The Choice Before Us

With wisdom from a Dylan song and my faith tradition

In 1979, at the beginning of his born-again phase, Bob Dylan released an album called “Slow Train Coming.” One of the songs on the album was “Gotta Serve Somebody.” It contains seven verses and a chorus repeated after each one. The song is written in the second person, i.e., the speaker is directly addressing the listener (the “you” who appears throughout the song). So, for example, the first verse and chorus go like this:

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

The point of the song, as reflected in both the title and these opening lines, is that neutrality is not an option. You either serve the devil or the Lord (or, from a secular perspective, the bad or the good). There is no third way.

While many have at times considered Dylan to be a modern-day prophet, he might be the first to tell you that he is really just a singer/songwriter. I never understood his brief period of overtly Christian songwriting that spanned three albums from 1979-1981 — were the songs genuine expressions of a personal faith or just experiments with a genre he had not yet explored? I find hints of religious content and imagery in some of his other songs (the beautiful and haunting “Dark Eyes” especially comes to mind), but none of those songs are as in-your-face as the songs of that two-year period. But I have no idea or particular interest in what Dylan’s personal religious beliefs are today or were back then; I’m more interested in the art than in the artist. (I think he would approve.)

Whatever one thinks of Dylan’s brief excursion into Christian music, and whether one holds any religious beliefs or not, it’s easy to find some truth in this song’s thesis: that regardless of who we are or what we do, we are at times presented with consequential decisions between diametrically opposed forces. That is, we may be forced to choose between evil and good, or more realistically, between very bad and significantly better. And some dualistic choices cannot be avoided. As theologian Harvey Cox has told us, even not to decide is to decide.

The question that follows, then, is how do we decide? How do we distinguish the good from the bad, or the better from the worse? And, in the world of human political choices, how do we know which would-be leaders are worthy of our service, as Dylan would have it, or of our following, as is more typically the case?

The religious texts from my faith tradition, arising as they did from an agrarian era, often pose these dilemmas through the metaphor of trees and their fruit. In the very first book of the Hebrew Bible, mankind is said to have fallen from grace when the first man ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Using a similar metaphor in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus admonished his followers to identify false prophets, whom he referred to as wolves in sheep’s clothing, the way one would identify a bad tree — by the fruit they bear. “Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit,” he explained.

Later in the New Testament, St. Paul advised the Galatians to distinguish between the works of the flesh and the fruits of the spirit. The former, he wrote, include (among other troubling qualities) “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy.” The fruits of the spirit, in contrast, Paul described as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

For the religiously minded, and even for those non-religious who simply want to live in a just and peaceful world, these passages can provide a useful litmus test. They can, at least occasionally, help us distinguish false prophets who would lead us down destructive paths from those who display greater fidelity to our most worthy ideals.

In a democracy, we choose our leaders. Invariably, we must choose between two or more imperfect candidates. Sometimes we base our choices on policy, sometimes on character, and often on both. Depending on the candidates, character can be more important than policy. When attempting to discern which candidate possesses the more laudable character, we can turn to this ancient wisdom. And sometimes when we do, the choice becomes clear.