Vincent

Vincent
by Pastor George Van Alstine

In 1971 singer/song-writer Don McLean came out with an album that made him a symbol of an era in American cultural history. The most famous song, still played on pop radio stations today, was “American Pie,” in which McLean strings together allusions to events and celebrity figures of the time and bemoans “the day the music died.” I never “drove my Chevy to the levee,” but McLean made me feel like I had.

In the same album was a totally different Don McLean composition. Some know it as “Vincent” and others as “Starry, Starry Night.” The Vincent of the song is Vincent Van Gogh, the famous Dutch artist who died eighty years earlier. Browsing through a book about Van Gogh, McLean found himself mesmerized by his paintings and personally drawn into his life story. It turned out that his beautiful classic work “Starry Night” was painted at a time when Van Gogh was deeply depressed and suicidal. McLean began to see other aspects of the artist’s personal struggles in many of his paintings. This profound encounter separated by many decades, across cultural and language barriers came by way of art. These observations led McLean to write:

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen
They did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now

Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blazeSwirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen
They did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now

For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you

Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget
Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen
They’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will

Everybody’s got a story. Everybody is a story. All the people you know—each is an exciting personal drama, unknown, unexplored. Can it be that these people are leaving clues so their secret stories can be understood and affirmed by others? Through art (as with Van Gogh), through music, through hobbies, through favorite sayings, through subtle looks and mannerisms? People around you are waiting to be discovered. Follow the bread crumbs.

McLean ends the first two stanzas of his song with the hopeful line “Perhaps they’ll listen now.” But he ends the last with the sad, but all too predictable “They’re not listening still; Perhaps they never will.”