Monday, December 1, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Beyond the Horizon: Bob Dylan Poet and Prophet
"Everybody's building big ships and boats, Some are building monuments, Others are jotting down notes, Everybody's in despair, Every girl and boy, But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here, Everybody jump for joy!
--Bob Dylan, musician, poet and, like the prophet Daniel, "a man of desire," one who seeks the things above and eternal life.
Was God's hand always on Bob Dylan? Born of Jewish parents at Duluth, Minnesota, his Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel Ben Avraham--"son of Abraham." Date of birth: 24 May 1941, feast day of Mary Help of Christians. Place of birth: St.Mary's Hospital. First address as a 20-year-old folk singer in New York: right across the road from St.Mary's church.
It comes through in his autobiography Chronicles, written in that life-on-the-edge style of American literature (1). For a listening experience try Sean Penn's flawlessly smooth talking-book version. This six-CD set is the perfect gift for a young performing artist starting out or "the man who has everything."
Anyone who loves the peel of church bells was born to be a believer (2). It comes through in Beyond the Horizon on the 2006 Modern Times album (3): "The bells of St.Mary's, how sweetly they chime."
And if you're asking yourself "Why am I reading this?" the answer could be right there in the same song: "Beyond the horizon, Someone prayed for your soul."
In November 1978 a personal crisis in Dylan's life culminated in some sort of apparition or intimation of Jesus (4). "You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies And I'll be with you when the deal goes down." But Dylan had long harboured doubts about the strictures of institutional religion (5). Discounting the unity of a divinely founded Church, opting instead for personal mysticism, private judgment and spiritual freedom, he fell for the fraudulent religion of Americanism with its ridiculous if not dangerously insane New Age fantasy called the Rapture (6). About that intense "born again" period in Dylan's life and its music, Scott Marshall's reviews for Jewsweek are worth reading (7).
Dylan would become disillusioned to discover most churches are counterfeits that operate like a decoy diverting people down the wrong road. The sign outside reads “Christian.” But what's in a name? “Appearances can be deceiving," wrote Aesop in his Fables 2500 years ago. "Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing.” Dylan: "I followed the winding stream, I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys, I know they're not what they seem."
Catholics too--what's left of them!--were misled by names and places and titles. "Inasmuch as to deceive if possible even the elect." "The Mass is the Mass...You can't go wrong if you follow the Pope." Dumb sheep! They ignored the Master's emphatic warning. "Beware of false prophets who will come among you in sheep's vestments but inwardly are ravening wolves." Sheep's vestments means priests, bishops, cardinals and yes popes too, who, not what they seem, destroyed from within. The prophecy of Garabandal: "Many priests, bishops and cardinals are on the road to perdition and are dragging many souls with them." Is that surprising? Jesus himself had said it. "When the blind lead the blind, they both fall into the pit together."
Dylan's work reflects the quiet desperation of millions yearning for God but separated from him not only by the world, the flesh, and the devil, but also by the churches. The spirit of the world permeated the house built on a rock because the house allowed itself to be moved off the rock (8). That's not to say that there aren't good people among churchgoers, only that they're victims of deception. Besides you don't get to heaven just by being good or by churchgoing, nor is obedience foolproof, or faith alone. St.James the Apostle put it bluntly. "You believe in one God? Well done! The devils too believe, and tremble!"
As for Americanism and the authors of the myth-promoting best-sellers Left Behind and The Late Great Planet Earth, there won't be much jumping for joy when the real Quinn the Eskimo gets here--the Messiah of the Apocalypse returning to judge the living and the dead. Sorry, folks, there is no Rapture Resort beyond the horizon, only your standard five-star Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. St.Paul: "Our wrestling is against the spirits of wickedness in the air." Blessed those not taken and not taken in. "Let us not talk falsely now The hour is getting late... Two riders were approaching The wind begins to howl"--All Along the Watchtower.
Feeling trapped in one hell and bound for the next? Where is salvation now? Not in churches where the faith has been turned into sugar-coated poison and watered-down mush, the solemn God-given Liturgy turned into a grace-cancelling self-parody, and the church into a banal self-congratulating "community" saying "Oh, what good boy am I!" Only they don't mean it. Because they're crippled by guilt. Only they don't know it. "But you'd better get used to it!"
Sophie Masson in her superb Quadrant October 2003 story The Eyes of the Icon summed up the majority that walked away. "They felt the church had betrayed them and itself; had, in an attempt at staving off secular hostility, caved in to a world that only sought its destruction" (9).
Nor is salvation to be found in Americanism and any other half-way-house variant of Christianity that offer only Step One. A bridge half-way is no bridge at all. "From him that has not, even that which he seems to have, shall be taken away."
The song called Not Dark Yet on Dylan's 1997 album Time Out of Mind is hauntingly sad, like a funeral march out of New Orleans--or the cry of a lost soul: "Shadows are falling, And I've been here all day, It's too hot to sleep, Time is running away. Feel like my soul has, Turned into steel. I've still got the scars, That the Son didn't heal. There's not even room enough, To be anywhere. It's not dark yet, But it's getting there."
"Walk while you have the light, that the darkness not overtake you. He who walks in darkness knows not where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may be the children of the light."
Behind all the glitz of the brazen new world is a gathering darkness. It's like the last days of Pompeii only worse. In the words of the late great St.Padre Pio: "Men are running toward the abyss of hell in great rejoicing and merrymaking as though they were going to a masquerade ball or the wedding feast of the devil himself!"
From Dylan's Thunder on the Mountain off Modern Times (10): "The writing on the wall, come read it, come see what it say... Everybody got to wonder what's the matter with this cruel world today... Some sweet day I'll stand beside my King, I wouldn't betray your love or any other thing... Shame on your greed shame on your wicked schemes, I'll say this I don't give a damn about your dreams... Thunder on the mountain heavy as can be, Mean old twister bearing down on me, All the ladies in Washington scrambling to get out of town, Looks like something bad gonna happen, Better roll your airplane down...I did all I could, I did it right there and then, I've already confessed, no need to confess again... The hammer's on the table, the pitchfork's on the shelf, For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself."
Writing on the wall refers to Daniel the prophet. The King of Babylon was giving a party. Making an uninvited appearance comes a disembodied hand hovering in the air and it starts writing on the wall. Like "If these children shall hold their peace, even the stones shall cry out." Or as if Bob Dylan were to wander into a banquet room full of politicians and businessmen and start singing something cryptic. They don't know what it means but what they do know is that it's not, "Hi everybody, I sure hope you're having a good time!" Holy Daniel was the one to decipher it, and it went something like this: You have been accused, you have been judged, you have been condemned (11). The king died that same night.
Now if there's one thing talking heads of government and lotus-eating fun in the sun seekers have in common, it's a dislike of prophecy. From the Psalms: "Our signs we have not seen, there is now no more prophet, and he will know us no more." From Isaiah: "Say to the seers See not! and to those that behold, Behold not for us things that are right. Speak to us of pleasant things."
Dylan's Thunder on the Mountain is religious symbolism straight down from Mount Sinai. With thunder bolts, lightning, storms, waves, earthquakes, hurricanes, the King of the Universe makes the earth shake and the seas break their bounds. From the Gospel of Luke: "And on the Earth distress of nations by reason of the confusion of the roaring of the sea and of the waves, men withering away for fear and expectation of what shall come upon the whole world."
And from the Book of Genesis: "And Abraham got up early in the morning and in the place where he had stood before the Lord he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah and the whole land of that country, and he saw the ashes rise up from the earth as the smoke of a furnace." So what was this son of Abraham Dylan prophesying? You that are rich in spirit, vain in self-reliance, skin-deep in self-esteem, read the signs of the times. Well at least read!
"Everybody's in despair, Every girl and boy." How to save your soul alive while you still have time in an era of spiritual and moral giddiness, when the ancient truths, as stated in The Lord of the Rings, are lost... when there is no longer "in every place among the Gentiles a sacrifice offered to my name and a clean oblation"... when the enemy within the Church has reduced it to a smoking ruin... when little remains but a facade covering up perversion and corruption, a rotting corpse slithered over by snakes, propped up to maintain appearances, a propaganda substitute for the banished heart... while the occupying coterie of salaried timeservers and "dogs in the manger" prevent any possibility of rejuvenation. Over their dead bodies will the Church rise again, unless the people themselves raise the siege... "Aint talkin' just walkin' Through this weary word of woe, Heart burnin' still yearnin' No one on earth would ever know...I practice a faith that's been long abandoned, Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road."
Lest you expire unexpectedly and go to judgment, ending up in the wrong place, and that for all eternity--St.Paul, "as it is appointed unto men once to die and after this the judgment" (12) --whoever you are, dear reader, you owe it to your immortal soul to view the documentary made by Mike Willesee (13) called The Eucharist: Communion With Me. It's available from Trans Media Productions, PO Box 634, North Sydney NSW Australia 2059 and transmedia @ tmgroup.com.au or phone 02-8923 0600. I humbly recommend to you the complete notes which conclude with a section on How to Find Faith Even When You Don't Believe (14) at writersdigress.blogspot.com plus ask for the sequel Why Believers and Non-Believers Alike Should Not Enter a Modern Catholic Church.
"The kingdom of heaven is like a man who takes a seed and throws it on the ground and goes to sleep and gets up night and day and the seed germinates and grows and he knows not how."
Chapters or Notes
(1) "Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing Company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street...etc.
(2) Author John Herdman: "There is one persistent area of preoccupation with which Dylan is recurrently concerned and that is religion...etc.
(3) "Beyond the horizon Behind the sun At the end of the rainbow Life has only begun..." etc.
(4) "Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd knew I wasn't feeling too well. I think they could see that..." etc.
(5) "What kind of house is this he said, Where I have come to roam? It's not a house, said Judas Priest, It's not a house, it's a home"...etc.
(6) Clinton Heylin writing in Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: By embracing the New Age brand of Christianity...etc.
(7) "In 1979 Bob Dylan became a 'Born Again.' That year he released his first Christian album..." etc.
(8) Anna Katarina Emmerick, an Augustinian nun bearing the "stigmata," the wound marks of Calvary mystically reproduced in her hands and feet...etc.
(9) "When it comes to inappropriate names, Summer of Love has to be right up there with Joy Division..." etc.
(10) "Resplendent in a dark suit, silk tie and wide-brimmed hat, Bob Dylan..." etc.
(11) "Another intriguing thing about this interview conducted for Playboy in late 1977 (a magazine not exactly based on a worldview where God reigned)..." etc.
(12) Scarcely had he uttered those words, when in the presence of all he began to tremble, roll his eyes, and with a faltering voice, said...etc
(13) Mike Willesee was one among millions of lapsed Catholics when something happened to him on the way to the agora...etc.
(14) Here then is the beginning of a step-by-step stairway to heaven. No need what's more to suspend your incredulity...etc.
--Bob Dylan, musician, poet and, like the prophet Daniel, "a man of desire," one who seeks the things above and eternal life.
Was God's hand always on Bob Dylan? Born of Jewish parents at Duluth, Minnesota, his Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel Ben Avraham--"son of Abraham." Date of birth: 24 May 1941, feast day of Mary Help of Christians. Place of birth: St.Mary's Hospital. First address as a 20-year-old folk singer in New York: right across the road from St.Mary's church.
It comes through in his autobiography Chronicles, written in that life-on-the-edge style of American literature (1). For a listening experience try Sean Penn's flawlessly smooth talking-book version. This six-CD set is the perfect gift for a young performing artist starting out or "the man who has everything."
Anyone who loves the peel of church bells was born to be a believer (2). It comes through in Beyond the Horizon on the 2006 Modern Times album (3): "The bells of St.Mary's, how sweetly they chime."
And if you're asking yourself "Why am I reading this?" the answer could be right there in the same song: "Beyond the horizon, Someone prayed for your soul."
In November 1978 a personal crisis in Dylan's life culminated in some sort of apparition or intimation of Jesus (4). "You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies And I'll be with you when the deal goes down." But Dylan had long harboured doubts about the strictures of institutional religion (5). Discounting the unity of a divinely founded Church, opting instead for personal mysticism, private judgment and spiritual freedom, he fell for the fraudulent religion of Americanism with its ridiculous if not dangerously insane New Age fantasy called the Rapture (6). About that intense "born again" period in Dylan's life and its music, Scott Marshall's reviews for Jewsweek are worth reading (7).
Dylan would become disillusioned to discover most churches are counterfeits that operate like a decoy diverting people down the wrong road. The sign outside reads “Christian.” But what's in a name? “Appearances can be deceiving," wrote Aesop in his Fables 2500 years ago. "Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing.” Dylan: "I followed the winding stream, I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys, I know they're not what they seem."
Catholics too--what's left of them!--were misled by names and places and titles. "Inasmuch as to deceive if possible even the elect." "The Mass is the Mass...You can't go wrong if you follow the Pope." Dumb sheep! They ignored the Master's emphatic warning. "Beware of false prophets who will come among you in sheep's vestments but inwardly are ravening wolves." Sheep's vestments means priests, bishops, cardinals and yes popes too, who, not what they seem, destroyed from within. The prophecy of Garabandal: "Many priests, bishops and cardinals are on the road to perdition and are dragging many souls with them." Is that surprising? Jesus himself had said it. "When the blind lead the blind, they both fall into the pit together."
Dylan's work reflects the quiet desperation of millions yearning for God but separated from him not only by the world, the flesh, and the devil, but also by the churches. The spirit of the world permeated the house built on a rock because the house allowed itself to be moved off the rock (8). That's not to say that there aren't good people among churchgoers, only that they're victims of deception. Besides you don't get to heaven just by being good or by churchgoing, nor is obedience foolproof, or faith alone. St.James the Apostle put it bluntly. "You believe in one God? Well done! The devils too believe, and tremble!"
As for Americanism and the authors of the myth-promoting best-sellers Left Behind and The Late Great Planet Earth, there won't be much jumping for joy when the real Quinn the Eskimo gets here--the Messiah of the Apocalypse returning to judge the living and the dead. Sorry, folks, there is no Rapture Resort beyond the horizon, only your standard five-star Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. St.Paul: "Our wrestling is against the spirits of wickedness in the air." Blessed those not taken and not taken in. "Let us not talk falsely now The hour is getting late... Two riders were approaching The wind begins to howl"--All Along the Watchtower.
Feeling trapped in one hell and bound for the next? Where is salvation now? Not in churches where the faith has been turned into sugar-coated poison and watered-down mush, the solemn God-given Liturgy turned into a grace-cancelling self-parody, and the church into a banal self-congratulating "community" saying "Oh, what good boy am I!" Only they don't mean it. Because they're crippled by guilt. Only they don't know it. "But you'd better get used to it!"
Sophie Masson in her superb Quadrant October 2003 story The Eyes of the Icon summed up the majority that walked away. "They felt the church had betrayed them and itself; had, in an attempt at staving off secular hostility, caved in to a world that only sought its destruction" (9).
Nor is salvation to be found in Americanism and any other half-way-house variant of Christianity that offer only Step One. A bridge half-way is no bridge at all. "From him that has not, even that which he seems to have, shall be taken away."
The song called Not Dark Yet on Dylan's 1997 album Time Out of Mind is hauntingly sad, like a funeral march out of New Orleans--or the cry of a lost soul: "Shadows are falling, And I've been here all day, It's too hot to sleep, Time is running away. Feel like my soul has, Turned into steel. I've still got the scars, That the Son didn't heal. There's not even room enough, To be anywhere. It's not dark yet, But it's getting there."
"Walk while you have the light, that the darkness not overtake you. He who walks in darkness knows not where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may be the children of the light."
Behind all the glitz of the brazen new world is a gathering darkness. It's like the last days of Pompeii only worse. In the words of the late great St.Padre Pio: "Men are running toward the abyss of hell in great rejoicing and merrymaking as though they were going to a masquerade ball or the wedding feast of the devil himself!"
From Dylan's Thunder on the Mountain off Modern Times (10): "The writing on the wall, come read it, come see what it say... Everybody got to wonder what's the matter with this cruel world today... Some sweet day I'll stand beside my King, I wouldn't betray your love or any other thing... Shame on your greed shame on your wicked schemes, I'll say this I don't give a damn about your dreams... Thunder on the mountain heavy as can be, Mean old twister bearing down on me, All the ladies in Washington scrambling to get out of town, Looks like something bad gonna happen, Better roll your airplane down...I did all I could, I did it right there and then, I've already confessed, no need to confess again... The hammer's on the table, the pitchfork's on the shelf, For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself."
Writing on the wall refers to Daniel the prophet. The King of Babylon was giving a party. Making an uninvited appearance comes a disembodied hand hovering in the air and it starts writing on the wall. Like "If these children shall hold their peace, even the stones shall cry out." Or as if Bob Dylan were to wander into a banquet room full of politicians and businessmen and start singing something cryptic. They don't know what it means but what they do know is that it's not, "Hi everybody, I sure hope you're having a good time!" Holy Daniel was the one to decipher it, and it went something like this: You have been accused, you have been judged, you have been condemned (11). The king died that same night.
Now if there's one thing talking heads of government and lotus-eating fun in the sun seekers have in common, it's a dislike of prophecy. From the Psalms: "Our signs we have not seen, there is now no more prophet, and he will know us no more." From Isaiah: "Say to the seers See not! and to those that behold, Behold not for us things that are right. Speak to us of pleasant things."
Dylan's Thunder on the Mountain is religious symbolism straight down from Mount Sinai. With thunder bolts, lightning, storms, waves, earthquakes, hurricanes, the King of the Universe makes the earth shake and the seas break their bounds. From the Gospel of Luke: "And on the Earth distress of nations by reason of the confusion of the roaring of the sea and of the waves, men withering away for fear and expectation of what shall come upon the whole world."
And from the Book of Genesis: "And Abraham got up early in the morning and in the place where he had stood before the Lord he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah and the whole land of that country, and he saw the ashes rise up from the earth as the smoke of a furnace." So what was this son of Abraham Dylan prophesying? You that are rich in spirit, vain in self-reliance, skin-deep in self-esteem, read the signs of the times. Well at least read!
"Everybody's in despair, Every girl and boy." How to save your soul alive while you still have time in an era of spiritual and moral giddiness, when the ancient truths, as stated in The Lord of the Rings, are lost... when there is no longer "in every place among the Gentiles a sacrifice offered to my name and a clean oblation"... when the enemy within the Church has reduced it to a smoking ruin... when little remains but a facade covering up perversion and corruption, a rotting corpse slithered over by snakes, propped up to maintain appearances, a propaganda substitute for the banished heart... while the occupying coterie of salaried timeservers and "dogs in the manger" prevent any possibility of rejuvenation. Over their dead bodies will the Church rise again, unless the people themselves raise the siege... "Aint talkin' just walkin' Through this weary word of woe, Heart burnin' still yearnin' No one on earth would ever know...I practice a faith that's been long abandoned, Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road."
Lest you expire unexpectedly and go to judgment, ending up in the wrong place, and that for all eternity--St.Paul, "as it is appointed unto men once to die and after this the judgment" (12) --whoever you are, dear reader, you owe it to your immortal soul to view the documentary made by Mike Willesee (13) called The Eucharist: Communion With Me. It's available from Trans Media Productions, PO Box 634, North Sydney NSW Australia 2059 and transmedia @ tmgroup.com.au or phone 02-8923 0600. I humbly recommend to you the complete notes which conclude with a section on How to Find Faith Even When You Don't Believe (14) at writersdigress.blogspot.com plus ask for the sequel Why Believers and Non-Believers Alike Should Not Enter a Modern Catholic Church.
