Sunday Mornin'

Trent Tomlinson and Bobby Pinson wrote a song, which recently received widespread, pop-country airplay, called ‘One Wing in the Fire’. Tomlinson (try to see past his bandana and earrings) performs the song and sings about his daddy, writing,

Daddy’s a back-row Baptist
With his share of front row sin
With Saturday night still on his breath
Every Sunday when he’d walk in.

There is a tension within the first four lines of this song, those quoted above, that many of us will recognize. A few of us may even find it in various shades of concealment within our own selves. Trent observes a duality within his father that harbors a sinful disposition (often visibly manifested) and a struggling Christian spirituality (for those of us indoctrinated through contemporary Christian institutions, we might know this conflict as ‘lifestyle’ versus ‘worldview’; the way things are and they way they ought to be; the inability to ‘walk the walk’ while ‘talking the talk’, etc.). This is a phenomenon common to us all at various degrees of appearance to both ourselves and those around us. The problem, however, resides in the fact that while we go on singing about it, living with it, and often celebrating it, we rarely reflect on it. Yet a vast amount of music—and for my purposes here, what is commonly recognized as ‘country’ music—reflects this tension. It is irresponsible, and foolish I argue, to ignore this duality. If we are ever going to truly find redemption in the God many of us believe in, we need to engage the tension and ‘call a spade a spade’.

Fumbling Through our Closet

I would like to begin by simply stating, you will not find answers here—at least that is not my intention. I am not trying to be another voice in the endless crowd of bloggers. Rather, I struggle with the tension between the doctrines I was raised to believe, the churches I simply cannot identify with, and the choices I am ever-inclined to make. I write out of that tension, and can begin nowhere else other than to think about it, wrestle with it, and write along the way. Hence, for the time being, the following is my ‘cleanest dirty shirt’.

For the moment, I want to turn my attention toward Johnny Cash’s song, ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’, which was written by Kris Kristofferson (while I wish I could quote at length the lyrics from songs I reference throughout, this would be entirely impractical; therefore, I encourage you to open Google, type in the song title + ‘lyrics’ and follow your nose). Recently I have been reflecting on the song’s lyrics and find it to be one of the most honest confessions found in hit-country music, past and present.

There is a reason you will not find yourself requesting this song when out on the town with friends on a Saturday night. First of all, it is a downer, so to speak. It is hardly the song that moves you to look around at your friends, sing as loud as you can, and pump your fist repeatedly. Instead, we spend our quarters on songs like ‘Friends in Low Places’, and despite that it depicts a pathetic drunk who crashes an ex girlfriend’s party, we don’t care and ‘you can kiss [our] ass’. By damn, we are gonna sing, dance and pump our fist—its Saturday night and the last thing on our mind is reality.

Saturday Night

A good friend of mine, who I grew up with and now performs at various clubs in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote a song called ‘Hard Drinkin’, God Fearin’ (www.myspace.com/jakemaurer).

The second verse is as follows:
My Mom and Daddy taught me
How to work and how to pray
My friends taught me to party
How to drink away a Saturday
No matter how hard I party
Drinking all night long
Come Sunday morning I’ll be sittin next to Mamma
Singing them gospel songs

First and foremost, please understand that on many occasions I, myself, have not only requested this song while seeing him perform live, but have pumped my fists furiously, while spilling beer all over myself, as he sang it. In fact, I appreciate the song, because it reflects all the values we most long to hear while out drunk on a Saturday night—freedom, fun, individuality, and redemption. There is a reason Jake is succeeding in Nashville right now. Yet, there is also a reason why we are not quick to play a song such as Jake’s or Garth Brooks’ ‘Friends in Low Places’ on a Sunday morning, when ‘there’s no way to hold our head that doesn’t hurt’.

Sunday Morning

Sunday mornings are probably the most honest moments of the week. There is rarely anything to do, and often nothing more to think about than what we did the night before and the fact that we either are, or are not, going to church that particular day. My own personal experience leans towards the latter much more often than the former. In either case, the booze from the night before no longer allows us to celebrate thoughtless glorification of fun-loving freedom while remaining convinced that our souls are sure to be well-received by the Lord. Enter the tension—the conflict between what we often consider to be ‘wrong’ and ‘right’.

The character in ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ embodies this tension poetically. The emptiness in his day is immediately apparent in verse 1 and then echoed in the opening lines of the chorus: “the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for desert. . . On a Sunday morning sidewalk, I’m wishing, Lord, that I was stoned’. The subject in the song immediately looks for pacification from his headache, and as the listener comes to see, his sense that something is missing. Indeed, as the first verse concludes, he tells us that the Sunday morning walk through town ‘took me back to something, that I’d lost somewhere, somehow along the way [through life]’.

