by Johnny Cash
I lay awake nights back in 1978 and 1979 thinking about Paul—the amazing transformation, how he turned that zeal for persecution and slaughter around and immediately went forth with the same zeal for Christ. That six-year period intrigued me. The more I studied, the more I wrote down my own thoughts on Paul. In my mind, he took on character and personality, and I wanted to give character and personality to the high priest who sent him to Damascus. I wanted the people he persecuted and slaughtered to have names, and I wanted to see them and hear them in those earliest Christian worship services.
Someone said a religious novelist can be “God’s liar”; that is, by novelization of the activity and reality surrounding a tiny grain of truth, great truths can be illuminated and activated. I have not and do not claim to be a novelist, but I suppose that is the form my writing about Paul has taken. I found a story to tell in those few verses, and the story I tell around those verses is my own.
Of course, the Scriptures dealing with the six years we’re zeroing in on don’t need further illumination by me—truth is its own illumination. In studying them, I began to glimpse the unfathomable depths that lay there.
What exactly was Paul seeing and hearing that instant he went blind on the Damascus road? I suppose I was trying to see beyond the great void, to perceive just a flicker of the divine brilliance that struck him down. One of the days I was pondering this, it wasn’t meant for me to get a flicker of divine brilliance, but it was meant for me to be struck down.
An ostrich tried to kill me. I was trying to look across the abyss between heaven and earth and put some of it in words at my cabin in the woods, which is near my home in a fifty-acre fenced-in area stocked with wild game. I got up to take a walk and relax when I met this eight-foot-tall ostrich in the path. He had lost his mate in the winter freeze and had become hostile. I was thinking of Paul being struck down on the Damascus road by a binding light when I was suddenly struck down by the two big feet of an ostrich.
As soon as he hit me, he ran off into the woods. I picked myself up, examined myself, and realized that I wasn’t hurt, so I walked on down the path.
After I had taken my walk and started back toward the cabin, there stood that ostrich on the path again. He spread his wings and hissed at me. “I think I’d better show you who owns this land,” I said, picking up a long stick. Then he attacked. I swung the stick at his long neck, which is just what he wanted me to do. He jumped straight up out of my reach and came back down on me feetfirst. He broke three ribs when he hit me, and only my belt kept his big, dirty claws from ripping me open.
Like Paul when he was struck by the Light, I fell flat on my back, but unlike Paul, I broke two more ribs on the rock I fell on. The ostrich ran and left me lying there. I finally managed to get back home and to the doctor.
Painkillers led to sleeping pills. Sleeping pills led to “uppers” again, and soon I was back on that mood-altered, not-so-merry-go-round. My story about Paul got stuck away in a closet. Only occasionally would I take it out and try to write. Mood-altering drugs vex the spirit, and if inspiration comes to a writer while under the influence, it’s usually distorted, meaningless, and senseless by the time it gets on paper.
I had to let Billy Graham read “my book,” and every time I talked to him, he asked me if it was finished. I’d say, “Too busy on the road,” or give some other excuse. The truth is I wanted to see more of what Paul saw on the Damascus road and thereafter, and it wasn’t happening. I had no vision. I had no inspiration.
I tried several times to “get away to write” in Florida or Jamaica, but I couldn’t get away from myself. The fire and the spirit were gone because of medication I was taking. I began to wish I’d never let Billy Graham, or anyone else, read anything I’d written. But I had.
John Seigenthaler of the Nashville Tennessean had read it and in April 1982 wrote a long critique on “my book” for me, greatly encouraging me to finish it and saying that it was an important story. I carried John’s letter in the back of the rough, ragged, would-be manuscript from that time on, and though I didn’t respond to his critique, I must have read it a hundred times.
June noticed that I wasn’t writing anymore, and of course she knew why, so I didn’t have to explain it to her.
From the pulpit at a crusade, I heard Billy Graham tell his listeners that Johnny Cash had written a book about Paul called Man in White, and he thought it was one of the best writings on Paul he’d ever read. I was embarrassed and ashamed. Man in White was about half-finished, and Paul was stuck indefinitely on the Damascus road. I could not “see” Paul’s experience. I decided that I had taken on more than I could handle. The love of writing was gone. I even forgot most of what I had written. After all, seven years had gone by since I had started it. I’ve changed my mind, I thought. I can’t write a novel. Why did I ever think I could? I resented the obligation I had saddled myself with.
During the excitement of my early writing, I had talked to everyone about it. “Just a few more months,” I’d say. “I’m still working on it.” But I wasn’t. By 1983, I had stuck it away in a closet somewhere and tried to forget about it. I kept it out of my sight for three or four months at a time, but I couldn’t forget about it. I’d drag it out, go over my notes, and try to write. Time after time I wrote dozens of pages while under the influence, but when I read them afterward with a clear mind, I burned them.
In October 1983, I was packing for a tour of Europe. There in the corner in the back of my closet lay the “Man in White” briefcase. I pulled it out and laid it with my suitcase.
“Are you going to finish your book?” June asked.
“I don’t know if I can,” I said.