"The kingdom of heaven is like a man who takes a seed and throws it on the ground and goes to sleep and gets up night and day and the seed germinates and grows and he knows not how."
Chapters or Notes
(1) "Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing Company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street...etc.
(2) Author John Herdman: "There is one persistent area of preoccupation with which Dylan is recurrently concerned and that is religion...etc.
(3) "Beyond the horizon Behind the sun At the end of the rainbow Life has only begun..." etc.
(4) "Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd knew I wasn't feeling too well. I think they could see that..." etc.
(5) "What kind of house is this he said, Where I have come to roam? It's not a house, said Judas Priest, It's not a house, it's a home"...etc.
(6) Clinton Heylin writing in Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: By embracing the New Age brand of Christianity...etc.
(7) "In 1979 Bob Dylan became a 'Born Again.' That year he released his first Christian album..." etc.
(8) Anna Katarina Emmerick, an Augustinian nun bearing the "stigmata," the wound marks of Calvary mystically reproduced in her hands and feet...etc.
(9) "When it comes to inappropriate names, Summer of Love has to be right up there with Joy Division..." etc.
(10) "Resplendent in a dark suit, silk tie and wide-brimmed hat, Bob Dylan..." etc.
(11) "Another intriguing thing about this interview conducted for Playboy in late 1977 (a magazine not exactly based on a worldview where God reigned)..." etc.
(12) Scarcely had he uttered those words, when in the presence of all he began to tremble, roll his eyes, and with a faltering voice, said...etc
(13) Mike Willesee was one among millions of lapsed Catholics when something happened to him on the way to the agora...etc.
(14) Here then is the beginning of a step-by-step stairway to heaven. No need what's more to suspend your incredulity...etc.
Opening Lines From Dylan's Autobiography
Chapter 1
Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing Company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and his Comets had recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock’--then down to Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we sat down in a red leather upholstered booth facing the front window. Lou introduced me to Jack Dempsey, the great boxer. Jack shook his fist at me. “You look too light for a heavyweight, kid, you’ll have to put on a few pounds. You’re gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharper--not that you’ll need much in the way of clothes when you’re in the ring--don’t be afraid of hitting somebody too hard.” “He’s not a boxer, Jack, he’s a song-writer and we’ll be publishing his songs.” “Oh yeah, well I hope to hear ‘em some of these days. Good luck to you, kid.” Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red lanterned streets, city types scuffling around, bundled up-salesmen in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors, steam rising out of manholes. None of it seemed to matter...
The sound of trains off in the distance more or less made me feel at home, like nothing was missing, like I was at some level place, never in any significant danger and that everything was fitting together. Across the street from where I stood looking out the window was a church with a bell tower. The ringing of bells made me feel at home, too. I'd always heard and listened to the bells. Iron, brass, silver bells--the bells sang. On Sunday, for services, on holidays. They clanged when somebody important died, when people were getting married. Any special occasion would make the bells ring. You had a pleasant feeling when you heard the bells. I even liked doorbells and the NBC chimes on the radio. I looked out through the leaded glass window across to the church. The bells were silent now and the snow swirled off the rooftops. A blizzard was kidnapping the city, life spinning around on a drab canvas. Icy and cold. Across the way a guy in a leather jacket scooped frost off the windshield of a snow-packed black Mercury Montclair. Behind him, a priest in a purple cloak was slipping through the courtyard of the church through an opened gate on his way to perform some sacred duty. Nearby, a bare-headed woman in boots tried to manage a laundry bag up the street. There were a million stories, just everyday New York things if you wanted to focus in on them. It was always right out in front of you, blended together, but you'd have to pull it apart to make any sense of it. St Valentine's Day, lovers' day, had come and gone and I hadn't noticed. I had no time for romance. I turned away from the window, from the wintry sun, crossed through the room, went to the stove and made and poured myself a cup of hot chocolate and then clicked on the radio.
Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing Company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and his Comets had recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock’--then down to Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we sat down in a red leather upholstered booth facing the front window. Lou introduced me to Jack Dempsey, the great boxer. Jack shook his fist at me. “You look too light for a heavyweight, kid, you’ll have to put on a few pounds. You’re gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharper--not that you’ll need much in the way of clothes when you’re in the ring--don’t be afraid of hitting somebody too hard.” “He’s not a boxer, Jack, he’s a song-writer and we’ll be publishing his songs.” “Oh yeah, well I hope to hear ‘em some of these days. Good luck to you, kid.” Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red lanterned streets, city types scuffling around, bundled up-salesmen in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors, steam rising out of manholes. None of it seemed to matter...
The sound of trains off in the distance more or less made me feel at home, like nothing was missing, like I was at some level place, never in any significant danger and that everything was fitting together. Across the street from where I stood looking out the window was a church with a bell tower. The ringing of bells made me feel at home, too. I'd always heard and listened to the bells. Iron, brass, silver bells--the bells sang. On Sunday, for services, on holidays. They clanged when somebody important died, when people were getting married. Any special occasion would make the bells ring. You had a pleasant feeling when you heard the bells. I even liked doorbells and the NBC chimes on the radio. I looked out through the leaded glass window across to the church. The bells were silent now and the snow swirled off the rooftops. A blizzard was kidnapping the city, life spinning around on a drab canvas. Icy and cold. Across the way a guy in a leather jacket scooped frost off the windshield of a snow-packed black Mercury Montclair. Behind him, a priest in a purple cloak was slipping through the courtyard of the church through an opened gate on his way to perform some sacred duty. Nearby, a bare-headed woman in boots tried to manage a laundry bag up the street. There were a million stories, just everyday New York things if you wanted to focus in on them. It was always right out in front of you, blended together, but you'd have to pull it apart to make any sense of it. St Valentine's Day, lovers' day, had come and gone and I hadn't noticed. I had no time for romance. I turned away from the window, from the wintry sun, crossed through the room, went to the stove and made and poured myself a cup of hot chocolate and then clicked on the radio.
Bob Dylan Man of Religion
Chapter 2
Author John Herdman: "There is one persistent area of preoccupation with which he is recurrently concerned and that is religion. It is not at least until 1979's Slow Train Coming album something which he sets out to define and elucidate, not a message that he strives to convey; rather it is something which will not leave him alone, which again and again obtrudes on his consciousness and asserts its claims through his songs. It represents, in the last resort, a part of his personality which has not been under his control, which repeatedly breaks through into consciousness in the form of persistent themes and obsessive images."
Bert Cartwright analysed the songwriter's lyrics during 1961-78. Out of 246 songs there were 387 individual Biblical allusions, split about 50-50 between Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
In 1975 Dylan told Jim Jerome of People magazine, "I didn't consciously pursue the Bob Dylan myth. It was given to me by God. Inspiration is what we're looking for. You just have to be receptive to it. I don't care what people expect of me. Doesn't concern me. I'm doing God's work. That's all I know."
Author John Herdman: "There is one persistent area of preoccupation with which he is recurrently concerned and that is religion. It is not at least until 1979's Slow Train Coming album something which he sets out to define and elucidate, not a message that he strives to convey; rather it is something which will not leave him alone, which again and again obtrudes on his consciousness and asserts its claims through his songs. It represents, in the last resort, a part of his personality which has not been under his control, which repeatedly breaks through into consciousness in the form of persistent themes and obsessive images."
Bert Cartwright analysed the songwriter's lyrics during 1961-78. Out of 246 songs there were 387 individual Biblical allusions, split about 50-50 between Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
In 1975 Dylan told Jim Jerome of People magazine, "I didn't consciously pursue the Bob Dylan myth. It was given to me by God. Inspiration is what we're looking for. You just have to be receptive to it. I don't care what people expect of me. Doesn't concern me. I'm doing God's work. That's all I know."
Modern Times: Glimmers of Faith
Chapter 3
Beyond the Horizon
Beyond the horizon Behind the sun, At the end of the rainbow Life has only begun. In the long hours of twilight 'Neath the stardust above, Beyond the horizon It is easy to love. I'm touched with desire What won't I do? Through flame and through fire I'll build my world around You. Beyond the horizon In the springtime or fall, Love waits forever For one and for all. Beyond the horizon Across the divide, Round about midnight We'll be on the same side. Down in the valley The water runs cold, Beyond the horizon Someone prayed for your soul. My wretched heart is pounding I felt an angel's kiss, My memories are drowning In mortal bliss. Beyond the horizon At the end of the game, Every step that You take I'm walking the same. Beyond the horizon The night winds blow, The theme of a melody From many moons ago. The bells of St Mary's How sweetly they chime, Beyond the horizon I found You just in time. It's dark and it's dreary I've been pleading in vain, I'm wounded I'm weary My repentance is plain. Beyond the horizon Over the treacherous sea, I still can't believe You've set aside Your love for me. Beyond the horizon Beneath crimson skies, In the soft light of morning I'll follow You with my eyes. Through countries and kingdoms And temples of stone, Beyond the horizon Right down to the bone. It's the right time of the season Somebody there always cared, There's always a reason Why someone's life has been spared. Beyond the horizon The sky is so blue, I've got more than a lifetime To live loving You.
When the Deal Goes Down
In the still of the night, in the world's ancient light Where wisdom grows up in strife My bewildering brain toils in vain Through the darkness On the pathways of life. Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air Tomorrow keeps turning around We live and we die we know not why But I'll be with you when the deal goes down. We eat and we drink we feel and we think Far down the street we stray, I laugh and I cry and I'm haunted by Things I never meant nor wished to say The midnight rain follows the train We all wear the same thorny crown Soul to soul our shadows roll And I'll be with you when the deal goes down. Well the moon gives light and it shines by night When I scarcely feel the glow We learn to live and then we forgive O'er the road we're bound to go More frailer than the flowers these precious hours That keep us so tightly bound You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies And I'll be with you when the deal goes down. Well I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes I followed the winding stream I heard the deafening noise I felt transient joys I know they're not what they seem In this earthly domain full of disappointment and pain You'll never see me frown I owe my heart to you And that's sayin' it true And I'll be with you When the deal goes down.
Aint Talkin
As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden The wounded flowers were dangling from the vine I was passing by yon cool crystal fountain Someone hit me from behind. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Through this weary world of woe Heart burnin' still yearnin' No one on earth would ever know. They say prayer has the power to heal So pray for me mother In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell I'm a-tryin' to love my neighbor and do good unto others But oh mother things ain't going well. Ain't talkin' just walkin' I'll burn that bridge before you can cross. Heart burnin' still yearnin' There'll be no mercy for you once you've lost. Now I'm all worn down by weeping, My eyes are filled with tears, my lips are dry If I catch my opponents ever sleeping I'll just slaughter 'em where they lie. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Through the world mysterious and vague, Heart burnin' still yearnin' Walkin' through the cities of the plague. Well the whole world is filled with speculation The whole wide world which people say is round They will tear your mind away from contemplation They will jump on your misfortune when you're down. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Eatin' hog-eyed grease in a hog-eyed town. Heart burnin' still yearnin' Some day you'll be glad to have me around. They will crush you with wealth and power Every waking moment you could crack I'll make the most of one last extra hour I'll revenge my father's death then I'll step back Ain't talkin' just walkin' Hand me down my walkin' cane. Heart burnin' still yearnin' Got to get you out of my miserable brain. All my loyal and my much-loved companions They approve of me and share my code I practice a faith that's been long abandoned Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road. Ain't talkin' just walkin' My mule is sick my horse is blind. Heart burnin' still yearnin' Thinkin 'bout that gal I left behind Well it's bright in the heavens and the wheels are flyin' Fame and honor never seem to fade The fire gone out but the light is never dyin' Who says I can't get heavenly aid? Ain't talkin' just walkin' Carryin' a dead man's shield Heart burnin' still yearnin' Walkin' with a toothache in my heel. The sufferin' is unending Every nook and cranny has its tears I'm not playing I'm not pretending I'm not nursin' any superfluous fears. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Walkin' ever since the other night. Heart burnin' still yearnin' Walkin' 'til I'm clean out of sight. As I walked out in the mystic garden On a hot summer day a hot summer lawn Excuse me ma'am I beg your pardon There's no one here the gardener is gone. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Up the road around the bend. Heart burnin' still yearnin' In the last outback at the world's end.
Thunder on the Mountain
Thunder on the mountain and there's fires on the moon Ruckus in the alley and the Son will be here soon. Today's the day, gonna grab my trombone and blow Well there's hot stuff here and it's everywhere I go. I was thinkin' 'bout Alicia Keys, couldn't keep from crying When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line. I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be I been looking for her even clear through Tennessee. Feel like my soul is beginning to expand Look into my heart and you will sort of understand. You brought me here, now you're trying to run me away. The writing on the wall, come read it, come see what it say Thunder on the mountain, rollin' like a drum Gonna sleep over there, that's where the music coming from. I don't need any guide, I already know the way Remember this, I'm your servant both night and day The pistols are poppin' and the power is down I'd like to try somethin' but I'm so far from town The sun keeps shinin' and the North Wind keeps picking up speed Gonna forget about myself for a while, gonna go out and see what others need I've been sittin' down studyin' the art of love I think it will fit me like a glove I want some real good woman to do just what I say Everybody got to wonder what's the matter with this cruel world today Thunder on the mountain, rolling to the ground Gonna get up in the morning, walk the hard road down Some sweet day I'll stand beside my king I wouldn't betray your love or any other thing Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches I'll recruit my army from the orphanages I been to St Herman's church, said my religious vows I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows I got the porkchops, she got the pie She ain't no angel and neither am I Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes I'll say this, I don't give a damn about your dreams Thunder on the mountain, heavy as can be Mean old twister bearing down on me All the ladies in Washington, scrambling to get out of town Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down Everybody going and I want to go too Don't wanna take a chance with somebody new I did all I could, I did it right there and then I've already confessed, no need to confess again Gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up north I'll plant and I'll harvest what the earth brings forth The hammer's on the table, the pitchfork's on the shelf For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself.
Beyond the Horizon
Beyond the horizon Behind the sun, At the end of the rainbow Life has only begun. In the long hours of twilight 'Neath the stardust above, Beyond the horizon It is easy to love. I'm touched with desire What won't I do? Through flame and through fire I'll build my world around You. Beyond the horizon In the springtime or fall, Love waits forever For one and for all. Beyond the horizon Across the divide, Round about midnight We'll be on the same side. Down in the valley The water runs cold, Beyond the horizon Someone prayed for your soul. My wretched heart is pounding I felt an angel's kiss, My memories are drowning In mortal bliss. Beyond the horizon At the end of the game, Every step that You take I'm walking the same. Beyond the horizon The night winds blow, The theme of a melody From many moons ago. The bells of St Mary's How sweetly they chime, Beyond the horizon I found You just in time. It's dark and it's dreary I've been pleading in vain, I'm wounded I'm weary My repentance is plain. Beyond the horizon Over the treacherous sea, I still can't believe You've set aside Your love for me. Beyond the horizon Beneath crimson skies, In the soft light of morning I'll follow You with my eyes. Through countries and kingdoms And temples of stone, Beyond the horizon Right down to the bone. It's the right time of the season Somebody there always cared, There's always a reason Why someone's life has been spared. Beyond the horizon The sky is so blue, I've got more than a lifetime To live loving You.
When the Deal Goes Down
In the still of the night, in the world's ancient light Where wisdom grows up in strife My bewildering brain toils in vain Through the darkness On the pathways of life. Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air Tomorrow keeps turning around We live and we die we know not why But I'll be with you when the deal goes down. We eat and we drink we feel and we think Far down the street we stray, I laugh and I cry and I'm haunted by Things I never meant nor wished to say The midnight rain follows the train We all wear the same thorny crown Soul to soul our shadows roll And I'll be with you when the deal goes down. Well the moon gives light and it shines by night When I scarcely feel the glow We learn to live and then we forgive O'er the road we're bound to go More frailer than the flowers these precious hours That keep us so tightly bound You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies And I'll be with you when the deal goes down. Well I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes I followed the winding stream I heard the deafening noise I felt transient joys I know they're not what they seem In this earthly domain full of disappointment and pain You'll never see me frown I owe my heart to you And that's sayin' it true And I'll be with you When the deal goes down.
Aint Talkin
As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden The wounded flowers were dangling from the vine I was passing by yon cool crystal fountain Someone hit me from behind. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Through this weary world of woe Heart burnin' still yearnin' No one on earth would ever know. They say prayer has the power to heal So pray for me mother In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell I'm a-tryin' to love my neighbor and do good unto others But oh mother things ain't going well. Ain't talkin' just walkin' I'll burn that bridge before you can cross. Heart burnin' still yearnin' There'll be no mercy for you once you've lost. Now I'm all worn down by weeping, My eyes are filled with tears, my lips are dry If I catch my opponents ever sleeping I'll just slaughter 'em where they lie. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Through the world mysterious and vague, Heart burnin' still yearnin' Walkin' through the cities of the plague. Well the whole world is filled with speculation The whole wide world which people say is round They will tear your mind away from contemplation They will jump on your misfortune when you're down. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Eatin' hog-eyed grease in a hog-eyed town. Heart burnin' still yearnin' Some day you'll be glad to have me around. They will crush you with wealth and power Every waking moment you could crack I'll make the most of one last extra hour I'll revenge my father's death then I'll step back Ain't talkin' just walkin' Hand me down my walkin' cane. Heart burnin' still yearnin' Got to get you out of my miserable brain. All my loyal and my much-loved companions They approve of me and share my code I practice a faith that's been long abandoned Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road. Ain't talkin' just walkin' My mule is sick my horse is blind. Heart burnin' still yearnin' Thinkin 'bout that gal I left behind Well it's bright in the heavens and the wheels are flyin' Fame and honor never seem to fade The fire gone out but the light is never dyin' Who says I can't get heavenly aid? Ain't talkin' just walkin' Carryin' a dead man's shield Heart burnin' still yearnin' Walkin' with a toothache in my heel. The sufferin' is unending Every nook and cranny has its tears I'm not playing I'm not pretending I'm not nursin' any superfluous fears. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Walkin' ever since the other night. Heart burnin' still yearnin' Walkin' 'til I'm clean out of sight. As I walked out in the mystic garden On a hot summer day a hot summer lawn Excuse me ma'am I beg your pardon There's no one here the gardener is gone. Ain't talkin' just walkin' Up the road around the bend. Heart burnin' still yearnin' In the last outback at the world's end.
