An apocalyptic band sees the world through the incarnation of Christ.
It was around this time of year three years ago that I encountered the music of the US-based band, Dirt Poor Robins. We had all just been plunged into lockdown again and too many people I knew unquestioningly acquiesced to what seemed to be an unnecessarily tyrannical response to the Covid pandemic. Churches had been closed, access to the sacraments blocked and I was beginning to wonder whether I was the only sane person in the asylum. After a particularly offensive attack against me for not wearing a mask, I recalled the words of Kurt Vonnegut that “a sane person to an insane society must appear insane”.
It was a lonely place to be, when suddenly, like a beam of light in the darkness, I heard Neil DeGraide and his band Dirt Poor Robins belting out songs with such prophetic insight that it was like coming up for air. I was reminded of the power of art.
My return to the Catholic faith began when I visited the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. I was a 23-year-old ball of resentment and anger. My mother had died, my only sibling had moved to France (hence the visit) and a God I no longer believed in had, I concluded, let me down.
On entering the chapel, I fell to my knees and began to weep. I could not have anticipated it, and I couldn’t explain it. Quite simply, beauty had penetrated deep into my soul, cracking me open and filling me with grace. How each of us choose to respond to these moments of grace determines the course of our lives.
This is something I discussed with Neil when we met in London recently. “We are an apocalyptic band,” he said, “who see the world through the incarnation of Christ. The moment Christ enters the world we have the answer to the riddle.” Exposing the riddle means grappling with darkness, but, like Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor, Neil recognises that any exaggerated element of evil only creates the conditions for its opposite to be revealed more clearly.
We are told in scripture that wisdom is “quick to anticipate those who desire her, and she makes herself known to them; be on alert for her and anxiety will quickly leave you” (Wisdom 6:12-16).
One of the ways in which she makes herself known to us is through artists like Neil and his wife Kate DeGraide whose music is gaining traction in an artificial world starved of meaning.
As he spoke, I was reminded of the words of Pope St John Paul II, who said: “None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.
A glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in your eyes when – like the artists of every age – captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colours and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you.”
I sat both listening to what Neil was saying and seeing who he was, reflecting on the way in which God wished to associate him with the mystery of creation. It was his whoness formed by participation in the sacramental life that was so captivating – how, then, could the whatness of the art which flowed forth from the man not also be?
“Art falls short when you think you can change the world with it,” he said; “that becomes propaganda.” In A Christmas Carol Ebenezer Scrooge sees what will happen if he doesn’t change course, the inevitability is laid before him and he is left with a choice; so too Dirt Poor Robins lay stories at our feet, never knowing, nor needing to know, how they will pierce the lives of their listeners, but pierce them they do.
As Christmas approaches, that point of incarnation when eternity is inserted into the split between BC and AD, Dirt Poor Robins might be a welcome find for those who mourn the loss of the supernatural and are looking for a broader and theologically deeper reconsideration of what we once were before artifice blinded us to the sacred.
Their magical realism presented through story and song calls to that part of each one of us which cannot, and will not, ever be extinguished; calls us out of the cave and challenges us to open our eyes and see the purpose for which we have been created.
St John Paul II wrote: “Art has the unique capacity to … nourish the intuition of those who look or listen.” As the artists create, all we need to do is look.
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