Arlo and Ma - Arlo Guthrie - Interview

Christian Century, May 5, 1993 by Arsenio Orteza

Arlo Guthrie's conversion to Christianity began 20 years ago, but most people don't know about it because, aside from the 1979 album Outlasting the Blues, he hasn't sung about it much. "I was a person who always loved God, but that was without knowing who God was. Still, it had always been an interest of mine. I even wrote songs on Alice's Restaurant that I think of as being vehicles for me to communicate with this nebulous God that I knew was there but that I'd certainly never met face-to-face."

Alice's Restaurant, the album with which Guthrie debuted in 1967, remains his most famous because of the 20-minute title song, a hilarious recounting of how his arrest for dumping garbage on private property developed into a Catch-22 scenario. For many people the song has symbolized the spirit of the '60s.

"I know that a lot of gospel-oriented people will disagree with me," contends Guthrie, "but I'm convinced that the primary focus of the '60s was one of spirituality and a searching for God, for what's permanent as opposed to what's temporary. And I think it's still with us. That's what I see going on in Eastern Europe and Tiananmen Square and Central and South America. If we could trust God a little more and our laws, our government and ourselves a little less, then things would work out." Guthrie comes by his distrust of laws and governments naturally. His father, the late Woody Guthrie, was America's pre-eminent Depression-era protest singer.

"I was raised in a Jewish household," Guthrie recalls. "I was bar mitzvahed when I was 13. But I always liked that Jesus character, too. I didn't know if he was God or what, but I liked him. He was like a hero. But there were others. Lao-Tzu was a hero of mine, and maybe a few other philosophers and theologians here and there - nobody who I ever thought would end up as the be-all and end-all of my life, but people who intrigued me. I was also interested in Eastern mysticism, old Christian mysticism and Jewish mysticism."

Then one day Guthrie had his interest rewarded in spades. "I was standing on my porch, and one of those things happened that I never imagined would happen to me. I don't know how to explain it, and I don't want to make a big deal out of it, but God showed up in the person of Jesus Christ. He was sort of right in front of me. I knew who he was even though nobody said anything. And not only that, but I knew that he knew everything about me. For about ten minutes - actually, I have no idea how long it was - I felt a love that I knew existed but that I never thought I would be in the midst of. And it penetrated every atom of my being."

Unsure of what to do, Guthrie joined a Roman Catholic church - "the first church I came to" - where he knew some Franciscan brothers. Guthrie eventually became a a third-order Franciscan.

"To me, as a Jew, which I never stopped being, it wasn't as if I'd traded gods. All that happened was that the God I knew got bigger."

During the rest of the '70s Guthrie combined his high-profile career as a recording artist and performer with a low-profile vocation as a pilgrim. As the former, he released nine albums - the well-regarded Hobo's Lullabye and Amigo among them - and scored his other well-known hit, "City of New Orleans." In his latter role he sought his "bigger God" by visiting monasteries, convents and other places where he thought he might re-experience the presence of Christ as intensely as he had at first. But the original experience proved elusive.

"I began to believe that this wonderful thing that happened to me was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to show me that God loved me, that Jesus is real and that he is who he said he was. And I firmly believed those things, but I didn't want the belief. I wanted the guy."

As the decade drew to a close and the hope that had sustained him through most of it soured into discouragement and loneliness, he recorded one of his strongest albums, Outlasting the Blues. Critics tended to explain its overt biblical themes and meditations on death as Guthrie's way of dealing with the possibility that he might die of Huntington's chorea, the hereditary disease that killed his father. His comparatively light follow-up record, Power of Love, failed to generate much interest among critics, fans or his record company, Warner Brothers. On top of all this, his home life was shaky. "My marriage was sometimes on the rocks," he admits. "The kids were sometimes going nuts. And sometimes the work was too hard or just too crazy.

In 1982 Warners rejected his studio album Someday, and Guthrie issued God a challenge. "I said, |God, maybe I've been doing it wrong. I only want what's meant for me, and that's my wife, my kids, my farm, my business, my songs, whatever. If it's not meant for me, I don't want it. But if it's meant for me, I want it. And if it's bad, I'll accept that. I just can't deal with making decisions about these things anymore." Not long after, Guthrie was introduced to a "guru-type person" who calls herself Ma, a woman whom be now refers to as his "teacher" and whom he credits with giving him an example of imitating Christ that he can realistically follow.