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.