I have never liked the phrase “heaven on earth”—until I heard Dorothy Scott sing those words at Acoustic Fest in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on Sunday, July 15.
Scott, a singer/songwriter now based out of Door County, sings with a tender, almost fragile voice that’s similar to Nanci Griffith and Shawn Colvin. In her song, “Pass It On,” she says, “Heaven is right here on this earth.” It is a much more highly charged and challenging song than the old Christian campfire tune of the same name. She is painting a vision of love transforming the world now—not just in the next life. By the power of song, she compelled a Jesus-led desire in me to share God’s love with this world.
Then Scott’s co-headliner, pat mAcdonald, took the stage. mAcdonald, writer of Timbuk 3’s 1986 hit, “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades,” lives in Sturgeon Bay playing dirty, rocking blues. mAcdonald plays a cigar box guitar, a literal cigar box fashioned into a guitar-hybrid instrument also called a Purgatory Hill Harp.
Despite Scott’s “heaven on earth” vision, the foreboding, bass-driven sound of the Purgatory Hill Harp brought me back down to reality. I’ve never believed in purgatory, but there are qualities of purgatory here in this world. In the dirty, stomp blues, I saw this world as “purgatory on earth,” a waiting room where we wait through struggles and suffering, waiting to be saved from the dark, brooding, foreboding tones of this world and be lifted up above the blues, lifted up to eternal life. We aren’t just waiting for “heaven on earth”.
Of course, as we wait for eternal life, God calls on us to do His will on earth, a similar goal to Scott’s “Pass It On,” and Scott’s song comes like an encouragement of this call. But we can’t be overconfident in our ability to make this world heavenly. This world is filled with the dark blues of sin. We can’t be lifted out of those blues by our own actions.
Our “heaven on earth” goals are stunted by “purgatory on earth” reality. This came together when Scott and mAcdonald sang Blind Willie McTell’s “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.” This old blues standard lays the blame squarely on our sin. It is our fault that this earth is a foreboding purgatory. God has given us salvation through Jesus—the promise of eternal life even as we live on this earth, but we are tempted to walk away from this gift. In Scott and mAcdonald’s music, there is both heaven and purgatory on earth, and this is our spiritual reality. We are all waiting for Jesus to lift us out of our blues and into His wonderful light.
This article is reprinted with kind permission from the Manitowoc Herald-Times Reporter, Saturday, July 21, 2007. www.htrnews.com Thank you to Dorothy Scott and pat mAcdonald for the review CDs.
