by the Night Writer
(Originally written, September, 2019.)
All my life, there has been music playing. And growing up, that meant country music, so I started watching the Ken Burns country music series on PBS, expecting to hear some familiar songs and stories. Turns out, the music isn’t the only thing familiar. I see the images, and hear the voices, and always the images and voices of my family are superimposed in my mind.
From the hard times of my grandparents’ hard-scrabble beginnings, through the challenging post-Depression and war years of my parents’ childhoods, to the records they brought home as adults and the radio stations they tuned to, country music was the quilt that patched it all together. My grandfather was born on a farm in rural Missouri (though almost all of Missouri was rural then), his large family scraping an existence and posterity out of the soil. When he was six, their house burned down and the family lived in the barn and outbuildings until his father could afford to rebuild. His annual clothing allotment as a boy was a pair of new overalls, two union suits, a shirt or two in good years, and cheap shoes that would be worn-out pieces of flapping cardboard by the spring, when it was time to go barefoot anyway. I saw the b/w images of the Carter Family, and the Maddox Brothers and Rose, but it was also the barefoot boy with the slingshot on the rocky farmstead that I was seeing.
The pictures and home movies of the young stars like Johnny Cash and others were a punch in the gut. The wavy hair, skinny arms in short-sleeve shirts, the wistful smiles, the hands holding a can of beer and a cigarette (when they weren’t holding a guitar) – that was my father and his brothers relaxing after their many labors as I was growing up in a succession of backyards in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Indiana. I see the pictures, and I know that even though they couldn’t see the future that I have seen, they believed in it.
And, of course, the series has to run now, in late September. Today is my father’s birthday, he would have been 84. He knew the roots and the rocks stretching back behind us, but never knew his great-grandchildren, yet the circle – as they say – is unbroken. And, as the song says, “I can’t stop loving you.”
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/country-music/episode-guide…
In Part 3, then, let’s look at some actual steps that can be taken to break the grip of depression. My list is not definitive, but these are things that I have found effective in my life and as I minister to others.
You’ve heard the word, “Hallelujah”. It means, “God Be praised.” We may think praise is for happy times, but it is for bad situations, too. Especially in bad situations! You’ve probably also heard the Leonard Cohen song, “Hallelujah”, it’s been covered by dozens of artists and appeared in movies and TV shows and is known even outside of “spiritual” circles. One of the most overlooked (because it’s hard to understand) verses of the song goes, “It’s not a cry that you hear at night, it’s not somebody who’s seen the light, but it’s a cold and it’s a broken, ‘Hallelujah’.”
These suicides and deaths are like people being picked off by snipers, and the numbers are starting to attract attention. Someone has even coined a name for these: “Deaths of Despair”, to describe people who are deliberately – or inadvertently – killing themselves because of a lack of hope.
We were wrapping up the prison Bible study session and a guy asked me for my take on all the big names being exposed for sexual harassment. My immediate response was, “the Word says that that which is done in darkness will be brought to light.” Just because you think you’ve gotten away with something – and are therefore free to keep doing it – doesn’t mean that that you won’t ultimately be held accountable for it, and that the accounting might not come at a dear cost.