“It’s funny that we never think about death, because we think it’s depressing, when the truth is we’re going to die”, Kris Kristofferson said before he left this world on Saturday, 28 September. He was 88 years old, but at 76 he already realised that “you leave more behind than what’s in front of you”.

The American singer-songwriter and actor felt closer and closer to his mortality. “Your close friends and heroes are dying and you become more reflective about your life”. That’s why he titled his 2013 album, Feeling Mortal.

Kristofferson belongs to a generation of country singers who changed the parameters of Nashville in the 1960s. His songs were about sex, drugs, urban issues and social concerns, which the conservative world of the Grand Ole Opry did not address. His music has more to do with artists like Bob Dylan or John Lennon than with traditional country musicians.

Kris studied literature at Oxford, England - thanks to a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship that allowed him to attend Merton College - after graduating cum laude from Pomona College in southern California, while boxing and playing rugby. As an aspiring writer, he admired the Romantic poet William Blake but decided to pursue a career in music rather than teach literature at West Point. Earlier he joined the army, where he became a captain, after marrying his lifelong sweetheart.

After becoming a military pilot, he went on to become a commercial helicopter pilot. In the 1960s he cleaned the Columbia studios in Nashville, until he met the gospel singer Johnny Cash, who popularised his song, Sunday Morning Coming Down. His son’s illness causes so many medical expenses that the marriage faces a crisis, which eventually leads to divorce. He then begins a relationship with Janis Joplin, who makes his song, Me and Bobby McGee, a hit.

All to die young

Kris Kristofferson’s relationship with Janis Joplin, just before her death in 1970 - from a heroin overdose, combined with the effects of alcohol - leads many to see him as responsible for it. Before he was with Barbra Streisand - with whom he made the 1976 film A Star Is Born - Joan Baez said she had been with him. Becoming a star, he went from one woman to another, but alcohol and drugs were killing him.

“I did everything to die early”, Kris recalls. “I was riding around in cars and wrecking motorbikes, drinking and doing everything to die young”. It seems he “agreed with Blake that the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”. Until something surprising happened when he returned from a Saturday night benefit concert in the early 1970s.

Singer Connie Smith told him they could go to Pastor Jimmie Snow’s service at the Gospel Temple the next day, which was Sunday. Kris didn’t go to church much, but said he would go with her anywhere. Snow had performed with Elvis. He had problems with alcohol and pills, until he converted to Christianity in 1958 and left show business, becoming an Assemblies of God pastor. Johnny Cash had a kind of reconversion in his church in 1971.

Why me, Lord?

The Sunday that Kristofferson came to church, Snow asked a member of the congregation, future singer Larry Gatlin - who was then cleaning up for a local television station - to perform a song he had written. It was called Help Me and it expressed our dependence on God:

I never thought I needed help before

I thought that I could do things by myself

Now I know I just can’t take it anymore

With a humble heart on bended knee

I'm begging you, please help me

After hearing the song, Kristofferson began to feel especially moved. As everyone's head was lowered in prayer, the preacher said if anyone felt lost, raise your hand. “Although I couldn’t imagine doing anything like that, I suddenly felt my hand go up, hoping no one was looking”, he said. When the pastor invited anyone willing to be saved to come forward, “what I thought would never happen, I got up and went with all those people”.

Kris doesn’t know what the pastor told him, but it was something like whether he wanted to accept Jesus Christ into his life. He said, “I don't know”. Confused and on his knees, he broke down in tears, as he had never done in public before. He felt he had hurt his family, his friends and everyone who knew him. He was relieved of the burden of guilt he carried. He experienced that he had been forgiven. In 1971, he wrote the song: Why Me Lord?

Why me Lord, what have I ever done
To deserve even one
Of the pleasures I’ve known
Tell me Lord, what did I ever do
That was worth loving You
Or the kindness You’ve shown

Lord help me Jesus, I’ve wasted it
So help me Jesus, I know what I am
Now that I know that I’ve needed you
So Help me Jesus, my soul’s in Your hand

Kristofferson recorded this track at the end of his album Jesus Was a Capricorn. The first side ended with Help Me, Lord, a duet with its author, Gatlin, which is also on the back of the single disc of Why Me, Lord? Both were performed by Johnny Cash on the soundtrack of the film Gospel Road - a presentation of the life of Christ, narrated, sung and dramatised in Israel, by ‘The Man in Black’ - as well as a Kristofferson song called The Burden of Freedom. In a scene that was filmed, but is not in the film, Pastor Snow baptises Cash in the Jordan.

The man dressed in black

The evangelical association Campus Crusade for Christ organised a meeting in Dallas in 1972 with Billy Graham for young people called “Explo”. It was presented as a kind of religious Woodstock, which was on the cover of Life magazine, while Time magazine was also announcing the Revolution for Jesus on its cover in 1971. Johnny Cash was then the best-known Christian artist to the general public. On the day of his performance, he invited Kris Kristofferson and his future wife, Rita Coolidge, to perform Why Me, Lord and Burden of Freedom with him.