Thunder on the Mountain
Thunder on the mountain and there's fires on the moon Ruckus in the alley and the Son will be here soon. Today's the day, gonna grab my trombone and blow Well there's hot stuff here and it's everywhere I go. I was thinkin' 'bout Alicia Keys, couldn't keep from crying When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line. I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be I been looking for her even clear through Tennessee. Feel like my soul is beginning to expand Look into my heart and you will sort of understand. You brought me here, now you're trying to run me away. The writing on the wall, come read it, come see what it say Thunder on the mountain, rollin' like a drum Gonna sleep over there, that's where the music coming from. I don't need any guide, I already know the way Remember this, I'm your servant both night and day The pistols are poppin' and the power is down I'd like to try somethin' but I'm so far from town The sun keeps shinin' and the North Wind keeps picking up speed Gonna forget about myself for a while, gonna go out and see what others need I've been sittin' down studyin' the art of love I think it will fit me like a glove I want some real good woman to do just what I say Everybody got to wonder what's the matter with this cruel world today Thunder on the mountain, rolling to the ground Gonna get up in the morning, walk the hard road down Some sweet day I'll stand beside my king I wouldn't betray your love or any other thing Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches I'll recruit my army from the orphanages I been to St Herman's church, said my religious vows I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows I got the porkchops, she got the pie She ain't no angel and neither am I Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes I'll say this, I don't give a damn about your dreams Thunder on the mountain, heavy as can be Mean old twister bearing down on me All the ladies in Washington, scrambling to get out of town Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down Everybody going and I want to go too Don't wanna take a chance with somebody new I did all I could, I did it right there and then I've already confessed, no need to confess again Gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up north I'll plant and I'll harvest what the earth brings forth The hammer's on the table, the pitchfork's on the shelf For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself.
Conversion Story of Bob Dylan
Chapter 4
"Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd knew I wasn't feeling too well. I think they could see that. And they threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don't pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I don't. But I looked down at that cross. And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona. I was feeling even worse than I'd felt when I was in San Diego. I said, Well I need something tonight. I didn't know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said I need something tonight that I didn't have before. And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross."
Clinton Heylin wrote: "Stuck in a Tucson hotel room, after a lifetime of visions that caused divisions, Dylan experienced a vision of Christ, Lord of Lords, King of Kings. His state of mind may well have made him susceptible to such an experience. Lacking a sense of purpose in his personal life since the collapse of his marriage, he came to believe that when Jesus revealed Himself, He quite literally rescued him from an early grave." Bob Dylan: "There was a presence in the room that couldn't have been anything but Jesus. Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up."
Does the Lord still have a liking for the minstrel from Minnesota? Dylan has long been protected, apart from a couple of injuries sustained in accidents which could have been worse. How many of his fellow musicians from the 60s through the turn of the millennium have died prematurely because they lived the message of their songs, nihilism unto self-destruction, false liberation, false consciousness raising, a revolution of selfish individualism, free sensuality, illusory invincibility, life without consequence, no spiritual combat, no self-discipline, and nothing beyond the horizon? The young were told even by governmental organizations such as bodies set up to fight clinical depression that life is all about fun, self-expression, being free. That means in practice promiscuity, porn, booze, drugs, violence and crime. No one told them that path inexorably leads to pain, suffering, sickness and death in this life and the next.
Dylan is a survivor. We should all say Thanks! to our overworked Guardian Angels! God made him out of nothing and saw him "from before the daystar." Predestined may niot be the right word. It takes old age to reduce most of us from our pride and curiosity but by then much hope has evaporated and with it the power to change. Dylan has remained outside the Catholic Church, the only Rock to received the light of a faith that was not counterfeit and man-made. "Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but my Father in Heaven," Jesus told St.Peter. And he gave him, one man, "the keys to the kingdom of Heaven," saying "What you bind on Earth will be bound in Heaven." Those things mean uniquely "guided into all Truth."
That is why the devil implanted his agents inside the Catholic Church: to rise to the top and neutralize this supernatural grace and destroy the church and make it repulsive instead of beautiful, to repel people like Bob Dylan and you, dear reader.
"Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd knew I wasn't feeling too well. I think they could see that. And they threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don't pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I don't. But I looked down at that cross. And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona. I was feeling even worse than I'd felt when I was in San Diego. I said, Well I need something tonight. I didn't know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said I need something tonight that I didn't have before. And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross."
Clinton Heylin wrote: "Stuck in a Tucson hotel room, after a lifetime of visions that caused divisions, Dylan experienced a vision of Christ, Lord of Lords, King of Kings. His state of mind may well have made him susceptible to such an experience. Lacking a sense of purpose in his personal life since the collapse of his marriage, he came to believe that when Jesus revealed Himself, He quite literally rescued him from an early grave." Bob Dylan: "There was a presence in the room that couldn't have been anything but Jesus. Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up."
Does the Lord still have a liking for the minstrel from Minnesota? Dylan has long been protected, apart from a couple of injuries sustained in accidents which could have been worse. How many of his fellow musicians from the 60s through the turn of the millennium have died prematurely because they lived the message of their songs, nihilism unto self-destruction, false liberation, false consciousness raising, a revolution of selfish individualism, free sensuality, illusory invincibility, life without consequence, no spiritual combat, no self-discipline, and nothing beyond the horizon? The young were told even by governmental organizations such as bodies set up to fight clinical depression that life is all about fun, self-expression, being free. That means in practice promiscuity, porn, booze, drugs, violence and crime. No one told them that path inexorably leads to pain, suffering, sickness and death in this life and the next.
Dylan is a survivor. We should all say Thanks! to our overworked Guardian Angels! God made him out of nothing and saw him "from before the daystar." Predestined may niot be the right word. It takes old age to reduce most of us from our pride and curiosity but by then much hope has evaporated and with it the power to change. Dylan has remained outside the Catholic Church, the only Rock to received the light of a faith that was not counterfeit and man-made. "Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but my Father in Heaven," Jesus told St.Peter. And he gave him, one man, "the keys to the kingdom of Heaven," saying "What you bind on Earth will be bound in Heaven." Those things mean uniquely "guided into all Truth."
That is why the devil implanted his agents inside the Catholic Church: to rise to the top and neutralize this supernatural grace and destroy the church and make it repulsive instead of beautiful, to repel people like Bob Dylan and you, dear reader.
Dylan's Dialogue With Catholicism
Chapter 5
"What kind of house is this he said, Where I have come to roam? It's not a house said Judas Priest, It's not a house it's a home." Dylan sings this with emphasis on the word "roam" so as really to mean Rome.
"And don't go mistaking paradise For that home across the road" (that is, St Mary's).
According to Michael Karwowski writing for Britain's Contemporary Review, Dylan's dilemma about the Catholic church is a central symbolic theme of albums as far back as the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde.
There the "sad-eyed lady of the lowlands" represents the Catholic church in a song full of things like "missionary times," "silver cross" and "holy medallion."
"Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes, My warehouse eyes my Arabian drums, Should I leave them by your gate, Or sad-eyed lady should I wait?"
Kawowski: But, if Dylan chose to underline Sad-Eyed Lady's significance by giving it an entire album side, there can be little doubt that the songwriter's predilection in Blonde on Blonde was towards mysticism rather than established religion, whether that of the Catholic Church or any other. This is because so many of the songs on the album imply a rejection of the straight and narrow path of established religion, symbolised in Dylan's image system as a 'railroad' or 'train line'.
Thus, in Absolutely Sweet Marie, where the railroad is 'yellow', implying cowardice or an abdication of spiritual responsibility by joining the Church, Dylan begins the song: 'Well, your railroad gate, you know I just can't jump it,' calling to mind the 'gate' of Sad-Eyed Lady and the 'leap of faith' implicit in a belief in Catholicism.
Perhaps the most definitive statement of Dylan's discomfort at the idea of joining the Catholic Church, however, comes in the song Just Like a Woman: "It was raining from the first And I was dying there of thirst So I came in here And your long-time curse hurts But what's worse Is this pain in here I can't stay in here Ain't it clear that, I just can't fit Yes I believe it's time for us to quit.
Your long-time curse here refers to God's expulsion of mankind from Eden for pride, which 'hurts' because it means a separation from God. This also accounts for 'raining from the first', 'rain' in Dylan's image system signifying the worldly illusions arising as an inevitable consequence of the separation from the reality of God.
But although Dylan admits that he 'was dying there of (spiritual) thirst' as a result of this separation, nevertheless, he cannot 'fit' in God's supposed Church.
In Visions of Johanna, the significance of Joan of Arc, which would explain her abiding fascination for writers through the centuries--few historical figures have inspired so many books--is the fact that hers was possibly the most dramatic recorded case of the inspired individual against the 'infallible' organisation, the mystic against the Church. And it is this conflict with which Bob Dylan is concerned in Blonde on Blonde.
Dylan makes clear in the song that his would-be commitment to the source of Joan's visions, the direct inspiration of truth, as he sees it, is threatened by two temptations. The first is his spiritual despair, arising from his painful experience of worldly illusion and the emptiness and futility of life he has encountered. Visions of Johanna, in fact, provides a brilliant evocation of the profound sense of self-pity underlying the spiritual despair which characterises the existentialist world-vision: "Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall How can I explain? Oh, it's so hard to get on." The wall here symbolises Dylan's distance from any spiritually meaningful life, while 'the hall' is where Dylan's soul awaits 'Madonna', who 'still has not showed'.
Dylan's disabling alienation, as expressed here, makes him particularly susceptible to the second temptation he finds himself facing, which is that of the Catholic Church's own spiritual confidence.
In Visions of Johanna itself, the Church is symbolised by the character of 'Louise.' The name Louis, and its female equivalent Louise, comes from the Jewish name Levi, one of the twelve tribes of Israel and the one appointed by God in the Old Testament as the priestly tribe and, thus, one of the earliest historical expressions of organised religion.
The first mention of Louise comes at the beginning of the song, where Dylan writes of 'Louise and her lover so entwined', the lover here being truth, or the source of divine inspiration.
The point is that Dylan cannot separate the two and is thereby confused by the Church's confidence in its infallibility as the voice of truth on earth. Thus, in the song, Louise tells him: 'Ya can't look at much, can ya man?' This echoes TS Eliot's Four Quartets: 'human kind/Cannot bear very much reality'. And again: "We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it."
The handful of rain here symbolises the illusions which, if direct inspiration is the only spiritual way forward, are what the Catholic Church's claims to represent truth must amount to.
Faced with the temptations of personal despair and a supremely self-confident Church, however, Dylan's constant refrain in the song is that, however despairing, however confused he may feel, the truth lies with Johanna's visions, representing as they do for him God's direct inspiration of the individual.
Thus, Louise's temptation is discounted by the 'visions of Johanna that conquer my mind', bringing to mind the 'white horse' of the Apocalypse that 'went forth to conquer'.
According to this interpretation, therefore, by implication, the 'pale horse' of Revelation, the horse of Death, represents organised religion, or, in this instance, the Catholic Church.
If we would seek some confirmation that Johanna is indeed Joan of Arc, however, this comes not in Visions but in another song on Blonde on Blonde, 'Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again', where Dylan writes: 'Well, Shakespeare, he's in the alley Speaking to some French girl, Who says she knows me well'. The reference to Shakespeare conjures up 'Hamlet', which is concerned with probably the best-known debate in literature between worldly concerns and those of the questing soul. And the reference to the 'French girl'--Joan of Arc--'Who says she knows me well' contrasts with another song on the album, One of Us Must Know, which is about Dylan's debate with the Catholic Church: 'I couldn't see how you could know me But you said you knew me and I believed you did... Sooner or later, one of us must know That I really did try to get close to you.”
The relationship with the Church, however, is already in the past tense: 'I did try to get close to you'. Thus, although Sad-Eyed Lady follows One of Us Must Know on the album, Dylan's decision between mysticism and established religion was effectively already made before he wrote the song.
"What kind of house is this he said, Where I have come to roam? It's not a house said Judas Priest, It's not a house it's a home." Dylan sings this with emphasis on the word "roam" so as really to mean Rome.
"And don't go mistaking paradise For that home across the road" (that is, St Mary's).
According to Michael Karwowski writing for Britain's Contemporary Review, Dylan's dilemma about the Catholic church is a central symbolic theme of albums as far back as the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde.
There the "sad-eyed lady of the lowlands" represents the Catholic church in a song full of things like "missionary times," "silver cross" and "holy medallion."
"Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes, My warehouse eyes my Arabian drums, Should I leave them by your gate, Or sad-eyed lady should I wait?"
Kawowski: But, if Dylan chose to underline Sad-Eyed Lady's significance by giving it an entire album side, there can be little doubt that the songwriter's predilection in Blonde on Blonde was towards mysticism rather than established religion, whether that of the Catholic Church or any other. This is because so many of the songs on the album imply a rejection of the straight and narrow path of established religion, symbolised in Dylan's image system as a 'railroad' or 'train line'.
Thus, in Absolutely Sweet Marie, where the railroad is 'yellow', implying cowardice or an abdication of spiritual responsibility by joining the Church, Dylan begins the song: 'Well, your railroad gate, you know I just can't jump it,' calling to mind the 'gate' of Sad-Eyed Lady and the 'leap of faith' implicit in a belief in Catholicism.
Perhaps the most definitive statement of Dylan's discomfort at the idea of joining the Catholic Church, however, comes in the song Just Like a Woman: "It was raining from the first And I was dying there of thirst So I came in here And your long-time curse hurts But what's worse Is this pain in here I can't stay in here Ain't it clear that, I just can't fit Yes I believe it's time for us to quit.
Your long-time curse here refers to God's expulsion of mankind from Eden for pride, which 'hurts' because it means a separation from God. This also accounts for 'raining from the first', 'rain' in Dylan's image system signifying the worldly illusions arising as an inevitable consequence of the separation from the reality of God.
But although Dylan admits that he 'was dying there of (spiritual) thirst' as a result of this separation, nevertheless, he cannot 'fit' in God's supposed Church.
In Visions of Johanna, the significance of Joan of Arc, which would explain her abiding fascination for writers through the centuries--few historical figures have inspired so many books--is the fact that hers was possibly the most dramatic recorded case of the inspired individual against the 'infallible' organisation, the mystic against the Church. And it is this conflict with which Bob Dylan is concerned in Blonde on Blonde.
Dylan makes clear in the song that his would-be commitment to the source of Joan's visions, the direct inspiration of truth, as he sees it, is threatened by two temptations. The first is his spiritual despair, arising from his painful experience of worldly illusion and the emptiness and futility of life he has encountered. Visions of Johanna, in fact, provides a brilliant evocation of the profound sense of self-pity underlying the spiritual despair which characterises the existentialist world-vision: "Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall How can I explain? Oh, it's so hard to get on." The wall here symbolises Dylan's distance from any spiritually meaningful life, while 'the hall' is where Dylan's soul awaits 'Madonna', who 'still has not showed'.
Dylan's disabling alienation, as expressed here, makes him particularly susceptible to the second temptation he finds himself facing, which is that of the Catholic Church's own spiritual confidence.
In Visions of Johanna itself, the Church is symbolised by the character of 'Louise.' The name Louis, and its female equivalent Louise, comes from the Jewish name Levi, one of the twelve tribes of Israel and the one appointed by God in the Old Testament as the priestly tribe and, thus, one of the earliest historical expressions of organised religion.
The first mention of Louise comes at the beginning of the song, where Dylan writes of 'Louise and her lover so entwined', the lover here being truth, or the source of divine inspiration.
The point is that Dylan cannot separate the two and is thereby confused by the Church's confidence in its infallibility as the voice of truth on earth. Thus, in the song, Louise tells him: 'Ya can't look at much, can ya man?' This echoes TS Eliot's Four Quartets: 'human kind/Cannot bear very much reality'. And again: "We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it."
The handful of rain here symbolises the illusions which, if direct inspiration is the only spiritual way forward, are what the Catholic Church's claims to represent truth must amount to.
Faced with the temptations of personal despair and a supremely self-confident Church, however, Dylan's constant refrain in the song is that, however despairing, however confused he may feel, the truth lies with Johanna's visions, representing as they do for him God's direct inspiration of the individual.
Thus, Louise's temptation is discounted by the 'visions of Johanna that conquer my mind', bringing to mind the 'white horse' of the Apocalypse that 'went forth to conquer'.
According to this interpretation, therefore, by implication, the 'pale horse' of Revelation, the horse of Death, represents organised religion, or, in this instance, the Catholic Church.
If we would seek some confirmation that Johanna is indeed Joan of Arc, however, this comes not in Visions but in another song on Blonde on Blonde, 'Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again', where Dylan writes: 'Well, Shakespeare, he's in the alley Speaking to some French girl, Who says she knows me well'. The reference to Shakespeare conjures up 'Hamlet', which is concerned with probably the best-known debate in literature between worldly concerns and those of the questing soul. And the reference to the 'French girl'--Joan of Arc--'Who says she knows me well' contrasts with another song on the album, One of Us Must Know, which is about Dylan's debate with the Catholic Church: 'I couldn't see how you could know me But you said you knew me and I believed you did... Sooner or later, one of us must know That I really did try to get close to you.”
The relationship with the Church, however, is already in the past tense: 'I did try to get close to you'. Thus, although Sad-Eyed Lady follows One of Us Must Know on the album, Dylan's decision between mysticism and established religion was effectively already made before he wrote the song.
Americanism: National Heresy
Chapter 6
Clinton Heylin writing in Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: "By embracing the New Age brand of Christianity advocated by the Vineyard Fellowship, Dylan was about to become, in popular perception, just another Bible-bashing fundamentalist...the Fellowship certainly shared the "born-again" precepts of more right-wing credos--believing such a change was an awakening from original sin.
It elevated the final book of New Testament allegories, John's Revelation, into a literal account of end times. All one needed was the code. The end of the world was not merely nigh, it was NIGH!
Apart from the scriptures, the classes sought to provide a grounding in the works of Hal Lindsey, the man to whom God in his infinite wisdom had revealed the true code of Revelation. Though no saint himself, Lindsey was closely associated with the Vineyard church. His book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) became Dylan's second Bible and added an apocalytpic edge to his worldview, allowing Christ Come Again precedence over Jesus the Teacher.
According to Lindsey, current world events had been foretold in the apocalyptic tracts of the Bible. His basic premise was that the events revealed to John in Revelation corresponded with 20th century history, starting with the re-establishment of the Jews' homeland, Israel. By identifying Russia as Magog and Iran as Gog--the confederation responsible for instigating the final conflict, the Battle of Armageddon--Lindsey prophesied an imminent end.
This scriptural snake oil was drunk whole by Dylan. There be no question that in 1979--and for some time to come--he believed that the finishing end was at hand. A lengthy rap from one of his fall 1979 shows illustrates the unequivocal nature of this belief.
"You know we're living in the end times. I don't think there's anybody who doesn't feel that in their hearts. The scriptures say, In the last days, perilous times shall be at hand. Men shall become lovers of their own selves, blasphemous, heavy, and highminded. Now I don't know who you're gonna vote for, but none of those people is gonna straighten out what's happening in the world today...Take a look at the Middle East. We're heading for a war. That's right. They're heading for a war. There's gonna be a war over there. I'd say maybe five years, maybe ten years, could be 15 years...I told you The Times They Are A-Changin and they did. I said the answer was Blowin in the Wind and it was. I'm telling you now Jesus is coming back, and he is! And there is no other way of salvation...There's only one way to believe, there's only one way--the Truth and the Life. It took me a long time to figure that out before it did come to me, and I hope it doesn't take you that long. But Jesus is coming back to set up His kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years."
His belief in the imminence of the End was reflected in almost all the songs he now found himself writing. Powerful evocations of dread like Precious Angel, Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, When You Gonna Wake Up? and When He Returns--all subsequently included on Slow Train Coming album--drew heavily and directly upon the Book of Revelation.
