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"Have Regard For This Vine"
August 18, 2019
If I had to name the one fact about myself that probably surprises the most amount of people, it would be this: I’m a big fan of country music. I know, I know, I’m not the typical representative of the country music target demographic. It’s not the genre that most people expect a brown classically trained vocalist from the great state of New York of all places who is an unapologetic feminist with a political framework that falls…let’s just say on the left end of the spectrum to be blasting in the car while on a long road trip or using to pump himself up in the gym.
Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure what it is about country music that keeps my radio dial tuned to 98.7 WMZQ, DC’s one stop shop for today’s best country (if anyone out there has any connections to iHeart Radio, I'll happily accept a sponsorship deal). When I was a kid, I actually hated the genre, but that didn’t stop my own father from listening to the likes of Shania Twain and Alan Jackson while my brother and I were stuck in the car with him.
But as I got older, there was something about the simplicity of the genre that drew me back in. And yeah, yeah, I know that a lot of that is probably as manufactured and authentic as the tchotchkes in a Cracker Barrel Country Store right off the interstate, but at their best, country songs tell stories. Stories about love and loss. Life and death. Joy and hardship. And the music lets those stories shine through. You know, three chords and the truth and all that.
And sure. I get that it has a reputation of being sometimes overly dramatic or melancholy. But let’s be honest. If your wife leaves you, your dog dies, and your truck breaks down, you’re not having a great day, are you?
At its best, country music is deeply relatable. Consider, if you will, Miranda Lambert’s hit 2013 single “Mama’s Broken Heart”. It’s a song about a girl who is having a rough time going through a breakup. And so her mom—who comes from, as the narrator puts it, a “softer generation”—comes along and tells her to go and fix your makeup girl, it’s just a breakup girl…start acting like a lady…I raised you better even when you fall apart, to which the narrator defiantly cries out “but this ain’t my mama’s broken heart”.
Now hold onto your seats, because this might shock you, but not once in my life have I been a young girl going through a traumatic breakup. I know, right? I’m as surprised as you are. And yet, I still really relate to this song. Throughout my life, I’ve felt all sorts of implied and explicit pressures to keep my emotions in check—to get a grip and bite my lip just to save a little face. To never let ‘em see you cry. These pressures have come from places as intimate as family members and friends to external forces from the media and culture at large. I’ve never felt the urge to cut my bangs with some rusty kitchen scissors like the girl in the song, but I have felt the need to suppress the feelings I was feeling, and so I find something really cathartic about the narrator’s clapback to the one telling her to stuff it all in.
I suspect that I’m not the only one in here who feels pressured to suppress their emotions from time to time. To build up a thick façade and present a picture of your life to the world that is perfect, all while stifling any emotional expression that might reveal the cracks. Because if the world knew the honest truth about how we were feeling, that perfect picture we spent so long and worked so hard at cultivating would fall apart and the wall would come tumbling down and we’d be left in a state of profound vulnerability that, in spite of the instinct to share everything in our networked and digital age, is a posture we just aren’t accustomed to in today’s day and age. A state of profound vulnerability with which we haven’t been comfortable for a really long time. We can thank stoicism for that.
You see, in the Greco-Roman world, in which everything about life, society, and culture was highly ordered, the goal in life—regardless of who you were or what your station was—was to be as virtuous and manly as possible. Influenced by the stoic philosophers of their time, who believed that the virtuous life was a life governed by reason and dispassionate rational thinking, being as manly as possible included not letting emotional responses dictate the way you lived your life. This kind of virtuous life is one that everyone, regardless of their gender, was to strive for. Having an emotional outburst of any sort made you more womanly, which was to be avoided at all costs.
The hold of the Patriarchy goes way back.
A couple thousand years and one boost from an Enlightenment later and this gendered line of thinking still persists. When we tell our boys to man up or that men don’t cry—usually at the sight of a quivering lip or as their eyes are starting to well up with tears—we are reinforcing this dangerous ideology: that to show your emotions or express your feelings is womanly and to appear womanly robs you of your worth as a human. And how many times have women been told, in response to emotional distress, abuse, harassment, or trauma, that if they want to survive in a man’s world, they’ll just have to suck it up? It’s the same dangerous, underlying philosophy, just remixed for a different gender.
Of course, when we name it like that and put it in those terms, it sounds absurd to us. I’m sure that there is no one in here that consciously thinks that womanly expressions make a person inherently less worthy. And if there does happen to be anyone in here who does think that, I would like to kindly direct your attention to our two United Methodist Women groups who are, in all of their womanly glory, doing amazing work in the Falls Church community and beyond to keep our church’s mission and vision alive and well.
Nevertheless, even though we recognize that the underlying reason behind our discomfort when it comes to expressing our emotions is sexist and dangerous, the fact remains that we still have difficulty giving those who we interact with—even those who we are most close with, our friends and our family—an honest and authentic picture of our emotional state of minds. Who among us, when asked “how are you doing?” have never responded with “fine” when we knew, deep down, that things were not fine. That the world was not fine. That we were not fine.
