The Blue Jays discover that love is everything

Jane Siberry last night

There were things I saw last night that I may never see again. The first was the stunning conclusion to the World Series, in which the situation arose at the end of the game where any one pitch would win or lose an entire season. A base hit and the Blue Jays win. A double play and the Dodgers win. I think I awoke in the timeline where the Dodgers won, but it did indeed have the feeling of one of those situations in which a timeline splits into two. Somewhere in a parallel universe, the Blue Jays won and the baseball gods took a shine to this particular Cinderella and granted her an inch or two of leeway, for a ball stuck under a wall, a bounce off an outfielders glove in a collision at the warning track, a zephyr to deflect a line drive an inch or two further away from a third baseman who happened to be in the way, the ever so slightest dip on a pitch that would have sunk a fastball in the strike zone and resulted in a ground out instead of a towering home run.

I have never seen a sporting contest come down to minuscule twists of fate in such strange ways.

When the game was over I took advantage of the extra hour of time change to watch all the post game interviews with the Blue Jays players. All they could talk about was the love they held for one another. Professional athletes don’t always have the broadest emotional vocabulary and you could see every single one of them struggling to find words to describe the depth of relationship they have with their colleagues, and their families and the staff of the organization. They were pleading with the cynical corps of sports reporters to have them truly understand the depth of love that they all experienced. It was a once in a lifetime experience. It was transformational. They didn’t win the World Series, but they can never forget the love – the utter agapé of it all – that flows between them. It is love that transformed them from a last place team to a team that missed their destiny by a whisper. It is love that left them changed as people. It is, I might say, the love that we should all have a chance to experience once in our lives. We are built for it. It does something to us. I’m not shy in saying there is a theology about it.

And that brings me to the second thing that happened to me last night, which I may never see again, and that was going to see Jane Siberry perform live and solo at the Motel Chelsea up in the Gatineau. It is a surprising and lovely little venue, a place of vision, stuck on a side road by an off ramp from the Highway 5 that winds its way from the city of Gatineau across the river from Ottawa up into the Gatineau hills and beyond in the wilderness of southwestern Quebec and the Kitigan Zibi homelands.

Jane Siberry is one of the people I count among the pantheon of psalmists in my life, along with Bruce Cockburn, Dougie McLean, Martyn Joseph and Ani DiFranco. She opens me up and can make me cry at the drop of a hat. Her performance last night was a ceremony of liberation, a woven story where lyrics and images flowed and churned like a river, coming back around in back eddies of meaning and imagery. A consistent tone centre, an entire first half hour played on guitar in a diatonic scale of open E voicings, the words “light” and “love” and “mother” coming back again and again, deepening each time.

I turned to the friends we were with at the end and said “this is a liturgy.”

She finished with “Love is Everything” and if you didn’t know the truth of these lyrics before, then you might have had a chance to witness them in much more stifled words from the mouths of the Blue Jay players in the locker room last night. And so, here they are. Because I hope that everyone who witnessed that journey – who witness the deep journey of being human, in fact – at some point comes to the realization that Jane Siberry and Ernie Clement et. al. have come to. May you live this.

maybe it was to learn how to love
maybe it was to learn how to leave
maybe it was for the games we played
maybe it was to learn how to choose
maybe it was to learn how to lose
maybe it was for the love we made

love is everything they said it would be
love made sweet and sad the same
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leaving

maybe it was to learn how to fight
maybe it was for the lesson in pride
maybe it was the cowboys’ ways
maybe it was to learn not to lie
maybe it was to learn how to cry
maybe it was for the love we made

love is everything they said it would be
love did not hold back the reins
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leaving

first he turns to you
then he turns to her
so you try to hurt him back
but it breaks your body down
so you try to love bigger
bigger still
but it… it’s too late

so take a lesson from the strangeness you feel
and know you’ll never be the same
and find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn’t I?
and I gave it big… sometimes
and I gave it in my own sweet time
I’m just leaving

love is everything…