Chimes of Freedom
This summer I got a new favorite song – Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It’s not a new song; it dates from the early 1960s. It remained entirely unknown to me until a few months back at Madison Square Garden, where Bruce Springsteen used it as the final song on his Land of Hope and Dreams tour. He used it, too, on his European tour last year. I am not the only one who often prefers cover versions to Dylan himself.
Is Bob Dylan’s music a Catholic thing?
Many a homilist has quoted his 1979 song Gotta Serve Somebody, especially against the argument that unbelievers are freer because they don’t have to serve God. Dylan knew better: “It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord/ But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”
In May, for Dylan’s 85th birthday – and his own 40th anniversary of priestly ordination – Bishop Robert Barron recorded a video singing You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.
In June, Pope Leo XIV saw Barron and praised him, citing Dylan in the foreword to an anthology on peace and disarmament. He quoted from 1963 lyrics that Dylan never recorded himself, Go Away You Bomb. That’s some serious Dylanology. “As the singer-songwriter and poet Bob Dylan wrote, addressing the atomic bomb figuratively in one of his poems: ‘I hate you because man created you, and man possesses and controls you,’” wrote Pope Leo.
Then there was Dylan with St. John Paul the Great in Bologna, at the 1997 Italian Eucharistic Congress, which had a World Youth Day vibe. Invited to sing in the presence of the pope and some 300,000 young people, Dylan sang Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door and A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. After greeting the 77-year-old John Paul, he concluded with Forever Young.
John Paul was not a Dylanologist, but someone in the papal speechwriting shop thought that Dylan might have sung Blowing in the Wind.
“The answer to the questions of your life ‘is blowing in the wind’. It is true!” John Paul said. “But not in the wind which blows everything away in empty whirls, but the wind which is the breath and voice of the Spirit. . . .How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? I answer you: one! There is only one road for man and it is Christ.”
Chimes of Freedom is about taking shelter from an evening thunderstorm, watching it unfold from a doorway, likely of a church. In the darkness of the sky, the blowing rain, the ripping hail, the noisy thunder, and the flashing lightning, Dylan writes “the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder/ That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze.”
The storm represents all those beaten down by life, the lightning “flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight/ flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight/ an’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night.”
The “bells of the lightning” are “tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake/ tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked/ tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake.”
The storm rages for those the world forgets. Dylan echoes Luke 14:21, where the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind are welcomed to the master’s feast.
The “bells of lightning and its thunder” are “striking for the gentle, striking for the kind/ striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind/. . .tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts/ tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute/ tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute/ for the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit.”
Then the lightning flashes, the “chimes of freedom” – a light shining in the darkness. Dylan invites us to gaze, in the storm, “upon the chimes of freedom flashing.”
Springsteen called it “one of the greatest songs about human freedom ever written.” That’s rather extravagant, but it is a great song, and expresses a deep human truth that we were created for freedom. Long before Dylan, Pope Leo XIII called “liberty the highest of natural endowments.”
The desire remains in the heart amidst so much which conspires against freedom. Freedom can seem like a brief lightning flash across the long vale of tears.
A bright flash of human freedom was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. For its fortieth anniversary, a global concert tour was organized by Amnesty International, including Springsteen, Sting, Tracy Chapman, Joan Baez, Bono, and Roy Orbison. How to conclude, with so many stars? They could all agree on Dylan, so Chimes of Freedom was the finale.
During that summer tour, Springsteen took a solo date in East Berlin. The Communist authorities permitted a western rock star to come, hoping to placate their young people – and co-opt the star.
When Springsteen arrived for his July 19, 1988 concert, he discovered that the East Germans had billed it a “concert for Nicaragua” in support of the Sandinista regime. Springsteen insisted the East Germans remove their signs and banners. They relented, lest Springsteen refuse to perform, but instructed him firmly not to speak about politics.
“I am not for or against a government,” Springsteen said anyway. “I’ve come to play rock and roll for you, in the hope that one day all barriers will be torn down.”
The immense crowd of 300,000 – the largest of Springsteen’s career – knew exactly of which barriers he spoke. He emphasized the point by launching immediately into Chimes of Freedom: “In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched with faces hidden while the walls were tightening.”
The following year, the chimes of freedom rang out over the Berlin Wall.
The skies are darkening, and the freedom agenda of the late 1980s is in retreat. The storm is gathering again. The chimes of freedom need to flash anew.
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