It was just what I needed. Exhausted from creating and hosting the First Annual Anti-Communist Film Festival, I saw a live music notice. Robert Lighthouse, a Swedish blues singer, was playing at Hank Dietle’s tavern, a juke joint in Maryland. Dietle’s was described by writer Eddie Dean: “The bar is a dimly lit, one-room, linoleum-floored clubhouse with dark wood-paneled walls cheered by strings of low-watt holiday bulbs. The feel is midcentury rec-room deluxe, a cozy time capsule from the era when Elvis dwelt among us.”
Perfect. A dude from Sweden with a guitar singing Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and R.L. Burnside. I was feeling vulnerable, but not in a bad or desperate way. I’d put a huge amount of work into the film festival, managing licensing, promotional material and blog posts, and staying in a cheap and scary old hotel because I wasn’t being paid. I needed some soul and TLC. Music that was gentle in a place full of people who are the same. There was too much rage online, too many hysterical leftists and too many people on the right ranting about Jews and calling for televised public executions. I needed the restorative humanity blues.
I arrived early for Lighthouse’s five p.m. set. When Lighthouse, a skinny and handsome man in his 60s, appeared at the front door, I offered to help with his gear. “Sure,” he said with a smile. “There’s an amp in the back seat of my car.” I brought it in. I’d been familiar with Hank Dietle’s, built in 1950, from the time I was in high school in the 1980s.
Lighthouse’s set was wonderful, with songs by Blind Willie Johnson, Memphis Minnie, R.L Burnside, Dylan and the highlight, James Brown’s “This is a Man’s World.” Lighthouse’s Swedish accent worked in his favor, making him sound original—and vulnerable. He was funny, joking about how his left-leaning song "If I Were President" went over differently the further South he went.
After the set, I sat with Lighthouse on the porch of the roadhouse, talking about the blues, God and watching the cars glide by on Rockville Pike. “I was born two weeks after ‘She Loves You’ was released by the Beatles in 1964,” he said. “I grew who with the Beatles, and then rock like Deep Purple. Then when I was a teenager I met a friend who had played with Muddy Waters. I listened to Muddy Watters and the folk records made by Alan Lomax, and that was it.” Lighthouse picked up a guitar, studied the blue masters, and came to America at 18 and started touring the South.
We talked about the blues as an art form that’s about life’s truths, from love to suffering to drinking and joy. It’s like what Stanley Crouch said about jazz: “A way to deal with adversity with grace.”
Lighthouse rolled a cigarette while I drank a non-alcoholic beer. I thought about the Jesuits next door at Georgetown Prep and Kenneth Tanner’s new book Vulnerable God: How Jesus Upends Our Assumptions About God—and Shows Us How to Be Human. Tanner explores how the vulnerability of Christ is essential to his being God:
Some speak of the cross in ways we can and should forget, a cross that is a brief stop of surrender and selflessness on a violent crusade toward a “greatness” that makes Jesus a kind of forever Caesar. In this scenario, Christ’s “humility” leads to an eternal tyranny, to world domination without end. Jesus dies precisely as God in God’s fullness, as the first of us to become fully and finally human, not as a tyrant but as an afflicted servant-king, for only the wounded God can save and rule the world. It takes the whole dangerous road to and through death to become human; surviving isn’t part of the equation for this kind of love—resurrection is. Self-defense doesn’t come into it, not even when the moment of truth comes. God’s self-giving love will not be and need not be shielded from our violence. Bearing wounds in powerlessness is the very nature of this human God—the nature of any greatness.
In his recent book The Moral Life, the priest James Keenan, SJ. argues that vulnerability is crucial to a Christian life. We’re not meant to ever fully recover from grief, Keenan writes, because grief a sign of abiding love. It keeps alive our love for the person we have lost: “Entrance into grief is not solely an encounter with absence but with presence as well.”
Grief makes us vulnerable, which is the opening to Christ. When Mark and the disciples were grieving in the Upper Room over the death of Jesus, it was their vulnerability that the Lord choose as the time to return to them. Jesus arrived when they were at their most defenseless and open. Grief, Fr. Keenan observes, “opens the door” for us to minister to others and share the love of Jesus. When the disciples went to the Upper Room to mourn Jesus, their tears, stories and pain weren’t a hindrance to their connection to God, but a vital doorway through which Jesus could enter. Keenan: “Their grief was not an obstacle to their capacity to see Jesus but rather the passageway itself.”