Woodstock, Rock and Sand

So whoever hears these words of mine

And acts on them is like a [person]

Who had the sense to build [their] house on rock.

The rain came down,

The floods rose, the winds blew and beat upon that house;

But it did not fall, because its foundations were on rock.

And whoever hears these words of mine

And does not act on them is like a [person]

Who was foolish enough to build [their] house on sand.

The rain came down,

The floods rose, the winds blew and battered against that house;

And it fell with a great crash.[1]

I was listening to a classic rock radio station the other day.  I usually listen to CBC, but the other person who drives the car in our family has more eclectic taste than I do.  Often I find myself driving to work listening to classic rock, in spite of myself.  Oh, I like the music all right.  It’s the disc jockeys I can’t stand.  Too many words.  Give me music without commentary.

Anyway, this one morning they were doing a phone-in thing on the classic rock station, where the person phoning in had to guess whether the people on the rock legend list were dead or alive.  As they went down the list, I realized that many of the dead ones- and there were many dead ones- were actually born after I was.  I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.  And it wasn’t my age.

Clearly, it seems, in the entertainment business, houses, expensive as they may be, are definitely built on sandy ground.  Rock may be their livelihood, but sand is the base of their existence.  But then there is this exception that stands out in the midst of the carnage of 27-year-olds in the music world dying prematurely.  There is this event called Woodstock.

The critics dismissed Camille Paglia’s contention that Woodstock, Joni Mitchell’s ode to the music festival now fifty years distant, was one of the most important contemporary poems of recent times.  It was a quirky claim, but maybe, like Mitchell at the time and us half a century later, Paglia is trying to figure out the importance of the event itself.  Make no mistake Woodstock is a visionary piece of writing.  And Mitchell’s rendering of the song is full of longing.  Don’t mistake it for the sanitized, empty cover Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young came out with sometime later.  Mitchell’s original reaches for cosmic significance.[2]  Cosmic seems too large, I know, but read on.[3]

There is no question of the importance of Woodstock, the event, to musicology.  From Crosby, Stills and Nash’s debut and their premiere of Suite: Judy Blue Eyes to Jimi Hendrix’s sublime riff on the Star-Spangled Banner.  But was there something more?  With the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy the previous summer and the ongoing Vietnam War as the backdrop, was Woodstock a worthy attempt, as Mitchell’s pilgrim says, to “get ourselves back to the garden” despite our lot, “caught the devil’s bargain”?  Recent documentaries on the event make you wonder.

Only weeks before Woodstock was to take place, the locale became impossible due to resident opposition.  The organizers happened upon a section of Max Yasgur’s dairy farm, a natural amphitheater, but the contractor building the infrastructure including the fence and stage made it clear they could not finish both in time for the three-day festival.  They opted to finish the stage.  The promoters knew this would almost certainly compromise their ability to profit from the event.  Still, they carried on.

Then in what seemed to be an insane move, but somehow consistent with what they always wanted the event to be, the organizers hired a commune called The Hog Farm to do security.  It proved to be an inspiration, perhaps the signal “back to the garden” move of them all.  Security would be based upon cooperation and mutual accountability.  The Hog Farm’s skill at fostering mutual caring, not only prevented violence in the extremis that was to follow during the event, it helped various people through the drug crises and actually got food to the crowd when supplies ran low.  Together with local residents, including Yasgur himself, who emptied their pantries and made food available to the hungry mass of young people when the food ran out, this showed what the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes could have meant in a real place and in real time.  It was a bit of a miracle with the cosmic in it.  Even Nelson Rockefeller, the New York State governor at the time, and more inclined to send troops to the site, was convinced by staff to send in helicopters with medical supplies and personnel instead.

What developed was an event that sustained up to half a million people over more than three days.  Through rain and wind and scorching sun; through mud and sanitary crisis and stench, the music carried Woodstock to a garden place that no one would have predicted given the various strategic mishaps along the way.  It had something of a real human miracle about it.  Woodstock called forth what human community could be for individual lives, a house built on rock that the elements could not blow down.  Contrast this with the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont Speedway, in December of that same year of 1969, and with many of the same performers.  The Hell’s Angels were hired as security.  Four people died and many, including performers, were injured.

Scholars tell us that the very simple little parable of Jesus we began with is about community.[4]  Perhaps you remember this story from Sunday School.   One person builds their house on sand and the other person builds their house on rock.  It is a very simple but profound commentary on the difference between an isolated life and a life based in community.  The collapse of the one house and the durability of the other in Jesus’ story is not dependent upon the strength or weakness of the walls or even the careful laying of the foundation but where the house is built - it is the site that is important.  The implication is that, in life, the context in which one chooses to live one’s life is critical to the durability of life itself.

Let’s face it.  Life is a vulnerable, fragile and shaky thing.  It needs something like rock underneath it.  What would that rock look like in the real world? In our individualistic times, we think of life as a “me up against the world” affair.  Community is in the background, almost an add on. But at every juncture in the context of our lives, community is the rock upon which life is built.  Life cannot thrive without community underneath it.  As a family therapist, I am constantly amazed at the degree to which people downplay the importance of community in their life.

