St. Peter Don't You Call Me

January 22, 1956
Bridgeport

With epic style, the seventh verse [of the second verse] of the first chapter of Genesis offers this superb symbolic explanation of the human creation: "And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

For some months it has been difficult to listen to the radio for any length of time without hearing the doleful protesting of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing "Sixteen Tons."

"You load sixteen tons and what do you get

Another day older and deeper in debt.

Saint Peter, don't you call me, cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store.

Some people say a man is made out of mud

A poor man's made out of muscle and blood

Muscle and blood and skin and bones

A mind that's weak and a back that's strong.

I was born one mornin' when the sun din't shine

I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine

I loaded 16 tons of number nine coal

And the straw-boss said, "Well-a bless my soul."

Why has such a sad song captured such wide popularity in the popular music area? The words speak of not only "blood, sweat and tears," but complete despair also. This song is somewhat reminiscent of a passage in the 142 psalm which has been called the saddest sentence in the Bible, "And no man cared for my soul."

The hopeless situation of the debt-ridden miner also recalls the plight of Job. In lines of magnificent poetry, Job cries out against the universe in much the same desperate protest of "Sixteen Tons." The glum prayer of the folk song "St. Peter don't you call me, cause I can't go," ought to give us a rather powerful nudge toward examining our values.

Therefore I would like to tell you why this song is a mental springboard for that which matters most.

Most of us have been relatively well-off financially. Some of us have been poor; but few of us have experienced the grinding poverty that drains the physical strength from the body, moral stamina from the spirit and the light of hope from the eyes of a person.

The "company store" is a vanishing institution in the United States. There was a time when it was the god of destiny for the miner, the mill-hand or the worker in a saw-mill village. In the industrial revolution, less attention was paid to the well-being of workers than to the opportunity to produce cheaply for profitable markets. The company store enabled the worker to run up bills for food, clothes, liquor, with the amounts being deducted from his pitifully small wages. In many cases the company not only had cheap labor, but also profited additionally, in a handsome way through a monopoly of consumer goods in the company-owned village. As the worker found it difficult, if not impossible, to buy enough food and clothes to provide a survival basis for a living for his family, many times a large one, the historical result was that he was constantly in debt to the company, with the principal increasing monthly. Thus, although the 14th amendment took the leg-chains from the ankles of slaves, and the whips from the hand of the overseers, many thousands of Americans were virtually wage slaves. They were powerless to make demands for decent living because, if the company shut off credit, the family would starve. No public welfare existed. Social consciousness had not grown enough a few years back to create a strong public opinion against permitting anyone to die of hunger, or forced to live in desperation.

Then the amazing expansion of American production: the gradual enlightenment of treatment of the working man through the benefits of education, labor unions and an increasingly humane employing group, has made the slave to the company store a tradition that survives largely in economic histories, folk-stories and folk-songs.

The modern song-hit, "sixteen tons" has much of the flavor of the old-time working class folk song.

The lyrics are of fascinating interest to a Universalist in religion because of what is said about man and God. All the sorrow of unceasing drudgery; all the indignity of being regarded merely as a mass of "muscle and blood" -- useful only to get sixteen tons of coal out of #9 shaft; all the despair which means that even God isn't powerful enough to break this low-rating of humanity, is embodied in the emotional tone of the melody, as well as the lyrics.

There are still company stores in the nation, I suppose. Many coal-towns still have them; some agricultural and lumber villages; perhaps many textile towns still are dominated by the company-owned or controlled store, which deliberate or accidentally, maintains economic power through control of the necessities of life. But the company stores are a fading remnant of a once dominantly-private industrialism.

The increasing certainty that labor and management are going to help each other for the benefit of all is a symptom of the times, in spite of such spectacular strikes as Westinghouse.

The real impact of this sad folk-song comes not from what it says or does not say about labor-management relations. Rather it is that we should ask ourselves this question. To whom do we owe our soul? The singer owed his soul to the "company store." Because we trade where we please, does that mean we are free souls?

The author of the song, Merle Travis, and the singer, Tennessee Ernie Ford, were wondering why more than a million Americans had bought this record about a man who didn't even have the freedom to die in peace. After talking one of them commented that the popularity of the song may be because "everybody owed most of their money to some sort of company store." We are at a high level of credit in this country, enough to worry some of the most learned of economic advisers. For example, in 1955 at this time, the average amount owed on new automobiles was $2000 with 24 payments remaining. Today the average amount owed is $2200, with more than 30 months owing. Haven't you heard a friend say, "I don't own a car, a car owns me", or, "I don't own a house, a house owns me" ? The matter, however, is more than the sum of our debts.

One of the most fallacious of wrong ideas that captures the mind, and destroys the perspective of the naive person, is to believe that one is a free soul. Now and again we encounter a person in life or literature who proclaims himself a "free soul." This is unadulterated nonsense. To live is to be limited.

We do owe our souls to a company store in the sense that our souls are mortgaged somewhere or to someone. We cannot live in a vacuum. Ahab was free of the ties of Nantucket and New Bedford but he was mortgaged to his obsession to capture and destroy Moby Dick, the great white whale. Judas was not captive in the company of Jesus, but he mortgaged himself for thirty pieces of silver. Was he a "free soul?"

Sometimes because our life is trivial, we acquire the erroneous notion that we are free. That is a universal act of all human beings. The important question is who holds the mortgage? Is it your work? If you are a slave to a desk, a bench, or a mop, then your soul is anchored there too.

