Johnny Cash Convicted Me

Because I spent Sunday afternoon compiling music for a class I will be teaching this coming week, I have had the good fortune of being forced to listen to the monks of St-Benoit-du-Lac, a Patriarchal Liturgy from Moscow, and the strains of Ambrosian Chant. Somewhat less fortunately, I have also had to listen to a piece or two from the pen of John Michael Talbot, whose use of first person personal pronouns must surely surpass history’s sum total before him. But it is a comparative exercise, so I had no real choice.

More seriously, though, I should have been prepared for what came next, yet in spite of having it in my collection, I wasn’t. To conclude the music exercise (the students will be asked to consider what is being said about the person and work of Christ in each piece), I decided to include Johnny Cash’s song Hurt. So I inserted the CD, and of course, the video for the song came up by default.

You already know where this is going, don’t you?

No matter how much I might wish I could, I can not watch that video with other people in the room. I am just not comfortable enough with my own manhood to let people see the inevitable contortions of my face as water collects along the bottom lid of my eye.

Cash’s song and accompanying video is an invitation to the viewer/listener to consider his or her failures and the grace by which they live in spite of this. It is an invitation that I myself often consider, but do not often feel.

This is because I am generally of the opinion that sin is something we can become too obsessed with. If the Church is the community of the redeemed, then whatever it is we might do, providing we offer it up with repentance, it should not burden us anymore. Furthermore, there is nothing we can do that stands outside the reach of this cosmic law. In this respect, we are free.

If anyone might have known this, it would be Johnny Cash. Cash was a man whose difficulties were well-known, and whose appeal to grace in the face of them was a matter of public knowledge. Yet in spite of everything he was sorry for, and in spite of the various figures of Love in his life, as far as I understand, he was still subject to drugs and whatever else may have weighed on his conscience. Like any redeemed human being, we can imagine that however much he might have confessed his faults, and however free he was, he continued to be afflicted by them like the bearer of a permanent Cross.

Then I saw Hurt again, and it struck me. I frequently repent of my sins, but seldom do I feel sorry for them. I am aware of them intellectually, but affectively they barely touch me. So it was that in that song and in that video, I was given a glimpse of the burdens I continue to carry without being aware of them. And then the inevitable happened. Luckily, my family thought I was doing some serious work and left me alone in the room.

I know what it is to repent, and even to let go of my sins and faults. Seldom in my life have I had such problems in conscience that I have felt the need for serious spiritual therapy. I have certainly had issues to work through; they have just not presented the sort of long-term burdens to me that can sometimes oppress. But for all that, there have been times when I have been made to realize just how much weighs down on my soul, and when that happens, I find a relief that I never knew I needed. Johnny Cash provoked one of those times on Sunday.

No matter how much we might be able to recognize what it is we do to separate ourselves from God and from other people, and however good it is that we are able to get over these things and move on, it must surely be the case that to feel the effects of our sin from time to time, and to reflect on them in light of our Lord’s Passion, is a profoundly therapeutic thing. As a community of redeemed creatures, we walk a fine line. First, we are offered forgiveness, which we can accept knowing that we can then just get on with things. At the same time, it is vital that we never take such grace for granted. Yes, we are called deeper into the life of God where we are meant to be transfigured, and because of this, we can leave the obstacles to that transfiguration behind. Yet for all that, it is good to weep for having set them up in the first place.

Lent began for the Church last Wednesday. For me, it began with Johnny Cash.