Cash: The Autobiography (23 page)

tion was rejected “on moral grounds.” I raged at the walls and ceilings for a while, and then I called Carl and raged at him, telling him I never wanted to hear another word from him about the Masons as long as I lived. I haven't. I don't know. Maybe I'd have made a good Mason. I'm flipping pages to 1976, seeing a long European tour, a Lionel Train commercial, a Billy Graham crusade, a Youth for Christ benefit in Sacramento, a Bob Luman session at the House of Cash, a commercial for Victoria Station, another free concert in Davenport, Iowa, for another preacher who talked me into it, and concerts, concerts, concerts: the Indiana State Fair, the Nebraska State Fair, the South Dakota State Fair; Toronto, St. Paul, Wolf Trap—altogether, fifty-two paying performances in the first half of the year. For the Bicentennial I went to the nation's capital, where I gave a concert at the Washing- ton Monument and then rang the replica of the Liberty Bell, which was Great Britain's bicentennial gift to the United States, swinging that clapper two hundred times in front of a huge, happy crowd in the light of the rockets' red, white, and blue glare. The bell had a very good tone. Even on that night, passenger flights were taking off from the Washington airport, very close to downtown, then climbing steeply on full power as they usually do in that airspace. From the crowd's perspective it seemed as if the fireworks were chasing the planes up the sky like missiles. People loved it: they laughed and cheered when- ever a rocket exploded into what looked like a direct hit. The war was over by then, of course.

You could say that the heart of this old house is in my personal private library, and you could say, too, that Pop Carter's books are the heart of that library. He began passing them along to me in the late '60s, one by one, like trail guides to the new paths I was taking, and I still use them on my voyages of discovery today. The deeper into them I go, the more I find to hold in my hand and ponder and the more to reach for on another day—an endlessly absorbing journey, rich beyond my most ambitious imagining. They're in the spirituality section of my library, next to my history and Americana shelves: The Life of Christ by Fleetwood and the same title by Farrar; The Life and Acts of Paul the Apostle by Conebere and Howsom; Lang's whole set of Bible commentaries, about thirty vol- umes; various books on various aspects of the Holy Land—its history, its archaeology, its horticulture—and many others in a similar vein. They're all showing their age, and they have that old-book smell, which you'd expect since the very newest of them date from before Pop Carter's death more than twenty years ago now, but they're not dusty. I read them. I never tire of learning about the lives and times of the early Christians, the cus- toms and traditions of the Palestinian Jews, the politics of the Roman Empire, and the trials of Christ's church in its first century. I've often found strength in the faith and courage of some of those early church fathers who kept the Word alive for us and refused to reject the Gospel in the face of torture and execution. Pop Carter was the one who really got me going on Bible study. I liked him a great deal, and learned a great deal from him in the days after I came out of Nickajack Cave. A self-taught theologian and dedicated scholar, he was also a warm and caring man with a lot of good com- mon sense, and he made a great instructor and discussion

partner, feeding and stimulating the hunger for spiritual truths that led me after a while into more formal Bible scholarship through correspondence courses. June and I both enrolled in a study program, and for three years we spent much of our time on airplanes, in hotels, and on the bus doing our lessons. We both graduated. I can't speak for June, but for me the experience was both exciting and humbling; I learned just enough to understand that I knew almost nothing. The spiritual well is so deep and unfathomable, but some beautiful water flows out of it. That's partly what John Carter and I had in mind when we wrote “Waters from the Wells of Home.” The song wasn't just literal (though it was that too). As I stroll along the road to freedom Like a gypsy in a gilded cage My horizons have not always been bright, But that's the way that dreams are made. Days all seem to run together Like a timeless honeycomb; I find myself wishing I could drink again Water from the wells of home. I've seen all the shining cities Lean against a yellow sky; I've seen the down and out get better, I've seen many a strong man die. Oh, the troubled hearts and worried minds And things that I've been shown Keep me always returning To the water from the wells of home. Always pray to go back someday To the water from the wells of home. By John R. Cash and John Carter Cash, © 1987 Songs of Cash, Inc., and Auriga Ra Music

