When Neil Diamond Turns Out To Be Your Spiritual Guide…

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Neil Diamond kept me on the spiritual path that led to priesthood. Allow me to ‘splain, as my grandmother McBrayer would say.

In last week’s article, I mentioned my Trappist monk spiritual director who helped me to an appreciative way of embracing Easter. My vocational journey had many such influences that led me to discern my vocation to priesthood. I’ll always remember and cherish the quip delivered by my spiritual mentor, Carlyle Marney, who opined: The hot Georgia sun called many a man to the ministry! Selah.

Those of you who regularly read South of God have been exposed to those many influences that led me on this path. Key teachers, wise colleagues, chance encounters, off-the-cuff comments (one in particular that I remember from Cindy Martin), personal relationships… all conspired to lead me to make the decision to take on the role of priest. But Neil is special. I need to remember Neil, particularly whenever I find myself taking all this stuff too seriously.

It all began with Donnie Harwell.

I have talked in the past about my two twin friends, Ronnie and Donnie Harwell, as we grew up together on the Southside of Atlanta. We all were members of Dogwood Hills Baptist Church, a progressive South of God church that actually toyed with the idea of racial equality, that is until the pastor decided to make the bold move of opening the doors of the church to black folks. The Board of Deacons met quickly and secretly, to make our Ph.D. in New Testament a Rhodes Scholar…they said “Hit the road, scholar!” firing his progressive ass. He landed a professor’s job at Mercer straightway, and that is thought to be “on your feet”.

Ron and Don’s father was the editor of the Christian Index, a Southern Baptist weekly publication, that put him in the thick of South of God politics. His name was Jack Harwell and he proved himself faithful as well as politically savvy as he negotiated the raging rapids of the river of the Southern Baptist trend toward fundamentalist literalism. Ron, Don, and I played golf together at the local municipal course just off the Atlanta Airport, and Jack would join us oin occasion. In fact, Jack hosted Billy Graham in playing golf when he was on crusade in Atlanta, but not at a fancy country club but at that municipal course where my high school team played its matches. I tell you all this, of course to drop the name of Billy Graham (I used to do a pretty good impression of him at fraternity gatherings: “I just love it when young people come to me and ask: Billy…what’s it all about?” I also did Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, and my personal favorite, Ernest Angely). God’s little joke or retribution was that “Rev” became my nickname at the fraternity and that I wound up in the clergy. That’s what I call exponential payback. Instant karma, baby…and it is a bitch as my brother says.

But back to Donnie. Donnie found himself working at a 8-track tape recording “studio” in a shopping center called Washington Plaza. The A&P store was the main presence, being the place where my family conveniently shopped for groceries. The tape studio was just next door, having previously been a slot car race track back in the sixties. Now, this tape studio had an interesting owner, Mike Thevis, a rumored, later convicted underworld figure in Atlanta. The front of the store housed pirated tapes of popular records, which may have been illegal in and of themselves. But in the back, pornography tapes were reproduced and sold as well. Donnie was the innocent “front” man who handled the public with his lilting winsome way while various minions worked in the back. I’m telling you all this to make the point that God sometimes works in mysterious ways.

One day, Donnie handed me an 8-track tape that came from Thevis’ shop. It was comprised of the greatest hits, at the time, of Neil Diamond. I would load it into the tape player in the dashboard of my Pontiac Firebird Formula 400, midnight blue and ready to roll. My friends, Ricky Heath and Doug Dunn, had identical cars but in other colors, silver and black. Needless to say, we were of the opinion that we were much hell, all three Delta Airlines brats with non-rev flight privileges. Sweet.

That particular summer, I was smack dab in a time of liminality, in transition from high school to beginning college. The Firebird was in many ways my refuge, and the music was always on, pumped up to 11. My car would take me through the summer and in the Fall, on to the Northside of Atlanta to Emory University.

At the time, I was feeling torn between my South of God grounding in Holy Scripture and my own proclivity toward science and looking for evidence as to the nature of reality. The church had come up short on the race issue two years earlier, leaving me with an after-taste of hypocrisy that would linger. Adding to my crisis of faith, a number of my senior classmates would die in the year after graduation, leaving me with deep questions about God’s goodness and even God’s existence. How do you make sense of suffering if God is supposedly “good”?

