GOING WHICH WAY? What is possibly Christian, properly pagan, and plausibly dangerous in popular culture?
O'Brien, Dennis
GOING WHICH WAY? Catholicism & pop culture Dennis O'Brien Andrew Greeley claims that Catholicism has a peculiar allegiance to so-called "pop culture." He explains, "The other three great...
...Jesus and the lone believer are spiritually open for one another...
...You come back into the ordinary world, the world of ordinary language, with a wonderful story: "I saw it...
...What happens to popular music from Bing to the Beatles and beyond...
...Pathways between good old ecstatic paganism and Christianity abound, but it may be important to discover in which direction we are traveling...
...The genius of Catholicism over the long centuries has been the ability to absorb local cults and enthusiasms...
...Except for the music itself: in the mystery which is at the center of the spirit, there is a paradox within anyone who creates and crashes out a great hymn of despair...
...Since there is little enough morality these days to go around, I am not going to knock it no matter how it is achieved, but I do want to say a good word for mystery...
...What does rock culture suggest: a new religion, an emotional collectivism which will rule the world (Peter Townshend of Who), or "overblown nonsense" (Mick Jagger...
...For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or winter lightning, Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, and you are the music While the music lasts...
...Spirit contains the fundamental "mood" of life...
...this road leads to "rainbowville...
...Enter rock music as a statement of fullness now...
...One longs for a world of peace and love, but there is no assurance that it can exist anywhere except in the right riff and set of chord changes...
...The adoption of animal names for Rock groups-Eagles, Beatles, etc.-is not accidental...
...Rock with all its excesses has the advantage of inhabiting spiritual territory, a territory where despair and hope, absolute loneliness and transcending love can abide...
...we fail to recognize the life of the spirit...
...We first see him seeking directions to Saint Dominic's Church in black clericals and a straw boater...
...Jesus is not the absent moralist who sets out the road map for life...
...Plato says in The Republic that changes in musical style indicate profound changes in the culture...
...Heaven is certainty...
...But there are problems in appropriating the local cult and present popular culture to theological ends...
...There is a there to Jesus which is not present in the clerical figure of Father Chuck...
...Mary Gordon reports on a priest friend who claimed that for generations, Father Bing was the paradigm for priests...
...Happiness is not "down the line," in the words of two best-selling albums of the Rolling Stones, it is Satisfaction and Now...
...I fear that this is the religious distillation of Going My Way and all too many traditional Sunday sermons...
...He is infinitely flexible, infinitely equipped with resources...
...One of the reasons that moralists are so suspicious of sex is its ability to waylay the distancing and appraisive stance which is required for moral effort...
...It is important to ask whose popular culture: the current generation's, the current younger generation's, the fans of golden oldies...
...The problems are solved in disguise, as it were, just as the straw boater disguises his true priestly power...
...If Going My Way was popular culture for the decade of the forties, one can sense a radical change in pop just by song titles...
...If deferred gratification, cultural uplift, and commitment to the day after forever are the metaphysics of Tin Pan Alley and the theme song of Going Father Chuck's Way, all this changes radically for contemporary rock culture...
...Hunter's world is as fragile and transient as the title of his 372 pages of collected lyrics, A Box of Rain (Viking Penguin...
...worth-the Antichrist...
...The song is called "Aim at the Heart" and the message seems the very antithesis of "the day after forever": Time doesn't fly Just hangs over like the sky It's we who go by Makes no difference how or why Everything you cherish Throws you over in the end Thorns will grab your ankles From the gardens that you tend Damned if you do Double damned if you don't try Caught on the fly Hello fades into good-by What can you say...
...I saw it...
...Father Bing tells her to put heart into the song and he shows her how...
...The film won seven Oscars...
...As I read the gospel message, "Go Your Own Way" remains fundamental in the sense of that black gospel hymn...
...It seems clear enough from title alone that Going My Way and Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" inhabit different emotional territories...
...The girl sings the song with some awkward "jazzy" gestures...
...A former altar boy, he contemplated entering the priesthood but, he says, "[I am] too weak a person to ever be a priest...
...The implications of the pop culture of rock music for churches are ambiguous...
...It is a relief, a relief from the failure of language...
...In 1944, Bing Crosby starred as Father Chuck O'Malley in Going My Way...
...Humans have to work themselves up (or down) to the fullness of animal intensity, but the moment passes until the next dose or drum beat...
