“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
We start with a famous quotation – one that I received in an email just a few days ago1 – which is often attributed to C. S. Lewis. It appears, though, that Lewis never publicly wrote or said those words. He probably did not even believe them.2
Here in the 21st Century, a time when what was once considered frivolous New Age thought has subtly infiltrated even traditional religious institutions, the quotation seems a reasonable concept that a spiritually inclined person might believe. However, it is certainly not the traditional Christian belief.
Christians have long believed that the body – indeed, all the material world – is the loving creation of God. Humans are seen as “enfleshed spirits,” with the body being much more than a machine that can be cast aside and traded in for a new one when it wears out. The Apostle’s Creed, which is from the 4th Century, affirms a belief in “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.” That view is still the accepted dogma and is probably the main reason that most Christians reject the idea of reincarnation.
Still, the thought that we are immortal souls with a temporary body has long resonated with some Christians. A training manual for the YMCA, published in 1900 (the year C. S. Lewis celebrated his second birthday), states, “Men often say, ‘I have a soul.’ That is not the highest truth. We must learn to say, ‘I am a soul, and I have a body.'”3
The basic idea is much older. In fact, one of the basic tenets of the so-called “Gnostic heresy” of the 1st and 2nd Centuries was that the spirit, or soul, is more important than the body.
For those who believe in reincarnation, the idea is even older and very easy to accept. For example, in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna reminds us that “as a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.”4
Underlying all of these expressions is the belief that there is something eternal within each of us, and probably within every living thing. It is from that perspective that we finally get to the new Song of the Week, “Highwayman,” by the Highwaymen.
“Highwayman” was originally a reflection on reincarnation by noted songwriter Jimmy Webb. Webb is the writer of a string of hits beginning in the mid-1960s – songs like “Up, Up and Away”; “Wichita Lineman”; “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”; and many more, including, of course, “MacArthur Park.”5 Clearly, Webb knows how to pen a popular tune; though most of his songs, to quote Oscar the Grouch, are just “not my cup of mud.”
Webb has discussed the composing of “Highwayman” in several interviews. It seems that in 1977 he was in London for a recording session and spent a long evening partying with singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson. When he finally got to sleep, he had a vivid dream in which he was running down a dirt road, carrying a brace of pistols and being pursued by police. The dream awakened him, so he got up and wrote the first verse of the song.
He wasn’t sure where the song was going, but in thinking about what he had written he realized the highwayman, who had been hanged, had not really died; but had moved on to his next life. Webb then wrote three more verses describing incarnations as a sailor who died at sea, a workman killed while constructing Hoover Dam and an astronaut who will “fly a starship across the universe divide.”
Webb recorded “Highwayman” for his 1977 album, El Mirage. I don’t know whether he accepted the idea of reincarnation or was just creating another of his hit songs. His father was a Baptist minister who worked in rural Oklahoma and Texas, so he certainly did not learn about reincarnation while he was growing up. Still, with Webb singing each of the verses, the song clearly told of consecutive incarnations of an eternal soul.
Webb then offered the song to other singers – some of whom, like Glen Campbell, recorded it; while others, like Waylon Jennings, chose not to6.
A few years later, Jennings was working on a “country super group” project with Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash. It was suggested that “Highwayman” would be good for them because each of the song’s four verses could be sung by a different member of the quartet, and the title “Highwayman” seemed appropriate to their reputations.
They recorded it. The single became the Number 1 Country song in nation in May, 1985, and remained on the charts for some 20 weeks. The song fit them so well that they named their “super group” the Highwaymen.
Their recording adds nuances to the song that did not exist in previous versions. In part, that was because Nelson, Kristofferson, Jennings and Cash are all better vocalists than Jimmy Webb. More importantly, having a separate person sing each verse permits more diverse interpretations. Do the verses actually recite incarnations of a single soul, or are there four souls who are now together in Eternity? Are the seemingly separate souls actually one Unity that includes us all?
The video shows us four riders, reminiscent of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The image is reinforced about 35 or 40 seconds into the video, when the highwayman is being hanged at the end of the first verse. Through a doorway, a rider on a pale horse appears and then moves away. Does that represent Revelation 6:8, which says: “And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was death, and Hades followed him”?
I will close with another quotation, this one from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”
Highwayman
By Jimmy Webb
I was a highwayman
Along the coach roads I did ride
With sword and pistol by my side
Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade
Many a soldier shed his life blood on my blade
The bastards hung me in the spring of ’25
But I am still alive
I was a sailor
I was born upon the tide
And with the sea I did abide
I sailed a schooner ’round the horn to Mexico
I went aloft to furl the mainsail in a blow
And when the yards broke off they said that I got killed
But I am living still
I was a dam builder
Across the river deep and wide
Where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around.
