I have always liked Reggae. As a child, I was introduced to Calypso music, popular in Trinidad and Americanized by Harry Belafonte. We had county fairs and such when I was a teenager, and invariably there was a steel drum band featured that played Caribbean music. As an adult, my favorite rock artists such as The Police and Peter Gabriel would play similar third world music. It didn’t take much of a leap to collecting Bob Marley songs. In this post, I’d like to review the movie “One Love.”
When Deena and I moved back to New York in the summer of 2019, we attended a concert in the park in downtown Albany featuring Stephen Marley, son of the late, great, Bob Marley. He and his band had a repertoire of their own and Stephen played music from among the eight Grammys he won in his own right. But after an hour or so, the hundreds of people at the concert heard a second hour of the best hits that his father had performed before Bob Marley died at the age of 36. It was wonderful! A warm, otherwise clear evening except for the smoky haze from reefers, roaches and the occasional bongs and bowls. Fortunately, Deena and I sat upwind from the extracurricular activities so we could enjoy the music in true fidelity.
The Spectrum
When the movie “One Love” was about to be released, I mentioned to Deena that I would like to see it. She noted last week that it was playing at The Spectrum, a neighborhood theater that we’ve been to before, and which is sadly about to shut its doors in the next few days. The Spectrum opened in 1983 as an arthouse, featuring independent, international, and “artsy” films in addition to regular cinematic fare. Prior to that when it was first built in 1941, it was the Delaware Theater. Member of the Warner Brothers family attended the grand opening. In addition to the latest movies, the Delaware Theater featured indoor air conditioning, a recent innovation. The Spectrum had a hard act to follow, but they succeeded magnificently. But after 40 years, it is closing, though hopes remain that it will reopen under new management. Usually there is no waiting to purchase tickets, and at a screening of Napoleon starring Jaoquin Phoenix last month, there were barely a dozen people watching it with me. But yesterday, there was a long line to get in as neighbors rallied one last time to patronize—and bid farewell to–The Spectrum.
The movie was better than I expected and Deena liked it as well. The was no profanity or sex (though Bob Marley had a dozen children so he must have found time off screen for that as well.) The movie begins and ends in Jamaica. There are flashbacks of his youth–his stern white father who took no responsibility for him–and begins with the political violence in Jamaica. In Kingston as elsewhere, left and right elements in Jamaican society fought for dominance. Eventually, drugs became another casus belli, and innocent civilians (including Marley) were caught in the crossfire. Marley was shot twice as was his wife and a trusted friend. Fortunately, all three survived. At the time, Marley was a rising start trying to unify and pacify the land he loved so much, but in order to protect those he loved from future assassination attempts on his life, he moved to London. From there he toured Europe and beyond as more and more crowds following his rising star and he was able to write and sing his songs of peace.
While playing a game of football (soccer to us), he stumbled and injured the great toe on one of his feet. This brought attention to an unsettling lesion that was slowing growing even before his injury, and eventually after postponing a visit to the doctors, he learned that he had a very rare, and deadly form of cancer which shortly took his life. But he continued to perform as long as physically possible.
The movie has an exceptional soundtrack, though some songs such as “Buffalo Soldiers” are not performed and other hits are represented in only a few bars. But it is a good movie. I found it difficult to follow some of the dialogue which is occasionally thickly-accented. The band members are exceptional, and the actor playing Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) does a very credible job portraying the man, the musician and the mystic. The movie is well worth seeing. So, why did Deena and I as Christians enjoy it? Read on.
Rastafarians
There is no “one-size fits all” in how Christianity is practiced, though there is a core belief system which must be recognized. Religious practices and traditions in Christian churches in Wales or Sweden are certainly different than one would find in Nigeria or Syria. The Church in Asia is different than the Church in the Americas. Yet, Christendom has creeds. Any religious group large or small purporting to be Christian must be able to support the Apostles’ Creed and also the Nicene Creed as well.
