Sam Cooke's Gospel: Some Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day

By Bob Schildgen

If you're looking for God—instead of howling about how you already found him, like those televangists—if you're looking for God—and there are worse ways to spend your time—listen to a few gospel songs by the great Sam Cooke—who would be 76 in a few days if he hadn't been fatally shot back in 1964, after getting into a fatal situation with a woman in a cheap motel—a tragic event Cooke himself could have written a soul-wrenching song about.

Though he is best known for brilliant pop songs like "You Send Me" and "Chain Gang," a wrenching song about oppression and enslavement, Cooke's gospel work matches them in its emotional power.

Two of his greatest gospel renditions are striking precisely because of they don't launch from pious declarations about the Lord or God or Truth or Heaven, or issue manifestos about majesty and might. They start on the ground, in the gritty suffering of ordinary people that is such a major part of the Christian gospels. The whole point of these stories, and one which is constantly forgotten, is that you don't get to the divine without doing your time in the mundane. Since Jesus was born in a barn, you would think that this message would always be foremost, but it often gets drowned out by shouts about power and glory from on high, in countless hymns like "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," which storm Heaven and bypass Earth. Well, when you conceive of your God as a military installation, you’re nowhere near the dung-heaps and dusty roads and diseases that the gospels have this Jesus wading through. You might as well be throwing dice with his executioners. And let us consider fish guts, too. Shouldn't preachers make a lot more to-do about fish guts, when some of Jesus' right-hand men were fishermen? Fish guts drying in the wind. Nets clogged with stinking scales and weeds, rope burns, pus, bilge sloshing in half-rotten boats.

Cooke's songs take us down along the rocky paths and shores, to the humblest people, while also reminding us of the remarkable role women play in the gospel stories. One of the best is a gospel piece Cooke himself wrote, "Touch the Hem of His Garment." He simply builds on the story of the gospel of a woman "having an issue of blood for twelve years":

"Oh, there was a woman in the Bible days,
she had been sick, sick so very long
but she heard about Jesus was passing by,
so she joined the gathering throng
and while she was pushing her way through,
someone asked her: 'What are you trying to do?'

Obviously the mere words on this screen can't capture the way Cooke's modulates his voice—one of the most nuanced in American music—to express the pain and desperate faith of the woman and the contempt people had for pushing her way through a crowd.

"She said:
'if I could just touch the hem of His garment
I know I'll be made whole'

"She cried:
'Oh Lord, Oh Lord and Oh Lord, Oh Lord'
Said :
'if I could just touch the hem of His garment
I know I'll be made whole' "

Cooke then goes into everyday economics, explaining in the simplest terms how the poor woman had spent herself into poverty trying to find a cure:

"Oh, She spent her money here and there
until she had no, had no more to spare,
the doctors, they'd done all they could
but their medicine would do no good.
When she touched Him The Saviour didn't see
but still He turned around and cried
'Somebody touched me'

"She said:
'It was I who just wanna touch the hem of Your garment,
I know I'll be made whole right now'

"She stood there crying:
'Oh Lord, Oh Lord and Oh Lord, Oh Lord'

"Said:
'If I could just touch the hem of His garment,
I know I'll made whole right now. ' ''

The song ends there, although the biblical narrative winds up the story with her immediate cure. Nor does the song need to go on to the conclusion, because the fact that Jesus was a divine gynecologist is arguably not as important than the other parts of the story: that he was in intimate contact with the people, that his compassion for them was so powerful it could heal even without his conscious intent (he didn't notice the woman until he felt power leaving his own body when she touched the hem), and that regardless of how poor and miserable someone is they have a place in his world. There's also the sheer physicality that is so much a part of gospel, where healing the body was as important as healing the soul, a point so often forgotten—forgotten because it's so much easier to engage with power and glory and saving your own soul than it is to touch and be touched and to engage in the grimy world of other people's reality. The gospels are deeply, sometimes disgustingly physical, full of sickness and healings and bodily and psychological resurrections that culminate in the resurrection of Jesus himself, with its obvious meaning that those who resurrect others will resurrect themselves—that to engage with others is to engage with divine power. The great struggle of Christianity is to keep this truth from being pushed aside by emphasis on the metaphysical, on immaterial soul and spirit. This physical gets displaced because it is a far more difficult truth to live with than airy thoughts of the beyond.

The same sort of earthy contact shines in another powerful song Cooke sang, "Jesus Gave Me Water." This one, written by Lucie E. Campbell, it works in a similar way, radiant because of a casual encounter on the streets turns into a revelation.

Jesus is hanging out by a well, asks for water from a Samaritan woman, and starts to converse with her. This itself she finds amazing, because, as she says, "the Jews have no dealings with the Samarians." Likewise, his disciples, who "marveled that he talked with the woman." (This was early in his career, before he had time to deal with all the outcasts and undesirable who make up the cast of characters in the gospel stories.) Anyway, in the course of a fairly long conversation, the woman finds out he sees into her and understands her problems. Instead of Cooke puts it this way:

"There was a woman from Samaria
came to the well to get some water.
There she met a stranger who did a story tell.
That woman dropped her pitcher,
her drinking was made richer
from the water he gave her
and it was not in the well.
Oh, He gave her water,
Jesus gave her water,
Jesus gave her water,
Oh, let His praises swell!
Jesus gave her water,
He gave that woman water.
Livin', lovin', lastin' water
and it was not in the well."

Of course the water was psychological and religious insight, a new way for her to feel and think about herself and the word and God that came from contact with Jesus.

This is nothing more or less than the theology of Martin Luther King. For him, a religion that did not continually heal our concrete physical and psychological woes was useless, and a Christianity without love was a sham. One had to act out the gospel. But that action had to be sustained by religious insight. For any religious seeker this interplay between action and meditation is a reinforcing process. Action deepens religious faith because of the discoveries made in action, but at the same time, faith deepens action, because its insights give power and depth to action. By faith, I don't mean some childish "believing in something," but contemplating religious ideas, incorporating them into your being, and using them as a central force in your life. That is what King did, with increasing depth, with his faith and his actions strengthening each other.

It is a shame that more intellectuals on the left do not understand how this religious dynamic works. Some, it seems are almost as theologically challenged as fundamentalists who insist on literal belief, and who demand that biblical narrative be accorded the status of scientific truth, or that religious truth is a black-and-white proposition instead of a continual process of discovery along a mysterious path.

Unfortunately, I find way too many on the left who dismiss religion as nothing more than latching onto a set of implausible beliefs. The seem to be afflicted by a fundamentalism of their own, a belief that religion is nothing but belief. This sort of utterly unsophisticated anti-religious bigotry explains the popularity of such historically and theologically ignorant books as Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion," an attack on religion. For a refutation of Dawkins superficial thinking--and a gorgeous intellectual bitch-slapping-- take a look recent review in the "London Review of Books" by Terry Eagleton, a leftist intellectual who DOES understand theology, at www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html.