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| Image Description: A two panel comic strip. The first panel has a brown dog wearing a hat nonchalantly sitting at a dining room table with a cup of coffee on it. The room around the dog is engulfed in flames and thick smoke fills the air. The second panel is a closer look at the dog, now smiling, in the room that's on fire. A speech bubble is above the dog, signifying that the dog is saying "This is fine." Credit: KC Green |
How many times, when we have gathered for worship throughout our lives, have we received that message?
How often does it appear in our hymns?
How often does it appear in our prayers?
In our fellowship together?
My guess is that for many of us, the answer would be not enough.
And that’s a real shame, because when we look at our scriptural witness, we see a profoundly different picture. Our lesson from the Psalms is just one example among many.
Like the Isaiah text, The Psalm uses imagery of a vineyard destroyed. However, unlike the Isaiah text, the destruction of the vineyard in the Psalm is not seen as an act of righteous judgement but rather carries the perception that God failed to be faithful to the covenant.
You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it.Why then have you broken down its walls?
You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land.
The mountains were covered with its shade, the mighty cedars with its branches;
It sent out its branches to the sea, and its shoots to the River.
Why then have you broken down its walls, so that all who pass along the way pluck at its fruit?
Why then have you broken down its walls?
This isn’t a prayer of confession. The psalmist doesn’t say that they did anything wrong, nor are they pleading for forgiveness.
It’s not the result of an act of repentance. The psalmist even makes a point of later saying then we will never turn back from you—then we will never turn back from you. Not “we know that we turned away from you and have seen the error of our ways and have reoriented our lives back to you”. No. It’s let your hand be upon us again and then we will never turn back from you.
This prayer is something else entirely. It’s called a lament. And guess what. The book of Psalms is full of them. As many as one third of the Psalms are Psalms of lament. It’s why sixteenth century Swiss reformer, John Calvin, called them “an anatomy of all parts of the soul” since they represent all the emotions we could ever know we have like a mirror.
Or, as a chaplain of mine was fond of saying, “Your wife left you, your dog died, and your truck broke down? There’s a Psalm for that.”
These Psalms of lament encourage us to look at the fire raging all around us and say this isn’t fine. Things are not fine. The world is not fine. We are not fine.
And what’s more, these Psalms also encourage us to adopt that same posture in our relationship with God. The book of Psalms is our common scriptural prayer book, after all. Each of the one hundred and fifty Psalms teach us how to pray in ways that are authentic to our lived experiences and faithful to God. And the Psalms of lament have a special place in that scriptural liturgy. Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, author of Journey Through the Psalms and my Hebrew Bible professor while I was at Wesley, identifies the Psalms of lament as being the most faithful prayers a believer can pray. It’s really easy to pray a prayer of thanksgiving, she says, but to be in a place of deep despair and to cry out “show yourself…come save us!” shows that you, 1) still acknowledge that God exists and cares about your cries and 2) believe that God has the capacity to do something about them and relieve them.
Laments come from a place of deep hope. Hope in a world more perfect than the world we find ourselves in. Hope that that more perfect world is possible.
I remember a romantic heartbreak that I went through a few years ago during my time at seminary. And to make matters worse, the heartbreak carried with it a shake to my sense of call. I knew that I had lost the relationship, but I desperately wanted that strong sense of call back.
I tried praying like I was typically taught—hands folded, head down. I tried reaching out to friends and pastors for support. But in the end, what brought me the most peace was sneaking into the chapel late one night after class.
It was dark.
I was the only one there.
And I just let God have it.
If you remember that one scene from the West Wing where Jed Bartlett is in the National Cathedral after his secretary and long-time friend’s funeral, it was kind of like that, only louder and with less Latin.
I screamed at God.
I cussed God out using just about every word in the book.
I questioned what more God wanted from me.
And when I ran out of words and my voice gave out, I collapsed onto the floor and wept like I hadn’t wept in a long time.
And as the walls of that sacred space echoed with the sounds of my cries and my profanities, I felt a calming presence wash over me. That night, I had the best night’s sleep that I had had since the breakup.
God doesn’t want us to stifle our emotions in the ways we interact with and relate to anyone.
God doesn’t tell us to fix our makeup.
God doesn’t tell us to get over it.
God doesn’t tell us to keep it together even when we fall apart.
Each and every one of our emotions is a God-given gift that we are meant to honestly and faithfully express in our lives and in our relationships, especially our relationship with God. Because guess what. God already knows the full extent of our emotional well-being.
When we lament, we honor our realities—our actual, messy realities; not the pristine and perfect ones we try to convince the world and ourselves are real.
And naming that things aren’t fine is the first step we need to take on the road to making a world that is.
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