“Yes, you can,” she said. “It’s important. You’ll have lots of spare time on airplanes.”
I had only recently had another accident. I had fallen on my knee and broken a kneecap. So I loaded up on strong painkillers, enough to last for the tour, and of course sleeping pills in case the pain kept me from sleeping, and of course “uppers” to kill the hangover from sleeping pills when it was time to perform.
I carried “my book” with me on the tour, but I never once looked at it. The combination of medications gave me blackouts. We performed in fourteen cities, but I only remembered four.
My physical as well as my mental and spiritual condition quickly deteriorated. I went home and into the hospital, bleeding internally. The pills, so many of them day and night, had burned holes in my stomach. By the time I had been given fourteen units of blood to replace what I had lost, the doctors had no choice but to operate. Surgery lasted seven hours; they took out half of my insides, and they gave me nine more units of blood by the time it was over.
Now the painkiller morphine was given to me intravenously around the clock, day and night, for many days, and I remember terrible hallucinations. I saw people coming at me to kill me. I threw things and screamed. The terrors lasted as long as the morphine was going in. I was as close to death as you can come. I saw, in hallucinating, old friends who weren’t really there, but they were talking to me, and every one was like a farewell conversation. They were saying things like, “Well, at least you can say you’ve lived a full life,” or “June and John Carter will be taken care of.”
In my half sleep, I heard the doctors talking beside my bed.“His chances aren’t good,” one of them said. Another one said, “His heart stopped once. I can’t see how he can fight it much longer.”
Many times I opened my eyes to see June’s face and the resigned expression. She was telling the rest of the family I was going to pull through, but her confidence didn’t show. Many times I was aware enough to pray, and many times, in my pain and mental terror, I felt the warm presence of the Great Healer, and I always knew that I would live, that I wasn’t finished for him yet.
Once when I was unconscious, I suddenly became aware of a gentle hand on my forehead, and I heard my mother’s voice. “Lord,” she said, “you took one of my boys, and if you’re going to take
this one, he’s yours to take, but I ask you, let him live and teach him to serve you better. Surely you still have work for him to do.” Though I was allowed no visitors, my mother got through.
Love and care poured in from everywhere. I began to be aware for a few minutes each day, then for an hour or two.
Waylon Jennings sent me a note in intensive care. The nurse read it to me. Waylon said,“I can’t imagine a world without Johnny Cash. Get out of there.” Every day I got a message of some kind from Waylon. I began looking forward to it each day. Once his message said simply, “Let’s get the show on the road.”
I began to feel alive again, and every day I was inspired, remembering Waylon’s line, “Can’t imagine a world without Johnny Cash.” I had been to the bottom of the pit, and God sent loved ones like June, Waylon, Jessi, Billy, and my parents; they were doing so much more to pull me out than the medical care I was getting.
My family was there when I came out of intensive care. The room was full of familiar faces, all but one. A doctor from the Betty Ford Center was there with them; he had called them together to explain my situation.
Because I had been on morphine for a long term and had other narcotics administered to me as well, the doctor suggested that as soon as I was able to travel I should go to the Ford Center in California as a volunteer patient for drug withdrawal and rehabilitation. It was going to be rough, but it would be the only way I could survive, and the education I would get on my problems of chemical dependency would help me in the future to guard against any use of mood-altering drugs.
We talked a long time. My pastor, Rev. Courtney Wilson, was there and prayed about it. I volunteered to go. When June was packing my things a few days later, I called her, told her where my manuscript was, and asked her to pack it. After two weeks at the Betty Ford Center, I read over my manuscript. I saw the story clearly now— where I would take Paul and how it would end.
For almost two years, I labored over it whenever time allowed. But since I had missed so many months of work—recording, concerts, television, and so forth—and a large staff of people were depending on me, it went slowly. The real problem, however, was the chapter on the Damascus road experience. I prayed for a vision. I prayed for a revelation, some glimpse into the “forbidden,” a look at the heaven-and-earth connection like the one that came to Paul.
Dreams have always played a role in my affairs from time to time. For instance, a few times I have dreamed I heard new songs never before sung, and I’d wake up and write them down. Some of them I recorded. As a child, I dreamed an angel came to me to tell me my brother Jack would die, but that I must understand that it was God’s plan and someday I would see that it was. Jack died two weeks later. I had another forewarning in a dream of a close friend’s death. I called his home the next day, and he had been killed in an automobile accident the night before. On Christmas night 1985, I had another visionary, dreamlike experience.
My father had died, and that day I had been to the funeral home with the family. He looked so handsome in that fine blue suit and burgundy tie. His countenance belied his eighty-eight years. After months of suffering he seemed to be so much at peace. The church and military funeral would be the next day. Loving words by Rev. Courtney Wilson and a twenty-one-gun salute at the cemetery would leave the old World War I soldier at his rest.
My father had always bought us kids fireworks for the Fourth of July and Christmas. It was one way we waved the flag and praised the Lord. Back in October, hoping my Dad would be home for Christmas, I bought a large assortment of fireworks and planned to shoot them in his front yard so he could see them through the window.