I believe that God's will for me is that I be content, even happy, and I know from experience that I'm happi- est when I'm closest to Him, so it's no mystery why Bible study pleases me so. It's one of the ways I get to the well. I don't feel any shame about my past today, but I do have some regrets about the time I've wasted, and one of the ways I work on that is to have a Bible next to me when I turn my TV on. I'm a channel surfer, so I flip through whatever's on, looking for something that grabs me—usually on A&E, CNN, PBS, the Discovery Channel, or the History Channel. But I've trained myself to turn the TV off right away if I don't find anything and pick up my Bible, either the old King James or the New Inter- national Version. I find a passage in one version that intrigues me and pick up the other to see how it's worded there; then I chase it down in one or more of the com- mentaries until I find what it really means. Once I learned what the Bible is—the inspired Word of God (most of it, anyway)—the writing became precious to me, and endlessly intriguing. Every scripture has a realistic interpretation, but finding its spiritual interpretation is truly exciting. Some- times, I'll suddenly understand that something I've been hearing all my life has a deeper, more beautiful meaning than I'd ever realized. That's a thrill, and more: usually at such moments I've just learned something new about how we humans are, and how to live in this world. Here at Bon Aqua or at home in Hendersonville, I start most of my mornings with coffee, then CNN, and then the Bible, and that sets me up for a good day. On the road the habit is harder to keep, but usually I have a King James by my side on the bus, and wherever I am I have my Franklin Electronic Bible in my briefcase. That's a wonderful tool—just punch in what you're looking for, hit “Enter,” and there's the scripture you want. I'm the spokesman for that product, and anything good you hear me say about it you can believe. At home my most-used tool is the Thompson Chain Reference system.

These days the man I go to for advice and inspiration in Bible study is Jack Shaw, a friend who's a minister in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Sometimes we talk for a long time. Sometimes I call him and just say, “Hey, Jack, what's the good word for today?” and he reads me a scripture he's been thinking about, then sends me off to chase it down in the commentaries. He's by no means the only man of God who's helped me over the years: the Reverend John Colbaugh, now preaching in Louisiana, became a close friend and anchor in the storm during my first years in Hendersonville. The Reverend Harry Yates, my sister Joanne's husband, is a great man to talk to on matters of the spirit, and so is Joanne herself; she's earned a master's degree in theology in recent years. And of course the Reverend Jimmy Snow, to whose Nashville congregation June and I belonged for several years, was and is a great preacher and teacher. It seems to me that God has always sent such people into my life just when I needed them. If Sam Phillips at Sun Records and George Bates at the Home Equipment Company back in my Memphis days were angels in dis- guise, my reverend friends have been angels in the open, obvious even to me. The movie Gospel Road, as I've said, was the most ambi- tious project I've ever attempted. Its seed was planted during a vacation June and I took in Israel in 1966, and it grew in the period after I came out of Nickajack Cave, when I was most intensely involved in Bible study. The works I was reading, especially the nineteenth-century commentaries from “The Age of Higher Enlightenment,” as they called it—and novels too: The Robe, Quo Vadis, The Silver Chalice, Pillar of Iron—drew me so power- fully into the story of Christ's three-year ministry on earth that I began to feel almost compelled to retell the story in my own words. I began writing with no clear pic- ture of where I was going or what, if anything, I would do with the result.

The idea of going to Israel and making a movie emerged one morning when June woke up and told me about a dream she'd had in which she saw me on a moun- taintop in the Holy Land, talking about Jesus. That seemed like a sign—one of many—and so I set to work. I enlisted the help of Larry Murray, my friend and the cowriter with Merle Travis of my TV show's “Ride This Train” segments, and we started working up a screenplay from the outline I'd been writing. It was finished in the fall of 1971. In late November of that year we set off for Israel to make a 16-millimeter, semidocumentary movie of the life of Christ, shooting wherever possible in the places where the events depicted actually took place. We were stepping out on blind faith, using our own money and resources, with no outside sponsorship or any arrangements for distribution of the film. We took almost forty people with us, just about everybody who worked for me in the music business, and while many of them volunteered their time, I paid everyone's travel and room and board. I was more than happy to do so; a lot of money was coming through the door in those days, and I literally couldn't think of any better way to spend it. We shot in Israel for thirty days with two cameras running almost all the time—a nightmare at editing time—and for me those days were intense and exciting Much of what happened was self-evidently true, but it seemed strange; mysterious, often almost magical. There was nothing big, just a succession of little things, almost every day. When we were filming on Mount Arabel, overlooking Galilee, June came up to me as I worked and said, “This is the mountain I dreamed about; this is where I saw you talking about Jesus.” When we got to the Church of the Beatitudes, which we'd been told was closed, the custodian was there with the key; he'd just had a feeling, he said, that somebody was going to need to film in the church, so he'd come and

