The Human Encounter with Desolation:
Highway 61 Revisited and the Prayers of
Karl Rahner

Karl Rahner (1904-1984) suggests that there is a vast cosmic order, lovingly created and set in place by God, designed to shepherd humanity back into integration with the divine. As such, our own experiences–the way we interact with history and the ethical acts which constitute relation–are more than mere whims given to expediency. Every time we step to the shoreline of our experience, we look out into the vast ocean of God's will and intention for humanity. It is at the horizon where the transcendent meets the limits of our perception. God is calling us to that ever receding and expanding meeting place, to reunion.

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With this understanding in place, we can enter into the mind of Rahner as he states in his book On Prayer, "Thus we come to realize, with a rush of panic, that what we regard as actions posited by us are in reality but aspects of our real selves: they are us."   Actions, and therefore consequences, are part of the cosmic order which encapsulate who we are. Life, in this sense, is a series of choices which reveal who we are and not simply what we believe we are doing. On Prayer,  a collection of Lenten lectures delivered in the bombed-out wreckage of St. Michael’s Church in Munich after the conclusion of the second World War, feature Rahner at his most poetic as he dealt with the horrors of war, responsibility, and the place of God in human suffering and history.

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In a section worth citing in full, Rahner describes life in bello in the city of Munich:

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Many of us remember those long nights in an air-raid shelter during the war, when we stood in abysmal loneliness among a crowd of terror-stricken people, waiting for death. In the darkness, we felt the coldness of fear chilling our hearts, and it was in vain that we put up a show of courage and stiff upper lip: our brave words were hollow, and fell as husks about our feet, leaving only silence and the vigil that might be the vigil of death. Then suddenly the explosion came, and the shower of debris to bury us. Let this be taken as the symbol of modern life.

 

Each person stands alone, as it were, before history, their choices, and God. Each of us left exposed in the humiliation of the fragility of our existence. Each of us held responsible for how lives come to mirror God's will in embracing love and service to one another. One can sense in Rahner the weight of humanity’s failure to respond to the ethical demands of his time. In other sources, Rahner is described as a relief worker in the war-torn remnants of Munich, feeding those left vulnerable in the aftermath of intense bombings and helping to pull corpses from destroyed buildings.   For Rahner, these were not courageous acts, nor were they acts of stoic acceptance of fate or guilt–it was simply the only human response to suffering, to the call to help others in their times of need and to live out God’s will. All that can be discerned from destruction is the duty to persist and to bear responsibility for those lives we are connected to.

 

Like Rahner’s sermonic lectures, Bob Dylan's music is obsessed with connection, with what it means to live in the complex reality of community. What we owe each other, what we owe to ourselves and our histories, and what we owe to the world that we co-create in the everydayness of our choices connect us beyond static individualism. In Dylan’s music, characters, chords, and verses collide and crash together. There is an almost  mystical confusion to Dylan's best records–driven in equal parts by a deep literary understanding and a pulsing beat of history. Highway 61 Revisited (1965) is the central piece in the great Dylan trilogy, bookended by 1965's Bringing It All Back Home and 1966's Blonde on Blonde. Released in a period of little more than a year, these are three dynamic albums pouring out at one of America's most confusing and tragic times. Dylan was embroiled in a country rebelling against traditional roles of men and women, of racial hierarchies and segregation, and against the emerging conflict in Vietnam. Dylan’s sensitivity placed him at the forefront of the changing landscape of what it meant to be American. Bringing It All Back Home features Dylan going electric–in part, turning his back on the conventions of the American folk music revival that had borne his star. Highway 61 Revisited is Dylan at the height of his powers and secure in the direction he has chosen. While the double album Blonde on Blonde is more polished and in many aspects more eloquent in its exploration of the major themes of Dylan’s work, it lacks the crash and baseness of Highway 61. Highway 61 contains the raw urgency of its moment. In hindsight, we can see Dylan's embrace of a more complex and inclusive instrumental sound as integral to his development as a storyteller.

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There is a breathless, charging energy to Highway 61. Driven by amphetamines and a boundless creativity, Dylan rushes into the rhythms of rock and roll and the pacing of poetic expressions inherited from the Beat generation and pointing toward the emergence of postmodernism. Dylan manages both to exist outside of time and as a troubadour in constant dialogue with the now. Highway 61 extends from Minnesota to Louisiana. We can imagine Dylan seeing the contours of his own life's journey reflected in the movement from the placidity of the Midwest to one of the major tributaries of American mythmaking. A mythologization of American history and a cataracted view of the contemporary moment make Dylan the most responsive artist of his time. In the pensive minor chords of “The Ballad of the Thin Man,” Dylan sings:

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You raise up your head

And you ask, ‘Is this where it is?’

And somebody point to you and says,

‘It's his.’

And you say, ‘What's mine?’

And somebody else says, ‘Where what is?’

And you say, ‘Oh my God,

Am I here all alone?’