Religions in the 21st century must grapple with this issue even more than a generation ago.  For outside of the walls of the church, synagogue or mosque, in our homes and at our work and when we play, we live in a world in which opportunities for community are elusive.  Belief systems no longer bind us together. In our day, it seems, community must be based on the thing itself and not on our wishful thinking about how our communities were in the past.  When we do not have the kind of support community has to offer, it makes life even more vulnerable, even more fragile, even more shaky.  In our day, stone or what we thought was stone, has been worn into sand.  And make no mistake, the absence of community, it has been shown, reduces our life expectancy.  It is vital to our very survival.

Why is it necessary to have community someone asks?  Why can’t I commune by myself on the mountaintop? Why can’t I commune with myself on the sea or by the sea?  Why can’t I walk alone on the path with my iPhone?  Well, here is one way to look at it.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in another context, put it best.  He said, we need other people who will speak words of encouragement to us for there is much uncertainty and discouragement in the world.  And in matters of life we cannot help ourselves.  We need our brother or our sister alongside us.  The confidence in my own heart is weaker than the confidence in the heart of my brother or sister.  My own heart is uncertain, my brother or sister’s is sure.  Alone on the path with my iPhone, my life is built upon a sandy uncertainty; even on the mountaintop, we must come down eventually to the delta where the waves of the sea may threaten to overwhelm us and, at times, the only way we can find the rock is to hear the word of confidence from our brother or sister.  Confidence when ours alone is shaky and uncertain.

Can I tell you a little secret?  When I meet with you to talk about the state of your life, you may leave feeling stronger, more solid.  When you feel stronger after that meeting, the secret is I feel stronger too!  You may think that when you come to meet with me, you are coming to gain strength from me, but I’m often thinking, “What could I possibly offer today in my own poverty of heart?” And when we both feel strong at the end of that sacred time, it has to do not just with ourselves in conversation, there is a third one talking there inside of us or beside us or over us.  We get stronger in the presence of the other.  It is almost as if there is a third between us.  Companionship is its own presence.  This is a kind of miracle that happens between people.  If you want to put God language into it, or a higher power, we could think of God or Jesus as the third.  But I don’t think the religious explanation is necessary.  When we enter into authentic community there is a visitor, visited and act of visiting all acting together.  It makes us more solid in the world.  This is the rock upon which our life may be based.  This is the firm ground.  This is the defense against the fury of wind and rain. 

Even though Woodstock experienced all of the elements and there was human misery, there was a solidity there too.  It may seem too much to say it had cosmic significance.  Jesus’ parable points to a very simple truth.  But maybe the simple and the cosmic are not so far apart.

Let me put it another way.  Anne Lamott tells this wonderful story.  A woman decides to take her summer holiday in Lake Tahoe with her two-year-old.  They stay in a rented condominium by the lake.  And of course, it’s such a hotbed of gambling... all the rooms are equipped with these curtains and shades that block out every speck of light so you can stay up all night in the casinos and then sleep all day. 

One afternoon she put the baby to bed in his playpen in one of those rooms, in the pitch-dark, then went to do some work.  A few minutes later she heard her baby knocking on the door from inside the room, and she got up, knowing he’d crawled out of his playpen.  She went to put him down again, but when she got to the door, she found he’d locked it. No little boy can resist pushing a button even if he finds one in the dark! 

Now he was calling to her, “Mommy, mommy”, and she was saying to him, “Jiggle the doorknob, darling,” and of course he doesn’t speak much English yet, so that didn’t work. 

And after a moment, of course, it became clear to the baby that his mother couldn’t open the door.  Panic set it.  He began sobbing.  So mother ran around like a crazy person trying everything possible: trying the front door key, calling the rental agency, the building manager having desperate, testy, virtual conversations with answering machines _ all the while running back and forth to check on her son.

And there he was in the dark, this terrified little child.  Finally, she did the only thing she could do, which was to slide her fingers underneath the door, where there was a one-inch space, the only band of light he could see.  She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers.  Finally, somehow he did.  So they stayed like that for a really long time, on the floor, him holding onto her fingers in the dark.  He stopped crying.

She kept wanting to go call the fire department or something, but she felt that contact was the most important thing.  She started saying, “Why don’t you lie down, darling, and take a little nap on the floor?” and he was obviously like, “Yeah, right, Mom, that’s a great idea, I’m feeling so nice and relaxed.”  So she kept saying, “Open the door now,” and every so often he’d jiggle the knob, and eventually, after maybe half an hour, it popped open.[5]

Think of us as that two-year-old in the dark.  Think of your brother or sister as those fingers under the door which you hold onto; your sister or brother, always on the lighter side of the door, a little more in possession of the light than you are, a little more in possession of the freedom, a little more based on the solid rock which you seek to ground yourself.   This is the mystery of kinship. This is the firm ground.  This is the defense against the fury of wind and rain.  Woodstock is a good example of that.  It’s how we can move back toward the garden.  It’s cosmic and it’s simple.

In addition to the citations footnoted, this article is based on reflections that appeared in the New York Times and in a documentary broadcast on the PBS program, The American Experience over the last two weeks.

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[1] Matthew 7:24-27 (REV).

[2] https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=75

[3] Paglia, Camille.  Break, Blow, Burn, New York: Vintage, 2005. pp. 225ff.

[4] This exegesis was inspired by Eduard Schweizer in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, in his Good News According to Matthew, pp. 189-209.

[5] Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions:  A Journal of My Son’s First Year (Pantheon:  New York, 1993), pp. 219-221.