Like A Rolling Stone

...Perhaps our faith is that of a child...

...The process hasn't been easy...

...I can assure you, the only thing that scandalized me was that there was way too much talk and far too little basketball...

...The Archdiocese of Philadelphia's weekly newspaper, ominously titled the Catholic Standard and Times, loomed large in my family's history...

...As a kid convinced that I would eventually have to give up my amateur playing status to turn pro, I was obsessed and had to see this movie...

...for my four sisters and me to inspect...

...But it did not mean, nor does it mean now, that the integration of these two is in any way complete...

...To paraphrase T.S...

...They had been silenced by a universal human truth these artists touched on in their songs...

...It took a long time before I could connect this to anything specifically religious...

...One on One was rated "Adults with Reservations," and my parents weren't about to let me see it...

...She was a very hard-line conservative Catholic, and would make it a point at family get-togethers to bait me with provocative questions about the church and my opinions on various doctrines and practices...

...I'll be the one wearing the Evel Knievel iron-on T-shirt...

...Around the same time, an aunt of mine began to suspect that I was becoming a heretic under the influence of the Jesuits...

...The artists who affected me--Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, the Clash, Bruce Springsteen among others--were vital compared to the faith I experienced...

...For a long time, I was what you might call a closet Catholic among my musician and artist friends...

...Silly as that may now seem, and as poorly as it might reflect on a very boring and uneventful childhood, this vivid experience clued me in on the fact that my family somehow wanted to remain separate from the world: There was something out there and we didn't want to have any part of it...

...Something had torn the curtain that separated the inside in which I had been taught to live from the outside that was dangerous and sinful...

...In fact, I believe there were more discussions around the McGarvey household regarding the Standard than there were about any other publication to which we subscribed, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Time, and Newsweek...

...For me, it was enough just to shut up, listen, and soak it all in...

...Eliot, we had the experience but missed the meaning...

...If the faith I was taught were true, it ought to be able to be in the world, without being crushed by it...

...It worked...

...The most notoriously eccentric teacher in my not-very-notorious Jesuit high school walks into class--a beret on his head and a pipe in his mouth--and without a word, writes these words on the blackboard: "When you ain't got nothin' You got nothin' to lose...

...With the advent of cable TV in the early 1980s and countless hours of unsupervised television viewing, I must have seen One on One at least fifty times...

...This article is based on a talk given at the National Center for the Laity' s conference, "Challenges Facing Christians in the Twenty-First Century" in January 1998...

...And to underscore how firmly I've found this to be true, I offer this final episode from my own experience...

...In my mind, this was true discipleship...

...As a result, the mystery of the world around us, and the lives we are leading in it, never deepen...

...We'd endlessly debate the role of the church hierarchy and dogma, until I eventually became so worn out that I would start to deflect her taunts by spouting off completely unrelated lyrics from favorite songs...

...So every week, I waited impatiently to see the new rating, hoping that my movie's category would change to something less scandalous...

...Sad as their misperception might be, I firmly believe that it exists because of our own failures...

...I was a twelve-year-old whose life was pretty well dominated by CYO basketball--I played on my grade school's JV squad, practiced constantly in neighborhood driveways, and idolized Julius Erving of the Philadelphia 76ers...

...We have produced many doctors, lawyers, and leaders in business...

...They were men in the real world trying to find God and his goodness all around them, not trying to remove themselves from creation, but trying to enter into deeper communion with God's love through the world...

...In trying to get a grip on the why, my mind travels back to my earliest memories of what could broadly be construed as episodes in my life of "culture challenging faith...

...To put it simply, I no longer wanted to live in fear...

...In a room filled with other young men, like me, being groomed to become distinguished Catholic doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, those words feel dangerous and radical to me...

...The music that began increasingly to occupy my interest seemed to make the faith I had been taught appear small, defensive, and claustrophobic...

...Move forward a few years: It is now the first day of my sophomore high school English class...

...At the time, being a person who felt and thought a great deal but was unable to articulate it, it was as if all the talk, all the tired debating, and all the arguing were over...

...It's as if the world is in a crisis of meaning and we as Christians are only able to offer it a superficial explanation of the status quo, cute anecdotes about the nuns who taught us in grade school, or sappy sentimentality about growing up Catholic...

