I’m certainly not the first to trace a line between the Psalms of Lament and the Blues. Both look despair in the eye, plumbing the depths of human suffering and sin with unflinching honesty as they sing of failure and conflict, loneliness and abandonment, illness, pain and death. Cultural critic Stanley Crouch once described Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross—‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (a direct quote from Psalm 22)—as ‘the greatest blues line of all time’. And when he was asked to define the Blues, Delta Blues musician Johnnie Billington said simply, ‘The Blues is the truth. The Blues is living.’
But if sin and pain are part of this truth—the truth of the human condition—then so is grace. The central message of Easter, after all, isn’t that hope and joy come to us despite suffering, but that they come to us through suffering—specifically, the suffering and death of Jesus at Calvary, an event that reveals not just the authenticity of Jesus’ humanity but also the depth of God’s mercy and love for a very broken creation.
Glib self-help mantras are to the Gospel what elevator music is to the Blues: a shallow parody of the truth.
We live in a world that often wants to push human pain to one side or to drown it out with superficial messages of ‘radical positivity’ and ‘living our best life’. But glib self-help mantras are to the Gospel what elevator music is to the Blues: a shallow parody of the truth.
Christian author, historian and podcaster Kate Bowler knows this better than most. Diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer at age 35, not long after becoming a mother, she was initially given only two years to live. Under the weight of the heartbreaking reality in which she suddenly found herself, many of the comforting platitudes of her Christian upbringing quickly crumbled.
Ten years on, her latest book, Joyful, Anyway, draws on her own and others’ experience of suffering to explore what she calls ‘the ache’ of being human—the sense of longing and incompleteness we all experience—and the ways that gratitude and even joy can exist right alongside uncertainty and pain.
In a recent interview about the book, Bowler describes the differences between happiness and joy, lamenting that as a culture, we often confuse happiness with mental health. By prioritising positive emotions, she says, we ‘crowd all experiences onto one end of the emotional spectrum’, unhelpfully pathologising healthy sadness.
The feeling that it’s never enough isn’t a glitch in the system, it’s part of the engine.
While she has nothing against happiness—welcoming those moments and seasons in her life with gratitude—she says ‘the idea that you can create a permanent state of happiness actually creates misery’. This kind of ‘toxic positivity’ is ‘almost guaranteed to make us sad’, she believes, because it prevents us from honestly naming our emotions and experiences. She wants ‘to allow us a minute for grief, for reality, for lament, for appropriate bitterness’.
For Bowler, the ache of living is ‘a reminder that every beautiful thing is here in a minute and may be gone in the next; the fleeting nature of our lives will always make us hunger, and our hunger can either then be manipulated and distorted to force us to buy enormous water bottles and comfortable jumpsuits on Instagram, or we can remind ourselves that the feeling that it’s never enough isn’t a glitch in the system, it’s part of the engine.’
Christians, St Augustine among them, have always suspected that the restless longing for more—for a place in our ‘Father’s house’, a home in the shimmering kingdom of peace that we glimpse at Easter and are called to commit ourselves to—is intimately linked to our capacity for hope and even joy.
Bibb’s music—at a particular moment of global uncertainty and sorrow—managed to harness all the longing and heartache in the room and bring out of it a surprising and hopeful sense of community and joy.
The cross remains the central emblem of the Gospel for a reason. The risen Christ, when he appears to his friends in his glory, still bears the scars of his passion. Real hope, Easter hope, is much more than just human optimism, more than stoically putting on a brave face or cheerfully denying that anything is wrong. Holy Week and Easter take us right into the terrifying heart of the storm and out the other side, not only marshalling its brutal force but transforming it into something unexpectedly inspiring and beautiful.
It’s hard to put my finger on what I experienced recently in St Kilda, but if I had to try, this would come close. It wasn’t just the impressive skill of the musicians, the sensitivity of the songwriting or Bibb’s warm, wry banter between songs. It was the way his music—at a particular moment of global uncertainty and sorrow—managed to harness all the longing and heartache in the room and bring out of it a surprising and hopeful sense of community and joy.
Describing the musical heritage of African Americans at the turn of the 20th century, W E B Du Bois famously said that ‘Through all the sorrow songs there breathes a hope.’
What I was experiencing was Easter hope—birthed in heartache, forged in the Blues.
‘Needed Time’ is one of those songs. Originally recorded in the 1950s by Blues singer Lightnin’ Hopkins, it’s a favourite of Bibb’s and is rarely left out of his set. As the whole audience sang along to the chorus that night—‘Now is the needed time, right now is the needed time … Jesus, won’t you come by here?’—it dawned on me how much I had needed this unexpected moment. And what is the season of Easter, in the end, but just such a ‘needed time’?