The Gospel of the Grateful Dead

A Worship Service conceived and offered at Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church – June 22nd, 2008

Gathering Hymn:

Birdsong by Jerry Garcia & Robert Hunter

Call to Worship:
Lemme hear you say: PRAISE THE SPIRIT!

Today we are gonna talk about all kinds of spirit.

We’re gonna talk about wandering and grateful spirits.

We’re gonna talk about the spirit of music! (One special kind of music!)

And we’re gonna talk about our holiest spirit: the Spirit of this Life!

Can I hear you say: PRAISE THE SPIRIT?

You are alive!

In this place.

On this day.

The Sun is shining. The solstice has (rather belatedly, to us in North Texas) trumpeted the arrival of summer.

Come: Let us share this morning, this music, this spirit, with grateful and open hearts.

Come: Let us worship together!

Opening Hymn
Sugar Magnolia by Robert Hunter & Bob Weir

A Story For All Ages:
The Swedish folktale of Pippin, King of the Franks (See Grateful Dead Folktales by Bob Franzosa)

Singing Out the Children:
Not Fade Away – (singalong) written by Charles (Buddy Holly) Hadin and Norman Petty

Pastoral Prayer:
Please bow your heads: Gracious and everlasting spirit of many names, we hold these spoken joys and sorrows in our hearts, as sign of the covenant of our community. We also pray for all those intentions left unspoken. Let us also remember and reflect on those times when we have forgotten our covenant with the world, and with each other, that we gain the wisdom to hold our covenant sacred and true.

Finally, we ask to be always open to the miraculous grace and challenges that we share in this life together. AMEN

Pastoral Hymn:
Going Down the Road Feeling Bad – traditional words & music

Reading:
This reading is reportedly an entry from Volume 1 of the 1955 Edition of the Funk & Wagnall’s New Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language

Grateful Dead:
The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begins with the hero’s coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny, either to pay the man’s debts or to give him decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune, saves his life, etc. The story ends with the companion’s disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the other had befriended.

Offertory:
Eyes of the World – written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

Sermon:
Let’s all close our eyes and do a little guided meditation.

Please center yourself, uncross your legs, and take a deep long breath that fills your belly and exhale it alllllll the way out…

It’s a beautiful sunny day and you are walking through the vast field of cars. The glorious sunlit warmth glows upon the side of your face. You feel the satisfying crunch – crunch – crunch of the loose gravel paving, as you make your way across the field, zigging and zagging between the cars, trucks, and vans that fill the field.

As you walk you hear snippets of music being played.

A car radio here.

A guitar strum there.

Far off to the right you here the rhythmic throb of what sounds like a LOT of drums being played.

On the left you hear a young woman laugh.

As you continue to walk, you smell a heady indescribable mix of fragrances that swirl around you and pass. Some lingering, some flitting by so quickly you can barely imagine them.

You smell sweet grass… and flowers… and incense… and car exhaust…. A whiff of patchouli oil…

You hear the sizzle of food cooking, and the smell of cumin… soy sauce… vegetables…

And soap… and also musky human bodies, and a certain unmistakable sweet skunky herbal scent….

Up ahead you hear the hopeful cry of voices calling “I need a miracle!” and “Kine veggie burritos”

As the drums grow closer, and louder.

Not too far off, you begin to hear the sound of electric guitars being tuned and sound levels being adjusted and what sounds like a BIG gathering of humanity, as you hear a man loudly repeating:

“PLEASE HAVE YOUR TICKETS OUT!”

You can come back to this room…

In 1965, a group of Northern California musicians, Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzman, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and Bob Weir, calling themselves the Warlocks were on the cusp of a record contract when they discovered: somebody HAD that name!

As legend has it, while at bassist Phil Lesh’s house, Jerry Garcia picked up a 1955 Funk & Wagnall’s New Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language and read the words GRATEFUL DEAD.Nobody really liked it, but nobody could really shake it.

And it stuck.

As we heard earlier, the Grateful Dead is a folktale motif that is found in many cultures around the world. We heard a Swedish version in A Story For All Ages. The Book of Tobit, part of the Apocrypha (the books that my beloved Christians can’t all agree on) is a tale of the Grateful Dead.

Tobit was an obedient and pious Jew who always did his best to follow the law. He made his pilgrimages to Jerusalem and paid his tithes to the priests and for widows and orphans.

And Tobit buried people, his country men, who were killed by the oppressive king. He stole their bodies from the king and buried them. For crossing the king, he was forced to flee. And, through a tragic bird-dropping accident in the night, he was struck blind.

In Tobit’s case, the Grateful Dead came in the form of the Angel Raphael who, in human form, helped Tobit’s son, Tobias, win the lovely Sarah and restore order in Tobit’s household, including returning Tobit’s sight.

Sarah, of course, had her own problems: she was melancholy for the loss of her husbands.

7 of them.

In a row.

I can see why some of you may find it difficult to read the Bible…

But we really want to talk about the modern Grateful Dead, don’t we?

The Greek’s have an interesting pair of words: chronos and kairos. Chronos is time, as in “what time is it?” What is the hour?

Kairos is also a word for time, but it’s about “the right time,” as in when things are ripe for a change, a move, a jump.

I came to the Dead late in their career. I didn’t really “get” the Grateful Dead in my first two casual brushes with them. In high school, I had an encounter with their studio album “Blues for Allah.” The kairos was definitely not there.

