When I was a little girl, my best friends across the street were Catholic
Actually, I didn’t know about anything having to do with religion or even Jesus
and they informed me that I would not be able to go to heaven but that I would be able to
go to Purgatory, because the Jews killed Jesus, and that’s what would keep me out of heaven
They were also the first people that ever told me about the Holocaust
and people being made into soap and lampshades, and I had no idea.
1975, I got to travel with Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Review on two six-week tours
and then a six-week European tour, and on that tour was Joni Mitchell
and Joan Baez, Ramblin Jack Elliott and Roger McGuinn from a group called The Birds
and we hung out with people like Ringo Starr and Jack Nicholson, and just…
it was a very very exciting, very fun time, you know, very heady, just playing all over Europe
staying in the best hotels, riding a private train through six different countries, it was great!
It was everything that you would think. When those tours were over, rather than being elated
I felt completely empty, completely lost, completely… just like I had
climbed a mountain, and I looked over, and there was nothing on the other side.
And I just was asking myself, what is life all about?
If it’s not about you know, having things that are just - just having fun, if it’s not that
if it’s not even that your art or your talent can fulfill you because these people that I
I traveled with were so artistic, so talented, but they had their own issues, what was life about?
It got to a certain point where I was so frustrated with life that I determined
I will give myself 35 days - and I wrote this in a diary - I give myself
35 days to find a new way of approaching life.
I am just sick of this brain inhabiting this body, and just the way I even thought about things.
During that 35 days I contracted an illness called Bell's Palsy.
As I was going to bed one night I was brushing my teeth, and water came squirting out
of the side of my mouth. I lived alone in an apartment at that point, and I thought to myself,
I’m going to go to bed, and I’m gonna wake up paralyzed, and sure enough
when I woke up in the morning, half my face was paralyzed!
Bob’s girlfriend, this big, black Baptist woman, grabbed me by the hands and said to me
she started praying for me in the name of Jesus, and I remember that when she was finished
I walked out of that trailer and I was stunned, and I looked around and I thought,
“What was that?” And the next day I actually started seeing an improvement
and feeling an improvement in my face, and I actually did end up
going to Europe on that six week Bob Dylan tour.
One day I was out in the desert with a girlfriend of mine, and we were in a motel and I remember
on my search I was still looking for truth, and I opened up the little drawer in the hotel room
and there was a red Gideon Bible, so I stole that Bible and I brought it home with me.
And I remember opening it up, never having read the Bible before, just opening it up to Matthew
and reading the words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God
blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted
and blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”
and I remember thinking to myself, whoever this Jesus is, I could use a friend like him.
I had a voice teacher who took me to a big church with his wife and with him
and there were about 1000 people there and they were all just singing songs to God
and enjoying themselves and their hands were raised, and I’m looking around the room
thinking to myself, “Are these people crazy and I’m the only sane one here?
Or do they know something that I don’t know?”
I came back really kind of just desperately more wanting to know what is this life all about
and a friend of mine gave me a book by CS Lewis called “Mere Christianity”.
And I was in a bar in Austin, Texas, with my brother and my cousin’s band who was playing
and I started reading that book, and as I’m reading the book, it was as if these scales
literally fell off my eyes. I remember laughing, thinking, “Oh my gosh, I know who Jesus is”.
Because CS Lewis said on page 42 in that book that you cannot call Jesus a prophet
or a wise man or a good man - he allowed people to worship him and fall at his feet.
Either he was who he claimed to be, or he was a raving lunatic, as crazy as a poached egg
a megalomaniac, but there is no room to call him “good”.
He was either who he was, or he was a madman.
When I got back to California, a friend of mine took me to a church, The Vineyard
and as I was leaving church, there in the back of the church, is Bob Dylan
his girlfriend Mary-Ellis, and she looked at me and she said
“Girl, you’ve got to go to discipleship school”, and I said, “No, I need a job”, and she said
“Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all else will be added to unto you”, and sure enough
I went to Bible school for five months, five days a week, four hours a day with Bob
and Mary-Ellis, myself, and nine other people.
Today I’m married to Marty Goetz, and we have one daughter who’s an adult
and I work as Marty’s manager, record producer, booking agent, travel agent
and he is my best friend, but I have even a better friend and it’s Yeshua, Jesus.
And I have a very simple, childlike faith that he loves me.