Angel From Montgomery

A photo of John Prine

"Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery, make me a poster of an old rodeo, just give me one thing that I can hold on to, to believe in this livin' is just a hard way to go."

Most of us know John Prine's sad tale of the Midwest housewife who just can't catch a break — desire, old age, loneliness, all of it pressing down on her at once. Bonnie Raitt made the cover famous, but the ache in the lyrics is all Prine. The hook lands in that refrain: she's begging the universe for something to hold onto. One thing. Something solid enough to make this whole hard business of living worth it.

It's a beautiful song. It's also, if you sit with it, a pretty accurate description of what it feels like to be a person with nothing steady to lean on.

A few years back, I was a very fresh Buddhist traveling in Asia with my daughter. One morning she announces we're going to see a monk. Sounds harmless enough.

We wind through the city to a temple, find the white canopy, and there's a monk waiting for us with an easy smile. So far, so good.

My daughter, by contrast, is Buddhist through and through — no hesitation, no small talk. I'm still the new guy, so standing under that canopy talking to an actual monk in Asia felt like a fairly rare occurrence for me. My daughter and the monk got into it for a solid forty-five minutes, going deep, while I mostly nodded along. Eventually they sat back, satisfied. They knew what they knew.

Then the monk turned and looked at me. I think he read my face pretty easily. He said, slowly, "The three jewels."

And there it was — the one Buddhist neuron I had firing that morning lit right up. Together we said it: "Buddha, Dharma, Sangha."

So here's the takeaway, the pithy dharma moment tucked inside all of this: don't let yourself get so worn down that a sad folk song describes your Tuesday better than you'd like. You don't need a poster of an old rodeo. You already have something to hold onto.

Here's why it works where a poster or a made-up angel never could. The woman in that song is asking for a symbol — something to look at, something to remind her of a better feeling, from the outside. A poster doesn't embrace you back. An imagined angel doesn't answer when you call. They're comforting for about as long as you're staring at them, and then the hard way to go is still the hard way to go.

The Three Jewels aren't like that. The Buddha isn't a picture of someone who once had it figured out on his own — in the Shin tradition, even Shakyamuni's awakening points us toward Amida, the Buddha whose vow already reaches out to catch ordinary, unfinished people exactly as we are. You don't have to earn your way to the door. It's already open, and it was opened for you. The Dharma isn't a poster on the wall — it's a way of seeing that you actually get to practice, today, with whatever mess is in front of you. And the Sangha isn't an imagined angel who might swoop in someday — it's real people, actually sitting next to you, going through the same hard way to go. That's the difference between something to look at and something to hold onto 

Hold on tightly to the Three Jewels. Hang your hat on that. I've found it to be true.

Namoamidabutsu, 
Richard Dean