Always About the Lyrics

THIS BLOG WAS WRITTEN IN NOVEMBER, 2014.

           True story: Folk singer Woody Guthrie, who had stood with the unemployed at the height of the depression, watched as thousands of Oklahomans, and Kansans, and Texas panhandlers headed west to California during the dust bowl, was incensed over Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” that melding of civil into religion that should give any devout Christian pause. Guthrie’s response was to pen “This Land is Your Land”

            “This land is your land, this land is my land

            From California to the New York Island;

            From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;

            This land was made for you and me.”

            I love that song. I love the imagery Woody Guthrie creates with Biblical clarity as “the fog was lifting, a voice was chanting, this land was made for you and me.” The lyrics; it is always about the lyrics. They can move you, sustain you, give you hope. Nowhere is that truer than in here.

            Each morning around 4:00 I begin my day with the Episcopal liturgical calendar. I’m not Episcopalian, but on my 50^th birthday a dear friend delivered the Episcopalian “Book of Common Prayer” to me at the jail. I’ve had it with me ever since and begin each morning with the day’s verse selections. Each day begins the same with Psalms, lyrical poems of praise, or anger, or fear, or just asking God “why” – why this, why me? Each morning I take a 3X5 index card and jot down a verse to contemplate throughout the day. The Psalms, those lyrical, powerful, gut-wrenching Psalms, provide me clarity – and hope.

            I don’t get most music today. I’m stuck in a warp of great old tunes, songs that mattered. I don’t get singing – or rapping – about “bling,” and Hennessy, and large butts, but I pause and think often of Peter, Paul and Mary singing “If I had a Hammer” or “Blowin in the Wind.” Folk singer Pete Seeger penned “Where have all the Flowers Gone.” He was blacklisted and attacked by a drunken, hateful Senator McCarthy during the red baiting of the ‘50s. Pete just kept on singing … about civil rights, and war, and the water. McCarthy fell and died in alcoholic oblivion; Pete kept singing into his 90s.

            They told Peter, Paul, and Mary if they marched in Selma they’d never sell another record south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The trio said the music mattered more than record sales. For almost 50 years they sang – in the face of Nixon’s battle with Vietnam War protesters, in El Salvador standing with the churches decrying the killing by both left and right. The lyrics mattered. The lyrics always matter.

            Almost every blog I write has some song lyric or Bible verse attached. Those words give me direction. I keep a large folder of song lyrics in my locker, close to two hundred songs. There are songs that speak of heartbreak and lost love; songs of the future; songs of protest. Each one contains lines which cry out with emotion and truth. And truth is so hard to find these days.

            Today begins the Christmas season, Advent, the coming of the long-expected Messiah, Emmanuel, “God with us,” Hymns, beautiful hopeful hymns I recite as I run the track. And, while hearing those songs, I remember John Prine’s “Christmas in Prison.”

            “It’s Christmas in prison

            There’ll be music tonight

            I’ll probably get homesick

            I love you. Goodnight.”

            Psalms, songs, poems, lyrics all speaking to who we are, who we want to be. The lyrics matter, especially in here.

 

RIP Chuck Colson

Chuck Colson died April 21^st.  To millions of incarcerated men and women like me, Chuck Colson was a hero.  He represented the transformative power of grace.  He was a man, alone at times, who cared about the plight of the incarcerated.  In many ways, Chuck Colson saved my life.

That his life turned out the way it did proves what the Prophet Jeremiah told the scattered, defeated people of Israel whose sins and failures led to their collapse as a nation and exile to Babylon.  “God says ‘For I know the plans I have for you, plans . . . to give you a future and a hope.’”

Chuck Colson, lawyer, rabid-Republican, a right-hand presence to Richard Nixon, was known as a fixer. Anything Nixon needed done, Colson would make happen.  He was ruthless, brilliant, arrogant and deeply committed to Nixon and his success in the Presidency. 

It was Colson who went after Daniel Ellsberg – leaker of the famous “Pentagon Papers” which detailed America’s military failures in Vietnam – using a series of illegally orchestrated actions against Ellsberg to embarrass and discredit him.  Colson engaged the likes of Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who shortly thereafter gained notoriety with their botched break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

Indicted on a charge of obstruction of justice for his role in the Ellsberg affair, Colson ignored the advice of his lawyer and friends and pled guilty, no questions asked, no deal sought.  He claimed a religious conversion.  He’d “found Jesus” and he had to eliminate his old life before he could begin anew.  For that, he was ridiculed and lampooned.  Sentenced to one to three years in a minimum security Federal prison, he made parole after seven months.  His imprisonment had a profound effect on his life. 

His “frightening experience in confinement” taught him that prison, for the vast majority of those sentenced, was a horrible failure and not a suitable punishment.  Prisons, he argued turned prisoners into embittered individuals who could only “contemplate escape and revenge at every turn.”

Colson founded Prison Fellowship, a Christian prison program evangelizing the incarcerated and pushing for prison reform and dignity for those behind bars.  His work led to him receiving the prestigious Templeton Prize in 1993, a million dollar award given to the person who had done the most to advance religion in that year.

For inmates and their families – Christian, Muslim, atheist – it didn’t matter, Colson was a source of comfort and hope.  Few programs work well in prison.  Prison Fellowship is one shining success in a sea of despair.

A few days after my arrest, as I calculated and contemplated ending my life realizing my worst fears had happened – I was losing everything even though I’d prayed over and over for a way out – I ran across Colson’s autobiography, “Born Again”.  Shortly thereafter I instructed my lawyer that I would cooperate fully, plead guilty to all charges brought provided I could sign our home and personal effects over to my wife.  Lawyers, friends and a doctor told me not to do it.  “You’ll have no leverage with the Commonwealth.  You’ll have nothing if she divorces you.”  It didn’t matter.  I’d made a promise to God to put aside the old.

Many times, days that I thought would never end, I returned to something I heard Colson say.  He would go through everything again, he said, for the opportunity to experience God’s grace.  I thought of that often and it sustained me.

Colson was a brilliant, driven man.  And, like all of us, he was flawed.  Yet God had a plan for Chuck Colson.  God has a plan for all of us.

Outwardly, Colson was the same man, still driven, still amusing, still engaging.  But inwardly he was a new creation.  That his “new” life didn’t begin until he was in his late forties gives me hope. 

The work Chuck Colson began with prisoners and prison reform will continue.  And for that, those of us in here can rejoice.   Chuck Colson and his story of faith will never be forgotten.