Polishing Up My Proverbs 16 Crown of Glory (Part VI): Johnny Cash and the Gifts of Old Age

I am not a huge Johnny Cash fan (though after reading this blog series on the theology of Johnny Cash, I gotta say: my esteem and curiosity both have been piqued).  There is a Johnny Cash song, however, that I think about a fair bit.  It was the last song he ever recorded, after some 50 years as a performer, and all the volatile victories and hard losses that “the Man in Black” lived through in that time.  It’s a cover of the Trent Reznor song, “Hurt.”

I am not a huge Trent Reznor fan, either, but I do know that he was the controversial front man for a hard-rock act named Nine Inch Nails, and the song “Hurt” was the last song on their 1994 album The Downward Spiral.  Whole album is a painful record of Reznor’s despairing life-reflections, shot through with themes of violence, nihilism and social deviance.  In Reznor’s own words, it’s about “somebody systematically throwing off every layer of what he’s surrounded with ... from personal relationships, to religion to questioning the whole situation.”

And like I say, this exploration of the end of all things good and bright culminates with a song called “Hurt,” a transparent lament that confesses all Reznor’s spiritual failings: deceit, drugs, destruction, self-injury.  It opens with the line, “I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel / I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real.”  Later in the song he says: “And you could have it all / my empire of dirt / I will let you down / I will make you hurt.”

It’s all very dark stuff, but the very last line—the album’s final word after spiraling downward for a full 65 minutes and 2 seconds—is this haunting phrase: “If I could start again / a million miles away / I would keep myself / I would find a way.” Now: I admit it’s pretty faint, barely audible maybe, and I doubt Reznor himself would put this word to it, but in this final breath at the end of the album, he seems to be asking about “redemption.”

And this is where, interestingly, Johnny Cash comes in.  Because in 2003, at the age of 71, Johnny Cash covered “Hurt.”  And, while he did it in classic Johnny Cash style, still he stayed faithful to the original, with the exception of just one word. There’s a line in the song that uses a synonym for human excrement that rhymes with “spit.”  It goes: “I wear my crown of (rhymes with spit) upon my liar’s chair / full of broken thoughts / I cannot repair.”  Cash took that obscene, filthy “crown” and replaced it with this phrase:  “I wear my crown of thorns upon my liar’s chair.”  A crown of thorns for a crown of s**t.

Here’s Johnny Cash’s video for “Hurt.”  It’s interspersed with footage from his life and career: his own empire of dirt.  The video ends, poignantly, tellingly, soberly, with a scene of the crucifixion of Christ:  Cash offers that name as the answer to this hurting cry for redemption.

Cash’s one-word edit to “Hurt” becomes especially poignant, telling and sobering, if you know anything about the downward spiral that was part of his own journey (and even though I’m not a huge fan, still, I’ve heard the legends).   My friend John Coutts puts it like this: “In his version of ‘Hurt,’ Cash isn’t sugar-coating the gospel ... He simply offered his life on the public stage, called it an empire of dirt ... changed one word and pointed instead to the crown of thorns and to the Christ who gave himself to us, and for us.”

There is something really powerful going on here, I think, in Cash’s choice to make Reznor’s “Hurt” his final act.   At the MTV music video awards, “Hurt” received 6 nominations, including “video of the year.”  When Reznor himself saw it, he said: “the song isn't mine anymore. .. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone.  [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era...”

As I continue to develop a biblical theology of aging, I find Reznor’s words especially haunting and compelling.  Could this be, in the end, one of the great gifts of the old to the community of faith—offering up their stories in a way that helps the young reinterpret the music of their lives, by seeing it through the eyes of a radically different era?

Maybe.

It was certainly Johnny Cash’s gift to his community.

In an article about Cash’s musical legacy among the young, Touchstone Magazine said this about the “Hurt” video and its impact at the MTV Video Awards: “The face of Johnny Cash reminded this generation that he has tasted everything the youth cultures of multiple decades has to offer—and found there a way that leads to death. ... Nine Inch Nails delivered ‘Hurt’ as straight nihilism, but Cash gives it a twist—ending the video at the cross.  Because for him, the cross is the only answer to the inevitability of suffering and pain.”

Of course, only one who has tried the cross through a long life of faithful following, decade after uncertain decade—plumbed its depths to Hell and back over the course of many years—can say with the fullest of conviction both that pain is inevitable, and also that the cross is the only answer.  This lived-experience of the cross, too, is the blessing of the very old.

But it's not just that the cross can be trusted; Cash's "Hurt" also assures us that the cross is, in the end, needed. To put it bluntly: aging is the ultimate memento mori.

Touchstone Magazine puts it like this: “In a culture that idolizes the hormonal surges of youth, Cash reminds the young what pop culture doesn’t want them to know: ‘It is appointed to man once to die, and after this the judgement.’  His creviced face and blurring eyes remind them that there is not enough Botox in all of Hollywood to revive a corpse.”

In Psalm 90, the same one that explains how God has set the upper limits of the human life span somewhere around 80 years (90:10), it goes on to pray earnestly and humbly this prayer: "Teach us Lord to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."  This prayer God answers, among other ways, by pointing us to those who have gone before us, the aged in the community of faith, and reminding us of where the passage of years inevitably brings us all.

So: whatever else was happening when Johnny Cash played the last note of "Hurt" and quietly closed the piano lid like a coffin for good, that was God, I think, teaching us again to number our days.  Like Johnny Cash, we will all, eventually, reach the end of the empire-building projects that are our lives.  May we, on that day, have the same kind of legacy to share with those who come next as he did: a long lifetime of putting the cross to the test.

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