I’ll always be around, and around, and around, and around, and around.
I’ll fly a starship
Across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I’ll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I’ll be back again
and again, and again, and again, and again…
© Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
_________________________________________
1. I received the quote shortly after various people I know had experienced the death of a goldfish that had graced an aquarium for 17 years, a beloved dog and a parent. Additionally, I heard a story from Hugh (who I mentioned last week) about a mother in East Africa, where he has served as a missionary for 52 years, who lost her seven-year old son. Each of those losses were significant to those who suffered them, as well as to those of us who care about them. My learning of those losses inspired, in large part, what I am writing here.
2. A good article from 2013, debunking the claim that the quote is from Lewis, can be found at MereOrthodoxy.com
3. Studies in God’s Method of Training Workers (1900), by Howard Agnew Johnston, at 5.
5. Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs (2000) honors “MacArthur Park” as the worst song of all-time. The Worst Rock ‘n Roll Records of All Time (1991), by Jimmy Gutterman and Owen O’Donnell, says it is only the tenth worst.
6. Waylon Jennings decision was not based on any disdain for Jimmy Webb’s music. Just a few years earlier, Jennings had won a Grammy for his version of Webb’s country outlaw anthem, “MacArthur Park.” See note 5.
Good thoughts, Louis. “Sympathy for the Devil” also reflects on the eternal existence of another consistent energy pattern which takes on different forms in the universe.
I come down more on the Gnostic and Gita and Teilhard de Chardin side of such speculations than the dogma that arose as a result of principles being strained through institutional hierarchies and which become tailored to local societal conditions and personalities.
Perhaps the Apostle’s Creed started out as a recognition of the principle of the continuation of life in a different form and morphed into the current dogma because it was comforting to think that survival of personality and the body after death was a certainty. But it’s all centered around speculation, isn’t it? The mystery can be embraced in faith, or acquired through personal blunt-force imposition of dogmatic belief, yet the true answer is only available to us when it’s time for it to be.
Even the nature of the next “body” is a question. It could be a higher order of energy than the human body constitutes now. Creation does have a pattern perceivable by mind which indicates that things in the universe tend to combine and rise to higher and more complex levels of organization. If the pattern holds true, then the concept of rising to a higher level of organization after death is a reasonable, if locally unverifiable, hypothesis.
When I learn of the death of someone, or in the times when I have lost family members or loved ones, the one consistent thought I have is “Now they know what the rest of us only guess at.” Some religions assert a knowledge of the actuality of reincarnation of the spirit and go so far as to claim to be able to locate the soul in its new body after death. I personally can neither confirm or deny that.
The transcendental moments I’ve experienced of union, and serendipitous non-coincidence, and shifts of perception from the local mind/body matrix to the universe we all share, and a near-death experience, and various telesthetic moments and empathic connections – all that has given me enough experiential information to think/speculate/suspect that there’s a lot going on within, without and throughout – and in addition to – the space time continuum that we perceive.
I regard an ongoing experience after death of the spirit/soul as a reasonable probability in my mind and a dead certainty (forgive the pun) so far as energy in the universe is concerned. I think that there are dimensions and orders of energy in the universe completely unfathomable to the human mind/body/spirit complex, and that the experience beyond the body will turn out to be “something wonderful.” Perhaps we will discover that we are energy moving from form to form across dimensions beyond time and space. That’s my bet, anyway.
The energy does seem to remain near us and in us when loved ones die. I personally make that energy welcome and allowed in my heart and in my life, just by silently expressing that to myself and the transcended being. I find solace in creating such “gateways” and markers for their energy. If nothing else it holds their spirit near in mind and heart for me. It seems reasonable to me that such energy, in whatever form or body it has evolved into, would be around the places and people it had encountered where love was present – and in those people and places as well.
Tough week here, and it appears another on the way as word comes that my mother is approaching her own moment of transition. I’ll check in here, as always, but may not be writing much for awhile. Keep up the good work Louis, I always like what you have to share.
As usual, I don’t know where to begin. You have raised a number of very good points.
First, I am sorry to hear about your mother. Please know that Cathy and my thoughts and prayers are with you and her and your family.
I am reminded of a story about someone who traveled a long distance to the home of a man who was reputed to be the world’s greatest living spiritual master. When he was given an audience with the master, he asked, “What happens to us when we die?” The master replied, “Why are you asking me that? I don’t know the answer.” “But,” said the visitor, “you are supposed to be the greatest living spiritual master.” “Perhaps,” said the master, “but the important word there is ‘living.'”
I think you are right in the idea that the body which the Apostle’s Creed says will be resurrected is most likely not the physical body or the individual human personality each of us is using in this world. I don’t know, though. I am just living here.