How Bob exposed flesh-coloured Christs that glowed in the garden

By poet and songwriter Giles Watson

I vividly remember the moment recorded in this video below, because I was there at the Sydney Entertainment Centre in 1986, and Bob Dylan was my hero.

He had helped me to confirm me in my own calling as a poet and a songwriter, and the songs from his “Christian period” had influenced me to read the Gospels. I had encountered this Jesus in those texts – the same one he seemed to be singing about on Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love – but not really so much in any of the churches I had visited.

This Jesus took a whip of cords to drive profiteers out of the Temple, made it clear that the worst of sins was hypocrisy in the face of social injustice, stopped bigots from throwing stones at women, told rich men it would take a miracle to get them into heaven, put children ahead of dignitaries, and took his uncompromising radicalism to such a point that he chose an agonising death over worldly power and influence.

And here was Dylan singing, it seemed to me, not of the dogmas of the Church, but of this person who, unlike Mel Gibson, Bruce Springsteen or Michael Jackson, had displayed such moral and spiritual consistency that he really did deserve the name of “hero”. It was a humbling moment for me, because my own hero had just said that for him there was only one hero – one who demanded a total overturning of our priorities, just like those money-changers’ tables.

The date of this performance – 1986 – testifies abundantly against those who claim that Dylan “went secular” again with the release of Infidels in 1983. That had always flummoxed me, because Infidels was so obviously a spiritual album, and one which helped to show the continuity which had always been there.

Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love may have represented some sort of eruption in Dylan’s own life, when undercurrents which had always been there became overt.

But I didn’t see how anyone could deny that John Wesley Harding was a spiritual album, or that the author of ‘Father of Night’ was a secularist, or that there wasn’t a genuine vision of the apocalypse in those words in ‘Romance in Durango’ about the face of God appearing “with serpent eyes of obsidian”. Dylan had been identifying with Jesus in ‘Shelter from the Storm’.

He had given us the whole of ‘Street Legal’ as a prelude to what was slowly coming down the tracks. “How much longer?” those gospel singers asked again and again and again. Dylan has always been a person with Jewish heritage who has been fascinated by that person in the Gospels.

It was always coming.

And yes, it all culminated with ‘In the Garden’: the song which to me was at the heart of those three albums, and at the centre of the one that is often most maligned – an album which, in my opinion, contains not one dud song.

Dylan puts us at Gethsemane and asks us relentless rhetorical questions to which, I felt at the time, the answer was a remorseless “No”: they didn’t know who they were coming for, they didn’t hear when he enjoined Peter to take the path of radical non-resistance, they hadn’t listened, they hadn’t noticed the healings, they hadn’t dared to speak out against him, and they would never understand anything about his wilful encounter with death.

We’re good at ignoring the challenges, we humans; in fact, many of us are doing it now as we eschew our social responsibilities in the face of racism, inequality, mass-extinction and the Coronavirus. We find it easy to not listen, to not be impressed by the miraculous. And when we are finally forced to make a reckoning with something sacred, we neutralise its uncompromising demands by packing it in dogma, or by commercialising it, making, as Dylan wrote at another time, “flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark.”

I found many luminous Christ effigies in the churches I visited in my formative years, but rarely saw a genuine attempt to put the Sermon on the Mount into practice.

I perhaps found the attempt most sincere amongst the Quakers, but by that time, I had read Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, and it had set me seeking the divine feminine.

So I gave up trying to find anything in the churches that lived up to the example of the man who fashioned that whip of cords to chase the Mammon-worshippers away from the place of worship, and sought my spirituality in trees and stones and birds, in the stories of the Mabinogion and the ancient Irish tales.

But I’ve never lost my love for the integrity and conviction with which Dylan sung about the Jesus of the Gospels, and I think that the people who voice their contempt for Slow Train Coming, and even more to Saved, should perhaps lay aside their preconceptions for a while and give those albums a fresh listening.

I think it’s significant that the songs from those albums have inspired gospel singers to record their own versions, many of which are deeply compelling. If you don’t believe me, try listening to Helen Baylor singing ‘What Can I Do For You?’ And then, go back to Saved, and listen to Dylan performing it again. Notice how he answers the question in the title with two staggeringly beautiful harmonica solos.

That’s the sound of Dylan offering up his talents to his hero. You can have your own ideas about the dogmas, but you can’t argue with the integrity of the spirit.

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