You mortgage your soul with the way you dispose of money, do you not? Jesus remarked with truth, universal in place and time, "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." No one, whether income is 1 or 100 thousand dollars a year, suffers from having a lack of advice on how to spend his money. There are such unlimited opportunities for spending money legally, that most of the laws do not bother the buyer who purchases illegally, only the seller. You can spend your money on food, liquor, automobiles, houses, yachts, airplanes, wine, women, and song. And if you provide the necessities of life for those legally dependent on you, the community at large is not going to criticize you excessively. You can spend $1000 at night clubs or the race track in a month, and give $10 to the church, and few church officials will have the nerve to chide you for your choice of values. You're free to do that, but you owe your soul to the night-club and race-track in that degree. A person can maintain a certain equality between the life of transportation and the life of intellect by buying one new car and one new book each year. He's free -- but do not be deceived, another mortgage has been placed upon the soul. This is not to defend one purchase or attack the other. There is a judgment operating independently of what any person thinks of another's purchases.

You mortgage your soul with your devotion, too. What is your real allegiance? Your home? Your political party? Your occupation? Your appetite for food or drink? Your drive for security, or for sensual satisfaction? What are the events that thrill you with warm gratification, or frighten you with quaking terror; or stimulate you to effort which resists the desire to take one's ease? Single those out, and that is where you owe your soul.

[handwritten insert: Vincent Van Gogh - prisoner of color= Thos ____ Javert]

You may well believe you are free, because you are not an excessive spendthrift, notorious playboy or religious fanatic. You may feel comforted [to have no] magnificent or dangerous obsession. This may be a hazardous complacency for it may mean, merely that you owe your soul to a number of insignificant mortgage-holders; you may be the prisoner of trivia. Do not all of us cry out at times with the same words, "I can't call my soul my own."

The people of the little Methodist church I once served used to love to sing the old hymn which began, "make me a captive, Lord, and then I will be free." Just because you must place a mortgage does not mean that you are compelled to place it in wrongness or insignificance. I believe that was what the old hymn was saying in evangelical, symbolic language. Our souls are going to be mortgaged somewhere; why not to something great and good?

David Reisman in his book, The Lonely Crowd, believes that most of us are one of three different personality types. We are tradition directed, we are inner-directed or we are other-directed. A tradition directed person, usually found in uncivilized cultures, does everything the way it was done before. He always knows how to act, -- the way his parents acted. Ingenuity and creativeness are never called on. Ways of acting and thinking are fixed by tradition.

The inner-directed person operates the way he does because he is unusually aware of his conscience. He responds to that inner direction which was implanted by his elders at an early date. One teacher (Van Cleve Morris in Teachers College Record) describes the inner-directed who lives in terms of implanted attitudes such as "money talks," "a penny saved, is a penny earned," or "I wanna girl, just like the girl that married dear old Dad." "The inner-directed person has a psychological gyroscope."

The third person, now becoming most common in our modern world, is the other-directed person. This person has psychological radar, so to speak; he catches impulses from other persons as to how to act. When the other-directed person wants to know what house to buy, or what political ideas can be held without being "different," he looks to his human surroundings to discover what is approved. The power of advertising resides in the fact that there are so many other-directed persons. That is why the personal testimonials about soap and whiskey have such persuasive sales power.

Now this classification of Reisman is quite fascinating. The truth is that all of us are partially tradition-directed; we are partially inner-directed, and we are partially other-directed. Our soul is usually always in debt to the past, to the conscience and to the power of our surroundings to make us conform.

We can't be "free souls" in the unrestrained meaning of the word. But why not mortgage our souls, not to any and all tradition of the past, but to the best of the past?

The Hebrew-Christian ethical ideal, not unique in the world , but most powerful for us in our culture, points the way toward the best. There are unmistakable moral values held high for our choosing. The Hebrew prophets, particularly Jesus, said it best in sermon and parable. His question in the 36th and 37th verses of Mark demands answering: "for what doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his own life."

We are all inner-directed too, at least in a measure. We are the prisoners of conscience. That is why we must experience, in greater or lesser degrees, the feelings of guilt and anxiety. The determined morality of the New England conscience has its high values too. The best mortgage for one's soul is to place considerable dependence on that Puritan conscience, but not be its prisoner -- for that way too lies destruction and self-deceit.

Of course we are other-directed. Just think of how you are conscious of clothing styles. Few people rebel at the height of a hem or the addition or subtraction of apparatus and padding in clothing. We follow the crowd. But when we become the prisoner of the signals that come to us over our personality radar, then we become part of the faceless mob that is the jailer for our souls.

"St. Peter don't you call me because I can't go." We go when we're called, regardless. The days along the way will be significant & happier, we will accept the hours of enfolding dark with greater thankfulness for life itself, if we give the keeping of our souls to good causes, home, community, church, and personal happiness -- balancing our bonded lives with several good causes.

May this be realized too -- that all of our mortgages can be under the direction of a worthy purpose. The first mortgagor can be a great cause. "Make me a captive, and then I shall be free." We can give the keeping of our souls to the dominating passion for good-will, for Love in the world. Skeptical wise old Bertrand Russell, surely the last person to be guilty of sentimentality, pleaded for this. "The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned thing. It is love, or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide in action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty. Although you may never find happiness, you will never know the deep despair of those whose lives are aimless and void of purpose; for there is always something you can do to diminish the awful sum of human misery."

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."