If John Wesley Harding had to deal with "the devil in a fearful way," the new songs dealt with Jesus in an equally fearful way. The scariest example of Lindsey's oddball eschatology, though, bought wholesale by Dylan, occurs in the song Ye Shall Be Changed, wisely omitted from the 1979 album. It was based on chapter 11 of The Late Great Planet Earth in which Lindsey fantastically interprets I Corinthians 15: 'In the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet...we shall be changed'--to signify that "when God has the last trumpet blow, it means He will move out all Christians--and at this point we shall be changed" into...Essence!
What is Americanism?
Americanism is a do-it-yourself, subjective, lawless religion. Hell in heaven's clothing.
Its first big lie justification by spiritual experience, its second lie the upside-down Gospel of money and self unlimited--"you can have it all now, just pray and pay here"--its third big fantasy the idea that Christ will return to Earth to reign physically for a thousand years--note this is by analogy a repetition of the mistake of the nationalistic, materialistic Pharisees 2000 years ago--together with a related fantasy, the so-called Rapture.
The truth is the opposite. Blessed those not taken and not taken in. The thousand year reign of Christ has been and gone. The Rapt merchants are 500 years behind the game.
St.Paul: "Such false apostles are deceitful actors transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light."
Rather our era is the one Jesus referred when he posed the sobering question: "When the Son of man returns, do you think he will find faith on Earth?"
These Millenarians forget the first among rebels was Lucifer, whose name was changed to Satan, and that his most destructive and deceptive field of operation was always against the Church from within, bad bishops and "Judas priests"--"false prophets who come to you dressed in the vestments of sheep but inwardly are ravening wolves."
The devil's other fields of operation sex, democracy and capitalism for the destruction of marriage, morality, authority, family, friendship and folk culture--every wholesome unblemished thing of tradition sacrificed to the idol of Mammon, the spirit of greed and darkness calling itself Progressivism and Enlightenment.
The Luciferian rebellion was the foundation stone of the Atlantean New World republic of America.
Contrary to the lie and absurdity perpetuated in every history textbook, America was named after something more significant than the some ship's lieutenant. It was most likely Ameru, the feathered serpent demon of the Amerindians and invisible lord of the land of the Americas. Known to the Aztecs as Quetzacoatel, the same "invisible energy" operated in the Old World under various guises such as the "sun-god" Baal or Bel, and Moloch, and Tammuz.
The life- and child-hating demon Ameru extorted of the poor Amerindians hundreds of human sacrifices each day, as depicted by Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto, a word meaning hidden truth revealed.
The name America is a skeleton-in-the-closet and dead giveaway, for the US never was a Christian country. That notion was a useful veneer to deceive the gullible voter.
For more on this subject, read Solange Hertz' books The Star-Spangled Heresy and The Battle for the Amerindian. Also the lectures of Gerry Matatics available from BiblicalFoundations.org.
When the government changes in Washington, not much changes, because the underlying spirit of the nation which is a conquering spirit remains the same.
American Republicanism is Revolutionary and not "Conservative." Bush government adviser Michael Ledeen in the William Buckley's so-called conservative National Review magazine admitted the aim of Americanism from its revolutionary beginning was prosecuted in all fields of endeavour. Note he is careful not to mention religion, for the destruction of the church has always been the heart of the matter, the bull's eye, the American bishops being the piper that paid for the song that Second Vatican Council intoned.
Ledeen: "Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence--our existence, not our politics--threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission."
Clinton Heylin writing in Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: "By embracing the New Age brand of Christianity advocated by the Vineyard Fellowship, Dylan was about to become, in popular perception, just another Bible-bashing fundamentalist...the Fellowship certainly shared the "born-again" precepts of more right-wing credos--believing such a change was an awakening from original sin.
It elevated the final book of New Testament allegories, John's Revelation, into a literal account of end times. All one needed was the code. The end of the world was not merely nigh, it was NIGH!
Apart from the scriptures, the classes sought to provide a grounding in the works of Hal Lindsey, the man to whom God in his infinite wisdom had revealed the true code of Revelation. Though no saint himself, Lindsey was closely associated with the Vineyard church. His book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) became Dylan's second Bible and added an apocalytpic edge to his worldview, allowing Christ Come Again precedence over Jesus the Teacher.
According to Lindsey, current world events had been foretold in the apocalyptic tracts of the Bible. His basic premise was that the events revealed to John in Revelation corresponded with 20th century history, starting with the re-establishment of the Jews' homeland, Israel. By identifying Russia as Magog and Iran as Gog--the confederation responsible for instigating the final conflict, the Battle of Armageddon--Lindsey prophesied an imminent end.
This scriptural snake oil was drunk whole by Dylan. There be no question that in 1979--and for some time to come--he believed that the finishing end was at hand. A lengthy rap from one of his fall 1979 shows illustrates the unequivocal nature of this belief.
"You know we're living in the end times. I don't think there's anybody who doesn't feel that in their hearts. The scriptures say, In the last days, perilous times shall be at hand. Men shall become lovers of their own selves, blasphemous, heavy, and highminded. Now I don't know who you're gonna vote for, but none of those people is gonna straighten out what's happening in the world today...Take a look at the Middle East. We're heading for a war. That's right. They're heading for a war. There's gonna be a war over there. I'd say maybe five years, maybe ten years, could be 15 years...I told you The Times They Are A-Changin and they did. I said the answer was Blowin in the Wind and it was. I'm telling you now Jesus is coming back, and he is! And there is no other way of salvation...There's only one way to believe, there's only one way--the Truth and the Life. It took me a long time to figure that out before it did come to me, and I hope it doesn't take you that long. But Jesus is coming back to set up His kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years."
His belief in the imminence of the End was reflected in almost all the songs he now found himself writing. Powerful evocations of dread like Precious Angel, Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, When You Gonna Wake Up? and When He Returns--all subsequently included on Slow Train Coming album--drew heavily and directly upon the Book of Revelation.
If John Wesley Harding had to deal with "the devil in a fearful way," the new songs dealt with Jesus in an equally fearful way. The scariest example of Lindsey's oddball eschatology, though, bought wholesale by Dylan, occurs in the song Ye Shall Be Changed, wisely omitted from the 1979 album. It was based on chapter 11 of The Late Great Planet Earth in which Lindsey fantastically interprets I Corinthians 15: 'In the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet...we shall be changed'--to signify that "when God has the last trumpet blow, it means He will move out all Christians--and at this point we shall be changed" into...Essence!
What is Americanism?
Americanism is a do-it-yourself, subjective, lawless religion. Hell in heaven's clothing.
Its first big lie justification by spiritual experience, its second lie the upside-down Gospel of money and self unlimited--"you can have it all now, just pray and pay here"--its third big fantasy the idea that Christ will return to Earth to reign physically for a thousand years--note this is by analogy a repetition of the mistake of the nationalistic, materialistic Pharisees 2000 years ago--together with a related fantasy, the so-called Rapture.
The truth is the opposite. Blessed those not taken and not taken in. The thousand year reign of Christ has been and gone. The Rapt merchants are 500 years behind the game.
St.Paul: "Such false apostles are deceitful actors transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light."
Rather our era is the one Jesus referred when he posed the sobering question: "When the Son of man returns, do you think he will find faith on Earth?"
These Millenarians forget the first among rebels was Lucifer, whose name was changed to Satan, and that his most destructive and deceptive field of operation was always against the Church from within, bad bishops and "Judas priests"--"false prophets who come to you dressed in the vestments of sheep but inwardly are ravening wolves."
The devil's other fields of operation sex, democracy and capitalism for the destruction of marriage, morality, authority, family, friendship and folk culture--every wholesome unblemished thing of tradition sacrificed to the idol of Mammon, the spirit of greed and darkness calling itself Progressivism and Enlightenment.
The Luciferian rebellion was the foundation stone of the Atlantean New World republic of America.
Contrary to the lie and absurdity perpetuated in every history textbook, America was named after something more significant than the some ship's lieutenant. It was most likely Ameru, the feathered serpent demon of the Amerindians and invisible lord of the land of the Americas. Known to the Aztecs as Quetzacoatel, the same "invisible energy" operated in the Old World under various guises such as the "sun-god" Baal or Bel, and Moloch, and Tammuz.
The life- and child-hating demon Ameru extorted of the poor Amerindians hundreds of human sacrifices each day, as depicted by Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto, a word meaning hidden truth revealed.
The name America is a skeleton-in-the-closet and dead giveaway, for the US never was a Christian country. That notion was a useful veneer to deceive the gullible voter.
For more on this subject, read Solange Hertz' books The Star-Spangled Heresy and The Battle for the Amerindian. Also the lectures of Gerry Matatics available from BiblicalFoundations.org.
When the government changes in Washington, not much changes, because the underlying spirit of the nation which is a conquering spirit remains the same.
American Republicanism is Revolutionary and not "Conservative." Bush government adviser Michael Ledeen in the William Buckley's so-called conservative National Review magazine admitted the aim of Americanism from its revolutionary beginning was prosecuted in all fields of endeavour. Note he is careful not to mention religion, for the destruction of the church has always been the heart of the matter, the bull's eye, the American bishops being the piper that paid for the song that Second Vatican Council intoned.
Ledeen: "Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence--our existence, not our politics--threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission."
Dylan's Born-Again Music Reviewed
Chapter 7
Slow Train Coming: In 1979 Bob Dylan became a "Born Again." That year he released his first "Christian" album, Slow Train Coming. Like his concerts at that time it was full-on evangelising. He called on the legendary Jerry Wexler, former Atlantic Records vice-president and producer of most of the big R&B stars: Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Ray Charles, Otis Redding. They decided to record in Alabama for the classic soul era sound. Clinton Heylin's biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades Revisited, quotes Wexler: "Naturally, I wanted to do the album in Muscle Shoals as Bob did but we decided to prep it in LA where Bob lived. That's when I learned what the songs were about: born-again Christians in the old corral...I liked the irony of Bob coming to me the Wandering Jew to get the Jesus feel...I had no idea he was on this born-again Christian trip until he started to evangelize me. I said, Bob, you're dealing with a sixty-two-year-old confirmed Jewish atheist. I'm hopeless. Let's just make an album." Dylan was a fan of a new British band Dire Straits and he recruited guitarist Mark Knopfler to lay down parts for Slow Train Coming. There's a remarkable similarity to Dire Straits on a few songs, like Precious Angel, but if Dylan stole from Knopfler, it was payback for Knopfler's own thievery. Knopfler's parts here are lush flourishes, not upstagey at all, but with enough of the guitarist's personality to add something. Musically Slow Train Coming is not much different from its predecessor, Street Legal (1978), which, though not associated with the Christian phase, tells of the "good shepherd" and of having "been to the mountain" and of a character who "practiced what he preached from the heart." Then again God's hand has always been on Dylan. But Street Legal's forceful, "live" sound is traded in for a tempered, gently bumbling, Southern groove. Man Gave Names to All the Animals has a subtle reggae bounce, particularly in the plucky bass. He treats the lyrics as a religious fable. "He saw an animal that liked to growl Big furry paws and he liked to howl Great big furry back and furry hair Ah, think I'll call it a bear." The last track When He Returns is the standout: just piano and vocal, and the keys are struck down hard, just barely redeemed from sloppiness but bursting with joy and passion. I could credit Dylan with giving the best vocal performance of his career, but the lyrics are so striking that they practically force the singer to deliver them with something resembling fervor. It's absolutely breathtaking, even more so when I think about a man so obsessed with the utility of words reaching into himself, past every wellspring of sarcasm and every bloody vein of finely tweaked anomie, trying to express his awe at God and his anticipation of the divine Judgment: "The iron hand it ain't no match for the iron rod, The strongest wall will crumble and fall to a mighty God. For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears It is only He who can reduce me to tears. Don't you cry and don't you die and don't you burn For like a thief in the night, He'll replace wrong with right When He returns. Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through, He unleashed His power at an unknown hour that no one knew. How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice? How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness? Can I cast it aside, all this loyalty and this pride? Will I ever learn that there'll be no peace, that the war won't cease Until He returns? Surrender your crown on this blood-stained ground, take off your mask, He sees your deeds, He knows your needs even before you ask. How long can you falsify and deny what is real? How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal? Of every earthly plan that be known to man, He is unconcerned, He's got plans of His own to set up His throne When He returns." In No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, Robert Shelton writes: "The scoffers felt that Dylan had also abandoned the progressive, tolerant side of Christianity to espouse an uncompromising, unforgiving sort of gospel stance. Later asked if he was concerned about being lumped together with the ultra-right-wing Bible-thumpers, Dylan spoke about reactionary religions as something "to be careful about...it's real dangerous. You can find anything you want in the Bible. You can twist it around and a lot of people do that." On tour to support the album, Dylan was booked at San Francisco's Warfield Theater for a fourteen-night stand. The events of these San Francisco shows are hotly disputed among people who attended, and when a few critical pans subsequently turned up in local papers (the Examiner and the Chronicle), word spread far and wide that audiences were heckling and jeering and storming out of the Warfield in droves. Corr Arnold wrote: "The first born-again shows were at the Warfield in San Francisco in 1979 and the crowd absolutely loathed Dylan. Since he played 14 nights, word got around and lots of people dumped their tickets particularly people who had tix for multiple nights. I saw one of the later nights, and it was Dylan at his most aggressively unlistenable. Bob did another round of shows in 1980, and Bill Graham (his producer/promoter] made him promise that it wasn't going to be "all-religious". Bob sent Bill a rehearsal tape, and there was a series of radio ads with Bill Graham swearing to the people of the Bay Area that he had "personal assurances from Bob Dylan" that he had been rehearsing lots of different songs, while a rehearsal tape of Mr. Tambourine Man played in the background. The first six shows sold out, so Bill added more, eventually going to 15 (remember the Grateful Dead had played 14 nights at the Warfield the month before). At the first show, Bob did a few perfunctory oldies and ground out more religious numbers. The crowds were furious, Bill was furious, and ticket sales for the last 9 nights went into the tank. The BGP organization started bringing in guest stars to pump up ticket sales--Roger McGuinn, Carlos Santana, Mike Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia. Dylan grudgingly did one or two more oldies." Michael Maxwell "saw the 3rd and 8th nights of Bob's 18 day marathon. The third night Dylan was badly abused and booed. The three back-up singers who "tried" to open the show were booed so loudly they couldn't be heard. The first three songs Dylan did could bearly be heard for the booing and he was visibly shaken. A young woman in the third or fourth row on the floor stood between songs ( 4th and 5th as I recall) and shouted " Jesus loves you Bobby and so do I." From that point on he focused on her. I was seated on the front row of the balcony and by the time Dylan took a short break half way through, nearly half the audience had walked out. I don't know how you feel about spiritual things, but that was one time in my life I felt the real presence of evil. The line had been drawn and curses were certainly cast. After the break, Dylan came back with alot smaller audience, but with fire in his eyes! What a second half! Thought you'd like to hear from a disciple that nearly saw another crucifixion!" By Scott Marshall.
City of Gold
There is a City of Gold, Far from the rat race that eats at your soul. Far from the madness and the bars that hold, There is a City of Gold. There is a City of Light, Raised up in the heavens and the streets are bright. Glory to God not by deeds or by might, There is a City of Light. There is a City of Love, Surrounded by stars and the powers above. Far from this world and the stuff dreams are made of, There is a City of Love. There is a City of Grace, You drink holy water in sanctified space. No one is farid to show their face, There is a City of Grace. There is a City of Peace, Where all foul forms of destruction cease. Where the mighty have fallen and there are no police. There is a City of Peace. There is a City of Hope, Above the ravine on the green sunlit slope. All I need is an axe and a rope, There is a City of Hope. I'm heading for the City of Gold, Before it's too late before it gets too cold. Before I'm too tired before I'm too old. There is a City of Gold.
Saved
"When destruction cometh swiftly And there's no time to say a fare-thee-well, Have you decided whether you want to be In heaven or in hell? Are you ready, are you ready? Have you got some unfinished business? Is there something holding you back? Are you thinking for yourself Or are you following the pack? Are you ready, hope you're ready. Are you ready? Are you ready for the judgment? Are you ready for that terrible swift sword? Are you ready for Armageddon? Are you ready for the day of the Lord?" Released in 1980, Saved is hardcore gospel, unapologetically religious record, it's as dogmatic as they come, Jesus-fearing, a prediction of the apocalypse. The music is warm and inviting gospel-rock sung with conviction, particularly his reworking of the gospel standard A Satisfied Mind featuring his female backup singers intonating a soulful "mmmmm" underneath his melody. But whereas Dylan's lyrics on Slow Train Coming used scripture as inspiration for his own poetry, Saved only preaches. Bert Cartwright in his book The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan wrote: "In contrast to composing songs in a folk culture with natural allusions to the Bible, or more sophisticated songs with literary allusions to the Bible, here Dylan composes songs in which the Bible is constantly alluded to as the essence of the believer's faith." Another example of the garden-variety born-again cliches that this otherwise original and shrewd songwriter fell victim to on Saved: "Pulled me out of bondage and You made me renewed inside, Filled up a hunger that had always been denied, Opened up a door no man can shut and You opened it up so wide And You've chosen me to be among the few. What can I do for You?" Saved is unmistakeably a Dylan record: Covenant Woman is a classic 70s/80s minor-key Dylan melody, recalling Jokerman and Baby Stop Crying), but the lyrics lead me to believe that Dylan was making a concerted effort to be the conduit for the holy word instead of the author of its interpretation. His Christian study at the Vineyard required him to abandon a lifetime full of smartass attitude and know-it-all-ism, traits to this day practically synonymous with Bob Dylan. He must have considered it a great challenge. "Being born again is a hard thing...We don't like to lose those old attitudes and hang-ups. Conversion takes time because you have to learn to crawl before you can walk. You have to learn to drink milk before you can eat meat. You're reborn, but like a baby. A baby doesn't know anything about this world, and that's what it's like when you're reborn. You're a stranger. You have to learn all over again." Overall, it's not disastrous, just a little cleaner than a good R&B/gospel record should sound, and there's something keeping it from fully coming alive, but it does have a few great moments, like the percussive, shouty, piano-driven Solid Rock and the stirring organ swells and verse-by-verse crescendos of Pressing On. It takes a few listens, some getting-used-to, to hear the beauty of Saved's most powerful tracks. In the Garden is quiet and humble, but its odd, incremental chord modulations give it a compelling strength it might not have with a simpler arrangement. Conversely, Saving Grace, which has the potential to bring the house down, never does, wasting a fine Dylan vocal with a rather conservative arrangement. I see the word "embarrassing" pop up in allusions to this phase of Dylan's discography, and despite some cringeworthy religious dogma, there's nothing on Saved that makes me feel pity for myself, Dylan, or anyone who buys, downloads, or borrows Dylan records. I don't revisit Saved often, but it feels less problematic with every listen.
Property of Jesus
Go ahead and talk about him Because he makes you doubt, Because he has denied himself The things that you can't live without, Laugh at him behind his back Just like the others do, Remind him of what he used to be When he comes walkin' through. He's the property of Jesus, Resent him to the bone, You got something better, You got a heart of stone. Stop your conversation When he passes on the street, Hope he falls upon himself Oh won't that be sweet, Because he can't be exploited By superstition anymore, Because he can't be bribed or bought By the things that you adore. When the whip that's keeping you in line Doesn't make him jump, Say he's hard-of-hearin' Say that he's a chump. Say he's out of step with reality As you try to test his nerve, Because he doesn't pay no tribute To the king that you serve. Say he's a loser 'Cause he got no common sense Because he don't increase his worth At someone else' expence. Because he's not afraid of trying 'Cause he don't look at you and smile 'Cause he doesn't tell you jokes or fairy tales Say he's got no style. You laugh at salvation, Yu can play Olympic games, You think that when you rest You'll go back from where you came But you've picked up quite a story And you've changed since the womb, What happened to the real you, You've been captured but by whom?