...There is something fundamentally out of kilter in a view which translates Christianity into nothing but moral injunction...
...The New York Times ran a feature article "Rock Finds Religion Again" (January 2,1994...
...One may dispense justice as a futile gesture of despair, or with a certainty that the heavens rejoice in the doings of the just...
...Yet he goes forward, and he goes forward alongside the Christian believer, so that his story of resurrection and my story exist for one another...
...Jimi Hendrix stated its metaphysic: "I am what I feel...
...Because despair, hope, certainty lie behind the acts of every day, setting the tone if not content of life, we can, as it were, fail to notice them...
...A God so vulnerable may require vulnerable ministers of grace...
...The disillusion and despair which are everywhere expressed in the music only make sense in a world of hope and love denied...
...Sexual restraint is central to Going My Way not Only as a good in itself and a sign of priestliness, but as the most striking example of gratification deferred in the formation of moral character...
...The cop is afraid that she may end up, ahem!, on the streets...
...The song reads, "The day after forever/ All through a lifetime/ I'll be loving you/ And on the day after forever/ I'll begin again...
...Botticelli's Birth of Venus, as Camille Paglia has noted, emerges naked from the sea in the posture of a medieval Madonna...
...Mary Gordon concludes her account of Father Chuck as follows: [Father Chuck's] maleness is iconic, but it is a particular kind of maleness cut off from the implications of sexual demand...
...My initial sympathy is with the rockers...
...I tell you the story of Christianity: a zealous peasant preaches a message of mercy and forgiveness, he is betrayed, abandoned, tortured, and put to a cruel and horrible death only to rise above death through God's almighty hand- and by the way, he didn't approve of premarital sex...
...My way, your own way, the way of Christ or Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols who proclaimed himself-for what that is Dennis O'Brien, president emeritus of the University of Rochester, is a frequent Commonweal contributor...
...Going whose way...
...The most interesting message for this priestly story is in the first song of the film...
...It is part of his vocation to make no demands, so he gives no ground, no place for anyone to stand...
...Jesus is the one who comes with, on the same journey, living his own story which ends in loneliness and abandon...
...The sound and the effects are tremendous and fascinating...
...Start with the Crosby image of Father O'Malley...
...Rudolph Otto described the holy as mysterium, tremen-dum, et fascinans: a good description of a major rock event...
...There is certainly a strong current within rock of Sam Phillips's "disillusion...
...A morality of deferred gratification appears to put off the real me to another day, but I can't really postpone my life...
...Each person lives and dies the one life that is his or hers alone...
...This essay is adapted from a talk delivered before the Catholic Committee on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs...
...The Gospels have such a narrative (though with a startling twist at the conclusion...
...The theologian John Dunne, in Time & Myth (University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), traces the life of the spirit in Dante's journey from Hell to Paradise...
...the guitar notes don't neutralize the pathos of the lyrics, they validate it...
...I am Jesus-of Teresa...
...Not only is the built-in hokiness of the tune diverted, the irony is boiled off...
...He explains, "The other three great [religious] traditions [Protestant, Jewish, Islamic], each in their [sic] own way, are structured on sensibilities that emphasize the radical discontinuity of God and the world...[T]he Catholic religious sensibility sees the whole of creation as a metaphor: everything is grace...
...like the cries and shouts of the Bacchantes, these noises suggest more than they can say until finally even the words give out and the crash of sound prevails...
...Novelist and critic Mary Gordon writes: Father O'Malley's great gift is to see everyone's need and provide for it...
...Rock music broadly conceived is one of those radical changes in musical style that deserves notice for what it promotes-especially what it might promise or deny to religious sensibility...
...The author, Guy Garcia, noted an almost apocalyptic denunciation of empty materialism-themes which have been stated in more measured terms by John Paul II...
...In 1977, Fleetwood Mac's single "Go Your Own Way" sold 12 million copies...
...they are wholly within the Tin Pan Alley tradition which dominated American popular music down to the revolution of rock 'n' roll...
...Only a narrative responsive to passion, loneliness, and defeat responds to the rocker's urge...
...Purgatory is hope...
...There is a fundamental aloneness to being human...
...The stages of that journey reflect the basic possibilities of spirit...
...I am Teresa of Jesus," she answers, "and who are you...
...Having described how music finally transcends verbal message, Marcus goes on to discuss a hokey song called "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," as performed by English rocker Elvis Costello with some simple, nonsinging, chord changes on his guitar...
