Lyfting Me Up

When I decided to write this today I asked myself, “Who the heck do you think you are to write anything about Dolly Parton”? What the hey… let me add my voice to the chorus of humanity that found themselves moved by this woman.

My first memory of Dolly goes back to my life as a young college student at Earl Butts Dorm. There was a group of guys in another wing of the dorm who had a routine of watching “The Porter Wagner Show” while drinking beer on, I believe Saturday afternoons. I decided one day to check it out… I am not sure if it was the show or the beer that brought me there. They would pack a dorm room and crowd around a black and white TV. What I remember about Dolly was her accent and her physic. She did leave an impression on me that made me smile. I was neither a fan nor a detractor.

I was living in Alamosa in 1990 when “Steel Magnolias” came to the Rialto Theater. What I remember most about that movie was the line—Truvy (Dolly’s character) “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion”. It landed deep in my soul and became the polar star for how I was to do ministry for the next generations. What makes it so powerful is that neither half cancels the other. The laughter doesn’t deny the tears and the tears do not forbid the laughter. Spend any time in a living room with a grieving family, and more often than not they will be laughing and crying at the same time. It’s grief refusing to have the last word without denying that grief. For those moments love has become larger than loss…perhaps this is a most apt definition of Grace.

The Gospel as I have experienced it, is the gift of walking through life holding both the pain of living in one hand, and the joy of same in the other.

The second point I want to suggest about Dolly is the example she lived in every aspect of her life’s journey. Matthew 5:8 from the sermon on the Mount says, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”. This does not mean morally spotless, sexually innocent, religiously proper, or somehow uncontaminated by human messiness. That, I believe, misses Jesus’s point. “Pure in heart” can carry a sense of undividedness—a heart without guile—the inside and the outside match. What you see is what you get. Blond wigs, lots of makeup, glitter and glitz, and generosity beyond measure… oh yes, and over 3,000 songs that play both heartstrings, and the backdrop of a life worth paying attention to.

Her wonderfully outrageous exterior—hair, rhinestones, curves, jokes, self-parody was almost a distraction from a remarkably consistent core of radical generosity, affection for ordinary people, lack of pretension, and the ability to laugh at herself. We need not mistake the package for the person.

The question was asked, “What kind of funeral will she have”? It will be very private… but her life was her funeral sermon… she defined “pure heartedness”.

Onward and Upward,

Mark