Kris Kristofferson's Mysterious Conversion

 

Kris Kristofferson

In 1971, songwriter Kris Kristofferson had pushed the envelope with relatively explicit country songs about sex and drugs such as "For the Good Times," "Sunday Morning Coming Down," and "Help Me Make It Through the Night," all popularized by other singers. His breakout hit as a performer came the next year with "Why Me":

Why me, Lord? What have I ever done

To deserve even one of the pleasures I've known?

Tell me, Lord? What did I ever do

That was worth loving you and the kindness you've shown?

Lord help me, Jesus. I've wasted it so.

Help me, Jesus. I know what I am.

But now that I know that I've needed you so,

Help me, Jesus. My soul's in your hand.

Kristofferson has repeatedly shared the origin of this song. He didn't normally attend church. Connie Smith persuaded him to attend a service at the Evangel Temple, a Nashville church pastored by Jimmie Rodgers Snow, Hank Snow's son. During the service, Larry Gatlin sang "Help Me," which Kristofferson would record as the flip side of "Why Me." Gatlin's lyrics set the theme:

Lord, help me walk another mile, just another mile.

I'm tired of walking all alone.

Lord, help me smile another smile, just one more smile.

I know I just can't make it on my own.

Then came that part of any evangelical service when the pastor invites converts. At 84 years old, Kristofferson recalled that moment in these words: "Everybody was kneeling down, and Jimmie said something like, 'If anybody's lost, please raise your hand.'" Then, as Kristofferson told a Playboy interviewer, "I had some kind of experience that I can't explain." He raised his hand.

That Kristofferson couldn't explain it says a lot. Though the singer cultivated a Southern drawl and craggy exterior, he was no untutored genius like Hank Williams but arguably the best educated man on the Nashville scene. Kristofferson's father was an Air Force officer who became a major general, himself the son of a Swedish army officer. As an army brat, Kris traveled widely and ended up in California, where he graduated summa cum laude in Literature from Pomona College, a highly-selective liberal arts school. While he was still an undergraduate, he published prize-winning essays in Atlantic Monthly and impressed an eminent philosopher of religion, Frederick Sontag. From Pomona, Kristofferson went to Merton College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar to study English Literature. He enlisted in the Army, rose to the rank of captain, and in 1965 was offered an assignment teaching literature at West Point. For years he had been writing and flirting with a music career--including unpublished short stories, a band in Germany, and an abortive record contract in England. Rather than teaching college, he resigned the Army and moved to Nashville, where he worked as a janitor while trying to sell his songs.

It took several years, but, of course, Kristofferson made it. His first marriage fell apart. He became Janis Joplin's lover (writing her biggest hit "Me and Bobby McGee") and was a friend and protege of Johnny Cash. Kristofferson threw himself into the hard-living scene of Nashville music and wrote about it. "Sunday Morning Coming Down" may be the first drug reference in a country song title, deftly concealed in the "ambiguity" that was beloved of New Critics when Kristofferson and I earned our degrees. The existential/religious angst behind a road musician's hard living is more explicit in "Out of Mind, Out of Sight," recorded in the album Jesus Was a Capricorn along with "Why Me." This song might be about Janis Joplin.

Yeah, I've been everywhere,

And I've seen anything there is,

But I never saw the light.

Scared to death of dying

So I do my best to live

Out of mind and out of sight.

Knowing no one nowhere's

Gonna miss us when we're gone,

Let's keep drinking till we're blind.

The song may have been written as a footnote to "Why Me."" It portrays the self-destructive lifestyle that would, I think, make anybody understand that they were lost and reach for help anywhere but in a bottle. It was against this backdrop that Kristofferson wrote "Why Me."

Here's how he told it on Ralph Emery's television show:

"The night before, we'd been down in Cookeville with a bunch of people doing a benefit for Dottie West's high school band or something, and then Connie took me over to church the next day, to Jimmie Snow's church. And I had a profound religious experience during the session, something that had never happened to me before. And 'Why Me' came out of it. Everybody was kneeling down, and Jimmy said something like, 'If anybody's lost, please raise their hand.' And I was kneeling there. I don't go to church a lot, and the notion or raising my hand was out of the question. I thought, I can't imagine who's doing this, and all of a sudden I felt my hand going up, and I was hoping nobody else was looking. Everybody had their head over praying. And he said, 'If anybody is ready to accept Jesus,' something like this, 'come down to the front of the church.' I thought that would never happen. I found myself getting up and walking with all these people and going down there, and I don't really know what he said to me. He said something to me like, 'Are you ready to accept Jesus Christ in your life?' And I said, 'I don't know.' I didn't know what I was doing there. And he put me down, said 'Kneel down here,' and I can't even remember what he was saying. Whatever it was was such a release for me that I found myself weeping, and I felt this forgiveness that I didn't know I even needed."