...Here tomorrow, gone today Faith fades away For idols with their feet of clay The chorus is: "Aim at the heart/ Don't ask whose love you're stealing...
...It is easier to think of converting a sexually passionate Augustine to burning Christian belief, than turning Father Chuck into Saint John of the Cross...
...Lacking incarnation, the spiritual world of some to-be-named rock group, Wild Thyme, cannot move to "prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action...
...The rock 'n' roll self is not the moral self which is always beyond itself, deferring the present for the future, weighing and assessing the course of action...
...Sexuality may be a symbol of fullness, but, unfortunately, humans cannot live in the innocence of animal sexuality...
...Tin Pan Alley types like myself complain that they can't understand the words...
...What was it...
...It is mystery even on its surface...
...Does "going your own way" lead to traumas and tragedies well beyond the gentle comic life of "going Father Chuck's way" where the burden is easy and the yoke is light...
...She emerges from the dressing room: "What happened Chuck...
...The mystery evoked is a self, the Whatever-It-Is that is "going your own way...
...Imagine the Apostles preaching on the street corner, certain that peace, love, and understanding is what life is all about...
...Stevens has not seen the clerical collar...
...If that is the final message of the music, it is certainly unacceptable to Christian belief...
...Assessing my spiritual state fits that description, am I hopeful examining my hope...
...Everyone has listened to enough rock-willingly or not-to have some idea of the musical character of such songs...
...But that is the point...
...Animals are all in all, just what they are...
...There is no there with Father Chuck...
...It also makes the moral message of O'Malley seductive...
...He may be a priest, but he is a real OK guy...
...In the sequel film, Bells of Saint Mary's, Father Chuck reassures a distraught Sister Ingrid Bergman that when in trouble she need only dial "O" for O'Malley...
...But suppose the original experience was validated where language broke down, and some elemental music of life allowed one to believe that even after an experience of defeat, betrayal, and death, "peace, love and understanding" is what life is all about...
...I am certain that swinging Father Chuck would be horrified by the carpe diem of Robert Hunter's lyrics...
...The songs in Going My Way are in no way idiosyncratic...
...Our contemporary Madonna of the Lingerie is not the first one to blur the lines between saint and siren...
...What hap...
...It is, he says, "rough, harsh, hard to follow...
...If sexual deferral is an important symbol for the music of morality, flaunting sexuality is an important symbol for the mystery in rock 'n' roll...
...Father Chuck knows all the American ways of sports, jazz, and romance-but from another life...
...Sam Phillips, the legendary producer of Sun records out of Memphis, the discoverer of Elvis Presley, characterized rock as the music of disillusion-"the passion of a moment that was meaningless...
...I heard it...
...But if old paganism became new gospel, maybe there is something in the new Eleusinian mysteries worth recapturing for the Old Time Religion...
...The girl tells Crosby that she will make it on her own as a singer...
...Macbeth despairs: life is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" but for all that, he is courageous...
...If sexual fulfillment is a traditional symbol of spiritual fulfillment, sexual demand, then, can be a symbol of spiritual need...
...Animals, unlike humans, lack future pretensions...
...For this reason he is determined to prevent the advent of the Lydian mode into his ideal state...
...Again the dominant theme of gratification deferred...
...Christianity makes the bolder claim about reality...
...Traditional Christian theology argued that the noble Greek virtues-courage, temperance, justice-were, after all, only "splendid vices" in comparison to the distinctly Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love...
...You can call yourself an Eagle, Door, or Stone, but one remains, alas, merely human...
...The lyric says "despair," but the music can transcend despair in its very boldness and assertion...
...The story of Jesus claims that actual human life, not the bold artifice of rock, can express the fullness of being...
...Consider the message in the music written for the film by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Huesen...
...Yeats says that Lear is "gay" in the very depth of his suffering...
...Gratification is deferred-"happiness is down the line...
...He is magical because conversion to proper conduct requires only a slight symbolic gesture...
...That may be a better path in so far as morality is a distinctively human trait...
...In a song called "Leave It up to the Angels," McDermott sounds the broad theme of disillusion that runs through rock: "I'm frightened by the way I feel, maybe you are too/I'm losing faith in everything and everyone but you...leave it to the angels...
...ain't nobody here gonna walk it for you...
