Keeping the Faith

I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it. (Bob Dylan 2022)

From busy to quiet in the blink of an eye, planes carried husband and son to far away destinations yesterday. In the absence of conversation and laughter, I hear the house breathing. A moment from Frozen Pizza, the short story Bob released on his Patreon on Easter Sunday, appears unbidden.

He remembered the way she used to hum while cooking, not a particular tune, just a soft thread of sound that made the room feel occupied even in silence. He had not noticed it much at the time, the way you don’t notice a clock ticking until it stops.

My silence is merely a temporary solitude but I befriend it nonetheless, allowing its space to weave its way through me.

When shall I depart to make my home
In cave or empty shrine or under spreading tree
With, in my breast, a free unfettered heart,
Which never turns to cast a backward glance

When might I abide in such a place
A place unclaimed and ownerless,
That’s wide and unconfined, a place where I might stay
At liberty, without attachment? (Shantideva)

Inside the quiet moments just before parting’s sweet sorrow and the airport’s approach, my son and I sit in the car and I think of all the other moments we’ve spent driving in LA together. As he fades into the flow of travellers, my heart limbers up for its familiar stretch. It’s a learned flexibility, navigating the departure of a son whose life is lived an ocean away but whose connection to family is as strong as if he were just next door.

I sit later in a warmly lived-in and elegant Los Angeles living room as my daughter listens to  her piano teacher. Over the years it’s been my privilege to watch her work with some superb musicians, all of whom have given her a particular gift through their teaching. As the notes shimmer and float through the air, I think of living transmission and that vital connection of person to person knowledge. I suppose in our daughter’s case it’s especially poignant as so much of her learning is individualized. Her current teacher is very dear to us; incorporating both fluidity and focus into her instruction she is never rigid and yet always precise.

As evening sidles into the frame, I drive again under that lavender sky. I return like a homing device to Shot of Love, a favourite album of mine since childhood and the third in Bob’s Christian trilogy. Its unequivocal depiction of the landscape of faith splashes the air with all the colors of moral delight and I listen to Heart of Mine more than once. I adore the album version of this song, populated as it is with my remembered visions but if you’re searching for the superlative experience then you should listen to the recording of the live performance on Biograph.

Heart of Mine is not a complex song; its power lies in its honesty, its creed of sticking to the moral choice no matter the temptation from without and within and its dose of devastating self knowledge. The self deception so dear to all our hearts is allowed no purchase; just listen to that closing verse,

Heart of mine so malicious and so full of guile
Give you an inch and you’ll take a mile
Don’t let yourself fall
Don’t let yourself stumble
If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime
Heart of mine

The final notes of every Grain of Sand fade into space and silence falls around me once again. It occurs to me lightly, that I’ve always been a little bemused by those who dismiss the Christian albums. For me, nothing has changed since I was a serious Buddhist child who understood the language Bob was speaking in these songs without any need for translation.

Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
It’s good enough for me