Stephen Fearing’s lyrics offer deep vision to world

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/07/2003 (8352 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHEN I met with the family about the service for the celebration of his life, they said that they would “like to use some of Stephen’s music.”

As they talked on about the music, they were politely conscious of the fact that I might not know “Stephen’s music”. But even before they used his last name, I knew who they were talking about from his lyrics; it was Stephen Fearing. Like so many other Canadian artists of word, image and sound, Stephen is a spiritual visionary whose deep vision we so greatly need in this world of quick fixes and easy answers. And it seems we simply don’t listen to the prophets of our own land. But then, that’s not a new problem. We always think of experts as others.

Here in Manitoba the 30th Folk Festival has just ended, and the Fringe Festival has just begun, and that will be followed by Folklorama. That’s a whole lot of ‘f’ words, but the other significant ‘f’ word that connects all of these events is, I believe, the word “faith.” And this is a particular kind of faith. It’s the faith of the artist believer who will not give up their art, even when the majority around them tell them to go and get “a real job.” It’s also the faith of the folk; the faith that folk (translated: regular everyday people) need to find meaning and mattering in their lives.

Let me use Stephen Fearing and his music as an example. I need to preface this by a disclaimer. I don’t know Stephen personally. This is not solicited advertising or even my unsolicited need for Stephen’s approval.

For me he is simply and yet quite complexly an artist who speaks to the quest of my soul. And that’s what artist’s at their best do. They are truth tellers of the secrets that we would never risk. Yet somehow they do.

They write them, act them, dance them, image them and sing them. They go to those places of our yearning and longing. Those places we rarely take the time to visit. those places we often fear visiting. They use satire, cynicism, humour, parody and beauty; they use every inch and ounce of talent they have to create something that will call us out into our truth. This is the deep work of a spiritual guide, yet few of these artists would call themselves spiritual teachers, and that is perhaps why they can do what they do so well. They are doing what they love, and even when it becomes so hard they hate it, you can tell that they are simply doing what they passionately must do.

Often I have folk ask me about my spiritual teachers and resources. I think they assume that I must have to travel halfway around the world; that there must be one primary person whose school of teaching I follow. Some may find that to be a helpful path, but my teachers are all around me in relationships I share, and in the sights and sounds that call me to deep quest and heights of joy.

Stephen’s music is one of those resources. It is I think in the combination of his talent and his torment. It’s partly his ability to make a single instrument (the guitar) sound like it’s part of his body, and partly his ability to use his voice like a fiercely tender yet raging prophet; and partly his way of taking words and weaving them into a terribly truthful beauty of genuine real human struggle and strength. Let me share some of his lyrics because I believe they are what we need as sacred writing today. In one piece he writes, “Don’t lecture me, don’t hit me with that stick I know how easily the little lies run off your lip. I know that jerking knee, I know the bully legged kick. It don’t take genius to see people driven by the whip. This country’s gone to hell, we just vote reactionary. Too many times to the well. And all the mines are full of dead canaries.” In another he gets even closer to home when he writes, “Just a baby and my father knew it well, The old man always told me, that good kids never tell, And no one dared to ask me, Why I lay awake at night, My arms so still beside me, As he turned out the lights.” He uses one liners like, “We tear through our lives like thorns ripping cotton… but dreaming in slumbers we walk with the dead, When the soul and the music go wandering home.”

Fearing is an apt name for the man. He knows about fearing and he knows about courage, just as he knows about dark and light, pain and healing. In another song he invites, “Cast your nets on the water, And your gaze on the sky, If it all crumbles tomorrow take strength in what you try. If the heart is an arrow, Then life must be the bow, So let it fly like one of God’s sparrows, Over all you think you know.” There was another poet once who wrote the famous words, “One can do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

Stephen Fearing and other artist/creators/spiritual visionaries like him are those who risk the tumultuous twisters of spirit seeking to find the gentle breezes of the soul coming home to its source. In his sound of song, and his poetry of word, he creates a combination that becomes for me an invitation. Music, paintings, dance, sculpture, drama, they are all a matter of very individual invitation based on the seeking of the very individual soul. In the plainest words possible, let’s give up trying to tell each other what we have to believe in order to be right, and look to the sacred creations of living word happening right in our midst. Whatever we do this summer, let’s take some time to stop, look, listen, and then act out the inspiration of truth we have discovered. In words of blessing and invitation from another song of Stephen Fearing, “Everyday may good grace surround us, Luck and love and life dumfound us, Beauty right up in your face; Everyday, everyday, a destination, Everyday a train at the station, Room for courage, room for change, everyday, everyday.”

Karen E. Toole has a masters of divinity degree. She is self-employed in Soul Seasons, a counselling and consulting partnership. Her e-mail address is: soulseasons@hotmail.com