Lenten Listening

Said he saw him comin’ with his dyin’ garments on/ said he saw him comin’/ said he saw him comin’, dyin’ garments on. Wouldn’t mind dyin’ if dying was all. –Blind Willie Johnson

Durer, Head of the Dead Christ

I. Lent is a terrible season. Modern usage being what it is, a word like terrible has largely been evacuated of all meaning, profundity, and now is taken as something unpleasant, bad but to a higher degree of badness than bad,. The word, though, comes from a Latin root terribilis, to frighten, to cause terror. In his novel Descent into Hell, Charles Williams tries to reclaim terrible for its root, one of the characters asks the playwright Stanhope (Williams’ representative much like Prospero is for Shakespeare), “If things are terrifying, can they be good?” “Yes surely,” Stanhope responds, “are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?” Lent is a terrible season.

II. The bluesman Blind Willie Johnson seems like a character out of a Flannery O’Connor story. Blind, black, destitute, he lived in a run-down house on a street corner in Depression era Beaumont. Every day, he would go out into the street with his guitar, a glass slide made of a broken bottleneck, and a Bible to preach on the streets and sing wild, frightening songs about Jesus dying on a cross. At some point he was noticed, brought into a studio and paid $5, $10 dollars a side to sing his eerie music into a can to be preserved on cheap acetone. One of his sides, surely unsettling to his producer sitting in the booth, reinterpreted the wreck of the Titanic as an Icarus-like fall, God’s judgment on the overweening pride of the ship’s captain – “A.G. Smith, mighty man, built a boat that he couldn’t understand/ named it a name of a god in tin/ middle of the sea, Lord, He pulled it in/ God moves on the water and the people had to run and pray.” Like all black (and many white) musicians of the day, he received no royalties, only a flat fee; soon he returned to the streets busking and preaching Christ crucified for our sins. One evening in 1945 his house burnt down, having no money, place to go, or way to make a living, Johnson lie down every night in the ashes of his ruined home in the place where his bed one stood. Every morning he would rise take up his guitar and head to a thoroughfare to play his wild music about his wild God giving His life for the folks living in Beaumont, Texas. In the late summer or early fall of that year Johnson caught malaria and died, refused any care at the hospital because of his skin color.

"God Moves on the Water" by Blind Willie Johnson

III. The terror of Good Friday is too often leapt over as we hasten to Easter; Easter itself has become for many day of obligatory church attendance and seasonal candy and, like language, is evacuated of much of its meaning. Music still seems like an entry point, an unguarded door where things can come in. It is hard to listen to Blind Willie Johnson moaning about the crucifixion in “Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground” and not be moved (to terror or pity).

It is hard to listen to Van Morrison, stunned, angry at his dying girlfriend for dying in “T.B. Sheets” and backing slowly away from the horror and the stench and not realize death is a terrible thing, an obscenity.

Johnson’s gravelly voice singing the refrain “I just touched the hem of His garment” in “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole” is not the treacly pop of CCM that can easily be dismissed; the man knows where he was, knows what Jesus did for him, knows where he’s headed.

Good Friday, Holy Saturday are places we need to linger a bit, imaginatively enter into, and this sort of music aids in that. Easter Sunday was, is a shock; people don’t rise from the dead, sealed tombs stay sealed, full, and all a messiah dying can possibly mean is that he wasn’t the messiah, God is with the victors. Yet death is swallowed up by victory, the tomb is founded empty and the King isn’t there, He’s on the move, abroad in the world. And we too, need not fear, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally/ And death shall be no more: death, thou shalt die.”