waited for us. And while it didn't rain for twenty-nine of our thirty days in the Holy Land, it did rain a little, just enough, on the only day when we needed it to, just as we were shooting the scene in which Jesus calms the storm on the Sea of Galilee. Every way we turned, doors opened—some that had been closed, some we didn't even know were there. We had some wonderful helpers. Joe Jahshan, from Jerusalem, one of our driver/guides, was plugged in with all kinds of offices of the Israeli government, and even though his car had license plates identifying him as an Arab, he could go anywhere and get anything done. He is a great man; John Carter grew so fond of him on later visits to Israel that he and Mary named their firstborn son, Joseph, after him. Our other driver, Shraga—Ben Joseph—was Jewish and had fought in the army. He was good at getting us into restricted areas like the Golan Heights, where the fiercest battles of the Six-Day War had been fought. We found actors as easily as everything else. In need of twelve disciples, we placed an ad in the Jerusalem Post detailing our requirements, and on the appointed day about fifty young men gathered in the lobby of our hotel. They were a highly unusual collection of individuals— Swedes, Danes, Germans, Swiss, French, British, Ameri- cans, dropouts and draft resisters, seekers and adventur- ers and escapees from something or other, some of them half starved and sleeping in the streets, none of them with money or means—and it wasn't hard at all to find the faces of our disciples in their ranks. One was obviously James, another John, that one Matthew, this one Mark. The young man who seemed like Peter turned out, most fortunately, to be a professional actor, Paul Smith, and did a fine job. We were well satisfied with the men we chose; they all did right by us in Jericho, in Nazareth, everywhere. Both Larry Murray and our director, Bob Elstrom,

did great work in Israel, and Bob and his editors per- formed virtual miracles in the editing room later, turning immense amounts of footage, much of it more or less improvised from day to day on location, into a coherent work. So despite the odds, it worked; it really did. The film is still out there doing its job today, circulated by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The other project to come out of my Bible study was my novel, Man in White. The last of my correspondence courses was on the life of St. Paul the Apostle, who fasci- nated me greatly, and eventually the thought occurred to me that I could do with his story what I'd done with that of Jesus in Gospel Road: tell it my way for my own ben- efit and that of anyone else who might be interested. Writing a novel was something I'd never done, so that's the form I chose. It took me a long time, years and years during which my energies focused for a spell, then went somewhere else—music, drug abuse—but I kept at it, and eventually I finished it and got it published in 1986, which made me the first published novelist in the family (though neither the last nor, I expect from what I read of Rosanne's work, the most celebrated). The title Man in White comes from Paul's vision on the road to Damascus, the event that turned his life toward Christ. As with Gospel Road, the process of creating it and making it public was deeply rewarding and fulfilling for me. It was like giving back a little of what the story of Paul had given me. Paul fascinated me so because, as well as experienc- ing such a dramatic conversion, he endured such trials of faith—he was shipwrecked, beaten with rods, thrown in boiling oil, snake-bitten, stoned, and left for dead—but he was still able to say, “In any situation I find myself in, I am content because of Jesus Christ.” I wanted some of that. Also interesting, for me at least, were the parallels

between Paul and myself. He went out to conquer the world in the name of Jesus Christ; we in the music busi- ness, or at least those of us with my kind of drive, want our music heard all over the world. He was a man who always had a mission, who would never stop, who was always going here, going there, starting this, planning that; a life of ease and retirement wasn't on his agenda, just as it isn't on mine. I'm much more interested in keep- ing on down the roads I know and whatever new ones might reveal themselves to me, trying to tap that strength Paul found: the power of God that's inside me, that's tnere for me if only I seek it.