Shhhh!!! Please don’t tell anyone but I have been listening to country music lately. Not exclusively, mind you, but more than I have for awhile. When I was in high school in the mid to late 1970s (graduated 1977), you did not listen to, or admit listening to, country music. That taboo has remained fairly strong over the years, though as time went by, there were those exceptions – Hank Williams (a precursor to rock ‘n’ roll), Johnny Cash (who was early rock ‘n’ roll) and a few others. I knew things were changing for kids when I was a youth pastor in Dallas and some of the youth in my youth group could listen unabashedly to country music. I began to loosen up, then, but it still feels kind of odd.

And now I have been listening to Garth Brooks, cowboy hat and all! I share this because I have found in a couple of his songs something I had not really expected – wisdom. Now I am not classing Garth Brooks with Buddha or Plato or Solomon, but when I put two of his songs together, there are the beginnings of a decent theology of life. Most surprising to me is that this theology includes a deep social conscience.

For whatever reason, not long ago, when it was on sale, I bought a two-CD, one-DVD hits collection of Garth Brooks music. I liked some of the songs well enough, but after hearing two in particular, I wanted to watch the accompanying videos. The videos were not simply light visual accessories to the songs, they added to their depth. One song, “The Dance,” seems to be about lost love – a frequent theme in country music (o.k. maybe I’ve listened to more over the years than I would readily admit). The singer recalls a moment of closeness, a dance, and then wistfully acknowledges that the relationship ended. He thinks about this. And now I’m glad I didn’t know/The way it all would end, the way it all would go/Our lives are better left to chance, I could have missed the pain/But I’d of had to miss the dance. So I watched the video, and Garth Brooks has pictures of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Well, yes, John Wayne is in there, too – I didn’t say this was deep theology in every respect! The idea, that while we might have been glad to miss the pain, we appreciate life’s joys, is powerful. When there are challenges and we strive to meet those challenges, and we know disappointment along with success, we usually would choose the same course. When we work for change, the road is long and hard, but we would not want to miss the dance. We don’t seek pain or relish it, and there is much we can and should do to lessen pain, but it seems to come with the territory of living, and we can choose to try and avoid it and stay cooped up, or be open to life.

The song that surprised me most, however, was a song called “We Shall Be Free.” It has as much a gospel feel as a country music feel to it, and the lyrics are powerful. Here is just one verse: When the last thing we notice/Is the color of skin/And the first thing we look for/Is the beauty within/When they skies and the oceans/Are clean again/Then we shall be free. There is something of the hopeful vision of the prophets in this song, and the video does a great job of helping us see the beauty and misery of the world as it is, while fostering hope for a better future. Sometimes the video is too sanguine about change for the better, but hope is a precious commodity in our day and time, and I will take it from anywhere I can get it. Toward the end of the video, you hear Garth Brooks say, “Now there’s faith, hope and love… and the greatest of these is love. That’s cool!”

Garth is no Barth, but that faith, hope and love thing is pretty cool.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David