 

As Dylan struggles to come to terms with the chaos, criminality, and pain of America in the mid-60s, we might recall Rahner standing alone in the crowded bomb shelter.  "Oh my God, am I here all alone?" Like Rahner, Dylan is existentially attuned to the awesomeness, and horrors, of gazing into the endless horizon. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman, the child of Jews who escaped eastern European pogroms only to end up isolated and poor in the stifling ordinariness of the American Midwest in the early 1900s. The boy from Hibbing constructs himself out of Americana and the need to shout into the vastness of creation. What's mine? Where what is?

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As Dylan struggles to come to terms with the chaos, criminality, and pain of America in the mid-60s, we might recall Rahner standing alone in the crowded bomb shelter.  "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"

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Dylan makes of God a personification. In the crashing characterization which marks a key storytelling element of Dylan's music, God's menace is always tempered with a wry sense of humor. Dylan trips and skips through the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, having been raised in a tight-knit community of Jewish refugees and later experiencing a personal, and perhaps narratival, conversion to Evangelical Christianity. In the song "Tombstone Blues," for instance, a torturer named John the Baptist, a nun named Jezebel, the king of the Philistines, and Delilah rub expository shoulders. Biblical characters often stand in for political figures and popular personages in Dylan's music. Matching these religious allusions to actual people is the work of a vast network of Dylan scholars and fans. Is John the thief torturer an oblique reference to Lyndon Johnson or Lee Harvey Oswald? Is the turn of phrase “Jezebel the nun” purely for irony’s sake, or did Dylan have an actual woman in mind? But God is always God for Dylan.

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In the title track "Highway 61 Revisited," Dylan writes:

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Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’

Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin' me on.’

God say, ‘No.’ Abe say, ‘What?’

God say, ‘You can do what you want Abe, but

The next time you see me comin' you better run.’

 

Abraham is free to do as he chooses, but the ability to choose does not release him from accountability. Dylan is a poet of the tragic; often choices lead to terrible consequences. Responsibility to make a choice, however, is never elided because, for Dylan, this is where story comes from. It should not escape our attention that Abe's question, "What?," goes unanswered. God is not there to give answers, but to provide choices and provoke us into making ultimate decisions.

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The final two songs of Highway 61 Revisited, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" and "Desolation Row," are riddled with religious symbolism and allusions. "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is written in the second person where the addressee, "you," is met in Eastertime and asked to tell Saint Annie, "Thanks a lot."   Saint Annie may be Saint Anne, the sainted mother of Mary, or an ironic way to characterize someone named Annie who is, as it were, less than saintly. In either case, the message of "Thanks a lot" is taken as an ironic statement attesting to the condition of the narrator caught in the grip of transience and desperation. Later, Dylan writes:

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And picking up Angel who

Just arrived here from the coast

Who looked so fine at first

But left looking just like a ghost

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It is left ambiguous whether, through the twists of the narrative, you have been transformed into Angel–but exposure to the life of addiction has left you ghostly in appearance. And just like Tom Thumb, you are somehow smaller than you ought to be, less able to impact the world or fulfill the promise of the well-being and goodness embodied by the arrival of the angel. Dylan points to death without resurrection. Saint Annie has introduced you, and perhaps "us" if the narrator is included, into a world unable to lift itself to the heights of purpose represented by the religious impulse. We are reduced to a ghostlike momentariness which only engages with the now in a passing way. The angelic and the ghostly represent a dynamic pair constitutive of what it means to live in an America on the edge of earth-shattering assassinations and never-ending wars.

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Similarly, in "Desolation Row," the final song of the album, Dylan continues his journey through the nowness of American life via characters whose familiarity has slipped the bonds of the purely biblical and allowed them to enter the national religious consciousness. Dylan writes:

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All except for Cain and Abel

And the hunchback of Notre Dame

Everybody is making love

Or else expecting rain

And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing

He's getting ready for the show

He's going to the carnival tonight

On Desolation Row

 

There is an analogical language, unique to the 1960s, which seeps into Dylan's words: rain is a placeholder for the continual possibility of nuclear fallout. Desolation Row stands for a carnivalesque atmosphere of otherworldliness and oddity representing an America bursting at the seams in a time of ragged desperation. Cain and Abel, the ur-murderer and the devout victim, along with the romantic outcast of Notre Dame, live outside the need to revel in the concerns of the age. But the Good Samaritan's metaphorical existence is dependent on responding to the needs of those affected by violence and contempt. For Dylan, there is an inescapably performative aspect to those committed to the needs of others– the ethical response to the other is part of what it means to engage in the act of self-creation. Robert Zimmerman must get dressed and ready for the show at the end of the long journey down the highway to the desolation awaiting the world at the end of a new age of war.