Shot of Love
After committing what many considered to be career suicide with Saved, the following year Dylan delivered Shot of Love to a label that had begun to treat the singer as persona non grata. In Behind the Shades Revisited, Tony Wright (who designed the cover art for Saved) recalls: "They were so rude, so nasty about Bob Dylan and said how they weren't gonna promote another gospel record...I was just astonished to hear these people high-up people at CBS talking about this man as if he were just someone...a curse him kind of attitude." The third and final album of Bob Dylan's extrovertedly Christian period, Shot of Love seems to capitulate a little to the skeptical fans, critics, and label people. Its biblical themes are still present, most notably, the liner notes begin with a quote from Matthew 11:25, and there's nothing subtle about the message of Property of Jesus, but they're mostly cloaked in secular language and rock arrangements. Indeed, Shot of Love is a more personal album than its two predecessors; the evangelical nature of Slow Train Coming and Saved revealed Dylan's desire to be "born again" and approach his material as a naive, innocent messenger rather than a songwriter. However Dylan deeply resented his detractors: "Hmmm. Pretty rude bunch tonight, huh? You all know how to be real rude. You know about the spirit of the Anti-Christ? Does anyone here know about that? Ah, the spirit of the Anti-Christ is loose right now...You talk to your teachers about what I said. I'm sure you're paying a lot of money for your education, so you'd better get one." His bitterness rears its head on Property of Jesus: "Go ahead and talk about him because he makes you doubt Because he has denied himself the things that you can't live without Laugh at him behind his back just like the others do Remind him of what he used to be when he comes walkin' through He's the property of Jesus Resent him to the bone You got something better You've got a heart of stone." And Dead Man Dead Man: "Satan got you by the heel There's a bird's nest in your hair Do you have any faith at all? Do you have any love to share? The way that you hold your head, cursin' God with every move Ooh, I can't stand it I can't stand it What are you tryin' to prove?...The glamour and the bright lights and the politics of sin The ghetto that you build for me is the one you end up in The race of the engine that overrules your heart Ooh, I can't stand it I can't stand it Pretending that you're so smart." These lyrics are certainly defensive, but they're from the heart and their sense of "I call bullshit here" is just as keen as it was on Ballad of a Thin Man and Masters of War. When Dylan sang "Oh my God, am I here all alone?" in 1965, I was right there with him, empathizing all the way. But with Dead Man Dead Man, I can't bring myself to share in his religious devotion, although his disappointment in mankind and all its post-Enlightenment smugness is something I can relate to. It's a 1981 album but Dylan's musical arrangements on Shot of Love are very 70s. Dylan worked with Springsteen co-producer Chuck Plotkin, although Dylan was the primary shot-caller on the sessions, rejecting several Plotkin mixes in favor of the rough monitor mixes. Shot of Love's sound is pretty engaging: Trouble benefits from Benmont Tench's thick, Kooperesque organ and the presence of four gospel-tinged backup singers (vocalist Clydie King, also a devout Christian, was Dylan's girlfriend at this time, and she shares singing duties with him on quite a few Shot of Love tracks). The opening and title track Shot of Love features King harmonizing along with every note. It's one of the album's most immediately potent songs. It recalls American gospel and blues, but with its dirty guitar sound and slinky groove, it could easily be an outtake from the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. Heart of Mine, meanwhile, would feel right at home on Dylan's own Desire (1975).Its reggae-country lilt and duetted vocals remind me of his not always successful but usually beautiful collaborations with Emmylou Harris on that record. Dylan's mid-to-late 70s and early 80s music gave us some of the singer's best vocal performances. Since the beginning, his voice has been a point of contention among those who either love or hate him, and on Shot of Love he uses his famous nasality to great effect. His voice during this period was deeper and fuller than his signature 60s style, but not quite as weirdly affected and drug-damaged as it was on Nashville Skyline, and not anywhere near as fried and wheedly as it would become in the 90s. His phrasing on Shot of Love, particularly on ballads like Lenny Bruce, is that of a sensitive-eared musician, a comedian (even in his darkest moments), and an old-school songwriter who knows that the singer's delivery is as crucial as the chicken scratch on the lyric sheet. These songs were written to be sung, and although reviews and essays tend to focus on Dylan's lyrics, it bears mentioning that his skills as a songwriter include his ability to make those lyrics into phrases and melodies that have lives of their own. Shot of Love has been called one of the worst albums of Dylan's long career. It was savaged by Nick Kent in NME and by Paul Nelson in Rolling Stone. Nelson wrote about people's propensity for giving any new Dylan work "the benefit of the doubt" and said "No more. For me it stops right here." Admittedly, it's a new addition to my collection, but it's fast becoming one of my favorite Dylan works: it's no Blood on the Tracks, but thankfully it's also no Empire Burlesque or Self-Portrait. I recommend it without caveats, without irony, and I hold it up as an example of why an artist's most universally maligned work is not necessarily his worst. Source: southsidecallbox.com/christian_dylan.html
Slow Train Coming: In 1979 Bob Dylan became a "Born Again." That year he released his first "Christian" album, Slow Train Coming. Like his concerts at that time it was full-on evangelising. He called on the legendary Jerry Wexler, former Atlantic Records vice-president and producer of most of the big R&B stars: Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Ray Charles, Otis Redding. They decided to record in Alabama for the classic soul era sound. Clinton Heylin's biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades Revisited, quotes Wexler: "Naturally, I wanted to do the album in Muscle Shoals as Bob did but we decided to prep it in LA where Bob lived. That's when I learned what the songs were about: born-again Christians in the old corral...I liked the irony of Bob coming to me the Wandering Jew to get the Jesus feel...I had no idea he was on this born-again Christian trip until he started to evangelize me. I said, Bob, you're dealing with a sixty-two-year-old confirmed Jewish atheist. I'm hopeless. Let's just make an album." Dylan was a fan of a new British band Dire Straits and he recruited guitarist Mark Knopfler to lay down parts for Slow Train Coming. There's a remarkable similarity to Dire Straits on a few songs, like Precious Angel, but if Dylan stole from Knopfler, it was payback for Knopfler's own thievery. Knopfler's parts here are lush flourishes, not upstagey at all, but with enough of the guitarist's personality to add something. Musically Slow Train Coming is not much different from its predecessor, Street Legal (1978), which, though not associated with the Christian phase, tells of the "good shepherd" and of having "been to the mountain" and of a character who "practiced what he preached from the heart." Then again God's hand has always been on Dylan. But Street Legal's forceful, "live" sound is traded in for a tempered, gently bumbling, Southern groove. Man Gave Names to All the Animals has a subtle reggae bounce, particularly in the plucky bass. He treats the lyrics as a religious fable. "He saw an animal that liked to growl Big furry paws and he liked to howl Great big furry back and furry hair Ah, think I'll call it a bear." The last track When He Returns is the standout: just piano and vocal, and the keys are struck down hard, just barely redeemed from sloppiness but bursting with joy and passion. I could credit Dylan with giving the best vocal performance of his career, but the lyrics are so striking that they practically force the singer to deliver them with something resembling fervor. It's absolutely breathtaking, even more so when I think about a man so obsessed with the utility of words reaching into himself, past every wellspring of sarcasm and every bloody vein of finely tweaked anomie, trying to express his awe at God and his anticipation of the divine Judgment: "The iron hand it ain't no match for the iron rod, The strongest wall will crumble and fall to a mighty God. For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears It is only He who can reduce me to tears. Don't you cry and don't you die and don't you burn For like a thief in the night, He'll replace wrong with right When He returns. Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through, He unleashed His power at an unknown hour that no one knew. How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice? How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness? Can I cast it aside, all this loyalty and this pride? Will I ever learn that there'll be no peace, that the war won't cease Until He returns? Surrender your crown on this blood-stained ground, take off your mask, He sees your deeds, He knows your needs even before you ask. How long can you falsify and deny what is real? How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal? Of every earthly plan that be known to man, He is unconcerned, He's got plans of His own to set up His throne When He returns." In No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, Robert Shelton writes: "The scoffers felt that Dylan had also abandoned the progressive, tolerant side of Christianity to espouse an uncompromising, unforgiving sort of gospel stance. Later asked if he was concerned about being lumped together with the ultra-right-wing Bible-thumpers, Dylan spoke about reactionary religions as something "to be careful about...it's real dangerous. You can find anything you want in the Bible. You can twist it around and a lot of people do that." On tour to support the album, Dylan was booked at San Francisco's Warfield Theater for a fourteen-night stand. The events of these San Francisco shows are hotly disputed among people who attended, and when a few critical pans subsequently turned up in local papers (the Examiner and the Chronicle), word spread far and wide that audiences were heckling and jeering and storming out of the Warfield in droves. Corr Arnold wrote: "The first born-again shows were at the Warfield in San Francisco in 1979 and the crowd absolutely loathed Dylan. Since he played 14 nights, word got around and lots of people dumped their tickets particularly people who had tix for multiple nights. I saw one of the later nights, and it was Dylan at his most aggressively unlistenable. Bob did another round of shows in 1980, and Bill Graham (his producer/promoter] made him promise that it wasn't going to be "all-religious". Bob sent Bill a rehearsal tape, and there was a series of radio ads with Bill Graham swearing to the people of the Bay Area that he had "personal assurances from Bob Dylan" that he had been rehearsing lots of different songs, while a rehearsal tape of Mr. Tambourine Man played in the background. The first six shows sold out, so Bill added more, eventually going to 15 (remember the Grateful Dead had played 14 nights at the Warfield the month before). At the first show, Bob did a few perfunctory oldies and ground out more religious numbers. The crowds were furious, Bill was furious, and ticket sales for the last 9 nights went into the tank. The BGP organization started bringing in guest stars to pump up ticket sales--Roger McGuinn, Carlos Santana, Mike Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia. Dylan grudgingly did one or two more oldies." Michael Maxwell "saw the 3rd and 8th nights of Bob's 18 day marathon. The third night Dylan was badly abused and booed. The three back-up singers who "tried" to open the show were booed so loudly they couldn't be heard. The first three songs Dylan did could bearly be heard for the booing and he was visibly shaken. A young woman in the third or fourth row on the floor stood between songs ( 4th and 5th as I recall) and shouted " Jesus loves you Bobby and so do I." From that point on he focused on her. I was seated on the front row of the balcony and by the time Dylan took a short break half way through, nearly half the audience had walked out. I don't know how you feel about spiritual things, but that was one time in my life I felt the real presence of evil. The line had been drawn and curses were certainly cast. After the break, Dylan came back with alot smaller audience, but with fire in his eyes! What a second half! Thought you'd like to hear from a disciple that nearly saw another crucifixion!" By Scott Marshall.
City of Gold
There is a City of Gold, Far from the rat race that eats at your soul. Far from the madness and the bars that hold, There is a City of Gold. There is a City of Light, Raised up in the heavens and the streets are bright. Glory to God not by deeds or by might, There is a City of Light. There is a City of Love, Surrounded by stars and the powers above. Far from this world and the stuff dreams are made of, There is a City of Love. There is a City of Grace, You drink holy water in sanctified space. No one is farid to show their face, There is a City of Grace. There is a City of Peace, Where all foul forms of destruction cease. Where the mighty have fallen and there are no police. There is a City of Peace. There is a City of Hope, Above the ravine on the green sunlit slope. All I need is an axe and a rope, There is a City of Hope. I'm heading for the City of Gold, Before it's too late before it gets too cold. Before I'm too tired before I'm too old. There is a City of Gold.
Saved
"When destruction cometh swiftly And there's no time to say a fare-thee-well, Have you decided whether you want to be In heaven or in hell? Are you ready, are you ready? Have you got some unfinished business? Is there something holding you back? Are you thinking for yourself Or are you following the pack? Are you ready, hope you're ready. Are you ready? Are you ready for the judgment? Are you ready for that terrible swift sword? Are you ready for Armageddon? Are you ready for the day of the Lord?" Released in 1980, Saved is hardcore gospel, unapologetically religious record, it's as dogmatic as they come, Jesus-fearing, a prediction of the apocalypse. The music is warm and inviting gospel-rock sung with conviction, particularly his reworking of the gospel standard A Satisfied Mind featuring his female backup singers intonating a soulful "mmmmm" underneath his melody. But whereas Dylan's lyrics on Slow Train Coming used scripture as inspiration for his own poetry, Saved only preaches. Bert Cartwright in his book The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan wrote: "In contrast to composing songs in a folk culture with natural allusions to the Bible, or more sophisticated songs with literary allusions to the Bible, here Dylan composes songs in which the Bible is constantly alluded to as the essence of the believer's faith." Another example of the garden-variety born-again cliches that this otherwise original and shrewd songwriter fell victim to on Saved: "Pulled me out of bondage and You made me renewed inside, Filled up a hunger that had always been denied, Opened up a door no man can shut and You opened it up so wide And You've chosen me to be among the few. What can I do for You?" Saved is unmistakeably a Dylan record: Covenant Woman is a classic 70s/80s minor-key Dylan melody, recalling Jokerman and Baby Stop Crying), but the lyrics lead me to believe that Dylan was making a concerted effort to be the conduit for the holy word instead of the author of its interpretation. His Christian study at the Vineyard required him to abandon a lifetime full of smartass attitude and know-it-all-ism, traits to this day practically synonymous with Bob Dylan. He must have considered it a great challenge. "Being born again is a hard thing...We don't like to lose those old attitudes and hang-ups. Conversion takes time because you have to learn to crawl before you can walk. You have to learn to drink milk before you can eat meat. You're reborn, but like a baby. A baby doesn't know anything about this world, and that's what it's like when you're reborn. You're a stranger. You have to learn all over again." Overall, it's not disastrous, just a little cleaner than a good R&B/gospel record should sound, and there's something keeping it from fully coming alive, but it does have a few great moments, like the percussive, shouty, piano-driven Solid Rock and the stirring organ swells and verse-by-verse crescendos of Pressing On. It takes a few listens, some getting-used-to, to hear the beauty of Saved's most powerful tracks. In the Garden is quiet and humble, but its odd, incremental chord modulations give it a compelling strength it might not have with a simpler arrangement. Conversely, Saving Grace, which has the potential to bring the house down, never does, wasting a fine Dylan vocal with a rather conservative arrangement. I see the word "embarrassing" pop up in allusions to this phase of Dylan's discography, and despite some cringeworthy religious dogma, there's nothing on Saved that makes me feel pity for myself, Dylan, or anyone who buys, downloads, or borrows Dylan records. I don't revisit Saved often, but it feels less problematic with every listen.
Property of Jesus
Go ahead and talk about him Because he makes you doubt, Because he has denied himself The things that you can't live without, Laugh at him behind his back Just like the others do, Remind him of what he used to be When he comes walkin' through. He's the property of Jesus, Resent him to the bone, You got something better, You got a heart of stone. Stop your conversation When he passes on the street, Hope he falls upon himself Oh won't that be sweet, Because he can't be exploited By superstition anymore, Because he can't be bribed or bought By the things that you adore. When the whip that's keeping you in line Doesn't make him jump, Say he's hard-of-hearin' Say that he's a chump. Say he's out of step with reality As you try to test his nerve, Because he doesn't pay no tribute To the king that you serve. Say he's a loser 'Cause he got no common sense Because he don't increase his worth At someone else' expence. Because he's not afraid of trying 'Cause he don't look at you and smile 'Cause he doesn't tell you jokes or fairy tales Say he's got no style. You laugh at salvation, Yu can play Olympic games, You think that when you rest You'll go back from where you came But you've picked up quite a story And you've changed since the womb, What happened to the real you, You've been captured but by whom?
Shot of Love
After committing what many considered to be career suicide with Saved, the following year Dylan delivered Shot of Love to a label that had begun to treat the singer as persona non grata. In Behind the Shades Revisited, Tony Wright (who designed the cover art for Saved) recalls: "They were so rude, so nasty about Bob Dylan and said how they weren't gonna promote another gospel record...I was just astonished to hear these people high-up people at CBS talking about this man as if he were just someone...a curse him kind of attitude." The third and final album of Bob Dylan's extrovertedly Christian period, Shot of Love seems to capitulate a little to the skeptical fans, critics, and label people. Its biblical themes are still present, most notably, the liner notes begin with a quote from Matthew 11:25, and there's nothing subtle about the message of Property of Jesus, but they're mostly cloaked in secular language and rock arrangements. Indeed, Shot of Love is a more personal album than its two predecessors; the evangelical nature of Slow Train Coming and Saved revealed Dylan's desire to be "born again" and approach his material as a naive, innocent messenger rather than a songwriter. However Dylan deeply resented his detractors: "Hmmm. Pretty rude bunch tonight, huh? You all know how to be real rude. You know about the spirit of the Anti-Christ? Does anyone here know about that? Ah, the spirit of the Anti-Christ is loose right now...You talk to your teachers about what I said. I'm sure you're paying a lot of money for your education, so you'd better get one." His bitterness rears its head on Property of Jesus: "Go ahead and talk about him because he makes you doubt Because he has denied himself the things that you can't live without Laugh at him behind his back just like the others do Remind him of what he used to be when he comes walkin' through He's the property of Jesus Resent him to the bone You got something better You've got a heart of stone." And Dead Man Dead Man: "Satan got you by the heel There's a bird's nest in your hair Do you have any faith at all? Do you have any love to share? The way that you hold your head, cursin' God with every move Ooh, I can't stand it I can't stand it What are you tryin' to prove?...The glamour and the bright lights and the politics of sin The ghetto that you build for me is the one you end up in The race of the engine that overrules your heart Ooh, I can't stand it I can't stand it Pretending that you're so smart." These lyrics are certainly defensive, but they're from the heart and their sense of "I call bullshit here" is just as keen as it was on Ballad of a Thin Man and Masters of War. When Dylan sang "Oh my God, am I here all alone?" in 1965, I was right there with him, empathizing all the way. But with Dead Man Dead Man, I can't bring myself to share in his religious devotion, although his disappointment in mankind and all its post-Enlightenment smugness is something I can relate to. It's a 1981 album but Dylan's musical arrangements on Shot of Love are very 70s. Dylan worked with Springsteen co-producer Chuck Plotkin, although Dylan was the primary shot-caller on the sessions, rejecting several Plotkin mixes in favor of the rough monitor mixes. Shot of Love's sound is pretty engaging: Trouble benefits from Benmont Tench's thick, Kooperesque organ and the presence of four gospel-tinged backup singers (vocalist Clydie King, also a devout Christian, was Dylan's girlfriend at this time, and she shares singing duties with him on quite a few Shot of Love tracks). The opening and title track Shot of Love features King harmonizing along with every note. It's one of the album's most immediately potent songs. It recalls American gospel and blues, but with its dirty guitar sound and slinky groove, it could easily be an outtake from the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. Heart of Mine, meanwhile, would feel right at home on Dylan's own Desire (1975).Its reggae-country lilt and duetted vocals remind me of his not always successful but usually beautiful collaborations with Emmylou Harris on that record. Dylan's mid-to-late 70s and early 80s music gave us some of the singer's best vocal performances. Since the beginning, his voice has been a point of contention among those who either love or hate him, and on Shot of Love he uses his famous nasality to great effect. His voice during this period was deeper and fuller than his signature 60s style, but not quite as weirdly affected and drug-damaged as it was on Nashville Skyline, and not anywhere near as fried and wheedly as it would become in the 90s. His phrasing on Shot of Love, particularly on ballads like Lenny Bruce, is that of a sensitive-eared musician, a comedian (even in his darkest moments), and an old-school songwriter who knows that the singer's delivery is as crucial as the chicken scratch on the lyric sheet. These songs were written to be sung, and although reviews and essays tend to focus on Dylan's lyrics, it bears mentioning that his skills as a songwriter include his ability to make those lyrics into phrases and melodies that have lives of their own. Shot of Love has been called one of the worst albums of Dylan's long career. It was savaged by Nick Kent in NME and by Paul Nelson in Rolling Stone. Nelson wrote about people's propensity for giving any new Dylan work "the benefit of the doubt" and said "No more. For me it stops right here." Admittedly, it's a new addition to my collection, but it's fast becoming one of my favorite Dylan works: it's no Blood on the Tracks, but thankfully it's also no Empire Burlesque or Self-Portrait. I recommend it without caveats, without irony, and I hold it up as an example of why an artist's most universally maligned work is not necessarily his worst. Source: southsidecallbox.com/christian_dylan.html
Prophecy of Anne Catherine
Chapter 8
In 1820 Anna Katarina Emmerick, an Augustinian nun bearing the "stigmata," the wound marks of Calvary mystically reproduced in her hands and feet, had some terrible visions of the future church.
