Back to the Garden

I know I already posted about Woodstock yesterday, but there is so much there, it deserves more. As I was thinking about it the natural tendency was for the words from Joni Mitchell to come to mind. It is the iconic song for the festival, written by Mitchell, according to Wikipedia, while she sat in a hotel room in New York watching what was happening.

The song expresses the depth of feelings that many had for Woodstock and the whole movement of the day. For some reason there was a yearning that became embodied in this event of half a million people on a New York State farm bonding into a new "nation."

It is not a surprise that there is a spiritual angle...

I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock n roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try and get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

I know there are many ways to accept or challenge this idea. This feeling of being oppressed as seen in the next verse wants to cry out against the war and the world. The feeling of alienation that supposedly drove it all was- and is- one of those underlying human drives. And it had nothing to do with Nixon or Vietnam or civil rights or the right to do sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was in the last two lines which became the mantra of the song.

And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden.

The biblical image is not an accident, of course. As a metaphor it is powerful. As a yearning it is deep. As a myth- it is what drives us. In the church we have always called this alienation and drive to return to Eden the result of original sin. Some of the ways that sin was affecting her (my) generation in 1969 come next..

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

The poisoned environment (smog) or the basic identity crisis (I don't know who I am) become the paradigms, but are but placeholders for whatever else may come next. Also seen is the hope for growing community- the child of God as the partner that we can walk along with to this new land. It has become a pilgrimage. Did it have a real goal or was it just a pipe dream? Was it an opportunity for something new to begin- or was it just a passing fancy?

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

No, we didn't know, but many dreamed. Like Joni and most other people, I was not there in person. But it did become that same hope and celebration of peace and love with bombers turning into butterflies an ultimate example of metamorphosis, a 20th Century renewing of Isaiah's dream to turn swords into plowshares.

For one brief shining moment we hoped.

But as always in this human realm it proved to be a moment in passing. Less than four months later it fell apart as the Hell's Angels turned the "garden" into what it often becomes- a place of death. When 300,000 gathered at Altamont in California the Woodstock Nation was found to be premature. Nixon remained in office, protests continued and escalated, Kent State was less than six months away. As Neil Young would later write:

We're finally on our own.

But that was later. On that Woodstock Weekend we lived in hope while at the same time affirming some very basic ideas about our humanity and what it means to be human. Joni captured it in those haunting chorus lines:

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Am I making too much out of this? Is this just another of the countless examples of the Baby Boomers taking our experience as transcendent? Are we all making Woodstock's Three Days of Peace and Love into some world changing event?

Let me rephrase that as I see it from the vantage point of AARP land. The truth of Woodstock is not in its uniqueness but in its sameness to all that has gone before. It may be a better example of the human pilgrimage into the deeply spiritual that always fights against what is and leans to what could be. It is an expression of the youthful idealism of any era. We just had the ability to gather in New York and let the whole world watch.

• Twenty years earlier it had happened as a previous generation went to war in Europe.
• Twenty years later it happened again as another group tore down the Berlin Wall.
• Last year we saw it in the groundswell that carried Obama into the White House.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

I'm not sure we can do it all alone. I firmly believe in grace and God helping us in the project... but the Garden is there and waiting. Each shining moment like Woodstock shows us it is worth working toward.