YouTube comments on this video reveal that the song and the narrative behind it are paradigms of the born again experience central to evangelical Christianity in the tradition of John Calvin. In that tradition, the irresistible action of the Holy Spirit or Jesus (the two being one in the Trinity) enters the believer and affects an involuntary, permanent change for the good. It is clear that, after his success in Nashville, Kristofferson was in a self-destructive spiral of drugs, sex, and alcohol of the sort that had just killed Janis Joplin, and it's also clear that he pulled out of that spiral, given that he is alive today at age 85. He appears smiling to retell the story of his experience decades later, but beyond that, evidence of his lifelong conversion is sketchy. Certainly, though, "Why Me" signifies beautifully the turn away from a destructive lifestyle. Dozens of comments after YouTube postings of this song credit it for religious conversions. It's common, though it was never my experience, for people to turn to addictions to ease the existential pain of life. Later, in the words of Kristofferson's other song, they transcend the pain of "Knowing no one nowhere's / Gonna miss us when we're gone" to live an ordinary, sensible lives by embracing religious faith, kneeling before the love of Jesus.

Two years ago, I wrote about my recollections of Can, a resident on my grandparents' old farm whose drinking kept his family deep in deep poverty, living in a shell of a borrowed house and begging food to get through the week. Later, I found him living in a tight little Jim Walters with a TV antenna and a used Chevy. My mother explained it, "Can got religion." Praise the Lord and pass the Ed Sullivan. I marveled at the fact that Jesus Christ was able to elicit behavior that any sane atheist would have advised (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/12/can-got-religion.html). 

Finding spiritual health in religion is no respecter of social class. In her Songwriters Hall of Fame bio, there's similar story about Marijohn Wilkin, "the den mother of Music Row" who wrote "Waterloo" and "Long Black Veil" and co-wrote "One Day at a Time" with Kristofferson. "Despite her success, Wilkin battled depression and alcoholism. When her third marriage failed, she became suicidal. In the early '70s, she found religion and turned her life around." Thirty-five-year-old Kris Kristofferson seems to have done the same.

There can be no doubt that Kristofferson's crisis in Jimmie Snow's church was a good thing. Fifty years later, he is healthy for his age after an Alzheimers scare that turned out to be Lyme disease. Unlike too many successful artists, he's had a long run, and the "Why Me" epiphany seems to have been instrumental. He was apparently changed, perhaps deeply and permanently, fulfilling the evangelical doctrine, "Once saved, always saved." Still, despite evangelicals' adoption of the song, Kristofferson describes its origin as a mysterious, subjective experience and never takes it to the theological bank by professing orthodox Christian gospel--as opposed to recalling a mysterious church-located experience. Outside of the song itself, he speaks in terms of "something inexplicable," not "thank you, Jesus."

In another account of the epiphany, he compares his public weeping to a drug trip: "I was too lost in what was happening to even be embarrassed by it. I was, a little later on, embarrassed because I had never done anything like that before or since. I can remember coming out of it. It was almost like coming out of some acid experience or something." It reminded him of an LSD trip.

Maybe, as Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley wrote, LSD is a doorway to spiritual insight, but psychedelic trips are seldom confused with truth "out there" in the straight world, and this realization may have inhibited the philosophy student and Rhodes scholar who wrote "Why Me." A song is a subjective gesture, the truth of one moment, but descriptive prose is something else. In videos anyway, Kristofferson speaks like a native of Tennessee, a place he didn't live until he was thirty, and blends with the academic dropouts working in Music City. He has shed his academic persona, but it might be harder to shed the critical thinking taught at Pomona College and Oxford University. I know that similar habits of thought haunt me. I can give myself to feeling, especially in music, but a rational demon still perches on my shoulder.

I take Kristofferson's silence on the explicit doctrines of Christianity in this light. Once in his life, at a moment of crisis, his hand raised itself, and I think he experienced his absolute dependence on Being outside of himself. He understood that everything he did depended on something that he could not earn because it was given freely before all that he ever did. There is a universal here, I think, buried in everyone's heart, crudely signaled in my last sentence but ultimately beyond verbal expression. The common term for this dependence is God.

Many people deny this absolute dependence and struggle to ignore the impossibility of self-sufficiency and self-justification, desperate to fill the infinite with finite things. The Void that is God (or  the absence of God) is not rational. It devours reason. Nor can a state of even ad hoc salvation be achieved by reason or doctrine. Whatever holy name is invoked, salvation moves in darkness, manipulated by names, symbols, and rituals but hidden in the heart. All articulate things, even the lyrics of a great spiritual song, float like a cloud around it.