"I saw again the new and odd-looking Church which they were trying to build. There was nothing holy about it...People were kneading bread in the crypt below but it would not rise. Nor did they receive the body of our Lord but only bread. Those who were in error through no fault of their own and who piously and ardently longed for the Body of Jesus were spiritually consoled but not by their communion. Then my guide said: This is Babel."
Meaning the divine liturgy in every language permeated by folk and pop culture. Inculturation the reformers called it, to present the Gospel in culturally familiar terms, whereas in fact it is adulteration and profanation of the most holy things which is a supernatural culture that is above all cultures.
"I saw how baleful would be the consequences of this false church...The local clergy grew lukewarm and i saw a great darkness...I saw many churches close down...I saw that the Church of Peter was undermined by a plan evolved by a secret sect...I saw a strange church being built against every rule...In that church nothing came from high above...there was only division and chaos. It is probably a church of human creation, following the latest fashion, as well as the heterodox church of Rome which seems of the same kind...There was nothing holy in it...I saw deplorable things: they were gambling, drinking and talking in church, they were also courting women. All sorts of abominations were perpetrated there. Priests allowed everything and said mass with much irreverence...there hardly remain a hundred or so priests who have not been deceived. They all work for destruction...I saw the Church of St Peter in ruins and the manner in which so many of the clergy were themselves busy at this work of destruction...The ecclesiastics in the inner circle looked insincere and lacking in zeal. I did not like them...Among the strangest things that I saw were long processions of bishops. Their thoughts and utterances were made known to me through images issuing from their mouths. Their faults towards religion were shown by external deformities. A few had only a body, with a dark fog instead of a head. Others had only a head, their bodies and hearts were like thick vapors. Some were lame, others were paralytics, others were asleep or staggering...In those days Faith will fall very low and it will be preserved in some places only, in a few cottages and in a few families which God has protected from disasters and wars...I see many ecclesiastics who do not seem to be concerned about it nor even aware of it. Yet they are excommunicated wherever they cooperate to enterprises, enter into associations, and embrace opinions on which an anathema has been cast. It can be seen therefore that God ratifies the decrees, orders and interdictions issued by the head of the Church and that He keeps them in force even though men show no concern for them, reject them, or laugh them to scorn...It seems to me that a concession was demanded from the clergy which could not be granted. I saw many older priests especially one who wept bitterly. A few younger ones were also weeping. But others and the lukewarm among them readily did what was demanded...I saw that many pastors allowed themselves to be taken up with ideas that were dangerous to the Church. They were building a great, strange and extravagant Church. Everyone was to be admitted in it in order to be united and have equal rights.
Transubstantiation of the Church
The clearest explanation for the rapid wholesale disappearance of the Catholic church is found in the book Iota Unum by Romano Amerio, masterfully translated into English by a reclusive Australian priest, John Parsons.
Iota Unum is a joy to read and the consolation of truth to all threatened by the tide of despair. Women of anger, men of despair, here's the antidote to pulling out your hair.
Romano Amerio: "The present decline in Catholicism towards a purely earthly system of values constitutes a substantial mutation in the nature of the religion." Substantial mutation means transubstantiation, it means something becomes something else.
The church is no longer the church but something else, a counterchurch, or an antichurch of an antichrist. There are interesting parallels between the destruction of the church and that of the temple of the first covenant at Jerusalem, which was also corrupted at the hands of its priesthood, and finally destroyed in year 70 by the soldiers of the Roman Empire doing God's will. The new covenant temple, the church, was likewise corrupted and destroyed by its own priesthood, aided and abetted by the successors of the Roman Empire, understood roughly as the Anglo-American Empire aka New Atlantis in coalition with United States of Europe aka the Office of the Antichrist Inc.
How was this done? As Amerio pointed out, by changing the essence into something completely different while retaining the accidents of outward appearances. Now when something changes in its essence, it becomes something else. Just as when a reaction takes place in a chemistry laboratory, the original substance is destroyed not in the sense of vanishing out of existence but becoming something else, another isotope or molecule.
Romano Amerio: "Those who sponsored the reforms usually denied that they amount to something approaching a fundamental change, but there is decisive evidence that this is precisely what has occurred. There are numerous statements by Protestants to the effect that the new Mass can be celebrated in conformity with their beliefs, and is thus acceptable for use at eucharistic celebrations in their own communities. Max Thurian of the Protestant Taize community has stated that one of the fruits of the new Mass will probably be: que des communities non catholiques pourrant celebrer la Sainte Cene avec the memes prieres que l'Eglise catholique: theologiquement c'est possible--La Croix 30 May 1969--that non-Catholic communities will be able to celebrate the Lord's Supper with the same prayers as the Catholic Church: theologically it is possible. The prior of Taize, Brother Roger Schutz, said: Les nouvelles prieres eucharistiques presentent une structure qui correspond a la Messe lutherienne--Itineraires December 1977--the new eucharistic prayers have a structure corresponding to that of the Lutheran Mass. In Pope Paul's New Mass, Michael Davies has shown that the new Roman rite is similar to and sometimes identical with Cranmer's Anglican Mass produced in the 16th century. It must therefore be recognised that the reform has changed a Catholic Mass that was unacceptable to Protestants into a Catholic Mass that is acceptable to Protestants. This judgment implies that there has been a profound change. Protestants are after all the best judges of what is acceptable to Protestants. Max Thurian's declaration is merely one among many of a similar kind; and the joint celebration of the eucharist by Catholic priests and Protestant ministers with only feeble opposition from the bishops confirms the fact that there has been a change in teaching." From Iota Unum by Romano Amerio. Conclusion: the Catholic Church has to all intents and purposes ceased to function if not exist.
Once There Was Unity
St.Paul: "Now I beseech you brothers that you all speak the same thing...perfect in the same mind and the same judgment." There was sanctity too. St.Paul: "Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and the dispensers of the mysteries of God. Here now it is required among the dispensers that a man be found faithful."
Today, from Pope down to parish priest, the custodians of faith and dispensers of the mysteries have lost the faith and desecrated the mysteries, they have violated the covenant and betrayed the people's trust. Jesus prophesied it. "When the Son of God returns, do you think he will find faith on Earth?" "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt shall lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more but to be cast out and to be trodden on by men."
The visible, institutional church was shifted off the Rock by incumbents who cut themselves off from the Mystical Body and entered into schism from the very Church of which they were its prime minister.
St.Paul foresaw this falling away of the Gentile Church and the comcomitant "ingrafting" or return of the Jews to the spiritual Israel. He warned the Church of Rome against glorying in themselves for their already world-famous purity of faith. "Your faith is spoken of in the whole world. [But] If God has not spared the natural branches [that is, the Jews] fear lest perhaps he not spare you too...Towards you the goodness of God if you abide in goodness. Otherwise you too shall be cut off. And they also if they abide not still in unbelief will be grafted in."
Deju Vu: As Went Jews So Go Catholics
If you read the last Old Testament prophet Malachi, you start asking yourself Whom is it referring to primarily, the Jewish priests of his time or the Catholic priests of modern times?
"Cursed is the deceitful man that has in his flock a male and making a vow offers in sacrifice that which is feeble to the Lord. For I am a great King, says the Lord of hosts, and my name is dreadful among the Gentiles. And now, O you priests, this commandment is to you. If you will not hear and if you will not lay it to heart, to give glory to me name, says the Lord of hosts, I will send poverty upon you. And I will curse your blessings, yes I will curse them because you have not lain it to heart. Behold I will cast the shoulder to you and I will scatter upon your faces the dung of your solemnities. And it shall take you down with it. And you shall know that I sent you this commandment, that my covenant might be with Levi, says the Lord of hosts. My covenant was with him of life and peace, and I gave him fear, and he feared me, and he was afraid before my name. The law of truth was in his mouth and iniquity was not found in his lips. He walked with me in peace and in equity and turned many away from iniquity. For the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge and they shall seek the law at his mouth, because he is the angel of the Lord of hosts. But you have departed out of the Way and caused many to stumble at the Law: you have made void the covenant of Levi, says the Lord of hosts. Therefore have I made you contemptible and base before all the people."
Pope Buried the Fatima Message by Marian Horvat
I do not believe that any Prelate has done so much in present times to bury the Fatima message as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI.
The Holy See's official response to the so-called Third Secret of Fatima released in 2000 was signed by Ratzinger and his Holy Office deputy Archbishop Bertone. It included a 40-page theological commentary by Ratzinger in which he did all he could to officially close the Fatima message. What did he say there?
First, he warned the third secret was anticlimactic, saying “no great mystery is revealed, nor is the future unveiled.” See Theological Commentary to the third part of the Secret of Fatima, in The Message of Fatima, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Vatican website.
With this statement, he contradicted Pius XII and many high-ranking Prelates--among them Cardinals Ottaviani, Oddi, Ciappi, and Biffi--who read the secret and affirmed it revealed a Great Apostasy in the Church and other catastrophic events. See interview with well-known Italian journalist Vittorio Messori in Jesus magazine, in Mark Fellows, Fatima in Twilight.
He also contradicted his own words in a 1984 interview where he stated the secret concerned “the dangers threatening the faith and life of the Christian and therefore the world, and also the importance of the last times.”
So, to bury Fatima, Ratzinger contradicted many including himself. Then he planted doubt about Lucy’s accounts of the angels and vision of Hell, suggesting they were “images which Lucy may have seen in devotional books and which draw their inspiration from long-standing intuitions of faith.”
He questioned whether these accounts might only be “projections of the inner world of children?” So, Ratzinger cast doubt on the veracity of the entire Fatima message.
This recourse of presenting the apparition as a figment of a child’s imagination is, in my view, a very dishonest progressivist trick. Indeed, the Miracle of the Sun--witnessed by a press estimate of 70,000 people--confirmed that the children’s account was true and not imaginary.
Third, in his declarations on Fatima Ratzinger tried to deny that Our Lady was speaking of a future triumph with her prophetic words, “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.” What did these words mean for him? Nothing new. He deviated the theme away from a future triumph: “The fiat of Mary, the word of her heart, has changed the history of the world, because it brought the Savior into the world.”
With this, he effectively set aside the devotion to the Immaculate Heart, ignored the call for the consecration of Russia, pretended the errors of the Schismatic Church and Communism do not exist, and closed his eyes to a restoration of Christian Civilization, the Reign of Christ through Mary on earth predicted before Fatima by St.Louis de Montfort and other Saints.
Instead of working for the Reign of Mary, Pope Ratzinger continues on John Paul II’s program to implant the kingdom of man envisioned by Vatican II, following the program of the UN.
At the end of his report, Ratzinger officially consigned Fatima to the past, a story with no future relevance. As Pope, he has followed this same agenda.
The few mentions he has made of Our Lady of Fatima can be counted on the hand.
In 2005, he told “believers” to turn “with confidence to Mary,” reminding them that May 13 was the feast of the Virgin of Fatima. In 2006 he summarized the message as “an intense call to prayer and conversion.” In 2007, he refused the invitation to go to Fatima for the 90th anniversary celebration, and simply asked people to pray the Rosary for peace at the October 7 Angelus. This year, he said nothing.
It is as if the greatest event of the 20th century--Our Lady coming to earth to warn mankind of a terrible punishment and of her triumph--would be no more than a children's tale.
A great act of oblivion, this is the “homage” Pope Ratzinger offered to Our Lady of Fatima this October 13. It brings to my mind the words of Cardinal Ciappi about the secret: “A great apostasy that will begin at the top.”
Fatima Vision: But I Did Not Shoot No Deputy
At the left of our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand. Flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire. But they died out in contact with the splendour that our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand. Pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: Penance! Penance! Penance! And we saw, in an immense light that is God, something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it, a Bishop dressed in White. We had the impression that it was the Holy Father. Other bishops, priests, men and women religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other bishops, priests, men and women religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.
Comment: What does one see in a mirror? One's self. If what is seen in the mirror is a bishop in white and if a bishop in white signifies a pope and if the one telling the prophecy was a deputy of the pope who five years later became pope himself, has Pope Benedict foretold his own death? Is that symbolic of how he helped to betray the Church? He who despises you despises me. He who curses you shall be cursed.
In 1820 Anna Katarina Emmerick, an Augustinian nun bearing the "stigmata," the wound marks of Calvary mystically reproduced in her hands and feet, had some terrible visions of the future church.
"I saw again the new and odd-looking Church which they were trying to build. There was nothing holy about it...People were kneading bread in the crypt below but it would not rise. Nor did they receive the body of our Lord but only bread. Those who were in error through no fault of their own and who piously and ardently longed for the Body of Jesus were spiritually consoled but not by their communion. Then my guide said: This is Babel."
Meaning the divine liturgy in every language permeated by folk and pop culture. Inculturation the reformers called it, to present the Gospel in culturally familiar terms, whereas in fact it is adulteration and profanation of the most holy things which is a supernatural culture that is above all cultures.
"I saw how baleful would be the consequences of this false church...The local clergy grew lukewarm and i saw a great darkness...I saw many churches close down...I saw that the Church of Peter was undermined by a plan evolved by a secret sect...I saw a strange church being built against every rule...In that church nothing came from high above...there was only division and chaos. It is probably a church of human creation, following the latest fashion, as well as the heterodox church of Rome which seems of the same kind...There was nothing holy in it...I saw deplorable things: they were gambling, drinking and talking in church, they were also courting women. All sorts of abominations were perpetrated there. Priests allowed everything and said mass with much irreverence...there hardly remain a hundred or so priests who have not been deceived. They all work for destruction...I saw the Church of St Peter in ruins and the manner in which so many of the clergy were themselves busy at this work of destruction...The ecclesiastics in the inner circle looked insincere and lacking in zeal. I did not like them...Among the strangest things that I saw were long processions of bishops. Their thoughts and utterances were made known to me through images issuing from their mouths. Their faults towards religion were shown by external deformities. A few had only a body, with a dark fog instead of a head. Others had only a head, their bodies and hearts were like thick vapors. Some were lame, others were paralytics, others were asleep or staggering...In those days Faith will fall very low and it will be preserved in some places only, in a few cottages and in a few families which God has protected from disasters and wars...I see many ecclesiastics who do not seem to be concerned about it nor even aware of it. Yet they are excommunicated wherever they cooperate to enterprises, enter into associations, and embrace opinions on which an anathema has been cast. It can be seen therefore that God ratifies the decrees, orders and interdictions issued by the head of the Church and that He keeps them in force even though men show no concern for them, reject them, or laugh them to scorn...It seems to me that a concession was demanded from the clergy which could not be granted. I saw many older priests especially one who wept bitterly. A few younger ones were also weeping. But others and the lukewarm among them readily did what was demanded...I saw that many pastors allowed themselves to be taken up with ideas that were dangerous to the Church. They were building a great, strange and extravagant Church. Everyone was to be admitted in it in order to be united and have equal rights.
Transubstantiation of the Church
The clearest explanation for the rapid wholesale disappearance of the Catholic church is found in the book Iota Unum by Romano Amerio, masterfully translated into English by a reclusive Australian priest, John Parsons.
Iota Unum is a joy to read and the consolation of truth to all threatened by the tide of despair. Women of anger, men of despair, here's the antidote to pulling out your hair.
Romano Amerio: "The present decline in Catholicism towards a purely earthly system of values constitutes a substantial mutation in the nature of the religion." Substantial mutation means transubstantiation, it means something becomes something else.
The church is no longer the church but something else, a counterchurch, or an antichurch of an antichrist. There are interesting parallels between the destruction of the church and that of the temple of the first covenant at Jerusalem, which was also corrupted at the hands of its priesthood, and finally destroyed in year 70 by the soldiers of the Roman Empire doing God's will. The new covenant temple, the church, was likewise corrupted and destroyed by its own priesthood, aided and abetted by the successors of the Roman Empire, understood roughly as the Anglo-American Empire aka New Atlantis in coalition with United States of Europe aka the Office of the Antichrist Inc.
How was this done? As Amerio pointed out, by changing the essence into something completely different while retaining the accidents of outward appearances. Now when something changes in its essence, it becomes something else. Just as when a reaction takes place in a chemistry laboratory, the original substance is destroyed not in the sense of vanishing out of existence but becoming something else, another isotope or molecule.
Romano Amerio: "Those who sponsored the reforms usually denied that they amount to something approaching a fundamental change, but there is decisive evidence that this is precisely what has occurred. There are numerous statements by Protestants to the effect that the new Mass can be celebrated in conformity with their beliefs, and is thus acceptable for use at eucharistic celebrations in their own communities. Max Thurian of the Protestant Taize community has stated that one of the fruits of the new Mass will probably be: que des communities non catholiques pourrant celebrer la Sainte Cene avec the memes prieres que l'Eglise catholique: theologiquement c'est possible--La Croix 30 May 1969--that non-Catholic communities will be able to celebrate the Lord's Supper with the same prayers as the Catholic Church: theologically it is possible. The prior of Taize, Brother Roger Schutz, said: Les nouvelles prieres eucharistiques presentent une structure qui correspond a la Messe lutherienne--Itineraires December 1977--the new eucharistic prayers have a structure corresponding to that of the Lutheran Mass. In Pope Paul's New Mass, Michael Davies has shown that the new Roman rite is similar to and sometimes identical with Cranmer's Anglican Mass produced in the 16th century. It must therefore be recognised that the reform has changed a Catholic Mass that was unacceptable to Protestants into a Catholic Mass that is acceptable to Protestants. This judgment implies that there has been a profound change. Protestants are after all the best judges of what is acceptable to Protestants. Max Thurian's declaration is merely one among many of a similar kind; and the joint celebration of the eucharist by Catholic priests and Protestant ministers with only feeble opposition from the bishops confirms the fact that there has been a change in teaching." From Iota Unum by Romano Amerio. Conclusion: the Catholic Church has to all intents and purposes ceased to function if not exist.