...In Marcus's description of "Go Your Own Way," he tries to explain why an instrumental solo, normally a "rest" in the performance, is suddenly a burst of even greater energy: Building in any successful rock 'n' roll record is a sense of the power of the singer to say what he or she means, but also a realization that the words are inadequate to that task, and the feeling of fulfillment is never as strong as the feeling of frustration...
...an aloneness that makes the animal warmth of sex and heavy metal a seductive anodyne...
...It is not just the magical power of Father Chuck that attracts...
...everyone asks, and you open your mouth, and begin to wave your hands in the air...
...I am inclined to believe that the spiritual journey is "rough, harsh, hard to follow," and that Father Chuck's world is only charming fantasy...
...Greeley finds grace everywhere from Bruce Springsteen's lyrics to Madonna's lingerie...
...Rock aims to get moral appraisal out of the way: Elvis Presley starts off the rock revolution on the proper note with his first big hit, "It's All Right, Momma...
...The rock impulse recognizes the superiority of the world of the spirit, but finally there is no incarnation, no daily bread...
...As it happens, Chuck has been wrapped in a raincoat up to now so that Ms...
...don't care a feather or a fig...
...The thrill is that of entering a world where anything can be said, even if no one can know what it means...
...The rocker's self is the whole present reality, the very feel of present existence...
...How to resolve the dilemma presented by Going My [Moral] Way and "Go Your Own Way...
...As spiritual advice, is "going your own way" rough, harsh, a prescription hard to follow...
...It is important to recognize, however, that the traffic is two-way...
...Father Chuck offers to give her a tryout to his accompaniment...
...For an instant, the search for peace, love and understanding is what life is all about...
...What happened Chuck...
...The singer still comes up short...
...In the back of the minds of the most disillusioning rock tune is a belief that "peace, love and understanding" is the real meaning of life...
...Desexualized power, the iconic male capacity to fix things as if it were all improvised on the spot, a lucky accident, a spot of grace, expressed in the nonchalant manner of the Groaner, Der Bingle...
...Briefly put, Tin Pan Alley's great composers, often Jewish immigrants trained in traditions of European operetta, wrote music of cultural aspiration and deferred gratification...
...Because the life of the spirit, the mood and music of life, is so fundamental, we properly label it as "mystery...
...As the old black spiritual puts it: "You got to walk that lonesome valley by yourself...
...It is easier to think of converting a sexually passionate Augustine to burning Christian belief, than turning Father Chuck into Saint John of the Cross...
...Finally, rock can only believe in artistic enactment...
...Post the rock revolution, sexuality is flaunted...
...The religious question I want to ask is contained symbolically in Marcus's description of the music...
...The problem seems that there is no known way of getting there...
...If there is no there to Father Chuck, what is missing is the aloneness of the spirit...
...The rest Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action...
...Nevertheless, rejecting the rocker's world is not easy...
...the performance demands the absolute lucidity it has already promised...and so an instrument takes over...
...So be it for the "golden oldies," but I suspect that somewhere in the passing years, Father Chuck's line has been disconnected...
...Sexual morality as sexual restraint is a central issue in the celibate state of the priests and the temptations of the runaway and her boyfriend...
...If you are "going my way...
...If the final word is "Go Your Own Way," a way that is "harsh, rough, hard to follow," Christianity at least says that one is accompanied on that way...
...So, if you are going my way, the destination is tomorrow, not today...
...I mean by mystery not something hidden from knowledge, like the cure for AIDS, but something so revealed, so present, that we cannot distance ourselves sufficiently for proper appraisal...
...This is a defensible claim only if the life of the spirit is our fundamental human reality...
...There is even "romance...
...Gabriel Marcel defines mystery as "a problem which encroaches on its own data...
...But the "salvation" sought by a rock singer like Michael McDermott in his album Gethsemane is strictly personal, outside if not against the churches...
...The fullness has to be human sexuality...
...A peculiar combination of religious restraint and jauntiness which perfectly defines the developed character...
...He's both the ideal father and the ideal mother, nurturing yet with access to power, particularly in the sacred American precincts of show business and sports...
...Somewhat revising Luther's characterization: Hell is despair...
...The Academy Award winning "Swinging on a Star" is sung by a street gang converted into the Saint Dominic's choir...
...In a later scene an old flame, played by Rise Stevens, invites him to her dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera...
...No wonder that rock appeals to teenagers, a stage on life's way when one seems to be full grown, yet stuck in a nest of economic and social deferrals and dependencies...
...Humans finally have to deal with the fact that the sexual other is a person-a category which transcends animal structures and the only one which validates a quest for peace, love, and understanding...
