This is a column I wanted to write 10 years ago, but it took a man I’ll call Cosmic Charlie to make me finally write it. 

Charlie was a candidate in my recent OCIA class. He was received into the church at the Easter Vigil, along with many other candidates and catechumens. Charlie didn’t register for the program in advance like he was supposed to; he just showed up on the first day of class. I’m glad that he did, and I’m glad that I admitted him. He turned out to be one of the brightest students I’ve ever taught, whether at the university or in OCIA. 

After all, I know that “Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if you look at it right.” 

That brilliant lyric is courtesy of Robert Hunter, lyricist for the beloved American musical institution known as The Grateful Dead, who celebrate their 60th anniversary this year. 

The lyric came up on the last Sunday of our OCIA class, just a couple of weeks ago. We were discussing mystagogy, the contemplation of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that is the foundation of the Neophyte Year, the first full year of new Catholics’ immersion in the church. 

The class and I were discussing St. Paul’s conversion at Damascus, and I said candidly that I couldn’t really talk about St. Paul without thinking about Grateful Dead songs. Almost at once Charlie and I—and a couple of other students—began singing that wonderful line from the song “Scarlet Begonias,” Once in a while you get shown the light … . 

Well, that sparked it, and the lyrics came one after the other: “When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door” from “Uncle John’s Band;” “One man gathers what another man spills,” from “St. Stephen;” “Nothing’s for certain, it can always go wrong,” from “High Time;” “Nobody messing with you, but you; your friends are getting most concerned,” from “Althea,” “Trouble with you is the trouble with me, you got two good eyes but you still don’t see,” from “Casey Jones” and just about all of “Ripple,” from which this column headline is taken. 

Jerry Garcia, one of the founders of The Grateful Dead, was baptized and raised Catholic.

But the line that kept coming back, the one that rang so true about grace and mystery and awe and wonder was that wonderful truth: “Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if you look at it right.” If any popular song lyric crystallizes the action of grace, it’s that one. 

When our impromptu sing-along was over, I am sure that we all agreed that no Grateful Dead song really stated a simple but profound truth more than one of their last great compositions “Touch of Grey,” which implores all of us to give and keep “a little grace, a little love.” 

The Catholic influence 

The founders of the Grateful Dead—Ronald “Pigpen” McKernan and Jerry Garcia, old souls both Charlie says—were both baptized and raised Catholic, a fact that any intuitive Catholic listener immediately recognizes. They both came from San Francisco, one of the most Catholic and inclusive cities in the United States, and they both retained and struggled with the essence of their faith. McKernan, a tragic alcoholic from early adolescence, died young in 1973. Garcia also died from years of substance abuse in 1995. While neither man was a model of practicing the Catholic faith, Pigpen is on record for professing belief in the power of prayer, and Garcia said “I was raised a Catholic so it’s very hard for me to get out of that way of thinking. Fundamentally, I’m a Christian in that I believe to love your enemy is a good idea somehow.” 

Our new Pope Leo XIV likes to sing, and he certainly knows the healing power of music and art to foster peace and understanding. There is no better example in American music of a band that encouraged community, tolerance and empathy than the Grateful Dead. Their audience is one of the most varied and comprehensive, Catholic we might say, of any band. There is room for everybody. 

The band comes with baggage; I know. As an Atlantan of a certain age, I am lucky to have seen the Grateful Dead many times at their annual Spring Tour shows at the Omni. While most of their traveling circus of “Deadheads” were well-meaning and law-abiding, a small element ruined the fun and created a stigma that is not altogether fair. 

Thirty years after the original band broke up in 1995, however, the truth remains. The band was formed in 1965 and took their name from a cycle of medieval Catholic folktales in which a traveler, not unlike the Good Samaritan, comes upon a group of people mistreating a corpse who had failed to pay his debts in life. The benevolent traveler pays the dead person’s debts and later is assisted in his own troubles by a spirit who reveals himself to be the soul of the dead person who the traveler once aided. 

While the saying “There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert” was certainly accurate, the band’s accomplishments and legacy go far beyond their years on the road. They have transcended entertainment to become a cultural institution and achieved one of the most difficult aims of any artist—they are able to instruct even as they delight. 

The Dead represented the very best of 1960s idealism at Woodstock and they witnessed the sad collapse of those high ideals at the tragedy of Altamont. Yet the band was never a nostalgic relic of hippiedom. Throughout their long, strange trip they remained relevant and progressive. 

Chief among the Grateful Dead’s accomplishments is how the band became an archive for American music and culture. Through their respectful, almost reverential love of the great American folk tradition, the Dead helped preserve a massive amount of American culture that might have been lost, including folk songs from Appalachia, African American Blues and Latin folklore. They did this through an almost nonstop touring schedule, only pausing to take a break in the mid-70s. The band earned their nickname, “The Hardest Working Rock Band in America.”  At one of their creative peaks between 1969-1971, they released two of the greatest live albums ever made and two of the best Americana studio records ever released. Many bands forge a career upon one great record, but in 1970, the Dead made two albums—“Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty”—that stand as a pinnacle of American roots-based music. 

Perhaps more than any other American band, the Grateful Dead’s music—particularly its live recordings—is an expression of euphoric, boundless joy. Yet even while the music has the power to make the listener happy, it also enlightens. The Dead are by turns introspective and reflective, and then sheer fun; in the span of one extended jam, they can bring you to the verge of tears and then compel you to dance your legs off. And all the while you marvel at the sheer power of the musicianship. 

Years after Garcia’s death and the effective end of the band, priests and other religious continue to express their approval of the band’s understanding of audience, communion and shared human experience. The Grateful Dead is not a church service, but at their best shows they could approximate the feeling of collective contemplation in action.  

The everyday and the eternal intersect  

The Grateful Dead were both idealistic and pragmatic; in their best songs they created an intersection between the everyday realities and troubles of the world with the spiritual and eternal, and their songs frequently allude to Scripture. Consider one of their earliest great songs, “St. Stephen,” which is about the deacon and proto martyr of the early church. Stephen gets hassled a lot. He annoys people. He seems to be in the way. In the end, however, he gets “Answers aplenty in the by and by” where “Saint Stephen will remain/All he’s lost he shall regain.”   

Or think of “Black Peter,” in one of the most poignant deathbed scenes you’ll ever hear, who marvels at the wind at the door commanded by an unseen spirit at the same time he considers the absolute absurdity that his dying day is “just like any other day that’s ever been.” 

So many of the Grateful Dead are, in fact, dead. As Phil Lesh, who died last year, sings in “Box of Rain,” it’s the same condition for us all: “Such a long, long time to be gone/And a short time to be there.” 

Jerry Garcia’s funeral service was fittingly held at St. Stephen’s Church in Marin County, California in 1995. St. Stephen died while beholding the beatific vision; Garcia was found dead in bed with a smile on his face. Years before, in 1973, at Pigpen’s Catholic funeral in a funeral home chapel, Garcia had said of McKernan, “Now he knows!”  Whether you’re a “Deadhead,” a casual listener, or someone yet to discover the band, “Fare you well, fare you well” on your own journey.