Elvis is dead. I didn’t mean to do it. But somehow, I became an unwitting accomplice to a national tragedy. My intentions were sincere. I only wanted to hear the King one more time. It is not as if I was a huge fan. No, I barely knew the guy. My Mom loved him for his Gospel music. When he was working his way through the business, he wanted to sing in a Gospel quartet like the Blackwood Brothers who attended his family church. Sadly, they turned him down—rejected for his inability to sing in harmony. Elvis never gave up on his career or his love of Gospel music, though. His reputation and fame as a singer rose faster than anyone could have predicted. He recorded several hymns and Gospel melodies. My favorite Gospel rendition is “How Great Thou Art.” He won a Grammy for that album, which also featured his own Gospel quartet as backup singers. In some ways, his career paralleled the Joseph story. The irony of this was alluded to by the Pharaoh character in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Rejected by his brothers, he ended up in the royal court. People sometimes use the term “meteoritic” to describe someone’s accelerated success in life. But meteors do not rise. They fall.

I don’t remember why Elvis was on my mind. But on a fateful day in August in 1977, I purchased the Pure Gold album on eight-track cassette tape. I played it several times over. That was the nice thing about eight tracks compared to two-sided cassettes. They looped endlessly—at least until the tape broke or the magnetic recording wore out. As I listened to his song “It’s Impossible,” I kept thinking about how his success was meant to be. This amazing talent led that country boy to receive the honorific title of “The King.” I played and played that tape. The next day, he was gone. My eight track killed Elvis, at least figuratively, for loving his sweet songs too much. His velvet voice was now muted as millions of mourners wailed “the King is dead.” And it was my fault.

It is remarkable how often we place guilt on ourselves for something that is out of our control. Take the example of family tragedies. I have worked with mourners who are burdened with guilt for not taking preventative measures to protect their loved ones from accidents, injury, or even death. That is a terrible thing to carry around with you. Yet, people suffer needlessly from these self-imposed emotional wounds.

That happened during the first semester of my seminary studies in Boston. My sister had been battling breast cancer for years with some success. We received a call that she suffered a serious setback. She was taken to the hospital without any hope of recovery. The family had to lend my wife and me money to travel from Boston to San Antonio to say our goodbyes. We had to wait 72 hours before the next flight was available. My younger brother met us at the airport and delivered the painful news that our sister had passed a few hours before we landed. Her cooling body was in peaceful repose on the hospital bed. My father said, “She tried to wait for you. She just … ran out of gas.” I didn’t hear anything after that. I felt consumed with guilt and anger at myself for not being there in her last moments. Somehow, I came to believe that it was my fault—that I could have prevented it with a special prayer or some hidden knowledge from the Bible. The reality was that she died because her weakened body could no longer fight that horrible disease, not through anything that I or anyone else did or failed to do. None of us could have prevented this enormous loss.

My faith tradition teaches us that tragedies are the common experience of all human beings. Jesus of Nazareth said that rain falls on the just and the unjust (see Matthew 5:45). In plain English, bad things happen to everyone, no matter who you are or what you do. Blaming ourselves for tragedies outside our control does not improve the situation. I could not have saved my sister any more than I could stop the sun from rising. Like the Elvis song, some forces are impossible to prevent.

That “just and unjust” maxim does not absolve us from situations that we have created (see, for example, David and Bathsheba’s story). When we do battle with regrets for hurtful actions, it is good to know there is the promise of forgiveness. If we are willing to reconcile with God and our fellows, there is also the possibility of transformation.

The upshot of all of this is that we can face life with a peace that comes from the genuine wholeness of spirit and mind. One of my seminary professors taught me that the Hebrew word for this condition is shalom. Whenever we face personal loss or tragedies, may God grant all of us the blessing of shalom.

 

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view(s) of The United Methodist Church or any other employer or institution.