My boyhood friend, Danny Hall, had preceded me at Emory and came back warning me about the professors who would challenge my faith. He gave me a book published by Campus Crusade for Christ, authored by Josh McDowell, entitled Evidence That Demands A Verdict. It could not have been better timed as it was a work of apologetics that offered a reasonable presentation as to why the Christian faith was true. I devoured it. In my Episcopal tribe’s language, I read, marked,, learned, and inwardly digested the words of Josh. Oddly, Josh actually came to have dinner and speak at my Sigma Chi fraternity house a few years later when I was the president. It is an understatement to suggest that it was awkward, but I tried to extend my native Southern hospitality in spite of my discomfort.

But as I was stewing in my doubt, trying to arm myself for the coming academic attack on what faith I had left, that 8-track tape provided the background music for my summer. Neil Diamond’s own existential wrestling emerged in his lyrics, oozing with themes of being in the world, making sense of life, straining for answers to my Billy Graham question, “What’s it all about?”.

Specifically, the Diamond lyrics provided images that gave leverage points for my thinking. “Solitary Man” framed some of my quest for identity. Who the hell was I? How do I emerge from my hometown matrix, retaining a connection with family, and yet making my own way, forging my own identity?

“I Am I Said” was my existential struggle set to music. Neil’s struggle with his Jewish background seemed to emerge in many of his songs that voiced a nod to his sense of the spiritual dimension of life such as “Holly Holy” and “Soolamon”.

He could be playful with his faith thoughts such as in the rocking “Thank The Lord For The Night Time”. He faithfully played with the option of finding a faith in the song he wrote for the Monkees, “I’m a Believer”. He could cut through the religious theatrics of which I was well aware and bring it home to its essence, as in “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” with a picture drawn of a hot August night at a tent revival. He gets to his spiritual point as Brother Love reminds us that we have “two good hands”, exhorting us to both reach out one hand to God, as well as the other hand to our sister and brother in need., a covenantal ontology if I have ever seen one. I had been to some of those Gospel meetings with my grandfather in West Georgia and knew something of that milieu. I must admit that it is soul-satisfying for me to use the word “milieu” in reference to West Georgia.

Finally, Neil nails my struggle with an acute sense of finitude, with my friends dying, in his poetic images of lament “Done Too Soon”. I was surprised to find that a lot of people have never heard this song. It is well-produced, with trombones and trumpets blasting as Diamond offers a litany of names in a kind of Jewish precursor to rap, to be followed by a soulful solo guitar, enhanced by magnificent strings, as he offers his philosophical exclamation point as to the nature of life. Here are the lyrics:

Jesus Christ, Fanny Brice, Wolfie Mozart and Humphrey Bogart, And Genghis Khan, and on to H. G. Wells

Ho Chi Minh, Gunga Din, Henry Luce and John Wilkes Booth, And Alexanders King and Graham Bell

Rama Krishna, Mama Whistler, Patrice Lumumba and Russ Columbo, Karl and Chico Marx, Albert Camus

E.A. Poe, Henri Rousseau, Sholom Aleichem and Carol Chessman, Alan Fried and Buster Keaton too

And each one there, has one thing shared… They have sweated beneath the same sun,…Looked up in wonder at the same moon… and wept when it was all done… for being done too soon, for being done too soon.

Let me recommend going to Youtube and finding this song, specifically the version with a pictorial representation of the names mentioned. It will be worth the effort, I promise.

I think that Neil was involved in a spiritual wrestling match with his Hebrew background and his own experiene as a human being in a time of rapid change. He answered with his music.

I had the same wrestling match going on inside of me with my South of God struggle, with the Vietnam war and the draft playing in the background. My answer would come with a circuitous route of chasing this alluring mystery of God and my own spiritual song of service and justice.

As I said in the beginning., Neil’s lyrics engaged me, pressed me, encouraged me, chided me as I made my way through that tough stretch of transition. He provided a musical link between my suburban daze of home and the familiar as I tried to make my way into the heady and turbulent world of college, in a critical time of vocational discernmet. I playfully joke about that chapter title in my life story of a time of choosing: Doctor, Lawyer, Tribal Chief? And for that lyrical and musical playground, I am most grateful. It was a good summer. Thank you, Donnie, and thank you, Neil.