...I eventually refined this tactic to the point that, in typically sadistic, adolescent fashion, I would start dropping these quotes, like bombs, just to try and unsettle her...

...It's spring 1977...

...I now see my desire not to be afraid as a sort of faith in itself, and that my desire to unite my faith and my work was a large step for me...

...Commonweal 2 ~ September 11, 1998...

...In the last seventy-five years, Catholics in this country have moved into the mainstream of American life...

...My Jesuit friends insist that this approach is a form of Ignatian spirituality...

...If I wasn't sure how the two fit together, I could be pretty certain that an iconoclastic group of artists wouldn't understand it either...

...Of course, there were other subplots involved--a love story and temptations about money and cheating--but the only thing I was interested in was that this was a movie with a lot of basketball...

...The paper, whose tone pretty accurately reflected the conservative nature of the archdiocese, published a column, "Viewers Guide to the Movies" that rated all current movies under the categories: "Adults and Children," "Adults," "Adults with Reservations" (which I never could quite understand), and, of course, the mother of all ratings, "Condemned" (reserved for Rosemary's Baby and Caligula...

...With a few strokes of a piece of ordinary chalk, my chubby, 5' 4" English teacher blows me away...

...To my mind, the inside/outside paradigm we unconsciously set up in our lives has no basis in the gospel message of absolute love...

...I wanted to recognize the transcendent meaning in the least obvious places, to see it in the ordinary world we are part of from the moment we are born...

...I can't disagree with them because the Jesuits I met in high school had a profound impact on my life...

...The first question is easy to answer--I write songs, make records and perform, and hope that there will be someone out there who wants to listen...

...I was frightened that they would see in it a form of blindness to the world, whereas I felt that my faith liberated me to see the world more clearly...

...They weren't churchy, or smug, or happy to live in their own Catholic ghetto...

...She eventually decided that I was hell-bound and out of my mind...

...My parents posted this guide every week in the kitchen Bill McGarvey is the singer and co-songwriter for the band Valentine Smith whose third album, Escape to Houdini's Grave, was released in July...

...There can be no separation of the inside and outside in a world where experience always closes in on us and teaches us anew...

...It has no place in a faith that proclaims that God became human and got the dust of this earth in his sandals...

...Of course, at age twelve, I didn't understand why, after a couple of months, the paper stopped publishing a rating for One on One...

...Travel with me to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...

...While our minds are adept in boardrooms, operating rooms, and courtrooms, hearts and imaginations are still sitting in the ancient, carved-up, varnished-to-death desks of our fourth-grade classrooms...

...Later, as an adult, I realized that it was through these artists that I caught some refracted ray of truth...

...When I finally hear the actual song, "Like a Rolling Stone," I am captivated by the powerful honesty of the singer's voice...

...What was masquerading as faith was anemic and shallow, and ultimately, felt to me more like fear...

...We are unable to live creatively, to see meaning and transcendence in what isn't obvious and explicit...

...I now realize that although I was Catholic by training and practice, my first felt religious experience was through music...

...It is a question I've asked myself for years...

...The answer to the second question is much more difficult to articulate...

...At their best, these artists were pilgrims completely alive to the world, people who wouldn't be caught dead parroting hack pieties...

...Without realizing it, I desperately needed my world to become bigger...

...But: So what...

...It never dawned on me that other movies had been released and replaced it at the theater, and I'd missed my chance to see it altogether...

...She gave up on me...

...As a group, we Catholics are well educated, but we have a poverty of imagination that runs wide and deep...

...Commonweal 2 | September 11, 1998 More important than the danger I feel (though most certainly connected to it), is just how utterly true those words seem...

...And that is our loss...

...In the bottom right-hand comer of the board he wrote the author's name, Bob Dylan...

...came from a setting where it was entirely posI sible to grow up without knowing anyone who wasn't Catholic, where there was a not-so-subtle judgmentalism and self-righteousness based on our faith, and where the spiritual was recognized only in the most explicitly religious terms...

...Around this time, a movie was released called One on One, the story of a young basketball player during his first year at a bigtime college basketball program...

...All this seemed to me to breed a fairly cheap, clich6d piety...