“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.”