 

Rahner and Dylan are not accidental dialogue partners in this essay. I find important and potent relationships between how they publicly speak to the mysteries of God's working in our lives and in the tortured history of our humanity. For both Dylan and Rahner, actions are a public engagement with our innermost convictions. Our relations to others are not merely constitutive of expediency or social reflexes; there is a deeper meaning to how we respond to the world embedded in how we believe the world ought to be. In Rahner and Dylan, the transcendental walks among us, calling us into relation and making demands both in our conduct and in our emotional lives. God is a being who must be reckoned with.

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Often, our feelings of compassion are caught up in thoughts of deservingness. The people huddled, sheltered together in Munich, were on the wrong side of history. Why, we wonder, should we spare our emotional energy for their suffering? Just like God’s, our compassion ought not to be limited. It is an ethical duty to seek out and love humanity wherever it is found, and in whatever condition it may be in. The wonder of Highway 61 is in its ability to present humanity in so many different circumstances and to plumb the depths of that humanity for stories that invite us into relation. We are all tossed into various forms of desolation through war, various pogroms and dominations, forms of addiction and need which threaten to consume us, and bestow on us the inability to understand that everyone is owed the right to choose their own stories. For Dylan, even God is owed empathy. And if the Most High calls us into relation, how could we deny it to those who suffer as we do in the desolation of our humanity?

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Rahner refers to "spiritual sclerosis" the hardening of the heart’s arteries to the sufferings of others.   The sermons and lectures collected in On Prayer, are often condemnatory. Rahner has little patience for the self-pitying of a nation destroyed as much by its own hubris as by carpet bombings. This ought to be a teachable moment: if experience is to have meaning it must lead to a conversion of the heart. "The truth is that many of us are as though we had remained buried in the debris, because we have suffered no change of heart through having been brushed by the wing of death,"      Rahner wrote. Just as Dylan would twenty years later, Rahner insists that what makes us the most human is the ability to make concrete choices in the midst of existential and material need. Responding to lynching in “The Death of Emmett Till,” Dylan wrote:

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If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust

Your eyes are filled with dead man's dirt, your mind is filled with dust

Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it

         must refuse to flow

For you let his human race fall down so God-awful low!

 

 Who are you? What are you? Where is your heart when it is most needed by your neighbor? In the debris of consequence and immense suffering, Rahner calls the people of Munich back into relation. And this relation is not only with the world at war or the Jewish people brutalized by hatred, but also with a God whose transcendence is always grounded in the lives of those in the most need. You can do what you want, but God will not be denied; the order of love and justice will come to pass.

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"Unless it is set free by God into that infinite freedom wherein alone it can realize itself, our heart becomes hedged in by mean limitations, by suffering, by hopelessness, by the daily commonplaces that chain us down...the heart then begins to feed upon itself."     Highway 61 Revisited remains a wonder of the power of storytelling. Over a half-century since its release, Dylan urges us  to explore who we are and what sorts of humanity ought to be our concern. Rahner warns of the heart hemmed in by suffering and hopelessness reduced to the commonplace; the music of Bob Dylan in its jumble and imagery gives us a way to see the commonplace through the amazement of narrative. Stories give us access to lives we would never encounter–ways of being outside of the limitations set by time, space, and the dominations of a broken world. Hans-Georg Gadamer calls this the "fusion of horizons": empathy, compassion, and understanding for others broaden who we are and the ethical dimensions of our duties. Dylan frames this broadening of the self as a journey down the highway connecting who we are with who we are meant to be. God is on this highway, waiting for us within the narratives of others.

 

In the essay “On the Need and Blessing of Prayer,” Karl Rahner writes, "We know we are suspended over the abyss of our nothingness by a thread of the mercy of God, and that we cling to that mercy. We seek only such light and strength as will enable us to persevere in prayer, lest our courage should fail us and our prayer turn to ashes in our mouth."     Part of Rahner's understanding of God infusing the world and our very being, is the responsibility not only to act and to die for the oppressed, but also, to suffer with those trapped on the underside of history. Jesus’ mission is to those brought low by the world, the Good News is their redemption from the domination of those who refuse to see their humanity. This is a Christology which insists that the crucifixion is a persistent act–a persistent indwelling of prayer both within and toward the transcendental horizon of God's will and presence. Such an act is, by its very definition, a public prayer–an invitation to God's indwelling in the everydayness of our need.

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Rahner will have the last word:

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The Garden of Olives was the desolation of Christ in order that it might become the consolation of all human desolation, for Christ is the living heart of the world. Christ crushed to the earth, His sweat becoming as drops of blood trickling down unto the ground, His whole human nature shrinking from the agony upon which He had entered, is the God-Man forcing Himself to make a human prayer. In the silence of the Garden, Christ knelt alone, His whole being filled with the darkness of a seeming abandonment by the Father. Yet, overcoming the shrinking fear of His human mature, and with immense courage, He prayed: "Not my will but thine be done."

 

Oh my God, am I here all alone? No, because the act of relation, of embracing the narratives of others and taking responsibility for the knowledge which emerges from such an embrace, is what speaking of God looks like in public. Compassion rescues all of us from desolation.