Seeking Shelter

I'm taking a break from Emily Dickinson today, to write about a lyrical ballad which - for me - relates to Good Friday.

This ballad was written in 1974. It is a both a true ballad, and a sung ballad. It begins:

’Twas in another lifetime,
One of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue
And the road was full of mud
I come in from the wilderness,
A creature void of form;
"Come in," she said, "I'll give you
Shelter from the storm."

You may recognize it now. It's a song from Bob Dylan's album, Blood on the Tracks. The lyrics for the rest of the song may be read here [note the transcriber breaks the lines differently than I would].

With ten verses, this almost qualifies as one of Dylan's long story songs; and thus, we may rightly call it a sung ballad. But it also fits a rhythmic pattern that may sound familiar from our study of Emily Dickinson poems: 4 accents in the first line, three in the following; the remaining verses generally fit that same model. This is the troubador's ballad form. And, if Dylan is telling a story here, it's appropriate that he use the troubador ballad form.

But what is the story? One striking clue occurs in what I count as the fifth verse: "She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns." Then there's this line in the penultimate verse: "In a little hilltop village / they gambled for my clothes." Certainly, in the context of Good Friday, we recognize the scene. What makes this even more striking to me is that the fact that Dylan wrote this five years before Slow Train Coming and his noisy conversion to Christianity.

We might discount these lines as throw-away, but there's other hints and reflections hidden in the song. In the fourth verse he sings, "I was hunted like a crocodile / Ravaged in the corn", which to my ear sounds very like "I am a worm and no man" from Psalm 22 (vs. 6); this same psalm has a number of other animal images (bulls, dogs, lions) which might also apply. In the 7th verse, "The deputy walks on hard nails / And the preacher rides a mount ... And the one-eyed undertaker blows a futile horn"; this reminds me of Psalm 22, verse 16: "the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me". Then, that line about gambling for his clothes - that could refer to verse 18 ("They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture") as much as it does to the Passion story.

For me, the punchline to the whole thing comes in the last line (appropriately): "Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born". The feminine Dylan is singing of is not the anima-projection he found in his wife Sarah; it is a woman who was with God from the beginning. In other words, the Hagia Sophia, the divine feminine.

And what does it say to me, on this Good Friday 2004? It reminds me that living the Christian life is not easy. Anyone who believes they can reach a meaningful Easter without the suffering of Good Friday is denying a part of our essential humanity. As the Buddha said, "Life is suffering". We do not reach the Promised Land without turning our back on what enslaves us. Odds are we will wander in the wilderness, or lay awake through the Dark Night of the Soul called Crow Time.

But there is shelter available, even in the wilderness. The Divine Feminine does not shun Crow Time or the Darkness or the Wilderness. She will meet us there, walking up to us in grace and beauty. Though we may "get our signals crossed" and find ourselves "living in a foreign country", she will continue to be our companion. Offering the protection and healing of her wings. Leading the way to shelter. Shelter from the storm.