“These are bad times,” Walker Percy wrote in the apocalyptic satire Love in the Ruins. “Principalities and powers are everywhere victorious. Wickedness flourishes in high places.” Percy’s dystopian future — a fiercely polarized populace, an ideologically divided Church, paroxysms of violence amid technological progress — has more and more become our present. Uncertainty seems to be all around us; darkness seems to loom everywhere we turn; the world seems to be spinning out of control.
Is there hope for humanity?
Fr. Tansi’s single “Dawn” beautifully captures the Christian answer to this question: Yes, there’s cause for hope, for joy, and even for excitement here and now — a “bright morning star” on the horizon (Rev. 22:16).
Fr. Tansi, a member of the Community of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (CFRs) currently serving in London, first hit the music scene around 2017 with his beautiful debut album Garden, as well as the single “Nani Chineke” and the CFRs’ beautiful cover of The Brilliance’s “Brother.” His second album, Light, was released unobtrusively five years later, and the music video for the quietly meditative but spiritually energizing lead single “Dawn” — which deserves far more views than it has — draws us into the holy silence of the friar’s early rising.
The physical dawn is, of course, but a symbol (in the Greek, a “throwing together”) of a spiritual dawn: the Lord Jesus, whose resurrection from the dead was also heralded by the dawn (Matt. 28:1; Luke 24:1), signaling the “eighth day” of the new creation (CCC 349).
With noble simplicity, Fr. Tansi’s lyrics echo the canticle of Zechariah proclaiming the arrival of the Savior, which is recited in every Morning Prayer (“In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace” — Luke 1:78–79); the prophecy of Isaiah quoted by Matthew (“For those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned” — Matt. 4:16); and the preaching of St. Peter (“Be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” — 2 Pet. 1:19).
The peace that pervades both the video and song is grounded in a real sense of hope: “And as you grope on the road through the dark,” Fr. Tansi sings, “you’ll get home by the hope that grows in your heart.” We’re drawn, in waves, to the source of that hope in the chorus, sung in his native Nigerian tongue: “Ino nime Jesus, bulu nwa Jesus, ka mma, obuya ka mma o” (To dwell in Jesus and be a child of Jesus is better, that is better o”). Benedict XVI wrote in Spe Salvi that “the one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.” And this hope is palpable in Fr. Tansi’s music.
The world is ending
Still, how — amid all the ecclesial, political, and social turmoil we see all around us — can we sing in such hopeful, joyful tones? Doesn’t this betray a naïveté that’s blind to the dire state of the world?
No, because the hope celebrated in “Dawn” is a far cry from mere optimism or progressivism; it orients us to a higher light, one that transcends all of history, and indeed all of space and time. The light of Christ “shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5), and points us beyond the here and now to the new Jerusalem, where “they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light” (Rev. 22:5).
Then isn’t this just spiritual escapism — a religiosity that takes seriously the sorry state of the world, but responds by looking up and away to the spirit world? This is clearly contradicted by the charism of the CFRs, who are vibrantly active in media, the arts, and city streets; they are focused not just on the above and beyond, but also the here and now. Fr. Tansi’s song reminds us of all the good and beautiful things around us in both the Church and the culture that we take for granted — and indeed, all the signs of good and beautiful things to come in the future.
There are tremors of hope everywhere; the edifice of secular humanism is cracking and crumbling, and something new and exciting seems to be on the horizon, something at the heart of which seems to be a kind of religious awakening. And even if it isn’t — even if the worst is true — Christ is still “making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
Since the “fullness of time” (Eph. 1:10), this world is always ending. And “Dawn” realigns us to ultimate reality: Its ending is also the morning star’s rising.