Cash had invited Kris on stage at the Newport Folk Festival when Kristofferson was in the audience. The ‘Man in Black’ had recorded a song of his called To Beat the Devil, and when Johnny Cash heard that Kris was sleeping in an old church that offered its space to hippies, he asked him to do two songs with him. They sang Sunday Morning Coming Down and Me and Bobby McGee. He did so well that the New York Times said he stole the show. He was invited to the Berkeley Folk Festival and to perform with musicians like Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor.

Kristofferson was still unsure of the meaning of the experience he had had at the Gospel Temple. He was uncomfortable at the idea of performing two songs with Johnny Cash in front of 80,000 young Christians, knowing that his appearance would be a public declaration of faith. “I was singing songs that I thought were spiritual, but people wanted to hear songs more specifically about Jesus”, he recalls. “So I had to tell John that I couldn’t do those kinds of concerts any more”, as “I felt like a hypocrite”, he confesses to gospel writer Steve Turner.

Johnny and Kris toured together and even starred together in a TV movie called The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James (1986). When they sang together in Dublin in 1993, Bono of U2 asked Johnny to play Preacher on the recording he was making with Brian Eno. It was a track based on Ecclesiastes – “one of my favourite books of the Bible”, says Bono - which was eventually titled The Wanderer. “It’s about someone who wants to know why he’s alive and why he’s been created”, says the U2 singer, who admired Cash as “a saint who preferred the company of sinners”.

“John respected people enough to let them decide for themselves what to do spiritually”, Kristofferson recalls. “He took me to a couple of Billy Graham events and that was it”, he says. “I think he was sensitive to the fact that I didn’t want to talk about it”.

What effect the experience that led to the song Why Me, Lord? had is unknown, but Kris has never wanted to identify himself as an evangelical artist. For him, it was “a profound religious experience, very personal”, but many doubt that it changed his life.

At the gates of heaven

There is no doubt that stepping forward in a meeting, or raising a hand, does not make anyone a Christian. Many believe they have been converted because of it, even if their lives don’t change, but that is not the case with Kristofferson.

Faith is much more than an emotional experience at one point in your life. It is when faith is put to the test that we see if we are truly believers. The nearness of death makes us see life differently.

On the Hawaiian island of Maui - where Kristofferson died - he has written some raw and poignant songs, which he recorded with Dylan and Rolling Stones producer Don Was. The album opens with a song that introduces him at the gates of Heaven, as in the 1980 film he starred in with Michael Cimino - the director of The Deer Hunter. He sings:

God almighty here I am
Am I where I ought to be
I’ve begun to soon descend
Like the sun into the sea

The second song (Mama Stewart) recalls the grandmother of his second wife, Rita Coolidge. It is a plea to God to give him the wisdom and discernment she had to discover the beauty and wonder of life. Then he regrets losing his life following a dream that was not his. In Bread for the Body he says:

I built my own chains in the land of the free
A slave to a job that meant nothing to me
With three shiny new cars and a split level home
To furnish the tomb I was dying to own

Then one day I wakened with fear in my eye
Aware of a world that was passing me by
And I knew that my savings of silver and gold
Would mean not a thing when my body was cold

In You Don’t Tell Me What to Do, Kris reminds us that life is too short to waste it living the way others want. Inside, he knows what he has to do and what he wants to be, “the things I have become too blind to see and the feelings I have hidden deep inside me”.

In Stairway to the Bottom, he confesses adultery with a friend’s wife, like a descent by putting “Was a new nail in the coffin of your soul”, even though “no one’s watchin’ but that mirror on the wall”

The moment of truth

Are we ready to die? In a sense, we never are. No matter how much we think about it, one never seems to be ready. Who can say that he has lived a life in which he regrets nothing? If we were to leave this world now, how would we know that we could be free from the all-knowing, all-measuring judgement of God in His perfect justice?

Compared to others, we may feel better, but not before the One who cannot overlook our shame.

Death is inevitable. We cannot escape it. We all have to face it, at some point in our lives. Psalm 90 tells us that when we reach the age of seventy or eighty (vv. 10-12), we are living on borrowed time.

Jesus speaks of a man who was not prepared to die (Luke 12:15-21). He was prepared to live. He had many things here and now, but he did not count on eternity. Hebrews 9 reminds us of the brevity of life and 2how it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment” (v. 27).

Woody Allen once said: “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying; what I don’t want is to be there when it happens”. However, we will be there. We can’t avoid that appointment. It is the only security we bring to this world, just as we came into it, one day we will have to leave it.

Life is short. It passes quickly, even if it seems like it will last forever. John Lennon said that “life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans”. It flies by, without us noticing. “Surely it is like a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14).

The American writer William Saroyan observes that “we all have to die, but I have always believed that an exception will be made in my case”. Why must we die? It is because we have the problem that the Bible calls sin.

There is nothing natural about death. God is not the cause of it. It is man who brought it about (Romans 5:12). And only a perfect Man can deliver us from it. God became man “that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14). Only he alone can deliver us from the fear of death (v. 15), which enslaves us.

José de Segovia, journalist and evangelical pastor in Madrid, Spain.