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.