Bob Dylan’s Eucharistic Longing

I only started listening to Bob Dylan in the last two years. Some will be outraged, others may want to offer their condolences. Whatever the case may be, I was unversed in the work of the (American) Bard until relatively recently in my life... What drew me to Bob Dylan? I’m not sure. Perhaps it was the influence he had on some of my favorite singer-songwriters, Joe Pug and The Tallest Man on Earth. Perhaps it was simply fortuitous circumstances. Likely it was a combination of both.

The first Dylan song I chose to listen to was “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Dylan wrote and recorded the song at 22 years of age. Listening to the song with his age in mind (weathered voice betraying his youth) makes the accomplishment all the more impressive. But why is this song such an accomplishment?

Plenty of young men have written plaintive songs dedicated to their loves, from the amateur scribblings of love-addled adolescents to the heights of Dante’s La vita nuova. So why is this song special, worthy to be counted with Dante in the latter category? It’s special because in it Dylan captures the heart of what it means to love another and long for their love. More importantly, what

Dylan uncovers about the nature of love ultimately points to the Eucharist as its fulfillment and confirmation. Hidden within Dylan’s picture of love is the shape of Eucharistic longing. The song opens with the beloved asking the lover whether “there’s something I can send you from across the sea / from the place that I’ll be landin’?” The lover responds emphatically, stating that the beloved cannot send him anything, there is nothing he wishes to own; he only desires for the beloved to “carry yourself back to me unspoiled / from across that lonesome ocean”...

Love first of all, then, consists in a desire for continual presence on the part of the beloved. As embodied creatures – animals, to speak frankly – we seek out and make relationships through bodily presence. We prefer never to be separated from our beloved. But when we must be separated, we desire the unspoiled return of the beloved: we desire the return of the same one whom we allowed to depart. Thus presence and constancy implicitly require, as their complement, the recognizability of the beloved.

The beloved continues, asking again whether the lover wants something fine “made of silver or of golden / either from the mountains of Madrid / or from the coasts of Barcelona.” The lover in true, romantic fashion rejects the request, stating that “If I had stars of the darkest night / and diamonds from the deepest ocean / I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss / for that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’.” We now arrive at the second aspect of love: the incommensurability of the beloved with other things. The true lover would not, even if he could, exchange the beloved for money, goods, fame, honor, or the like... wealth and reputation are incapable of rising to the heights to which love carries us.

A third time the beloved repeats their request, reminding the lover that “I might be gone a long, long time... is there something I can send you to remember me by / to make your time more easy passin’?” The beloved seems consumed with care for the lover, wondering how he can continue on without a sign or a symbol of their love. But continue on he does, rebuffing the beloved: “how can, how can you ask me again? / it only brings me sorrow / the same thing I would want today / I would want again tomorrow.” The lover, in reproving his beloved, speaks to the desire of the lover for repetition. The lover desires the beloved not only once, but over and over in the wholeness of their presence.

After this the pretense of the beloved falls away. A letter arrives, informing the lover that “I don’t know when I’ll be coming back again / it just depends on how I’m a-feelin’.” At this point the lover arrives at a resolution, albeit ambiguous — the song itself does not give us the resources to resolve the ambiguity. The lover apparently concedes to the premise of the beloved’s requests to offer a substitute: “yes, there’s somethin’ you can send back to me / Spanish boots of Spanish Leather.”

This can either constitute a defeated capitulation, or a final, romantic affirmation of the essence of love. The lover can be cynically conceding that boots of Spanish leather can substitute for the object of his love. Or this is a biting statement of a lover tortured by the loss of the beloved. The Spanish boot can, in fact, refer to a medieval torture device. One tell against this reading is the fact that Spanish boots were constructed from iron, typically, but predecessors were sometimes constructed from leather. In this case, the lover is requesting — perhaps in jest, perhaps in truth — a device for torture, the lover’s final, sarcastic affirmation of the beloved and the pain they will constantly bear with the loss.

Dylan, then, offers us a poignant picture of love: to love another, ultimately, is to desire the repeated presence and return of the beloved in their wholeness. The beloved is a person, one who invites a response of admiration rather than use. To be separated from or deprived of the presence of the beloved is agonizing.

Dylan’s song – hymn, really – is replete with theological undertones and resonances. The New Testament is replete with reference to these three elements of love – presence, incommensurability, and repetition. Judas’s despair after betraying Christ for silver (Mt. 27:1-10), and the parable of the pearl of great price (Mt. 13:45-46), mirror Dylan’s vision of love as a love of the incommensurable other. The lover’s desire for presence finds its resonance in the repeated promise, in the Old and New Testaments, that God shall dwell among his people. It finds especially poignant expression in the disciples’ delight at the presence of the glorified Christ (Mt. 17:4), and in their aching at his departure (Acts 1:9-11). The desire for repetition is embedded in the very structure of the song, which in its triplicity mirrors two significant moments of the Gospels: Peter’s threefold rejection of Christ before the Crucifixion (Lk. 22:54-62; Mt. 26:69-75), and his threefold affirmation of love after the Crucifixion (Jn. 21:15-17).

Ultimately, Dylan’s vision of love finds its confirmation and fullness in the Eucharist, which embodies the fullness of love and the fulfillment of the desire of the lover. In the Eucharist, Christ offers His presence to us in all its fullness, the consummation of His pledge never to be separated from us or leave us orphans. In the Eucharist, Christ continually returns to us unspoiled (but not unscathed!). And in the Eucharist, Christ infinitely renews His coming because the human longing for union with God is, itself, infinite, unable to be satisfied by any temporal good. If Dylan is right about love, then, all human love by extension bears within it the shape of Eucharistic love. Perhaps he is not simply a Bard, then, but also a theologian.