Rector’s Note: Remembering Dolly Parton: Fully Alive-8.27.26

The phrase “the glory of God is the human being fully alive” is often attributed to St. Irenaeus of Lyons. Whatever he originally meant by the phrase, it’s an idea that rings with its own truth when we encounter people that are unabashedly themselves, who are true to their deepest nature, and are unashamed at how God made them. When such a life is lived with open gratitude to the God who fashioned it, it especially rings with divine glory.

As the nation mourns the death of country music diva, Dolly Parton, we are celebrating a woman who was indeed fully alive, larger than life, really, and who will live on in our collective psyche from now on. That she was a woman of deep faith, and that she lived out that faith publicly in what she sang, who she helped, how she walked in the world, puts Dolly Parton right in the pantheon of the saints in light, in my book. Rhinestones and all.

I must admit that my musical tastes over the years have run more Dolly adjacent -- folk music, mountain music, a touch of Grand Ole Opry – rather than a full-on embrace of the country music she epitomized. Even so, "Jolene or Nine-to-Five" make my heart sing when I hear them. They’ve been going non-stop on my internal play list all week.

The stories of Dolly now filling the airwaves have also been running through my head. Most are new to me, and yet not surprising, given Dolly Parton’s reputation for larger-than-life kindness and compassion: the books she provided for children through her Imagination Library, her financial support for the COVID vaccine, her public support and defense of LGBTQ people and of the Black Lives Matter movement.

She was studiously nonpolitical in her statements throughout her career. Yet in these cruel days, acts of kindness and solidarity have very political implications. What Dolly said simply also spoke volumes.

“It helps to remember that the same world that has created so much ugliness right now, also gave us someone like Dolly Parton,” my husband Jess said, as we joined the national discussion of what Dolly Parton meant to us.

In a 2001, Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, Dolly described how she developed her great, big, gaudy persona. As one of 12 children growing up poor in the Smoky Mountains, she didn’t have much of her own, be it toys or attention.

“ I didn't have any money to have stuff,” she said. “And I have often joked about it, but it's the real truth that I patterned myself after what they considered the trash in our hometown. There was this one woman - I thought she was beautiful - … she had the peroxide hair, and she … had it all piled up on her head and had red fingernails and red lipstick and … wore her powder, and I just thought she was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen. And Mama said, oh, quit looking at her. She ain't nothing but trash. And I thought, ooh, that's what I want to be when I grow up - trash.”

What is it about that story that reminds me of Jesus? Perhaps it has to do with who Dolly considered beautiful, and what it meant to elevate that beauty to a whole different dimension.

Which is what makes Dolly Parton an icon, and not just a cultural one. Religious icons were painted figures whose image directed worshipers to gaze deeply into the eyes of God. Dolly fit the bill – painted lady, larger than life, whose gaze landed on the sacredness of everyday life – broken hearts, poverty, relationships, everlasting love, and faith in the savior at the heart of Gospel music. When her biographer Tom Roland asked her how she prepared for her shows, she said “Well I pray, then I pee.”

Which, again, I think is what Jesus would do, and what he would say if anyone thought to ask.

Because the sacred life, one spent fully alive, is honest and earthy and impossible to ignore. It glories in the gifts that God has given. It acknowledges that one’s life itself is the main gift and the whole gift, to be both savored in deep gratitude and shared with others.

Dolly the saint, at her iconic best, gives us all permission to live a bit larger than we might think possible. Not in the way of the narcissist, who believes that all eyes are on her. But in the way of the one who can look at themselves with no shame, who celebrates how they were fashioned, and who chooses to live what they deeply long to be. Prophets lived that way. John the Baptist in his camel-hair coat and his locusts and wild honey comes to mind. Jesus on a donkey amid waving palm branches is a good example.

All evoke the down-home glory of God. Dolly Parton in life and in death, continues to show us how it’s done.