Once There Was Unity
St.Paul: "Now I beseech you brothers that you all speak the same thing...perfect in the same mind and the same judgment." There was sanctity too. St.Paul: "Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and the dispensers of the mysteries of God. Here now it is required among the dispensers that a man be found faithful."
Today, from Pope down to parish priest, the custodians of faith and dispensers of the mysteries have lost the faith and desecrated the mysteries, they have violated the covenant and betrayed the people's trust. Jesus prophesied it. "When the Son of God returns, do you think he will find faith on Earth?" "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt shall lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more but to be cast out and to be trodden on by men."
The visible, institutional church was shifted off the Rock by incumbents who cut themselves off from the Mystical Body and entered into schism from the very Church of which they were its prime minister.
St.Paul foresaw this falling away of the Gentile Church and the comcomitant "ingrafting" or return of the Jews to the spiritual Israel. He warned the Church of Rome against glorying in themselves for their already world-famous purity of faith. "Your faith is spoken of in the whole world. [But] If God has not spared the natural branches [that is, the Jews] fear lest perhaps he not spare you too...Towards you the goodness of God if you abide in goodness. Otherwise you too shall be cut off. And they also if they abide not still in unbelief will be grafted in."
Deju Vu: As Went Jews So Go Catholics
If you read the last Old Testament prophet Malachi, you start asking yourself Whom is it referring to primarily, the Jewish priests of his time or the Catholic priests of modern times?
"Cursed is the deceitful man that has in his flock a male and making a vow offers in sacrifice that which is feeble to the Lord. For I am a great King, says the Lord of hosts, and my name is dreadful among the Gentiles. And now, O you priests, this commandment is to you. If you will not hear and if you will not lay it to heart, to give glory to me name, says the Lord of hosts, I will send poverty upon you. And I will curse your blessings, yes I will curse them because you have not lain it to heart. Behold I will cast the shoulder to you and I will scatter upon your faces the dung of your solemnities. And it shall take you down with it. And you shall know that I sent you this commandment, that my covenant might be with Levi, says the Lord of hosts. My covenant was with him of life and peace, and I gave him fear, and he feared me, and he was afraid before my name. The law of truth was in his mouth and iniquity was not found in his lips. He walked with me in peace and in equity and turned many away from iniquity. For the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge and they shall seek the law at his mouth, because he is the angel of the Lord of hosts. But you have departed out of the Way and caused many to stumble at the Law: you have made void the covenant of Levi, says the Lord of hosts. Therefore have I made you contemptible and base before all the people."
Pope Buried the Fatima Message by Marian Horvat
I do not believe that any Prelate has done so much in present times to bury the Fatima message as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI.
The Holy See's official response to the so-called Third Secret of Fatima released in 2000 was signed by Ratzinger and his Holy Office deputy Archbishop Bertone. It included a 40-page theological commentary by Ratzinger in which he did all he could to officially close the Fatima message. What did he say there?
First, he warned the third secret was anticlimactic, saying “no great mystery is revealed, nor is the future unveiled.” See Theological Commentary to the third part of the Secret of Fatima, in The Message of Fatima, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Vatican website.
With this statement, he contradicted Pius XII and many high-ranking Prelates--among them Cardinals Ottaviani, Oddi, Ciappi, and Biffi--who read the secret and affirmed it revealed a Great Apostasy in the Church and other catastrophic events. See interview with well-known Italian journalist Vittorio Messori in Jesus magazine, in Mark Fellows, Fatima in Twilight.
He also contradicted his own words in a 1984 interview where he stated the secret concerned “the dangers threatening the faith and life of the Christian and therefore the world, and also the importance of the last times.”
So, to bury Fatima, Ratzinger contradicted many including himself. Then he planted doubt about Lucy’s accounts of the angels and vision of Hell, suggesting they were “images which Lucy may have seen in devotional books and which draw their inspiration from long-standing intuitions of faith.”
He questioned whether these accounts might only be “projections of the inner world of children?” So, Ratzinger cast doubt on the veracity of the entire Fatima message.
This recourse of presenting the apparition as a figment of a child’s imagination is, in my view, a very dishonest progressivist trick. Indeed, the Miracle of the Sun--witnessed by a press estimate of 70,000 people--confirmed that the children’s account was true and not imaginary.
Third, in his declarations on Fatima Ratzinger tried to deny that Our Lady was speaking of a future triumph with her prophetic words, “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.” What did these words mean for him? Nothing new. He deviated the theme away from a future triumph: “The fiat of Mary, the word of her heart, has changed the history of the world, because it brought the Savior into the world.”
With this, he effectively set aside the devotion to the Immaculate Heart, ignored the call for the consecration of Russia, pretended the errors of the Schismatic Church and Communism do not exist, and closed his eyes to a restoration of Christian Civilization, the Reign of Christ through Mary on earth predicted before Fatima by St.Louis de Montfort and other Saints.
Instead of working for the Reign of Mary, Pope Ratzinger continues on John Paul II’s program to implant the kingdom of man envisioned by Vatican II, following the program of the UN.
At the end of his report, Ratzinger officially consigned Fatima to the past, a story with no future relevance. As Pope, he has followed this same agenda.
The few mentions he has made of Our Lady of Fatima can be counted on the hand.
In 2005, he told “believers” to turn “with confidence to Mary,” reminding them that May 13 was the feast of the Virgin of Fatima. In 2006 he summarized the message as “an intense call to prayer and conversion.” In 2007, he refused the invitation to go to Fatima for the 90th anniversary celebration, and simply asked people to pray the Rosary for peace at the October 7 Angelus. This year, he said nothing.
It is as if the greatest event of the 20th century--Our Lady coming to earth to warn mankind of a terrible punishment and of her triumph--would be no more than a children's tale.
A great act of oblivion, this is the “homage” Pope Ratzinger offered to Our Lady of Fatima this October 13. It brings to my mind the words of Cardinal Ciappi about the secret: “A great apostasy that will begin at the top.”
Fatima Vision: But I Did Not Shoot No Deputy
At the left of our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand. Flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire. But they died out in contact with the splendour that our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand. Pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: Penance! Penance! Penance! And we saw, in an immense light that is God, something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it, a Bishop dressed in White. We had the impression that it was the Holy Father. Other bishops, priests, men and women religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other bishops, priests, men and women religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.
Comment: What does one see in a mirror? One's self. If what is seen in the mirror is a bishop in white and if a bishop in white signifies a pope and if the one telling the prophecy was a deputy of the pope who five years later became pope himself, has Pope Benedict foretold his own death? Is that symbolic of how he helped to betray the Church? He who despises you despises me. He who curses you shall be cursed.
Hippie Hippie Shakedown
Chapter 9
When it comes to inappropriate names, Summer of Love has to be right up there with Joy Division, the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves.
For one thing, it was not just a summer event. The countercultural happening that swept through San Francisco and beyond began with an April1967 planning announcement by concert promoter Chet Helms, aka Family Dog, creating the Council for the Summer of Love.
It still goes on today in the burned-out minds of its rapidly fading survivors, remnants of the thousands of teens who ran away to find Love in San Francisco, only to wind up wasted on a street whose name sounds like Hate.
Where, indeed, was the love in the San Francisco of Helms and other Summer of Love organizers, of whom so many have died young? Helms would later boast on his website that the event "sowed the seeds of a compassionate idealism which still lives in the hearts of many of our own and subsequent generations." He pointed to the organizers' efforts to feed the runaways.
Other Summer of Love chroniclers note that the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in the summer of 1967, still help the needy today. The irony is that there would have been no need to feed those runaways, nor to care for so many drug abusers, alcoholics and venereal-disease victims, had Helms--who succumbed to hepatitis C at 63--and his compatriots, not encouraged youths to flood San Francisco. And for what, exactly? Drugs, to be sure, and "free love"--free as opposed to...Thanks to the Pill and a counterculture that defined rebellion as annoying one's parents, thousands of youths became guinea pigs in a kind of mass experiment propagated by prurient Beat Generation relics such as Helms, Allen Ginsberg (died at 70, hepatitis and liver cancer) and Ken Kesey (died at 66, liver cancer).
They were told that they would overcome the superficial consumerism in which they had been raised, reaching a higher spiritual level by uniting their minds to drugs and their bodies to willing takers.
Instead, they themselves became products to be consumed--victimized by pushers, treated as sexual objects to be disposed of, or corrupted into predators ...
In following their leaders' urging to do their own thing, they found themselves locked in a society that gave them all the restrictions of communal life--poverty, squalor, and social pressure to self-destruct--and few of the protections. At the celebrated Be-Ins and Love-Ins, the mob ruled, while--like those Playboy cartoons of orgies where one person's orifice is indistinguishable from another's--the individual was subsumed.
Supporters of the hippies' objectives argue that they and future generations benefited from the dismantling of repressive Eisenhower-era values that restricted sex to marriage.
Well, say what you will about a culture that presumed women found their highest fulfillment in motherhood, but one doesn't see many repressed housewives panhandling on modern-day Haight Street.
One does see lost geriatric flower children with stringy hair and rotten teeth who contracepted or aborted the children who could have taken care of them in their old age.
Years after the Summer of Love's Bay Area invasion, a more moneyed class of Californians popularized a term that parallels what the hippies accomplished: garbage in/garbage out.
The true measure of the success of the Love-In is the love that came out. Today, the counterculture's victims are dying with few children to mourn them--at least, few who are willing to speak to parents who put their own desires ahead of their children's. It is the end of a long, bad trip. By Dawn Eden dawneden.com
Jewish Conversion Story
Dawn Eden, celebrity blogger and Deputy News Editor for regional editions at the New York Daily News, was doing a book signing for her new book "The Thrill of the Chaste" at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast last week when she sat down with LifeSiteNews.com for an interview.
Her life story as she revealed it in snapshots is a fascinating and captivating chronicle of rebellion. In the 1990's as a rock journalist and unobservant Reform Jew, Eden says she thought herself the quintessential subversive, in a lifestyle of sexual liberty amid the excitement of the music world.
As Eden puts it, "I was brought up in a fairly secular, Jewish home...I did not continue observance after my bat mitzvah and it was not anything that was stressed to me outside of the annual Passover Seder and family get-togethers at holidays." "I thought that I was this great rebel," she related, "because I was writing about rock 'n roll and having sex with whomever I pleased and I was going to work at my job at Kim's Video on St. Mark's Place wearing fishnet hose and vinyl boots."
Her self-assessment was altered radically when, on the recommendation of a musician she interviewed, she discovered famed Christian author GK Chesterton. Eden explains:
"Back in December 1995, while doing a phone interview with Ben Eshbach of an LA band called the Sugarplastic, I thought I would ask him something more erudite than the usual rock-journalist questions, so I asked what he was reading. He said that he was reading GK Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday.' So, I thought, well, I'll impress him and I'll go out and read it. I picked it up, not knowing what I was in for."
Chesterton, she said, presented the heroes in the book as rebels who "discovered that what they were ultimately searching for was the very thing that they thought they had been rebelling against God." "I saw that Chesterton was presenting Christianity as the ultimate rebellion which was very jarring for me because I had defined myself as being countercultural," she said. "This turned my worldview upside down," Eden went on, "because I had thought that Christians were conformists," said Eden. "It felt strange for me to have this idea planted in my head that to be Christian was to be creative and subversive."
Although the seeds of Christianity may have been planted at that time, Eden's embracing faith did not come to fruition until nearly four years later, in October 1999.
"I had a faith experience that changed my views on God, taking me from accepting him as an intellectual proposition to accepting Him personally into my heart. Because I had read the New Testament -- and had absorbed all the Chesterton and CS Lewis I could find--feeling God's presence for the first time drew me into faith in Jesus."
Baptized nondenominationally at a Protestant church, Eden was not eager to adopt Chesterton's Catholic faith--a family member who was a lapsed Catholic convert warned her it was "unbiblical."
However, her new convictions bore fruit in a manner that began attracting the interest of Catholic blog readers, as she started blogging about being pro-life.
"I started to get more vocal about it because I liked being subversive and to me it seemed to me one of the greatest ways to be rebellious was to be pro-life," Eden told LifeSiteNews.com.
As Eden's Christian convictions grew and her notoriety from her Dawn Patrol blog publicized it--leading to her granting interviews to such disparate publications as the American Chesterton Society's Gilbert magazine and the salacious gossip site Gawker--her then-job as copy editor with the New York Post became tenuous.
She was asked by her boss more than once not to mention her job at the Post in interviews if she noted her Christianity. In addition to her faith, her pro-life convictions also got her into trouble at the Post.
"I was copy-editing a story about so-called 'miracle babies' as the story called them who had been created through in-vitro fertilization," she recalled, "and I felt the need to stress the fact that, in this IVF episode described in the story - there was a death." She added, "The story said that a woman had three embryos emplanted and 'two took,' resulting in 'miracle babies.' I didn't think the babies were such miracles if one baby died in order to create them, so I took away the 'miracle babies' term. After the phrase 'two took,' I added, 'one died,' and I noted that embryos are routinely destroyed in the process of in-vitro fertilization. I'm not proud of making those changes," Eden adds. "It was the cowardly thing to do. I should have asked that the editor make them, and if the editor refused, I should have refused the story and risked being fired. As it was, I was so angry after three years of working at the Post and seeing how the newspaper avoided telling readers the facts about life issues, that I tried to slip the changes under the radar."
The reporter, Susan Edelman, was outraged when the story came out, Eden said. Eden apologized to the editor and was told that she would have to sign a letter taking responsibility for what she did, but she was not fired. At that point, incensed that Eden was retaining her job, Edelman printed up Eden's blog entries against Planned Parenthood and those calling abortion "murder."
Eden recalls that she prayed for strength during the ordeal and even though not Catholic, she took solace in the story of another media personality and pro-lifer who had suffered for his faith--St.Maximilian Kolbe.
Kolbe, who was killed in Auschwitz, volunteering to take the place of a stranger who was condemned to death, was an inspiration for Eden and she told LifeSiteNews.com she felt that he could hear her from heaven and pray for her.
"I talked with him like I would speak with a friend and I asked him if he would pray for me," she recalled. "As soon as I did that, I felt a sense of calm in the midst of a storm. I had this feeling that no matter what happened to me, I was going to be all right."
A few days later she was fired--but even then, she felt grace in the midst of all the antagonism directed at her by her employer. "I had been praying that if I was fired that I wouldn't break down and cry," she said, "because I cry at the drop of a hat and I didn't want them to feel vindicated in firing me by thinking 'Oh, she's crazy anyway, she broke down.'" God answered her prayers. "I was very calm as the editor in chief, Col Allan, was firing me and I actually felt that I had to warn him in some way that he was doing something wrong," she related. "So, when he announced that he was firing me, I said to him, 'Sir, you are older than I am and you have had more experience in this field than I have and I am sure that from where you are sitting, you are doing the right thing. But, from where I am sitting, it is the wrong thing.'" "He pushed himself up on his desk," she recalled, "and his face got red and his forehead tightened, and he shouted at me, 'You are a liability' and ordered me out of the office."
The firing dampened neither her spirits nor her spunk. As she departed the offices of the paper she shouted to a colleague what was to become the front-page headline a few days later. "So, I had to put my stuff in the proverbial cardboard box, and as I was walking out, I shouted to the deputy copy chief the headline for next Sunday's front page, because I knew that it was the Trump wedding - 'Milt, for Sunday - 'The Lady is a Trump.'"
Sure enough, that headline not only graced the front-page of the New York Post marking the Donald Trump wedding but was also reproduced as far afield as the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.
The day after her ouster from the Post she was approached by George Gurley, a reporter from a smaller New York newspaper well-read by the city's media folk, the Observer.
"He didn't know about my firing," she recalled, "but he...said he wanted a story on me because I was a right-wing Christian at the New York Post." Quick as ever, Eden replied, "Well, I've got a better story for you than that because I am the one who got fired from the New York Post for being a right-wing Christian."
Soon the news of her being fired from the Post was on the front page of the Observer. The editor of the Post's major rival The New York Daily News saw the Observer story and that resulted in Eden's current employment with the Daily News--presumably for her headline skills rather than her political stances, since the News' editorial page is resolutely pro-choice.
It was also through the firing, Eden told LifeSiteNews.com, that "W Publishing Group got in touch with me and asked me if I would like to write a book and I suggested 'Thrill of the Chaste'."
Eden went from believing she would never again be able to work in journalism again to having a major new job and a book deal.
Shortly thereafter she entered the Catholic Church believing God had answered her prayers in a miraculous way and that, as she puts it "I felt that St.Maximilian was praying for me."
She started inquiring into Catholicism, she said, just after her being fired. "I realized that if I am going to be taking a hit for life, I might as well be with the Church that has been taking hits for life for 2000 years--you can quote me on that," she told LifeSiteNews.com.
Her Christianity has not diminished her fondness for rebellion and being subversive. "Just a couple of nights ago," she reminisced with a mischievous smile, "I went to an alumni/student roundtable at NYU and some of the people at the roundtable were media people--one of them was a reporter for Newsweek." The Newsweek reporter asked her what she wrote about on her blog, to which Eden replied, "Well, I write about my faith and values and chastity and about pro-life issues--that is very important to me."
Explains Eden, "Of course, to a Newsweek reporter or to your average NYU student, it's probably like saying, 'I write about killing small children and boiling them.' Because that is how they think of it. Poor analogy, I know, since it's abortion that kills children, but pro-choicers have that same kind of revulsion to hearing someone say they're pro-life, that you and I do when hearing someone say they're pro-choice. So, it was kind of funny to see how these people's expressions very carefully didn't change when I said that." By John-Henry Westen.
Is Modern Music Base and Hypnotic?
Roger Kimball in his book The Long March: How The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, said all rock n' roll "offers is a prefabricated Dionysius ecstasy, blatantly sexual, conspicuously nonrational."
Asked later if there was no pop music he liked personally and found palatable, he replied, "Sure. I grew up with rock music. But what is palatable is not necessarily good for you. I think that Bob Dylan is a clever songwriter--pretentious, vastly over-rated as a poet, clever. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were very clever songwriters. Not in the league of Cole Porter, and certainly not in the league of Gilbert and Sullivan, but clever. There are many other clever rock songwriters. But my objection to rock focuses not on the tunes but on the basic intent of the music, which I believe amounts to prefabricated Dionysius ecstasy. I believe, in other words, that Allan Bloom had it right in The Closing of the American Mind when he argued that rock is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. In some ways this is a very old argument.
"In essence, it is a Platonic argument. In The Republic, Plato argues that music is such a powerful stimulant of the emotions that the state should be cautious about what sorts of music it encourages. Some modes of music, he thought, encouraged noble emotions, other forms encourage base emotions. Aristotle did not put the matter quite so starkly, but he, too, recognized that music was a powerful educational force that could be used and misused.
