Joan Baez - 'Day After Tomorrow'

I am a semi-retired Lutheran pastor. Like Joan Baez, I was born in 1941. I have heard songs in many styles which enhance and enliven my faith and songs which challenge me to reexamine what I profess to believe. I treasure Joan’s new CD, Day After Tomorrow. The opening song, Steve Earle’s musical gem, ""God is God,"" reaffirms yet simultaneously challenges my faith, just as Joan's earlier music both encouraged me and made me think twice about my spiritual, social and political convictions as a student in the late ’60s and early ’70s. One line, ""Even my money keeps telling me it's God I need to trust,"" not only refers literally to the words on our currency but becomes allegorical and prophetic for all of us as we face the current worldwide financial crisis. Eliza Gilkyson’s ""Rose of Sharon"" (Song of Songs 2) is an ancient Hebrew duet between a lover and his beloved. The song wandered its way into the Bible when someone, traditionally King Solomon, adopted it as an allegory about the love of Yahweh for His bride Israel. Centuries later, Christians adopted it as an allegory about Jesus' self-sacrificing love for believers. Joan’s singing is both emotionally moving and spiritually uplifting. Elvis Costello’s ""The Scarlet Tide"" and Tom Waits’ and Kathleen Brennan’s ""Day After Tomorrow"" are especially meaningful for my family right now. My daughter and her two toddlers have come home to my wife and me as her husband completes his training to go to Iraq with his National Guard unit in January. Diana Jones’ “Henry Russell’s Last Words,” an expression of a dying miner’s love for his wife and family, complements another wonderful recent CD, Kathy Mattea’s ""Coal."" And I am persuaded that my past judgment is correct: Joan and Kathy are kindred spirits and should sing together. The result would be world-class. In Earle’s “I Am a Wanderer” Joan puts us all into the walking shoes of several types of people, including a prisoner, as we try to make our way through life. The two Marian songs, Patty Griffin’s ""Mary"" and Gilkyson’s ""Requiem,"" challenge me to recapture my mother’s dedication to Jesus’ Mother, who is a source of prayer and help for those who suffer from tragedy. It is a dedication which Martin Luther retained until his death but which we Lutherans seem to forget about. Thea Gilmore’s “The Lower Road” leads me to see myself, someday, becoming peaceful and released from toil. And I will be “rolling on” and “going home.” The closing song, Earle’s ""Jericho Road,"" reminds me not only of the loving meeting of The Good Samaritan and the injured Jew in Jesus' account, which may not have been a parable but an actual event well known to Jesus' hearers. The song reminds me also of Psalm 23 with its deep faith in God the Shepherd. In Jesus' day, the road from Jericho to Jerusalem was known to the locals as ""The Valley of the Shadow of Death"" because of the dangers of being attacked as one walked it. I would indeed sing and clap like a Gospel choir if I met my loved ones traveling that road safely. Thanks to Joan and her colleagues for a wonderful album. And thanks as well to Joan and Steve for introducing me to some wonderful songwriters whose names I have just mentioned but of whom I had never previously heard. My next project will be to buy and listen to their recordings. The use of traditional acoustic instruments from various cultures enhances the universal character of the album. Universal not only in terms of space but in terms of time as well, as anyone who has heard medieval songs delicately accompanied by lutes can testify. Joan’s collection brings to mind one of my favorite poems, ""God’s Grandeur,"" by the 19th-century English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. God is God in the midst of human toil and the Holy Ghost enlivens and brightens the world of men. I hope that someday one of the songwriters represented on Day After Tomorrow may see fit to set Hopkins’ words to a song which Joan and Steve will record. THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. God's Grandeur is in the public domain (I believe)

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