Cat Stevens, "Morning Has Broken"

Pop Argot turns the show over to his friend Dave* today: after his terrific piece last fall on Todd Rundgren's "Hello, It's Me," he's back with another contemplative early '70s entry.

The Saturday before Palm Sunday, there were articles in the New York Times talking about something I had never heard of before: Birkat Hachama, a Jewish blessing recited once every 28 years, at dawn, to celebrate the sun's return to its original position on the morning of creation.

This sounded too cool to pass up, so on April 28th, I went down to the parking lot behind our triple-decker at precisely 6:17, one minute before dawn. The sky was half-blue, half-filled with a very dark, advancing cloud bank, but for the moment one could clearly see the sun beginning to peek out from behind the hills of Worcester. I waited for it to get high enough to discern the top of the solar disc, and then chanted:

"Blessed are you, LORD our God, King of the Universe, who makes the works of creation."

That only took a moment. As you can see in the above Wikipedia article, the blessing is usually said as part of a small liturgy. The occasion certainly seemed to demand more. I thought for a second, then added the Gloria Patri: "As it was in the beginning/ Is now and ever shall be." And then, as the dawning sun rose at the precise angle it did over Eden, I sang:

Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for the springing fresh from the Word

I think most people think of "Morning Has Broken" as a Cat Stevens song, but fact is, it was written in 1931 as a hymn. Stevens, who even before his conversion to Islam had a religious streak a mile thick, heard it and loved it enough to record and release as a single (which subsequently went to #6 this month in 1972).

I know it as a child from church, from singing in pews on warm spring Sundays, when the windows would be open and the sounds of the world would join our singing. During my childhood, nature seemed to me to be a grace-ful thing. Though my family were never biblical literalists, there was nonetheless a very strong sense in our house that God had created the trees, the water and the animals and that He loved them. I found comfort in nature. Compared to a human world that seemed cruel to me, forests and rivers were always welcoming and peaceful. I loved the bleakness of snow, the soft fall of rain, the smells of a spring thaw, the crunch of autumn leaves. The only interruption to this was the work of man, destroying and polluting, sinning.

But as I got older and learned more about biology, certain facts kept sticking themselves uncomfortably into this picture. I found the unspoiled natural landscape I thought was so tranquil was actually a constant battlefield. Everything is trying to eat or avoid being eaten. The trees and grasses grow as tall as they can to secure their source of sunlight and avoid being shut out by those larger than them. Predators kill mercilessly - indeed, there is no room for mercy, since forgoing prey would just ensure the predator's own death. Whatever is left of the dead is eaten by a thousand hangers-on. All that snow and rain looks much prettier from behind the walls of the warm house, a vantage point no wild animal has. Wasps place spiders into comas so their young can eat the spiders alive. Dolphins and ducks rape. The penis of the bedbug is like a syringe, and its insertion like stabbing. Parasites insert themselves wherever they can find an opening, and will fill up a weak creature with as many of their own as can fit. And when humans blast their way into nature, it is not due to any moral evil but simply from the same evolved urges that every organism unwittingly obeys.

God is nowhere to be found in any of this. There is neither need nor want of Him. The world is powered by eating, fighting and fucking, a massive ball of pain rolling from nothing to nothing.

Is this true? I asked as a sun rose. I stood over a small lake filled with fish and insects, home to ducks, gulls, swans and a great blue heron, bottomed and bordered by trees, bamboo and weeds, lit by the new sun. I love it. Is there any room for Creation here? I have staked my soul on the idea that among all the struggle, God is guiding, and that the turbulent nature and turbulent man will someday be renewed, put again as they were intended, magnificent and peaceful. On that day the lion shall lie down with the lamb, the lion shall eat grass (or not even grass, for the grass will be a friend as well). I long for that day. Until then, under the sun of the first day, I sang:

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day.