Kingdom Harbor

Three days before Buddy Holly’s plane crashed in an Iowa field killing Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson — “the day that music died” — the Winter Dance Party tour stopped at the Duluth Armory in frigid Minnesota. Standing in front of the stage was a teenage boy named Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, MN, who had come to see one of his heroes perform. The 17 year old is better known today as Bob Dylan.

I spent this past weekend up north and made my own pilgrimage to the hollowed Armory building on a drizzly Sunday morning. I parked my car and snapped a photograph of the build where inside some mysterious exchange happened on that fateful night back in 1959.

Dylan has spoken about the significance of that moment in both his 1998 acceptance speech for his Grammy for Album of the Year and in his 2017 Nobel Prize lecture where he said:

“He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence… I was three feet away from him. He looked at me… and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what it was. And it gave me the chills.”

Dylan viewed this as a spiritual passing of the torch just days before Holly’s brilliance was so tragically snuffed out in his prime.

“I got the serious shivers thinking of what a profound moment took place in January 1959 at the Armory,” reflects Rock ‘n Roll historian, Dennis McNally, “of Buddy Holly passing on some mysterious spiritual message to a teenager named Zimmerman (Bob Dylan) who would become the poet of his generation standing there in front of that stage.”

I, too, get shivers pondering the reality of one person passing their mantel, their power, their presence, their mission onto a younger protege. This all has the ring of something spiritual and “of biblical proportion” as we say. Indeed, it reminds me of my favorite passing of the torch in the Scriptures, where the great and powerful prophet Elijah is Buddy Holly, and the younger protege Elisha is Bob.

Here’s a brand new short visual summary of my reflection Elijah passing the torch to Elisha and on the significance of mentorship in general. Our world is suffering from a serious lack of moral exemplars and positive role models. We platform the rich and ruthless, the powerful and power-hungry, these days; and wise and soft-spoken men and women want nothing to do with the ugly world of political leadership, so the downward spiral into deeper corruption intensifies in places of power and influence. Young people would be wise to seek out their own older, wiser godly Elijah to help guide them in this dog-eat-dog world.

While Bob hasn’t looked me in the eye or passed anything directly onto me, I touched the door of the Armory on Sunday to hopefully bring some inspiration back with me before our fun little concert this Saturday at the Gillespie Center in Mound at 7pm. Come join us!

Now check out this 5 minute video on Elijah and Elisha and share with others: