Sacramentalism in the music of Sufjan Stevens
By Kate Kennedy
Every year or so, I get the urge to send some of my Christian friends the final track of Sufjan Stevens’ 2004 album Seven Swans. The song “The Transfiguration” relates the event in Christ’s life known by the same name. Musically, it begins with Sufjan’s voice and the strumming of a banjo, and as the song progresses, more and more instruments chime in. As do more voices: “Lost in the cloud, a sign: Son of man! Turn your ear!” The layers wash over you until you have the sense that what began as simple narration has turned into a revelation.
Most of the tracks on Seven Swans are thematically Christian, but Sufjan has adamantly resisted being labeled a “Christian artist.” Christian music is more than a genre; it is an entire industry with a logic and market all its own. When it comes to Sufjan’s music, you cannot check boxes. And just when you think you “get” his musical style, the next album comes out, offering something totally new.
Guest Author, Kate Kennedy
If Sufjan’s music can be considered Christian, it has to be considered so in a deeper sense. He delivers no pat messages for the faithful. No, Sufjan is doing something entirely different. In anticipation of his latest album, The Ascension, which comes out this Friday, I wanted to dive into what is so special about his music. So, I invite you to grab a tea and sit back. And as you come across a link, click on it to hear the song that is being described. I guarantee it’s worth it.
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Christians are not the only ones who would like to claim Sufjan as one of their own. There is a popular meme that started circulating years ago on the internet: Is this Sufjan Stevens song gay or just about God? While benevolent in its intent, it makes clear once again that we as listeners would prefer clear boxes to be checked. But Sufjan holds his personal-sexuality-cards close to his chest while the online discussions carry on.
I bring up this meme, because it belies something much more profound at play in Sufjan’s work than the ambiguity of who the intended “you” in any given song might be. Consider where we now find ourselves at this moment in musical history. R&B music, and by extension pop music, which dominates the radio waves, emerged out of the gospel tradition – only instead of singing about a love of God (‘Agape’ in Greek), lyrics became directed toward lovers on earth (‘Eros’). And since then, it seems that never the twain shall meet.
Image of Sufjan Stevens performing, taken from Wikipedia
Sufjan’s songs often bridge this Agape/Eros divide, and they do so in one of two ways. The first is by expressing a relationship to Christ that is deeply personal. More than that, it is a relationship that is embodied. Take the song, “To Be Alone With You,” for instance. The song starts as any love song might:
I’d swim across Lake Michigan / I’d sell my shoes / I’d give my body to be back again / In the rest of the room / To be alone with you…
As the song, continues, however, Sufjan sings warmly, confidentially:
You gave your body to the lonely / They took your clothes / You gave up a wife and a family / You gave your ghost / To be alone with me… / To be alone with me you went up on a tree / I’ve never known a man who loved me.
This song, intimate and stripped down, sings of this Agape love found in Christ in a way that is immediate and sensual – sensual in that it acknowledges and lives into the bodily experience of Jesus of Nazareth. Not only does the heart respond to this love of Christ, but the whole body does, as well.
This relationship is not always so clear and simple, though. On “Casimir Pulaski Day”, one of the songs from his 2005 album Illinois, Sufjan sings the story of a dear friend in youth who was diagnosed with bone cancer. It is an achingly tender song that weaves together the bodily intimacy they share with the immediacy of the singer’s experiences of the divine.
All the glory that the Lord has made / And the complications you could do without / When I kissed you on the mouth
Tuesday night at the Bible study / We lift our hands and pray over your body / But nothing ever happens
For Sufjan, “the complications” always seem to be there. He has found love, but the beloved is dying. They pray over the body, “but nothing ever happens.” Why isn’t this a cause for him to lose faith as it has been for so many others? Well, because it’s complicated. There is unbelievable suffering and grief expressed in many of his songs, and alongside that there is something else.
For me, the beauty in Sufjan’s music comes from his taking his time to get to that something else. He wants you to feel that empty place with him first. Every time I hear the line in this song: “All the glory when you ran outside / With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied / And you told me not to follow you,” I feel the immeasurable distance between the two, how his friend is going towards death and how Sufjan is left behind. And I hear the longing in Sufjan’s voice. It is a longing that is familiar to me, though normally it is tucked away, pressed deep below the surface. Feeling it, if only for the duration of a song, is a gift.
This line opens up into a musical interlude that is bittersweet, piercing and ever so softly triumphant. Like so much of Sufjan’s music that follows on the heels of his voice having just reached up to the quality of prayer (even if the words are not obviously one), this interlude sounds as if it is coming from the other side of the threshold. It is a sounding from the heavenly realms that lays the ground for the rest of the song. For although the imminence of death has created “a great divide,” Sufjan is not left with emptiness the day his friend passes. He sings at the end of the song:
In the morning when you finally go / And the nurse runs in with her head hung low / And the cardinal hits the window
In the morning in the winter shade / On the first of March, on the holiday / I thought I saw you breathing
All the glory that the Lord has made / And the complications when I see His face / In the morning in the window
All the glory when He took our place / But He took my shoulders and He shook my face / And He takes and He takes and He takes
Grief has attuned his senses. The cardinal hits the window. His friend, who has passed, appears to still be breathing. And in this moment of heightened perception, Sufjan sees Him in the window and is touched by Him. Grief has revealed his Lord, has drawn Him close. And as he says, there are complications.
