Wasting Away Again in Mordorvitaville

Margaritaville, Middle-earth, and the Meaning of Mortality

One cannot imagine Jimmy Buffett and J. R. R. Tolkien in a room together, sharing a “cheeseburger in paradise” at The Eagle and Child. Tolkien was drawn to “northernness,” to Icelandic myths and elvish languages. Buffett captured the breezy exuberance of Caribbean rum. And yet both merged without rancor into my life from childhood on, somewhere between Middle-earth and Margaritaville.

And then last week, Jimmy Buffett died—on the 50th anniversary of the death of Tolkien. Both of them, I think, have something to remind us about the meaning of mortality.

As I’ve written here before, my wife often tells people that if they really want to know me, they should know that my most listened-to artist is not who they think it is (Johnny Cash); it’s Jimmy Buffett.

That makes sense, of course. Buffett was from Pascagoula, Mississippi, a couple of towns over from my hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. Buffett and I both went, a generation apart, to the University of Southern Mississippi. Though, his biographer Ryan White notes that he spent more time where the action was: in New Orleans “and its scrappier Gulf Coast neighbor—Biloxi,” a city that White describes as having “scars and a temper and ill-considered tattoos.”

I don’t have much of a temper, and have no tattoos, but the description isn’t really wrong. When Buffett sings “Biloxi,” I feel like I’m home.

My wife says what’s really telling is that the songs I listen to over and over again aren’t the “Don’t Chu-Know” type of cruise-ship party songs. What resonates with me is the melancholy, moody Jimmy Buffett. The songs that have made up my life include “He Went to Paris,” “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” and “Death of an Unpopular Poet,” all of which deal with the fragility of life and the inevitability of death, along with “One Particular Harbour,” “When the Coast Is Clear,” and “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” all of which capture a kind of longing for a just-out-of-reach home.

On a superficial level, Jimmy Buffett music can seem like the opposite of a counting of one’s days. Instead, it can seem like a perpetual adolescence that uses fun to pretend that death will never come—what Blaise Pascal called the kind of “diversions” we employ to divert our consciences from judgment.

That might be an accurate reading of many Jimmy Buffett fans, but not an accurate reading of Jimmy Buffett himself. In “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” for example, Buffett showed the dark side of the aftermath of a life of diversion—of feeling “drowned” and out of place in life. In fact, as White points out, “Margaritaville” only sounds light and fun because Buffett’s the one singing it; the lyrics themselves are less a lifestyle celebration than the kind of cautionary tale one might hear in Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” or George Jones’s “Still Doing Time.”

For someone born on Christmas Day, Buffett had complicated feelings about Jesus. Reacting against what he saw as a cold, judgmental, hypocritical Bible Belt religion, Buffett described his beliefs as a California-like Zen Buddhist pluralism. That doesn’t mean, though, that he escaped any sense of sin and judgment. In fact, “He Went to Paris” is a kind of secularized Judgment Day—the accounting of a human life from youth to death, of someone who was “looking for answers / To questions that bothered him so.”

The same is true with a song he wrote about a life lived on the road, “Stories We Could Tell”:

All the stories we could tell

If it all blows up and goes to hell

I wish that we could sit upon the bed in some motel

Listen to the stories we could tell

Stories only last a little longer than the storyteller, though—unless there’s a bigger Story behind it all. Perhaps that’s why we can see shadows of Eden lurking in Buffett’s lyrics, along with a realization that the shadow of death is still there, that there must be, in some way, a Fall (some people claim that there’s a woman to blame, but I know it’s humanity’s own fault).

Buffett sings in “Son of a Son of a Sailor”:

Where it all ends I can’t fathom my friends
If I knew I might toss out my anchor

So I cruise along always searchin’ for songs

Not a lawyer a thief or a banker

But a son of a son, son of a son,

Son of a son of a sailor

Now, again, I would hardly expect Tolkien to have been anything but horrified by Jimmy Buffett. He was irritated enough when the Daily Telegraph described C. S. Lewis as “ascetic.” “He put away three pints in a very short session we had this morning, and he said he was ‘going short for Lent,’” Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher.

I think Tolkien would have recognized nonetheless how Buffett’s songs are shot through with a kind of longing for Eden. Again to Christopher, Tolkien wrote that, while he saw Genesis as a different type of history than other accounts, he nonetheless believed that Eden did, in fact, exist. “We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile,” Tolkien wrote.

In his “happier” songs, Buffett sang about his own kind of Shire—of islands, not highlands. But even so, his fuller work seems to recognize the truth of what Frodo said, when he headed home after all that had happened: “There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?” In other words, “A Hobbit Looks at Eleventy.”

Those wounds are, in fact, unhealable, but only within the confines of the story. What Tolkien knew, and what Buffett seemed to want to be true, is that the longings themselves point beyond what we can find—whether sailing under the Southern Cross or dancing under fireworks in Hobbiton. Changes in latitudes can force changes in attitudes, but only when the latitudes give way to something beyond what we can find on a map.

Like Buffett, I’ve read lots of books about heroes and crooks, and learned much from both of their styles. One never knows what happens in the last moments of a man’s life, but I hope that Jimmy Buffett found the answers to the questions that bothered him so. I hope that he could see, even from southeast of disorder, that there’s a Father who welcomes home his children—even a prodigal son of a son of a sailor. That Father is preparing a party beyond the imaginations of this life.

I don’t know if Jimmy Buffett ever found that, but I know that you can.

