Collecting Manna: The Decemebrists

Driving up to Durham this morning, I heard this song from the latest album by literary-folk-pop artists the Decemebrists, and immediately fell in love. If so inclined, one could read this as a visionary description of the Kingdom, a call to the personalistic solidarity of mutual burden-bearing that is the church's life and witness as she beats her pilgrim path towards new creation. If that's making too much of the otherwise semi-paganistic overtones of nature worship, all I can say is, well, we've been doing it since there was semi-paganstic stuff to make too much of (see Easter and Christmas).

Here we come to a turning of the season
Witness to the arc towards the sun
A neighbor's blessed burden within reason
Becomes a burden borne of all and one

And nobody, nobody knows
Let the yolk fall from our shoulders
Don't carry it all, don't carry it all
We are all our hands and holders
Beneath this bold and brilliant sun
And this I swear to all

A monument to build beneath the arbors
Upon a plinth that towers t'wards the trees
Let every vessel pitching hard to starboard
Lay its head on summer's freckled knees

A there a wreath of trillium and ivy
Laid upon the body of a boy
Lazy will the loam come from its hiding
And return this quiet searcher to the soil

So raise a glass to turnings of the season
And watch it as it arcs towards the sun
And you must bear your neighbor's burden within reason
And your labors will be born when all is done

(The live version is cool, but the audio is crap. Here's the original track, in all its Arcade Fire-meets-Tom Petty glory)