...Just as Father Chuck's "romantic life " is elsewhere in another time and place, so fulfillment is elsewhere: Take a short cut to what you wish and you may end up as a fish, happiness is down the line, and love is not just today, it is "the day after forever...
...I heard it...
...Although his aura is maternal, his identity is necessarily and inextricably connected to male-ness...
...Finally, rock is an aesthetic passing as religion-not the first or last time that noble gesture has been tried...
...Death, like sex and drugs and the rocker's scream, accomplishes the fullness of being-there is nothing yet to come...
...Going My Way as movie and song moves in the world defined by morality...
...But if rock opens into the life of the spirit/while O'Malley's moral musical messages do not, one has to assess the spiritual life expressed...
...Rock reminds critic Camille Paglia of the great mystery religions...
...What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding...
...Momma's moral injunctions are put aside...
...Now, nothing...
...One could dismiss rock as mere paganism all over again...
...The Roman Januarius becomes San Gen-naro, and the Celtic Bridgid, goddess of spring, reemerges as Saint Bridget of Kildare...
...Eliot, who of course knew nothing of rock 'n' roll, expresses in The Four Quartets a view which might encapsulate a Christian response to this music...
...In one of her mystical experiences, Teresa of Avila hears the question, "Who are you...
...There were no more letters...
...Father Chuck's actions in the film express a sort of magical priestliness as he solves every problem great and small from the finances of Saint Dominic's to street gangs...
...The implication for official Catholicism may be contained in McDermott's personal history...
...Clearly this is not Crosby crooning "the day after forever...
...The traditional moral virtues may have their place, but for the Christian the fundamental issue is whether they dwell within the spirit of despair, hope, or certainty...
...It is, as music critic Greil Marcus has written, "an assault, a hammering...moaning, pleading, damning...
...Father Chuck, alias Crosby, made a deep impression on Catholic imaginations...
...Father Chuck is ultimately a moral magician who shows everybody that if you don't care a feather or a fig, you may grow up to be a pig...
...What is possibly Christian, properly pagan, and plausibly dangerous in popular culture...
...On its face, it would seem that rock is not only distant from the Saint Dominic's of Father O'Malley but from the saint himself and the dominant Christian tradition...
...The contrast between Tin Pan Alley's Going My Way and the rock experience of "Go Your Own Way" is a contrast between morality and mystery...
...Someone begins to write it out: the New Testament with lyrics by Matthew, Mark, Luke & John...
...It turns out that Father Chuck worked out with the Saint Louis Browns and led a small scat band in his previous existence...
...Except for the music itself...
...Whatever else one might say about sex, it is an overwhelming experience of presentness...
...But common morality cannot be used as a shield for the aloneness of the spirit...
...A lyric by Robert Hunter, one of the principal writers for the legendary band The Grateful Dead, states the themes of rock...
...While dressing in the adjoining room she asks through the open doorway why he had never answered her letters, "You wrote to me in Rome, Florence, in Naples, Vienna, Budapest...From there I went to South America...
...The point of the song is that if you don't go to school, you may grow up to be a mule...
...If, as Robert Hunter says, "Faith fades away/For idols with their feet of clay," life is something "caught on the fly...
...The local very Irish cop brings to the rectory a young girl who has run away from home...
...The spirit is reached only outside ordinary daily life in drugs, ecstatic sex, overwhelming music...
...In the long run-and the short run-you have to "go your own way...
...The ghost of the omnipotent, invulnerable Father Chuck haunts the church: far from an image of sympathy or salvation, he is-in rock idiom-a "real turnoff...
...His maleness is iconic, but it is a particular kind of maleness cut off from the implications of sexual demand...
...On the other hand, attention to the books, and you "could be swinging on a star...
...Will stingy banker Gene Lockhart relent on the mortgage to the church...
...Chastity as a symbol of human freedom is better than sex as an ardent retreat from care...
...Antiseptically cleansed of sexual demand, Father Chuck becomes spiritually neutered...
...it is this "fullness of being" which rock seeks to recover...
...All the songs are songs of "aspiration," cultural uplift, and "deferred gratification...
...I lose myself in moral earnestness...
...She sees the Roman collar, beams in surprise, "Father Chuck...
...there are no fish striving to be archbishops...
...I would like to propose a proper synthesis of morality and mystery, but the exact synthesis eludes me...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 16