"Rock music is now ubiquitous, of course, and to some extent we all tune it out. But its basic message--what makes rock rock--is not the sweet strains of Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" but the amplified percussive assault that addresses not the head or heart but lower organs. Again, this is a complicated question that deserves a complicated answer; the biggest question is whether music can shape one's basic emotional responses. I would say, yes, it can.
"Does it then follow that music can corrupt as well as nurture the emotional life of individuals? Again, I would say yes. Hardly a new idea: consider what Nietzsche has to say about the baneful influence of Wagner. If civilization is about nuance, restraint, discrimination and order, rock is none of these things."
When it comes to inappropriate names, Summer of Love has to be right up there with Joy Division, the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves.
For one thing, it was not just a summer event. The countercultural happening that swept through San Francisco and beyond began with an April1967 planning announcement by concert promoter Chet Helms, aka Family Dog, creating the Council for the Summer of Love.
It still goes on today in the burned-out minds of its rapidly fading survivors, remnants of the thousands of teens who ran away to find Love in San Francisco, only to wind up wasted on a street whose name sounds like Hate.
Where, indeed, was the love in the San Francisco of Helms and other Summer of Love organizers, of whom so many have died young? Helms would later boast on his website that the event "sowed the seeds of a compassionate idealism which still lives in the hearts of many of our own and subsequent generations." He pointed to the organizers' efforts to feed the runaways.
Other Summer of Love chroniclers note that the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in the summer of 1967, still help the needy today. The irony is that there would have been no need to feed those runaways, nor to care for so many drug abusers, alcoholics and venereal-disease victims, had Helms--who succumbed to hepatitis C at 63--and his compatriots, not encouraged youths to flood San Francisco. And for what, exactly? Drugs, to be sure, and "free love"--free as opposed to...Thanks to the Pill and a counterculture that defined rebellion as annoying one's parents, thousands of youths became guinea pigs in a kind of mass experiment propagated by prurient Beat Generation relics such as Helms, Allen Ginsberg (died at 70, hepatitis and liver cancer) and Ken Kesey (died at 66, liver cancer).
They were told that they would overcome the superficial consumerism in which they had been raised, reaching a higher spiritual level by uniting their minds to drugs and their bodies to willing takers.
Instead, they themselves became products to be consumed--victimized by pushers, treated as sexual objects to be disposed of, or corrupted into predators ...
In following their leaders' urging to do their own thing, they found themselves locked in a society that gave them all the restrictions of communal life--poverty, squalor, and social pressure to self-destruct--and few of the protections. At the celebrated Be-Ins and Love-Ins, the mob ruled, while--like those Playboy cartoons of orgies where one person's orifice is indistinguishable from another's--the individual was subsumed.
Supporters of the hippies' objectives argue that they and future generations benefited from the dismantling of repressive Eisenhower-era values that restricted sex to marriage.
Well, say what you will about a culture that presumed women found their highest fulfillment in motherhood, but one doesn't see many repressed housewives panhandling on modern-day Haight Street.
One does see lost geriatric flower children with stringy hair and rotten teeth who contracepted or aborted the children who could have taken care of them in their old age.
Years after the Summer of Love's Bay Area invasion, a more moneyed class of Californians popularized a term that parallels what the hippies accomplished: garbage in/garbage out.
The true measure of the success of the Love-In is the love that came out. Today, the counterculture's victims are dying with few children to mourn them--at least, few who are willing to speak to parents who put their own desires ahead of their children's. It is the end of a long, bad trip. By Dawn Eden dawneden.com
Jewish Conversion Story
Dawn Eden, celebrity blogger and Deputy News Editor for regional editions at the New York Daily News, was doing a book signing for her new book "The Thrill of the Chaste" at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast last week when she sat down with LifeSiteNews.com for an interview.
Her life story as she revealed it in snapshots is a fascinating and captivating chronicle of rebellion. In the 1990's as a rock journalist and unobservant Reform Jew, Eden says she thought herself the quintessential subversive, in a lifestyle of sexual liberty amid the excitement of the music world.
As Eden puts it, "I was brought up in a fairly secular, Jewish home...I did not continue observance after my bat mitzvah and it was not anything that was stressed to me outside of the annual Passover Seder and family get-togethers at holidays." "I thought that I was this great rebel," she related, "because I was writing about rock 'n roll and having sex with whomever I pleased and I was going to work at my job at Kim's Video on St. Mark's Place wearing fishnet hose and vinyl boots."
Her self-assessment was altered radically when, on the recommendation of a musician she interviewed, she discovered famed Christian author GK Chesterton. Eden explains:
"Back in December 1995, while doing a phone interview with Ben Eshbach of an LA band called the Sugarplastic, I thought I would ask him something more erudite than the usual rock-journalist questions, so I asked what he was reading. He said that he was reading GK Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday.' So, I thought, well, I'll impress him and I'll go out and read it. I picked it up, not knowing what I was in for."
Chesterton, she said, presented the heroes in the book as rebels who "discovered that what they were ultimately searching for was the very thing that they thought they had been rebelling against God." "I saw that Chesterton was presenting Christianity as the ultimate rebellion which was very jarring for me because I had defined myself as being countercultural," she said. "This turned my worldview upside down," Eden went on, "because I had thought that Christians were conformists," said Eden. "It felt strange for me to have this idea planted in my head that to be Christian was to be creative and subversive."
Although the seeds of Christianity may have been planted at that time, Eden's embracing faith did not come to fruition until nearly four years later, in October 1999.
"I had a faith experience that changed my views on God, taking me from accepting him as an intellectual proposition to accepting Him personally into my heart. Because I had read the New Testament -- and had absorbed all the Chesterton and CS Lewis I could find--feeling God's presence for the first time drew me into faith in Jesus."
Baptized nondenominationally at a Protestant church, Eden was not eager to adopt Chesterton's Catholic faith--a family member who was a lapsed Catholic convert warned her it was "unbiblical."
However, her new convictions bore fruit in a manner that began attracting the interest of Catholic blog readers, as she started blogging about being pro-life.
"I started to get more vocal about it because I liked being subversive and to me it seemed to me one of the greatest ways to be rebellious was to be pro-life," Eden told LifeSiteNews.com.
As Eden's Christian convictions grew and her notoriety from her Dawn Patrol blog publicized it--leading to her granting interviews to such disparate publications as the American Chesterton Society's Gilbert magazine and the salacious gossip site Gawker--her then-job as copy editor with the New York Post became tenuous.
She was asked by her boss more than once not to mention her job at the Post in interviews if she noted her Christianity. In addition to her faith, her pro-life convictions also got her into trouble at the Post.
"I was copy-editing a story about so-called 'miracle babies' as the story called them who had been created through in-vitro fertilization," she recalled, "and I felt the need to stress the fact that, in this IVF episode described in the story - there was a death." She added, "The story said that a woman had three embryos emplanted and 'two took,' resulting in 'miracle babies.' I didn't think the babies were such miracles if one baby died in order to create them, so I took away the 'miracle babies' term. After the phrase 'two took,' I added, 'one died,' and I noted that embryos are routinely destroyed in the process of in-vitro fertilization. I'm not proud of making those changes," Eden adds. "It was the cowardly thing to do. I should have asked that the editor make them, and if the editor refused, I should have refused the story and risked being fired. As it was, I was so angry after three years of working at the Post and seeing how the newspaper avoided telling readers the facts about life issues, that I tried to slip the changes under the radar."
The reporter, Susan Edelman, was outraged when the story came out, Eden said. Eden apologized to the editor and was told that she would have to sign a letter taking responsibility for what she did, but she was not fired. At that point, incensed that Eden was retaining her job, Edelman printed up Eden's blog entries against Planned Parenthood and those calling abortion "murder."
Eden recalls that she prayed for strength during the ordeal and even though not Catholic, she took solace in the story of another media personality and pro-lifer who had suffered for his faith--St.Maximilian Kolbe.
Kolbe, who was killed in Auschwitz, volunteering to take the place of a stranger who was condemned to death, was an inspiration for Eden and she told LifeSiteNews.com she felt that he could hear her from heaven and pray for her.
"I talked with him like I would speak with a friend and I asked him if he would pray for me," she recalled. "As soon as I did that, I felt a sense of calm in the midst of a storm. I had this feeling that no matter what happened to me, I was going to be all right."
A few days later she was fired--but even then, she felt grace in the midst of all the antagonism directed at her by her employer. "I had been praying that if I was fired that I wouldn't break down and cry," she said, "because I cry at the drop of a hat and I didn't want them to feel vindicated in firing me by thinking 'Oh, she's crazy anyway, she broke down.'" God answered her prayers. "I was very calm as the editor in chief, Col Allan, was firing me and I actually felt that I had to warn him in some way that he was doing something wrong," she related. "So, when he announced that he was firing me, I said to him, 'Sir, you are older than I am and you have had more experience in this field than I have and I am sure that from where you are sitting, you are doing the right thing. But, from where I am sitting, it is the wrong thing.'" "He pushed himself up on his desk," she recalled, "and his face got red and his forehead tightened, and he shouted at me, 'You are a liability' and ordered me out of the office."
The firing dampened neither her spirits nor her spunk. As she departed the offices of the paper she shouted to a colleague what was to become the front-page headline a few days later. "So, I had to put my stuff in the proverbial cardboard box, and as I was walking out, I shouted to the deputy copy chief the headline for next Sunday's front page, because I knew that it was the Trump wedding - 'Milt, for Sunday - 'The Lady is a Trump.'"
Sure enough, that headline not only graced the front-page of the New York Post marking the Donald Trump wedding but was also reproduced as far afield as the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.
The day after her ouster from the Post she was approached by George Gurley, a reporter from a smaller New York newspaper well-read by the city's media folk, the Observer.
"He didn't know about my firing," she recalled, "but he...said he wanted a story on me because I was a right-wing Christian at the New York Post." Quick as ever, Eden replied, "Well, I've got a better story for you than that because I am the one who got fired from the New York Post for being a right-wing Christian."
Soon the news of her being fired from the Post was on the front page of the Observer. The editor of the Post's major rival The New York Daily News saw the Observer story and that resulted in Eden's current employment with the Daily News--presumably for her headline skills rather than her political stances, since the News' editorial page is resolutely pro-choice.
It was also through the firing, Eden told LifeSiteNews.com, that "W Publishing Group got in touch with me and asked me if I would like to write a book and I suggested 'Thrill of the Chaste'."
Eden went from believing she would never again be able to work in journalism again to having a major new job and a book deal.
Shortly thereafter she entered the Catholic Church believing God had answered her prayers in a miraculous way and that, as she puts it "I felt that St.Maximilian was praying for me."
She started inquiring into Catholicism, she said, just after her being fired. "I realized that if I am going to be taking a hit for life, I might as well be with the Church that has been taking hits for life for 2000 years--you can quote me on that," she told LifeSiteNews.com.
Her Christianity has not diminished her fondness for rebellion and being subversive. "Just a couple of nights ago," she reminisced with a mischievous smile, "I went to an alumni/student roundtable at NYU and some of the people at the roundtable were media people--one of them was a reporter for Newsweek." The Newsweek reporter asked her what she wrote about on her blog, to which Eden replied, "Well, I write about my faith and values and chastity and about pro-life issues--that is very important to me."
Explains Eden, "Of course, to a Newsweek reporter or to your average NYU student, it's probably like saying, 'I write about killing small children and boiling them.' Because that is how they think of it. Poor analogy, I know, since it's abortion that kills children, but pro-choicers have that same kind of revulsion to hearing someone say they're pro-life, that you and I do when hearing someone say they're pro-choice. So, it was kind of funny to see how these people's expressions very carefully didn't change when I said that." By John-Henry Westen.
Is Modern Music Base and Hypnotic?
Roger Kimball in his book The Long March: How The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, said all rock n' roll "offers is a prefabricated Dionysius ecstasy, blatantly sexual, conspicuously nonrational."
Asked later if there was no pop music he liked personally and found palatable, he replied, "Sure. I grew up with rock music. But what is palatable is not necessarily good for you. I think that Bob Dylan is a clever songwriter--pretentious, vastly over-rated as a poet, clever. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were very clever songwriters. Not in the league of Cole Porter, and certainly not in the league of Gilbert and Sullivan, but clever. There are many other clever rock songwriters. But my objection to rock focuses not on the tunes but on the basic intent of the music, which I believe amounts to prefabricated Dionysius ecstasy. I believe, in other words, that Allan Bloom had it right in The Closing of the American Mind when he argued that rock is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. In some ways this is a very old argument.
"In essence, it is a Platonic argument. In The Republic, Plato argues that music is such a powerful stimulant of the emotions that the state should be cautious about what sorts of music it encourages. Some modes of music, he thought, encouraged noble emotions, other forms encourage base emotions. Aristotle did not put the matter quite so starkly, but he, too, recognized that music was a powerful educational force that could be used and misused.
"Rock music is now ubiquitous, of course, and to some extent we all tune it out. But its basic message--what makes rock rock--is not the sweet strains of Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" but the amplified percussive assault that addresses not the head or heart but lower organs. Again, this is a complicated question that deserves a complicated answer; the biggest question is whether music can shape one's basic emotional responses. I would say, yes, it can.
"Does it then follow that music can corrupt as well as nurture the emotional life of individuals? Again, I would say yes. Hardly a new idea: consider what Nietzsche has to say about the baneful influence of Wagner. If civilization is about nuance, restraint, discrimination and order, rock is none of these things."
Dylan's 2007 Australian Tour
Chapter 10
Resplendent in a dark suit, silk tie and wide-brimmed hat, Bob Dylan opened his current Australian tour in Brisbane last night. Despite the legion of labels lumbered on the artist over the years, today Dylan embodies his own vision of a 21st century troubadour. Opening with Cat's in the Well, Dylan still has a spring in his step and a lot of bite in his Fender Stratocaster. Beneath a red velvet backdrop, the initial flurry of tunes included It Ain't Me babe, Tom Thumb's Blues, and Lay Lady Lay.The arrangements saw Dylan toy with any preconceptions of meter and melofy. Moving to the keboard, it was impossible not to ponder the image of the teenage Robert Zimmermann pounding the piano for Bobby Vee. Fast-forward nearly five decades, and Dylan is still a slave to his own vision of reinvention. Behind the keys for the rest of the evening, Dylan brings a primitive energy to the instrument that perfectly juxtaposes the deft swagger of his accompanying band. As we've come to expect, Bob likes to take liberties and, at times, the results were a roaring success. Highway 61 was incendiary. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll carried a tremendous weight, while the re-invention of Tangled Up in Blue saw the artist alter phrasing, lyrics and plot lines with jarring results. The mood of the audience seemed to support the artist, and why not? If offered the chance to see picasso knock up a painting at the local mall--whether it was good, bad or indifferent, you'd be foolish not to take it. It's the same with Bob. What a perverse treat it remains to see the minstrel deconstruct his own work in front of your eyes and ears. Has there ever been another artist of this stature brave enough to dismantle his or her own myth? His voice might be shot, or maybe this is another new voice? The croak certainly suits his newer material and injects life into ancient melodies. There's no fakery to Dylan: the performance offers a rare beauty that could falter, but succeeds despite itself. Dylan brings to life songs such as Nettie Moore and Ballad of a Thin Man arming them with a sense of the present. There was no acknowledgement of the audience, save for band introductions towards the very end. Deadpan for much of the evening, even Dylan couldn't resist a broad grin at the in-jokes of Summer Days. Witnessing Dylan, with his Lonnie Johnson guitar style and garage band keyboard, you're remindced that this is a man who draws on the wellspring of folk, blues and early rock n' roll. The ghosts of Woody Guthrie and Buddy Holly inform his performance, though the ensuing results are ideosyncratic and pure Dylan. The encore included a fantastic Thunder on the Mountain. By Sean Sennett for Brisbane Courier Mail.
Comment: Australia does not like prophets. When he toured Australia in the 90s, Dylan sometimes disdained to talk to the audience. Was he contemptuous of our superficiality and trivializing irenicism? She'll be right, mate! It's childish in the sense that infants don't want to know first of all, they want to be titillated. "Loquimini nobis placentia"--speak to us of pleasantries--from the Book of Isaiah. Note the pun in Latin between placentia and placenta or umbilical cord. The pleasure principle of modern life is childish. The meaning of life for mature persons is not found in pleasure-seeking but in the cross and our own crosses and how we deal with them, "when the deal goes down--In the still of the night in the world's ancient light Where wisdom grows up in strife."
Resplendent in a dark suit, silk tie and wide-brimmed hat, Bob Dylan opened his current Australian tour in Brisbane last night. Despite the legion of labels lumbered on the artist over the years, today Dylan embodies his own vision of a 21st century troubadour. Opening with Cat's in the Well, Dylan still has a spring in his step and a lot of bite in his Fender Stratocaster. Beneath a red velvet backdrop, the initial flurry of tunes included It Ain't Me babe, Tom Thumb's Blues, and Lay Lady Lay.The arrangements saw Dylan toy with any preconceptions of meter and melofy. Moving to the keboard, it was impossible not to ponder the image of the teenage Robert Zimmermann pounding the piano for Bobby Vee. Fast-forward nearly five decades, and Dylan is still a slave to his own vision of reinvention. Behind the keys for the rest of the evening, Dylan brings a primitive energy to the instrument that perfectly juxtaposes the deft swagger of his accompanying band. As we've come to expect, Bob likes to take liberties and, at times, the results were a roaring success. Highway 61 was incendiary. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll carried a tremendous weight, while the re-invention of Tangled Up in Blue saw the artist alter phrasing, lyrics and plot lines with jarring results. The mood of the audience seemed to support the artist, and why not? If offered the chance to see picasso knock up a painting at the local mall--whether it was good, bad or indifferent, you'd be foolish not to take it. It's the same with Bob. What a perverse treat it remains to see the minstrel deconstruct his own work in front of your eyes and ears. Has there ever been another artist of this stature brave enough to dismantle his or her own myth? His voice might be shot, or maybe this is another new voice? The croak certainly suits his newer material and injects life into ancient melodies. There's no fakery to Dylan: the performance offers a rare beauty that could falter, but succeeds despite itself. Dylan brings to life songs such as Nettie Moore and Ballad of a Thin Man arming them with a sense of the present. There was no acknowledgement of the audience, save for band introductions towards the very end. Deadpan for much of the evening, even Dylan couldn't resist a broad grin at the in-jokes of Summer Days. Witnessing Dylan, with his Lonnie Johnson guitar style and garage band keyboard, you're remindced that this is a man who draws on the wellspring of folk, blues and early rock n' roll. The ghosts of Woody Guthrie and Buddy Holly inform his performance, though the ensuing results are ideosyncratic and pure Dylan. The encore included a fantastic Thunder on the Mountain. By Sean Sennett for Brisbane Courier Mail.
Comment: Australia does not like prophets. When he toured Australia in the 90s, Dylan sometimes disdained to talk to the audience. Was he contemptuous of our superficiality and trivializing irenicism? She'll be right, mate! It's childish in the sense that infants don't want to know first of all, they want to be titillated. "Loquimini nobis placentia"--speak to us of pleasantries--from the Book of Isaiah. Note the pun in Latin between placentia and placenta or umbilical cord. The pleasure principle of modern life is childish. The meaning of life for mature persons is not found in pleasure-seeking but in the cross and our own crosses and how we deal with them, "when the deal goes down--In the still of the night in the world's ancient light Where wisdom grows up in strife."
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