PEACE IN THE VALLEY ONCE AGAIN
The Handsome Family, that quirky American couple Brett and Rennie Sparks, throw their Goth-like storytelling and American folk template into shapes that could often called Old Testament Biblical. Perhaps their most prophetic song takes the title of the old hymn Peace In The Valley, though they add Once Again to the end. Brett’s lyrics are like a final chapter in a Douglas Copeland novel describing a post apocalypse world where “empty shelves swarmed with bees” and “cash machines sprouted weeds.” Instead of this catalogue of desolate images culminating in doom laden judgment we find that it leading to “peace in the valley once again.” The shopping mall has become the centre, all but Cathedral, of the modern world and rather than being a helpful source of human progress and well being, Sparks is suggesting it is the very place that rids us of our inner peace; gadgets, needless trinkets and fashion choice have played havoc in many person’s deep soul.
How accurate he is. We seem to love loving ourselves with things that are killing what’s important. The answer to our every need is to visit that Mall and pamper ourselves with analgesic consumption. My good friend Justin Zoradi, Executive Director of the wonderful These Numbers Have Faces charity, used to call Belfast’s biggest mall, Castle Court, a Church. For him it is the place we go to get what Church should give us. We love ourselves as we pamper ourselves with the right fashion house label, the right product, the right skirt with the matching top or the latest sleek Apple Store invention. As we do, there are armies of business heads sitting in New York offices trying to con us into making them rich by convincing us in advertising propaganda that their piece of disposable trash can give us meaning, identity and transcendence; some kind of redemption. We selfishly strive through our shopping to acquire other people’s attention and yet never quite get there, feeling that tug of yearning deep within as we never look quite good enough or up to date enough with our acquisitions. Ultimately the Church of the shopping Mall fails.
Irish folk singing prophet Christy Moore has been singing a cultural history of Ireland for well over forty years. He is a true Irish bard who can make us laugh at ourselves and cry repentant tears at our lost innocence, in detailed accounts of our defining events. His cover version of Peace In The Valley Once Again on his album Burning Times is reset in Dublin’s relatively new Liffey Valley Shopping Centre (Valley… get it!), one of the many results better or worse of the famed, but now ailing, Celtic Tiger. The Irish context somehow gives even more power to the hoped for Kingdom in the song where the mirrors will crack, mannequin eyes will fall out and birds will nest in the escalators! When Jesus said “Blessed are the poor…” and “Woe to you who are rich…” (Luke 6) he may have sensed the same spiritual sickness that The Handsome Family and Christy Moore expose so brilliantly.
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