Can you hear the call to a wedding feast, an invitation to walk down the road to the party at the Father’s house? Maybe the time to seek out that eternal party is now. Life is fragile and short, but, well, it’s five o’clock Somewhere.

What the Church Can Learn from Songwriting

In my book Losing Our Religion, I introduce the concept of revival with a look at the music subgenre of outlaw country. As I noted there, the same principles come from countless genres—jazz, blues, the list goes on and on. And that list includes the late Jimmy Buffett.

Buffett was different from Waylon and Willie and the boys, but he, like they, were out of step with the so-called “Nashville Sound,” the sort of music expected from industry executives to make it on the radio.

Journalist Ryan White, in his (excellent) Buffett biography I’ve already mentioned, noted that Buffett tried to make the industry happy, but he couldn’t. As long as he tried to keep meeting those expectations, he couldn’t succeed—and even if he had succeeded in getting on the radio, he would’ve been just one more one- or two- or three-hit wonder. He wouldn’t have been Jimmy Buffett.

Buffett decided, as he would later sing, that “if it suddenly ended tomorrow I could somehow adjust to the fall.” So he started doing the kind of music that resonated with him, the sort of music he was made to do.

“He’d played to nearly empty rooms and done multiple sold-out nights,” White writes. “He’d built a loyal little following around the country. He was a cult act and he was perfectly happy about it. Should it change, well, what would they do if he just sailed away?”

“Buffett had once been too country for New York and Los Angeles, and not country enough for Nashville,” White continues. Buffett “tried to be something other than himself,” but gave up and began singing for his Parrot Heads—the term used to refer to Buffett’s followers. “And then he became a genre unto himself. The industry finally came around. … While Music Row was booking beach vacations, Buffett was busying himself being Buffett.”

That’s the irony of it all. All of these art forms were “outlaw” because they didn’t meet expectations. Jazz wasn’t the symphony. Blues wasn’t the choir. Willie Nelson wouldn’t wear rhinestone. In every one of these cases, the “outlaws” actually weren’t doing anything rebellious. They were writing and singing the way they did not because they hated their genres but because they loved them. They tapped into an even older tradition (“Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” Waylon sang) and thus renewed it for a new generation.

The church isn’t an art form, and discipleship isn’t song-writing, but revival is awfully close to the dynamic I just described. Revival is almost never just the status quo with bigger numbers. And it’s also not the sort of flattening out that tries to take the strangeness out of the gospel (as did, say, Protestant modernism of the twentieth century). In almost every case, revival starts with a group of outliers who reconnect with something very ancient, but something the powers-that-be often don’t think is the way things should be done.

Justification by faith won’t build St. Peter’s Cathedral the way indulgences can, but Luther preached it anyway. The necessity of personal regeneration doesn’t fit with a respectably established state church, but the Wesleys advocated for it anyway. Nonviolence was no match for an entrenched political structure in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia, but King and Lewis modeled it anyway. That’s how it happens—over and over and over again.

If we can see the way this works in something as relatively trivial as popular culture, why can’t we see the infinitely more thrilling way that renewal happens when it comes to more ultimate things?

Don’t Abandon AIDS Victims in Africa

Last year, we lost my friend Michael Gerson. Mike was a committed Christian and served as speechwriter for former president George W. Bush. One of the passions of his life was what was almost inarguably the most life-saving initiative of the recent past—PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

A while back, my CT colleague Emily Belz wrote about how some individuals and groups would like to see PEPFAR defunded, seeing fighting reauthorization of this program as a “pro-life” matter.

I am, as you know, a committed pro-lifer. I’ve worked in that space—both in legislation and in ministry—for over 30 years. As Roman Catholic medical missionary Richard Bauer wrote in The New York Times, there has been no change to the way that PEPFAR has operated from the very beginning. The Hyde Amendment applies to it as it always has (and always should), prohibiting any funds to be used for abortion. No one has given the least bit of evidence that any organization has violated that law. What has been shown is that 25 million lives have been saved through this program.

A pro-life vision only makes sense when it recognizes some fundamental truths—people are worth more than their perceived usefulness, and even the most vulnerable lives are worth saving. As I’ve written here before, a pro-life ethic cannot co-exist with a culture of cruelty or nihilism.

We disagree on a lot of things in American society, including things that were, just a few years ago, unthinkable as points of debate. One thing we’ve been able to agree on—Democrats and Republicans, progressives, centrists, and conservatives—is that it makes sense on humanitarian, economic development, and national security grounds to make resources available to save human lives in Africa from this dread disease. And unlike a lot of governmental and non-governmental initiatives that have been tried and discarded, this one actually works.

I pray that Congress does the right thing, and doesn’t pull the plug on a program saving lives. I also pray that we will have a culture in which vulnerable human lives—AIDS victims, pregnant women in crisis and their unborn children—are valued as worth more than statistics.

Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Catherine Parker from South Bend, Indiana. Here’s her list:

“Play Me” by Neil Diamond
“Dona Nobis Pacem” by Guilio Caccini, arr. by James A. Moore
“Sheep May Safely Graze” by J. S. Bach
“Come Live With Me” by Ray Charles
“Agnus Dei” by Samuel Barber
“Graceland,” by Paul Simon
“Ave Maria” by Guilio Caccini
“Dawn” by Dario Marianelli
“September” by Earth, Wind & Fire
“Cavelleria Rusticana: Intermezzo” by Pietro Mascagni
“Home” by Michael Bublé
“Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber

Thank you, Catherine!

Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together

Send your list (or both lists!) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like.

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Onward,
Russell Moore