Walking in the Graveyard: An Agnostic Gospel Song

 

     Like all my early and heartfelt songs, this one is engraved in memory. A paper copy may not exist. In fact, in the half century since I wrote it, I've never performed it, as if these words in the air, not just in my head, might break a taboo. It’s in the style of a gospel quartet, but its message might be anathema to the myth-affirming gospel crowd. 

     How do you cross yourself and feel something like justification without magical faith? Suppose that St. Paul’s grand and ghostly edifice crumbles around you even as you kneel before the passion of the Son of Man, stopping with the original text of Mark’s gospel: "So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid" (Mark 16:8).

Walking in the graveyard,

Heard the rooster crowing,

Thinking bout the dead folks underground,

My body weary, 

I heard Jesus saying,

"Look up, sinner. Lay your burden down.”

Well, I heard about hellfire

And the white worms crawling,

And I’ve felt my poor heart thumping in the night,

But I don’t want no

Half-assed solution.

If I’m gonna be saved, I’m gonna be saved right.

Who’s that shining

In the garden?

Who’s that walking on the water like nobody can.

His words burn like

Hot quicksilver.

I can’t help it. I believe he’s the perfect man.

I believe he’s

Prince of Heaven,

And I’m raising up right now to take his hand,

But if he was lying still

In the graveyard (oh, no!),

I’d say, “If you can go that way, my Lord, I can.”

Walking in the graveyard,

Heard the rooster crowing,

Thinking bout the dead folks underground,

My body weary, 

I heard Jesus saying, 

"Look up, sinner. Lay your burden down.”

     Many years after writing this, I read Friedrich Schleiermacher's reformulation of reform theology, which would have been a welcome counterweight to the Calvinism of my childhood church. Though Schleiermacher did apparently affirm in the historical resurrection, he considered it nonessential. The essential Christian impulse was, for him, a sense of absolute dependency on God through Christ--not the ego-gratification of personal immortality. That, for him, was a denial of the call to transcend self and an essentially anti-religious goal. I quote Dawn Devries from p. 79 of Servant of the Word: Selected Sermons of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1987):

     "The significance of Easter is not to be found, according to Schleiermacher. in the physical, historical events of Christ's raising. It has less to do with an empty tomb or a resuscitated corpse than with the living presence of the Redeemer in the lives of his own."