I resonate with this picture well, as there have been many Sunday mornings where my immediate thoughts turned back to substance for help through the approaching day. Fortunately, this impulse almost always gives way to better sense, but I understand it nonetheless. After a weekend of ‘transgressing’ convictions, the boredom and loneliness of the week ahead can be daunting. And we recognize that the main character in ‘Sunday Morning…’ struggles with similar issues. Not only did he ‘smoke his mind the night before with cigarettes and songs that he’d been pickin’’, but by the way Kristofferson frames the final verse, we can see that the subject wrestles with internal conflict—pondering family life and the songs escaping from a nearby church. At this point it is worth quoting the entire last verse:

In the park I saw a daddy,
With a laughin' little girl who he was swingin'.
And I stopped beside a Sunday school,
And listened to the song they were singin'.
Then I headed back for home,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'.
And it echoed through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

The joys of common life within the frameworks of considered ‘decency’ and ‘normalcy’ are pitted against the character’s current experience? Images of ‘laughing little girls’ and Sunday school classes resonate with peace, serenity, and mundane joy, while from the moment this man wakes up he communicates futility and despondency—above all, loneliness and perhaps despair as he is reminded of the ‘disappearing dreams of yesterday’.

I interpret this song so extensively because it offers a point to begin pondering this conflict that exists between our desires, personalities, and actions and all that which represents the traditional moral teachings that accompanied much of our upbringings—many of which represent ‘Christianity’. This is important for many of us because these moral teachings etched themselves into our convictions to various depths along the course of our years on earth. Furthermore, some of us continue to believe strongly, even passionately, in the God of the Bible and His love for a sinful humanity. We still wonder, though, ‘Am I Heaven Bound’?

Asking Questions and Avoiding Answers

Jake Maurer, the friend whose song I referenced earlier, wrote another song called ‘Chariots of Fire’. When I visited him a few weeks ago he played it for me in his living room as we passed the guitar back and forth. The song depicts a man in the act of dying, and as he reflects back on his life he wonders if it has been enough. He asks the fundamental question I pose at the end of the immediately preceding paragraph—seeing the ‘chariot of fire’, he wonders if it has come to take him ‘below’ or to take him ‘higher’. You see, Jake knows what makes a good ‘country’ song, which is why he wrote both the ones I mention here. Fundamentally, though (and I apologize for taking the liberty to interpret your music Jaker), he lives with the same conflict ‘come Sunday morning [when he’s] sittin’ next to Momma, singing them gospel songs’.

I want to raise one caveat regarding this ‘quest’ of sorts—this pondering of life and fate. It will inevitably become tempting to generate answers. Unanswered questions make us uncomfortable and have a tendency to keep us awake at night. Too often, though, the answers we generate are nothing more than falsely contrived jargon—a coping mechanism. Christians are experts in this, quoting overused idioms that, once fleshed out, mean very little and do not help us live genuinely. In retrospect, I recognize attempts at doing this in my own songwriting.

When I first began learning the guitar and writing music, I wrote a song call ‘Finding that Man (My Mama Sees in Me)’. The song chronicles my life and wrestles with the very questions I am posing in this essay. Throughout the choruses and verses, though, I not only question my life’s mistakes and fate, but I am altogether too eager to tie up the loose ends, in order that I may ‘find the man’ my mom wants me to be and, thus, be ‘redeemed’ (if nowhere else, at least in my own mind). In the final verse I basically close the case on my life and the conflict therein:

I’ve ran a thousand miles
Through screw ups and trials
Studyin’ Scripture
And drinkin’ beer out of cans
Well I finally found
Need to lay down my crown
Just gotta put it all into God’s hands

Notice that while I am beginning to articulate the lifestyle/spiritual conflict with my references to Scripture and beer, I copout by claiming to ‘finally [find]’ an answer that is, in fact, a non-answer. It offers nothing in the way of helpful advice or thought. Of course we who are Christians want to put our lives in God’s hands or ‘surrender ourselves to the Lord and His causes’ or ‘lay our lives at the foot of the cross’. Really, though, these statements are overused clichés that mean nothing more than ‘try to live like a Christian’ (but these idioms make us sound more spiritual and carry a rhetorical quality, which listeners fear challenging because they sound so biblical and wise). But trying to determine how to live like a real Christian is the question. It cannot, therefore, also be the answer. Thus, when I wonder how I can live as both genuinely my unique self as well as a genuine Christian, the answer cannot in essence be ‘Live like a Christian’. This tells me nothing, so despite that I may have ‘finally found [that I] need to put down my crown [and] put it all into God’s hands’, I still do not have any answers and must continue living and pondering life, myself, and God.

Conclusion

When we look at our lives and the faith many of us have been exposed to in varying degrees, there is conflict and tension. I simply suggest we start thinking about it, instead of pretending on Saturday night and faking it on Sunday morning. For me personally, I am just trying to call a spade a spade (I do a lot of stupid, probably sinful shit), ask questions (where does God’s grace and mercy begin and end?), keep my own personality (I still have trouble resolving myself to a small group and singing under the direction of some guy with a pastel-colored shirt and crazy facial expressions), and see where it all gets me.

Suggested Listening: Kris Kristofferson’s song, “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33”