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September 8, 2006
Bob Dylan and Religion
The number one album in the United States as I write is (no fooling!) Modern Times by an old goat some of us have been obsessing about for quite some time.
High on the list of Mr. Dylan's talents is the capacity -- while, as he puts it in a recent interview, conforming to his own "reality" -- for disappointing large portions of his fans. The secularists among those fans -- cheered, justifiably or not, by early songs such as With God on Our Side -- have taken some big hits.
However, here near the end of the last song on this new album is an elliptical lyric that seems to imply that the Deity may have exited, for a moment at least, from the Bard's world-view:
As I walked out in the mystic garden
On a hot summer day, a hot summer lawn
Excuse me, ma'am, I beg your pardon
There's no one here, the gardener is gone
Posted by Mitchell Stephens at September 8, 2006 8:13 PM
Comments
Full circle from The Wicked Messenger's "if you cannot bring good news then don't bring any"
But its alright, Ma, its life and life only
Posted by: Jay Saul at September 8, 2006 10:23 PM
Wow I wrote about the aloneness of the garden too! The silence there as I have transitioned out of faith.
I wrote using the garden setting for my poems about it because Jesus was in The Garden of Gethsemene and also buried in a garden cave.
So when I wanted to hear from Him, believe He is, I thought of the waiting place as a garden...
Maybe that is what Bob Dylan was thinking too!
I have to be honest, I never did really listen to much of his music. Only as a Christian, I know there was a song of his that a man named Phil Driscoll did called Gotta Serve Somebody.
Posted by: Bonnie Kim at September 9, 2006 12:07 AM
Those were all lyrics he wrote before his conversion to Christianity. Look up the albums "Saved" and "Shot of Love"
Posted by: Chris Ahn at July 14, 2009 4:14 PM
