting comment. I would certainly agree with you that whatever “blessing” is being let through in their performance (which, as you well observe, makes for a (theologically significant) different effect than the recorded music alone), it is an atmosphere that The Civil Wars, or any musicians, neither create nor control, but they do symbolize and “orchestrate” this “more.” And they themselves are in a sense symbolized and orchestrated by it — and so, too, are fans, whether in sympathy with or reaction to the performers. You also raise a topic that I don’t think has gotten much discussion: whether we might find theologically or spiritually significant a performing style that does not issue in any notable song in particular. Usually in theological studies of popular culture we are working from a (notable) song backward to the artist or forward to the audience, or vice versa. But what about banal songs (on whose terms?) that are yet full of theologically significant gestures? Any fan of 80s rock, like me, will eventually have to face that question. I tried to do so a little bit on a post on musical “comfort food” here: http://www.rockandtheology.com/?p=436
   Thanks, Jeff, for continuing the conversation.
   TB

   Comment by T Beaudoin — November 1, 2011 @ 11:44 pm

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