"Spaceman came travelling" - a theological reflection

Let's face it. It is, to all intents and purposes, Xmas. Around us the Herald Angels sing, from Argos to Zanussi.  And it is traditional in the Beaker community, at this time of year, to play that great classic from the Much-Eyebrowed One, Spaceman came travelling.


But we are deeply theological people, and it would be wrong to leave a work this deep unexplored. In merely listening to the song over the Public Address System at Body Shop or, as it might be, Debenhams, one merely absorbs a measured dose of Xmas cheeriness. But this is a song that deserves deeper investigation.

Let us take the first line and title. A spaceman came travelling. Note the assumed masculine superiority. We have no evidence, for obvious reasons, that alien life will split into two neat genders as most of humanity does. Little green people (I adopt the term despite its obvious chromist and anthropomorphic implcations) could reproduce by mitosis, by budding or - if they stayed in the same place on their alien soil for long enough - by the dispatch of rhizomes. They could have two genders, but it could be the Little Green Women that go to work, fly space-ships and fight off Space-wolves, while the Little Green Men stay at home and watch J3r3my Kyl3. Or there could be three genders, with all the inter-relational complexities that would involve. After all, just imagine if an alien of the "Male" gender fancied the podules off a member of the "Female" gender, but she had the hots for a member of the "Neuter" gender who didn't like the Male at all. No wonder on the earth a limit of two seems to be optimal.
So much for the title.

The second line has a reference to "light years of time" during which said spaceperson travelled. Well, I didn't need Burton Dasset to point out to me the apparent flaw with this. A Light Year is a measure of distance, not of time. But I would not use this line to have a cheap gybe at the scientific illiteracy of the man with the biggest eyebrows and creepiest smile till his cousin Richard Dawkins appeared on the scene. No. Clearly Mr de Burgh is playing with the concept of Relativity. Is it a distance, is it a period of time? Who knows. Maybe for the quantum space person of indeterminate colour, he can roam the vastness of time while he inches ever further forward - and can never go backwards - along the dimension of depth.

We then move on to the line in which the alien (or, as I should say, "welcome visitor") has "the face of an angel" and talks to a mother and child. Clearly we are to think of a certain mother and child, and a story involving angels. But of course that story never had an angel addressing the mother and child together. Go and check it. I'm pretty sure I'm right. So maybe this spaceperson has actually gone to a mother and child in a completely different village - maybe even in a different country, in a different time, on a different planet or even in a different universe. It's deliberately left unclear. In his ability to combine apparent profundity with deep vagueness, Chris de Burgh aspires even to the Beaker. He could almost rival certain bishops.

And look at the craft in the songwriting. On a superficial listening we would think this is just another shallow festive record such as "Walking in the Air" - albeit that has terrifying Pelagian overtones when you think about it. Listen to it more carefully and you might think it fetches its theology from Erich von Däniken, a "God was a spaceman who came travelling" kind of theme. But of course it's not the baby with its mum - whoever they are meant to be - that is the spaceperson. It's the visitor him/her/it/er-self. Again, achieving what one might call a level of mythic auto-deception.

We now move on to what might be called the promise of an Alien Parousia - "When two thousand years of your time has gone by,This song will begin once again, to a baby's cry..."
Now, I've thought long and hard about this. Clearly one would think this messianic. There is the promise of a return. But what is de Burgh saying? That somehow, in his own era, the promise that was first seen in what one presumes is meant to be 1st Century Palestine is fulfilled? That's one heck of a forecast.

But I think it's easy to read this in too portentous a way. Maybe the message is this - that 2,000 years after the alien made its first visit to earth, a song would arise that would make a baby cry.

And I think it's pretty plain, when we read the text in this way, that the song thus prophesied is "Lady in Red".

This becomes clearer when we hear the line "There are thousands standing on the edge of the world." What could those thousands possibly be doing? My contention is that they are waiting to jump off the edge into the void of outer space, if they ever hear Lady in Red again.

So I hope this has helped. And that next time you hear "Spaceman came travelling" playing in a supermarket in the five or six months running up to Christmas, you won't just ignore it as a festive song from the 1970s. And instead treat it as the sinister thing it really is.