Please see my links and find the youtube link for the song. If I tagged you it is because I thought you in particular might get something out of it.
This song has always struck me as the best representative of an important Biblical insight and intuition, something that undergirds the religious dimension of life in general, by my lights. The image of the wanderer is a recurring theme in the Bible. From Abraham to the Jews' life in exodus and exile, through the various images of the prophets, and finally in Jesus Himself, the idea that the religious life is a life of wandering is almost insisted upon in much of scripture. To live the life of faith is to have no final home in this world. It is a life void of proximate security, where the need to control and guarantee one's own existence is abandoned. Russell Pregeant talks about this as the life of 'risk and venture', a life where we step out into uncertainty and adventure, not knowing what will come next, but taking life however it comes and trusting that the adventure we enter into is grounded in the universe as such. It is living as if the universe is not indifferent to the life of risk and venture. Jesus insists on this over and over again in scripture, especially through the parables. Matthew 8:19-22 reads:
' ...a teacher of the law came to him and said, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go."
Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."
Another disciple said to him, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."
But Jesus told him, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead." '
Here we see a radically departure from the normal movements of society, and an life void of the need to ground itself in security and safety, a life of true risk and venture. The same ideas can be found in Luke 12:13-21 and Matthew 25:14-30. And a related sentiment is struck by Alfred N Whitehead in RELIGION IN THE MAKING:
"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. It runs through three stages, if it evolves to its final satisfaction. It is the transition from God the void to God the enemy, and from God the enemy to God the companion.
Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. Collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches, rituals, bibles, codes of behaviour, are the trappings of religion, its passing forms...The great religious conceptions which haunt the imaginations of civilized mankind are scenes of solitariness: Prometheus chained to his rock, Mahomet brooding in the desert, the meditations of the Buddha, the solitary Man on the Cross. It belongs to the depth of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God."
It is about taking a risk and walking out into uncertainty, taking life as it comes and not conforming the normal patterns of the world. Could anything express this better than WHEREVER I MAY ROAM? The words and music communicate a life where the normal patterns are indeed thrown off and a life of risk and venture is embraced. Life is hard but a place of adventure, where nothing is certain but the world is trusted with almost reckless abandon, and no proximate security or safety or control is sought. Hetfield says he is stripped of 'all but pride', craves the dust in his throat, says that from society's point of view he is a roamer, a wanderer, a vagabond, is freed of all ties. This last line is reminiscient of Jesus' injunction to 'let the dead bury the dead', a throwing off of the normal Jewish familial responsibilities that were the very foundation of the society to which He spoke. Further, the song speaks of 'adapting to the unknown' and growing up under 'wandering stars'. I have never heard a song that more succinctly reflected this basic religious insight, and it is for that reason the song is almost a hymn for me.
But that is not all. Also like the Bible, there is a sense that one learns to 'trust' in this life, to give oneself
over to it, to form a kind of relationship with the life of risk and venture. The "Road" that determines life, is also the 'Bride' of the wanderer. And one walks down it taking whatever comes. The earth is one's 'throne', a place where one is at home. As Jesus CALLS us to step into uncertainty, risk, venture and ADventure, the road CALLS and welcomes Hetfield into this life of wandering.
And the sacrifice of a life of proximate security, paradoxically, opens one up to a kind of Ultimate Security that can be found no other way. In the Parable of the Talents (see: the aforementioned Matthew passage), the risk-takers are rewarded richly, given kingdoms to rule over. The one who sells all they have purchases 'the pearl of great price', (Matthew 13:45-46), the wanderers in the desert find the Promised Land, and perhaps the best sum up is Jesus famous line that, 'those who lose their lives will find it' (Matthew 16:25). In the song, the slow, foreboading action of the guitar that accompanies the description of the life of wandering gives way to a powerful, upbeat demonstration of the benefits of that life: true freedom (to 'take ones time anywhere' or 'speak one's mind anywhere'), and those who forsake this life, remain a 'slave to the game', and perhaps most interestingly Hetfield talks of being 'by himself but not alone'. In the Bible and other religious traditions, too, the need to guarantee proximate security, to act only in certainty and to avoid risky venture is to forgoe Ultimate Security, and really to live in fear and INsecurity, to remain a kind of slave. It is by living the life of risky venture, by living out the human adventure and all that entails good and bad, trusting that such a quest is grounded in the nature of things, that one finds the security that so often eludes one when one is trying to create a life of safety and security through control. It is by giving up the quest to guarantee all one's needs that one discover what one really needs.
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