All posts tagged bob dylan

  • Cannonball Jesus

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    Cannonball Jesus
    by Brian Zahnd

     “You cannot bear to hear my word.” -Jesus (The Gospel of John)

    “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” -T.S. Eliot (The Four Quartets)

    “Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”
    -Bob Dylan (Visions of Johanna)

    It seems to me that what we really want is a tame Jesus, a domesticated Christ.

    We want a Jesus who will “save our soul” — not so much now, but later on.

    We want a Savior who tweaks the status quo, making slight improvements on the basic scheme of things.

    We want a divine “life coach” to make us winners in The Game. Read more

  • Blood On The Tracks


    35 years ago today Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks was released.
    In this blogger’s opinion it’s the finest album ever recorded.

    Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’, I was layin’ in bed. It was a Saturday in 1975. I was 15. A Zeppelin freak and a brand new Christian. Bob Dylan was the guy who did Blowin’ In The Wind, Lay Lady Lay and Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. I woke to Tangled Up In Blue on KY-102. I was in that beta state between sleep and waking and her hair was still red. Every one of those words rang true. Revolution was in the air. I was mesmerized. Something was awakened in me. Something I had never known before. Love of language. Love of story. Love of song. From a different point of view. From a Dylan point of view. That love is still with me.

    Thank you, Mr. Dylan.

    BZ

  • Crassus and the Appian Way

    (A slightly reworked rerun. I was digging around in my archieves and decided to bump it up.)

    Marcus Licinius Crassus

    I promise you a new Rome.
    I promise you a new Empire.
    -Marcus Licinius Crassus

    Went down the road to Damascus,
    The road to Mandalay
    Met the ghost of Caesar
    On the Appian Way
    He said, It’s hard to stop this binging
    Once you get a taste
    But the road to empire
    Is a bloody, stupid waste
    And it’s a long road out of Eden
    -The Eagles

    And I discovered that my castles stand
    Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand…
    Just a puppet on a lonely string
    Oh who would ever want to be king?
    -Coldplay

    It shall not be so among you.
    -Jesus

    The Appian Way.
    The Great Road to Rome.
    The Road of the Roman Triumphs.
    “All roads lead to Rome.”
    I hope not.
    I believe there is another way.
    A better way than the Appian Way.
    The King’s Highway.
    Read more

  • I’m Not Here

    I’m not inside your computer.

    I’m not in cyber space.

    I’m not here.

    I’m in the mountains with the whole family.

    So no blog. Just a quote, a book, and a song. Read more

  • Highlands


    Philip in the highlands

    Peri, Philip and I spend Memorial Day well above treeline.

    My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam.

    Highlands. I love this song. It’s long. 16 minutes and 32 seconds. So slow down and enjoy life.

    Enjoy Life. That’s what I’ll preach on Friday night. When we return from the highlands.

    My heart’s in the Highlands, can’t see any other way to go.

    Blessings,

    BZ

    Here’s the tune…
    Read more

  • Veritas

    Veritas. Truth.

    Your first allegiance must be to truth.

    You must love truth before you love God.

    For without a primary love of truth, how do you know that the God you love is the God that is?

    Without primary allegiance to truth, you may just love your own ideas which you call God.

    If you don’t love truth enough, you will sell it cheap.

    Without a costly commitment to truth, you’ll trade truth for certitude.

    Certitude is a poor substitute for truth.

    If all you want is cheap certitude, that’s easy enough to come by. Just land on some opinion one way or the other, tell yourself you’re certain, and that’s that. No wrestling with doubt, no dark night of the soul, no costly agonizing over the matter, no testing yourself with hard questions. Just accept a secondhand assumption or a majority opinion or a popular sentiment or an inherited tradition as the final word and settle into certainty. You don’t have think about it ever again. Ignorance is bliss. So is certitude.

    But… Read more

  • The World and The Dance

    “And in the distance the Jesus-lovers sat with hard condemning faces and watched the sin.”
    –The Grapes of Wrath

    Thus John Steinbeck depicts the world-denying Pentecostals in The Grapes of Wrath as self-righteous , self-appointed morality police who take perverse pleasure in condemning the Saturday night square dance in the California migrant camp. Steinbeck’s terse portrayal of the “Jesus-Lovers” is unflattering, but not an unfair invention of fiction. Unfortunately, such people do exist, and in their existence they horribly distort the good news of Jesus Christ.

    The worst way to define ourselves as Christian is in the negative: What we are against. Steinbeck’s migrant camp Jesus-lovers were against dancing (and most other expressions of humanness). Of course, it is a caricature, but only in that it is perhaps an exaggeration. There remains the misguided tendency to identify ourselves by what we condemn.

    And we have made this quite clear to the wider society. Ask a non-evangelical to define what evangelicals believe and odds are they will not speak in terms of a personal salvation experience (the classical marker of evangelicalism), but will give you a summary of political positions and a list of items evangelicals are opposed to. And that these items may indeed be real evils and not the innocent dance of Steinbeck’s novel is beside the point. The question remains, do we really want to be primarily identified by what we are against? Don’t we have some good news to identify us?

    Here’s the question: What do we think of the world? Are we part of the world or not? Do we love the world or not? Do we have hope for the world or not? Read more

  • You Can Have It All?

    Because I was speaking to a gathering of pastors yesterday my Thinking Day is making an unusual Tuesday appearance. Perhaps I can think a little bit online.

    Saturday morning I saw some Christian television (I was on my way to ESPN College Game Day and came across it. Strange how I feel the need to qualify why I was watching Christian television). Anyway, the star of the show was promoting a new sermon series, “You Can Have It All.” Included in the package was a book entitled, How To Be A Millionaire God’s Way. Whatever.

    A little bit later I remarked to Peri, “Did you know you can have it all?”

    She replied, “What, my empire of dirt?”
    Read more

  • Crazy Stuff

    Now everything’s a little upside down
    As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped
    What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good
    You’ll find out when you reach the top
    You’re on the bottom

    -Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind
    Read more