I came home from the funeral home around sundown on Christmas evening and dropped my mother off at her house. Her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and other friends and loved ones were there to be with her.
I went home to change clothes, and there in the corner of my closet was that big box of fireworks I had bought in October. I picked it up and showed it to June.
“I was going to shoot these tonight for Daddy,” I said. “In his front yard.”
“The children would like to see them,” she said. “And Grandpa would want you to.”
I hesitated, then finally came up with that old corny line. “What will the neighbors say?” Then I burst out laughing. “He’ll see them better tonight than ever before,” I said. “He’s no longer got cataracts on his eyes.”
I set them up in a row across the middle of the front yard of my parents’ house—skyrockets, Roman candles, sparklers, colored fire fountains, bursting stars, rainbow cones, everything that would shine, sparkle, pop, spurt, and glow. My mother watched from the window, and the children laughed and squealed at the beautiful display of fireworks. There was a constant stream of multicolored fire across the yard, and a lot of laughter. I kissed my mother good night, reminding her of what time I would be there tomorrow to go to the funeral.
I went to bed early, but it must have been three hours or more before I fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed that I was standing in front of my parents’ house, facing the road as if I was waiting for someone. I was there alone, and my mother was somewhere inside.
A long, bright silver car came over the hill and stopped at the curb, which was about fifty feet directly in front of me. The car had no driver, but the left rear door opened and my father got out and started walking toward me. He had on that beautiful blue suit, white silk shirt, and burgundy tie. He was smiling as he approached me, walking with the stride of a young man. His clear eyes sparkled; they were not covered with the dull film of age I was used to seeing, but were clear, bright brown eyes. His teeth, when he smiled, were like a young man’s, and his gray hair was full, with as much dark hair as gray.
“I was waiting for you to come home,” I said. I reached out my hand toward him to shake hands. His hand reached out toward mine, and we were only a few paces apart when suddenly a long row of light streamed up from the ground between us. He smiled a knowing smile, dropped his hand, and stood looking at me. The steam of light between us widened, grew in brilliance, and became an unbreachable gulf. His face smiled at me across the chasm, and I knew that I could not touch him.
I looked behind me through the window. I couldn’t see my mother but knew that she was inside. I turned back to Daddy and asked, “Are you coming inside? Mama would like for you to.”
Still smiling, he said, “No, Son, I’m afraid it would just cause more pain for everyone.”
The light was streaming between us. “You really look great, Daddy,” was all I could say.
“Tell your mother,” he said softly, “that I just couldn’t come back. I’m so comfortable and so happy where I am.”
“All right,” I said, and I knew it was all right.
“I just don’t belong here anymore,” he said.
The light grew in intensity and I couldn’t see him though it. Suddenly the light was gone, and so was he, and there was no bright silver car at the curb. The only thing in the yard were the spent fireworks from that evening.
I awoke and looked at the clock; 1:00 a.m. I had slept only a few minutes. I got up and walked the floor most of the night, troubled by such a vivid dream. It had been unlike any dream I’d ever had. I felt that I had lived it. Day was breaking and I was sitting by the window looking out at the lake when I finally found peace and understanding.
The burden of grief was lifted that day, even at the funeral. When I went to pick my mother up, the house was full of people—family, friends, and loved ones. I took my mother aside, and in private I said, “I had a God-sent dream last night, Mama,” She smiled, believing. “I dreamed about Daddy, and he asked me to tell you something.”
“What?” she asked, holding on to my hand.
“He asked me to tell you that he’s comfortable and happy where he is. Besides, he said that he doesn’t belong here anymore.”
I explained the whole dream to her, the silver car, the blue suit and burgundy tie, and the deep gulf with
light between us.
She cried, then she laughed. “God still has his hand on you,” she said.
We both felt great peace that day. She sang along to “Amazing Grace” and led the whole family clan out of the church with a smile of joy that comes from knowing a loved one is at peace and with God.
I was never privileged to have an experience like Paul did just outside Damascus, but on Christmas night 1985 I had that visionlike dream and saw a light that was unearthly and much more beautiful than the whole box of fireworks.
The glorified Christ is described in the book of Revelation in imagery of flame and fire. Also fire, water, and wind are sometimes symbolic of the Holy Spirit; so are tongues. It all helped to spark my imagination.
I went to work. Once again, I found joy in writing. I’ve “finished”Man in White several times since my father died. I’m never satisfied that I didn’t leave out something important or put in something meaningless. If the publisher hadn’t finally said, “Enough,” I’d still be writing.
If no hidden grain of truth is illuminated in this book, it will still have served its purpose. It kept me going back to the Bible—searching,meditating, envisioning, and talking about it for the better part of ten years. My disclaimer is that it’s only a novel. Other than that, it’s something I should have been doing anyway.
Please understand that I believe the Bible, the whole Bible, to be the infallible, indisputable Word of God. I have been careful to take no liberties with the timeless Word. Where the Word is silent and for my story’s sake, I have at times followed traditional views. Other things, some characters, some conversations, and some occurrences are products of my broad and at times strange imagination.