Sufjan describes Christ both as the one who “took our place”* and as the one who takes, and takes and takes**. It’s not one or the other. It’s both at the same time. We are left with that tension, and it is not a tension that the song wishes to resolve. Instead, it’s as if that tension is at the heart of Sufjan’s experience of the divine. If our love for each other is riddle-filled, he seems to be saying, why wouldn’t it be the same with divine love? This song weaves together Agape and Eros love so thoroughly, that the divide between them – the spiritual/physical divide – seems to completely dissolve.
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If one of the ways that Sufjan bridges the divide is by revealing a relationship to the divine that is personal and embodied, the other is the way he expresses his personal, earthly relationships. Not content to simply live in feeling, Sufjan is always telling a larger story, one that involves not only complications, but also deep spiritual struggles. He draws from a wide array of places to tell this larger story: Greek mythology, American history, geological features, and Chinese astrology – to name just a few. And sometimes he uses Biblical imagery.
This imagery is especially striking on his 2015 album, Carrie and Lowell, which has Sufjan predominantly working through his relationship with his mother following her death. It is an album that can break your heart, and then through the cracks, it lets the light shine in. In one of the songs a promising moment in his childhood upon the entrance of his stepfather into the family is cast as [a] “season of hope after the flood.” In another song Sufjan encounters suicidal feelings while in a hotel room following his mother’s passing. The one reason he finds to live is sung as: “Signs and wonders: water stain riding the wall / Daniel’s message: blood of the moon on us all.”
By seeing his life in the context of larger stories, he lifts his experiences up to a realm that is universal and true; he lifts them from the realms of body and soul to the realm of the spirit. The pain and passion of earthly relationships, when seen in the context of the larger story, becomes wedded to His pain and passion, to Agape love.
These two ways of bridging the divide are really two sides of the same coin. The divine for Sufjan is experienced through his relationships to other people and through the sense perceptible things of this world. The divine shines through them, even in the darkest of hours. By bridging the divide that normally separates spirit and matter, he is alchemically wedding the two. He is doing sacramental work, for that is what sacraments do; they wed earthly substance with spiritual reality – and as a result both “sides” are changed. But how?
At a certain point, we as a humanity lost the capacity to perceive spiritually. The world became dark, and we were cut off from our true essence. If we were not to lose the spirit altogether, it had to become physical, sense-perceptible. We needed to see it with our eyes, to touch it with our fingers. For that, Christ came to the Earth and entered a human body. Not only that, but the spirit was given a gift, too. The spirit learned what it is like to be human, to feel bodily pain, to die. It was given the gift of knowing us more deeply. Christ became the bridge between the two worlds. And since that first Easter Sunday, the potential for this wedding has been given to all of us.
We still live in darkness most of the time, because this wedding is not a foregone conclusion. It is one we must wrestle through to again and again, and this is what I hear in Sufjan’s music. In listening to it, my pain does not go away, but neither would I want it to. Even better than going away, my pain changes. It becomes illumined by something larger than myself. It grows lighter, and my heart is gifted tenderness. I feel more whole, more fully myself.
I said at the outset that Sufjan delivers no pat messages for the faithful. But if there is anything close to a theology to be found in his music, I think it is this sacramental one, and it is given words in “The Only Thing,” also from Carrie and Lowell.
Should I tear my eyes out now?
Everything I see returns to you, somehow
Should I tear my heart out now?
Everything I feel returns to you, somehow
I want to save you from your sorrow
Is the “you” in the above lines his mother on the other side of the threshold? Is it Christ? He who has ears, let him hear. I hear it as both.
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You are not likely to come across a Sufjan Stevens song on the radio, even on an indie station. I have often wondered why that is. Perhaps such sacramental work is not suited to a radio station format.
His music has achieved critical acclaim, though. In 2018 he performed a truncated version of his Oscar-nominated song, “The Mystery of Love” at the Academy Awards ceremony. And I’ll admit, I was anxious for him. I couldn’t imagine Hollywood’s elite, with the attendant spirit of earthly glory, being the most welcoming audience for lines like: “Hand of God, deliver me.”
My anxiety was replaced by awe, though, as Sufjan somehow managed to show the audience in physical space what was simultaneously happening in spirit: He who has eyes to see, let him see.
The camera turns to an empty stage, and the soft sound of a lone mandolin can soon be heard. Then from below, Sufjan, along with a host of musician friends, rises on a platform to visibility. And from center stage, he humbly sings his song. He is a gladiator emerging from the bowels of the Coliseum for our entertainment. He is Daniel being thrown into the lion’s den.
He is Sufjan Stevens. And he is singing the new song.
Footnotes:
*This refers to Christ’s deed on Golgotha. He who was without sin died for the sin of mankind.
**As in Job 1:21 – “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”
Kate Kennedy is in the last trimester before ordination in The Christian Community, studying at the seminary in Toronto. She is a writer and mother of two and is really enjoying digging holes and planting things in them.
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