The Rastafarians, however, do not have a creed. In this religion, you start off with Abraham, Moses and other Biblical heroes and themes and the notion that Jaj (God) lives within you and you develop your own belief system based on whatever light, intuition or experiences you encounter. Some Rastafarians accept the traditional Jesus, others believe Jesus was not white (and He probably wasn’t as Americans perceive white given the gene pool in the Holy Land when He was born.) Some Rastafarians are very close to Christianity in their beliefs, others see Christianity as evil, a way to exploit and enslave peoples of color. Many Rastafarians are influenced more by Marcus Garvey than the apostle Paul. And, almost every one smokes pot in this patriarchal religion. In fact, smoking week is a sacrament, prefaced by a prayer of thanks before one lights up. And, there are also diet restrictions as well that are religiously if not culturally agreed on.
Yet, this religion cannot break entirely free from the Bible. The current world system is seen as Babylon (predicted in the Old Testament) and the late Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie, much more than a patron saint, is thought to have been Jesus in His Second Coming (predicted in the New Testament.) There is conflicting evidence of how Selassie understood the worship of the Jamaican people concerning him. Some accounts say that he tried to make the Rastafarian understand he was just a man, mortal like them. He agreed with their dreams of returning to Africa, but that he could not save their souls. On the other hand, reports say that he was coy about it when he visited Jamaica personally and interacted with the Jamaican authorities.
Bob Marley finds redemption and peace
I am always a bit suspicious to hear of death-bed conversions to Christianity, even though this was the experience of my own father. These anecdotes to me raise more questions than they answer. It’s as if groups in our society are hunting among pop stars and other celebrities for “trophies.” And then, too, there is the temptation to rewrite history. So, when I read of Bob Marley’s conversion to Christianity, I first took a jaundiced view of it. But as I consulted multiple and also credible sources and read more, it seemed to be more likely to be true than sketchy.
Marley was raised as a devout Roman Catholic. As an adult, he drifted away to become the personification of the Rastafarian movement, though people who knew him said he would often hum or sing scraps of his favorite hymns from his youth. Then, too, he read the Bible regularly, whether to search for lyrics to his reggae music or to understand better the roots of Rastafarianism. Trips to Africa and particularly Ethiopia convinced him that that continent and particularly that country were not the Promised Land that he longed. He clearly saw that the political and religious violence in many African countries rivaled that of his own Jamaica.
The unauthorized literature on Bob Marley suggests that he would often drift back to his Catholic faith during the zenith of his career with all of the pressures such a career brings and with all of the ambitious but occasionally duplicitous people with their own agendas who try to befriend a celebrity. Many of the people in his inner circle were said to have pressured Marley to “stay on topic” as far as his music and his ideology was concerned. Some may have been personally hostile to a “white man’s Jesus” while others may have had financial stake in the artist and the music. What’s more, the people of Jamaica needed him as they knew him.
But during his fight against cancer, he was introduced to new people; doctors and nurses, caregivers. One caregiver in particular was said to have been a devout Christian, and it is easy to believe that her presence in his times of pain and suffering might have been an influence on him. Regardless, “on November 4, 1980, in a New York City hotel room, Bob Marley was baptized as a Christian.” Specifically, “Abuna Yesehaq, archbishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church baptized Bob Marley” and according to reports, it was a joyous occasion. According to Bishop Yesehaq:
Bob was really a good brother, a child of God, regardless of how people looked at him . . .He had a desire to be baptized long ago, but there were people close to him who controlled him and who were aligned to a different aspect of Rastafari. But he came to church regularly.”
“Yes, but he knew he was dying” you might say, “and he was desperate under the circumstances.” Bishop Yesehaq specifically refutes that notion:
Many people think he was baptized because he knew he was dying, but that is not so. He did it when there was no longer any pressure on him, and when he was baptized, he hugged his family and wept, they all wept together for about half an hour.”
Bob Marley, who after baptism took on the name Berhane Selassie (Light of the Trinity), died at the age of 36, calling for Jesus to take him home. His wife Rita and his children were themselves baptized on another occasion. Yet, his musical legacy lives on.