My lovely wife (at the time my lady friend), who is Deadhead #1 in our household, also coaxed me to a Los Angeles concert of theirs in the early 90s, but having been coaxed into it mostly to fulfill HER desire to go, it didn’t stick with me.

A few years later, I drew a 6 month assignment on a theme park job in Osaka, Japan. There’s a funny thing that happens after a few months of being in a foreign culture, you start to pine a bit for things that are from your own culture. One of my fellow workers on this project had left a tape of one of their live shows (Dead Set) in our shared communal car, and the kairos apparently was ripe: this stuff sounded pretty terrific!

This is sometimes called “getting on the bus” from a famous Dead Lyric in their song The Other One: “The bus came by and I got on, that’s where it all began.” An allusion to Ken Kesey and his Merry Prankster’s psychedelic bus, Furthur, which was sometimes even parked at Grateful Dead shows.

Upon my return to the States, my future wife was dumbfounded that I had “found” the Dead on the other side of the world. So we started going to shows, which is when things really started to get interesting.

The Grateful Dead were FEARLESS. I came to understand that the chemistry that they had was seldom (if ever) something found in the recording studio, but something that they had to mix in front of a crowd. And sometimes, it didn’t mix right. They could be bad and it didn’t seem to matter, because they were chasing something different, an alternative type of excellence. It’s said they were so bad at Woodstock that they got CUT OUT OF THE MOVIE.

I hate it when the band can’t handle their high.

Most bands try to give you something that approximates the experience you got from their recorded studio albums. Oh sure, they might tart it up a bit, but they know that the average fan wants to hear the hit songs and not too fancied up, thank you very much.

The Dead never played a song the same way twice!

They were chasing a musical transcendence, and that chase could only be made if you were willing to stretch out into unplanned places. And the audience just said: We want to go with you. In fact, it often seemed like no one actually had their studio albums (or they didn’t seem to play them) as the talk was always about live tapes, amateur-recorded audience tapes, or tapes from the Dead’s infamous Vault, of all their recorded shows.

After attending a few shows, I started to understand that this was actually a thinly veiled religious experience.

Now stay with me: it’s easy to dismiss this bunch because they’re about as “other” as a comfortable suburbanite can imagine. Long hair, often scruffy, unshaven (men & women!), sometimes smelly. Dressed funny.

(One of my favorites were a certain type of Deadhead that I usually call the Renaissance People. To me they look like some serfs who have wandered out of some long ago, feudal / peasant, lifestyle. I’ve never seen where those clothes are sold; there must be a J.C. Peasant department store, that I have never heard about.)

I won’t glamorize the scene: I don’t have any illusions about the various escapist vices that people engaged in, and often to excess. There’s nothing ecstatic or transcendent about being so high you can’t move and are laid out, with your friend’s trying to drag your limp body to the Rock Med Aid Station.

But the root word of religion is religiare, which means “to bind.” And I started to see that there was an unspoken bond amongst the people at these shows. And what was amazing was what could happen (unaided by chemicals) to me at these shows.

Spalding Gray, the late, great American monologist, spoke once about being in South East Asia and trying to force himself to have a perfect moment, and finally after trying to force it — trying to will his moment into being — he decided to give up on it, and in the process found a perfect blissful moment bobbing around in the Indian Ocean. He described the feeling of the boundaries between himself and everything else fading away, and feeling at one.

And that’s the kind of feel that could sneak up on you at a Grateful Dead show. If the kairos (including your heart space) was right. You could feel an amazing slip-sliding in your focus, away from secular concerns, away from boundaries, away from all of the screwed-up world, and bask, even for a moment, in a boundless, trans-rational communion of ecstatic souls swaying in the dark night.

Or it might suck. You never knew.

What is the Good News about the Grateful Dead? In many ways I find it similar to the Good News that I see in Unitarian Universalism, or even the Good News that Jesus taught: you have a place here. You can ride this bus, all you have to do is walk this “way” with us.

And I could see why these people were literally “on the bus,” following this band wherever they went, for months and years. Not just to get high on drugs, that’s the facile explanation. Sure, there were some people for whom the scene was just about another chance to smoke pot or drop acid or imbibe the intoxicant of your choice. But I think that most of them, perhaps even those who could or would not ever verbalize such a thing, were there to chase an even greater high of that BLISS. That ecstacy, that communion. An unearned grace.

You are alive.
You didn’t choose it,
you can’t buy a 2nd one,
you can’t will it into existence.
This life, also, is an unearned grace.

On this beautiful (and hot) summer morning you are here on this bus, in this community, I think to chase after a little of that ecstasy. To search for those ecstatic moments. To go where the “chilly winds don’t blow” and “the climate suits your clothes.” And to go there with this family.

And when we can keep our covenants,
When we can remember to put aside, for a time,
all those worldly concerns,
And leave our ancient angers
and hurts at the door,
Occasionally, we’ll feel that
unearned blissful communion
slip-sliding into our lives.

May we never cease to search for that communion and may the spirit help us always to be open to the possibilities “on the bus.”

May it be so.

Closing Hymn:
Ripple – written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

Benediction:
Please bow your heads. We gather in this community to celebrate our sacred communion of souls. We pray that this communion feed and nourish us through both life’s joys and sorrows. May we walk humbly with open and grateful hearts until we meet again. The blessing of the spirit be upon you all the days of your life.

And all the people said:

PRAISE THE SPIRIT.

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